This then--this long trouble of body and of spirit--was what he remembered, sitting in the armchair beyond his bedroom fire, watching the glow, and Sylvia sleeping there exhausted, while the dark plane-tree leaves tap-tapped at the window in the autumn wind;watching, with the uncanny certainty that, he would not pass the limits of this night without having made at last a decision that would not alter.For even conflict wears itself out; even indecision has this measure set to its miserable powers of torture, that any issue in the end is better than the hell of indecision itself.Once or twice in those last days even death had seemed to him quite tolerable; but now that his head was clear and he had come to grips, death passed out of his mind like the shadow that it was.Nothing so simple, extravagant, and vain could serve him.
Other issues had reality; death--none.To leave Sylvia, and take this young love away; there was reality in that, but it had always faded as soon as it shaped itself; and now once more it faded.To put such a public and terrible affront on a tender wife whom he loved, do her to death, as it were, before the world's eyes--and then, ever remorseful, grow old while the girl was still young? He could not.If Sylvia had not loved him, yes; or, even if he had not loved her; or if, again, though loving him she had stood upon her rights--in any of those events he might have done it.But to leave her whom he did love, and who had said to him so generously:
"I will not hamper you--go to her"--would be a black atrocity.
Every memory, from their boy-and-girl lovering to the desperate clinging of her arms these last two nights--memory with its innumerable tentacles, the invincible strength of its countless threads, bound him to her too fast.What then? Must it come, after all, to giving up the girl? And sitting there, by that warm fire, he shivered.How desolate, sacrilegious, wasteful to throw love away; to turn from the most precious of all gifts; to drop and break that vase! There was not too much love in the world, nor too much warmth and beauty--not, anyway, for those whose sands were running out, whose blood would soon be cold.
Could Sylvia not let him keep both her love and the girl's? Could she not bear that? She had said she could; but her face, her eyes, her voice gave her the lie, so that every time he heard her his heart turned sick with pity.This, then, was the real issue.
Could he accept from her such a sacrifice, exact a daily misery, see her droop and fade beneath it? Could he bear his own happiness at such a cost? Would it be happiness at all? He got up from the chair and crept towards her.She looked very fragile sleeping there! The darkness below her closed eyelids showed cruelly on that too fair skin; and in her flax-coloured hair he saw what he had never noticed--a few strands of white.Her softly opened lips, almost colourless, quivered with her uneven breathing; and now and again a little feverish shiver passed up as from her heart.All soft and fragile! Not much life, not much strength; youth and beauty slipping! To know that he who should be her champion against age and time would day by day be placing one more mark upon her face, one more sorrow in her heart! That he should do this--they both going down the years together!
As he stood there holding his breath, bending to look at her, that slurring swish of the plane-tree branch, flung against and against the window by the autumn wind, seemed filling the whole world.
Then her lips moved in one of those little, soft hurrying whispers that unhappy dreamers utter, the words all blurred with their wistful rushing.
And he thought: I, who believe in bravery and kindness; I, who hate cruelty--if I do this cruel thing, what shall I have to live for;how shall I work; how bear myself? If I do it, I am lost--an outcast from my own faith--a renegade from all that I believe in.
