When consciousness returned, he found himself stretched at full length upon the couch. Lady Tintagel knelt beside him, her arms around him.
He could feel the rapid beating of her heart; her soft, quick breathing, mingled with kisses, on his brow and hair. Words of tenderness unthinkable poured from her lips.
He woke at once to vivid consciousness; but lay with eyes closed, waiting till he could gather up his strength, master himself, and take hold on calm speech.
And all the while her flood of tenderness poured over him. It was as if his helplessness had broken down all barriers, his loss of consciousness had burst the 134bonds of her reserve. The love and longing of those thirty years throbbed in her clasping arms.
“My Love, my own! Don’t go from me again. Ah, when you wake you will remember all! Nigel, you will remember.”
She held him closer to her breast. He felt the desperate strength in those poor clinging arms.
“Dear God, when he awakes, he will remember! He will call his own wife by her name. He will know all at last. At last he will remember.”
Her tears and kisses rained upon his face.
At length he spoke.
“Loose me,” he said.
“Mine,” she murmured, her trembling lips against his hair. “Mine again, at last. I have waited so long—so long.”
He shrank away from her.
“Loose me,” he said, “loose me and let me go. I do not want to hurt you.”
“You could not hurt me, Nigel. I am 135past being hurt. My love would welcome pain.” Yet her lips quivered. Her eyes searched his. No answering light of love was in their sombre depths.
“You would loose me at once,” he said, “if you could know how much I loathe that you should hold and touch me.”
Her arms fell away from him. She pressed her hands against her breasts, as if his words had been an actual blow. She recoiled from him, moving backwards on her knees, gazing at him in dumb dismay; then hid her stricken face in both her hands.
He sprang to his feet, crossed to the window, and flung aside a curtain.
Dawn was breaking, in one pale silver streak on the horizon.
Sea birds called to one another in the distance.
A chill mist lay on the lawn. In the corner of the veranda he could see the ghostly outline of the chair in which he had waited the night before.
136He turned back into the lighted room.
The fire burned low. He stirred the embers and threw on fresh logs.
He raised Lady Tintagel from her knees and led her to the couch.
“Forgive me,” he said. “How I hate to give you pain! But our only hope is to be absolutely honest with ourselves and with each other.”
She lifted sorrowful eyes, but made no answer.
“Will you forgive me if that which I must say is hard to hear? It would help me if you could say: ‘I will forgive you’”
Her smile was sadder far than tears.
“We never forgave one another, Nigel. If need for forgiveness arose, love had already met it, and swept it away. Besides, I do not blame you for my pain. Say what you will.”
He stood long silent, looking into the heart of the red embers.
At last he spoke.
“It is dangerous work,” he said, “to 137tamper with the Dead. The Dead are safe with God, at home in that eternal Dwelling Place. Do you realise the awful wrong you did to me and to yourself, by that insistent call which brought me back? Through all these years in the great Life beyond, the fulness of my love would have been yours. That letter told you of a changeless tie—you mine, I yours, for ever. But it also spoke of a parting bravely borne, in faith and patience. A sorrow thus endured would have kept us both safe in the Will of God. But you called me back, with passionate insistence, and—it seems—I responded to the passion of that appeal, and came. But in so doing, I put myself outside the supreme Will. Had I waited God’s time for my return to earthly life, I might have come strong in His strength and grace, filled with his Holy Spirit, ready to overcome, to rise at His command to a higher level than I had before attained. Instead of which I am but a poor derelict, shipwrecked upon life’s ocean, drifting rudderless 138at the mercy of each wind of circumstance. And alas, I returned empty—emptied of that Spark Divine, which is the very essence of the life of man; emptied of aspiration; emptied of the capacity for love. I have no assurance of the Love of God; I have no remembrance of my love for you; I have no power to feel love for others or to accept love offered me. For thirty wasted years I have been seeking, seeking, ever seeking, for earthly love, and now that I have found it, it is Dead Sea fruit—mere dust and ashes. I wander, God forsaken, like the demons of old, ‘walking through dry places, seeking rest, and finding none.’ I have no faith, I have no hope; I ask only for Oblivion. ‘Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?’ You who call yourself my loving wife?
“One sentence in that letter which you say is my own, wakes in me a realisation of all that I have lost. ‘Lord, Thou hast been our Dwelling Place in all generations.’ My soul remembers that divine security; 139but I have left it, and there is no return. You thought, while I lay senseless I should reme............