When It Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy

And yet, strangely enough, she felt nothing but a quickening of the pulses, a swift embracing pity which was almost a joy in its breaking away of barriers.

If the end were here, it should be together – at last together.

For she loved this cruel, sinning man, this lover of light loves, this man of purple, fine linen, and the sparkling deadly wines of life.

"Kate!"

He said it once more.

Her manner changed. Shrinking, timidity, fear, fled for ever. In her overpowering rush of protecting love all the diffidences of temperament, all the bars which he had forced her to build around her instincts, were swept utterly away.

She went quickly up to him, folded him in her arms.

"Robert!" she said, "poor boy, the end has come to it all. I knew it must come some day. Well, we have not been happy. I wonder if you have been happy? No, I don't think so. But now, Robert, you have me to comfort you with my love once more, my poor Robert, once more, as in the old, simple days when we were young."

She led him to a couch.

He trembled violently. His decision of movement seemed to have gone. His purpose of flight had for the moment become obscure.

And now, into this man's heart came a remorse and regret so awful, a realisation so sudden and strong, so instinct with a pain for which there is no name, that everything before his eyes turned to burning fire.

The flames of his agony burnt up the veils which had for so long obscured the truth. They shrivelled and vanished.

Too late, too late, he knew what he had lost.

The last agony wrenched his brain round again to another and more terrible contemplation.

His thoughts were in other and outside hands, which pulled his brain from one scene to another as a man moves the eye of the camera obscura to different fields of view.

Incredible as it may seem, for the first time Llwellyn realised what he had done– realised, that is, in its entirety, the whole horror and consequences of that action of his which was to kill him now.

He had not been able to see the magnitude and extent of his crime before – either at the time when it was proposed to him, except at the first moment of speech, or after its committal.

His brain and temperament had been wrapped round in the hideous fact of sensuality, which deadens and destroys sensation.

And now, with his wife's thin arms round him, her withered cheek pressed to his, her words of glad love, a martyr's swan song in his ears, he saw, knew, and understood.

Through the terror of his thoughts her words began to penetrate.

"I know, Robert – husband, I know. The end is here. But what has happened? Tell me everything, that I may comfort you the more. Tell me, Robert, for the dear Christ's sake!"

At those words the man stiffened. "For the dear Christ's sake!"

Suddenly, in the disorder and tumult of his tortured brain, came, quite foolishly and inconsequently, a quotation from an old French romance – full of satire and the keen cynicism of a period – which he had been reading:

"'Tres volontiers,' repartit le démon.
'Vous aimez les tableaux changeans;
Je veux vous contenter.'"

Yes! the devil who was torturing him now had shown him many moving aspects of life. Les tableaux changeans!

But now, at last, here was the worst moment of all.

"For the dear Christ's sake, tell me, Robert!"

How could he tell this?

This was his last moment of peace, his last chance of any help or hope.

He had begun to cling to her, to mingle foolish tears with hers – the while his fired brain ranged all the halls of agony.

For if he told her – this gentle Christian lady, to whom he had been so unkind – then she would never touch him more.

The last hours – there was but little time remaining – would be alone. Alone!

This new revelation that her love was still his, wonder of mysteries! this came at the last moments to aid him.

A last grace before the running waters closed over him. Was he to give this up?

The thought of flight lay like a wounded bird in his brain. It crept about it like some paralysed thing. Not yet dead, but inactive. Though he knew how terribly the moments called to him, yet he could not act.

The myriad agonies he was enduring now, agonies so various and great that he knew Hell had none greater, these, even these were alleviated by the wonder of his wife's love.

The terrible remorse that was knocking at his heart could not undo that.

He clung to her.

"Tell me all about it, Robert. I will forgive you, whatever you have done. I have long ago forgiven everything in my heart. There are only the words to say."

She rested her worn, tired head on his shoulder. The sunbeams gave it a glory.

Again the man must suffer a terrible agony. She had asked him to tell her all his trouble in a voice full of gentle pleading.

Whose voice did her voice recall to him; what fatal hour? A coarser voice, a richer voice, trembling, so he had thought, with love for him.

"Tell me everything, Bob!" It was Gertrude's voice.

The day of his undoing! The day when his horrid secret was wrested from him by the levers of his own passions. The day which had brought him to this. Finis coronat opus!

But the agony within him was the agony of contrast.

The great fires round his soul had burnt his lust away. There was no more regret or longing for the evil past. All the joys of a sensual life seemed as if they had never been. Now, the pain was the pain of a man, not who knows the worst too soon, but who knows the best too late!

A vivid picture, a succession of thoughts following each other with such kinetic swiftness that they became welded in one single picture, as one may see a vast landscape of wood and torrent, champaign and forest, in one flash of the storm sword, came to him now.

And, at the last, he saw himself seated at a great table in a noble room. There were soft lights. Silver and flowers were there. Round the board sat many men and women. On their faces was the calm triumph of those who had succeeded in a fine battle, won an intellectual strife. The faces were calm, powerful, serene. They were the salt of society. He saw his own face in a little mirror set among the flowers. His face was even as their faces. Self-reverence had dignified it, self-knowledge and self-control had turned the lines to kindly marble, defiant of time.

At the other end of the table sat a calm and gracious lady, richly dressed in some glowing sombre stuff. She was the grave and loving matron who slept by his side.