There came a night when Anne too gave up all attempt to sleep. Even after her illness she had found no difficulty in resuming the long unbroken rest of youth, but youth had taken itself off in a fright.

On this night she wandered about and faced the truth. It was a night to assist the least imaginative to face an unhappy crisis. A small hurricane raged, seeming to burst in wild roars from Nevis itself. The streams on the mountain were cataracts. The sea threatened the island. At another time, Anne, like other West Indians, would have paid incessant visits to the barometer, but to-night she cared nothing for the threat of the elements. A storm raged within her, and she had a perfect comprehension of the madness and despair in the library.

She was out of her fool's paradise at last. She knew that he would never write his drama without the aid that marvellous but rotten spot in his brain demanded. And its delivery was in her hands. He was the soul of honour, unselfish, high-minded. He had taken the woman he loved better than himself into his life and he would keep the promise he had voluntarily made her unless she released him. He would conquer and kill the best part of him.

Anne had no apprehension of his physical death. No doubt his mere bodily well-being would go on increasing after the struggle was over; but what of his maimed and thwarted intellect, the mind-emptiness of a man who had known the greatest of mortal joys, mental creation? What of the haunting knowledge throughout a possibly long life, of having deliberately done a divine gift to death?

Anne felt like a murderer herself. She went suddenly out into the gallery, and stood for a moment with her arms rigidly upraised to the black rolling sky. There was no response in the fury of the rain that drowned her face, and compelled her to bend her head.

The great banana tree was whipping about like an alive creature in agony. She could hardly keep her breath, and the salt spray flew over the roof and touched her lips. The elements roared and shrieked and whistled in a colossal orchestra, and above them she could hear that most uncanny of all sounds in a West Indian storm, the rattling of the hard seeds of the giant tree in their brittle pods.

But the noise inflamed rather than benumbed the tumult in her soul. Little as her husband suspected it, the gossip of Bath House and her own imagination had enabled her to realise the being he was and the life he led when transformed by drink. She had long since put those images from her, but they peopled the gallery to-night. And they were hideous, loathsome. She felt old and dry and wrecked and polluted in the mere contemplation of them. Could even her love survive such an ordeal? Or life? She had experienced mortal happiness to an extraordinary degree. Were she firm now, she might know it again--not to the same degree--doubtless not--but all that a mere mortal had any right to expect after that one foretaste of immortality. She had her rights. Her life could be made monstrous for a time; then she would go back and live on through countless years by the North Sea. For did Warner return to the habits of the years that had preceded their marriage his extinction would be a mere question of time. He might survive this work, and another; for he would never return to this battle between his love for her and for a love older still and far more deeply ingrained. A year or two and he would be under the island.




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