As soon as he had said it he knew that it was inept, and quite unsuitable to the role which he ought to play.
Rachel had gone straight to the dressing-table, apparently ignoring him, though she could not possibly have failed to notice that he was awake. She turned sharply and gazed at him with a look of inimical contempt that aggrieved and scarified him very acutely. Making no answer to his query, content solely to condemn it with her eyes as egotistic and vain, she said--
And then she curtly showed him her bent back, and over the foot of the bed he could see her preparations--preliminary stirring with a spoon, the placing of the bright tin saucepan on the lamp, the opening of the wick, seizing of the match-box.
As soon as the cooking was in train, she threw up the window wide and then came to the bed.
"I'll just put your bed to rights again," she remarked, and seized the pillow, waiting implacably for him to raise his head. He had to raise his head.
She replied in a tone of calm indifference--
"I know you are. But you'll soon be better. You're getting a little better every hour." And she finished arranging the bed, which was presently in a state of smooth geometrical correctness. He could find no fault with her efficiency, nor with her careful handling of his sensitive body. But the hard, the marmoreal cruelty of his wife's spirit exquisitely wounded his soul, which, after all, was at least as much in need of consolation as his body. He was positively daunted.
He had passed through dreadful moments in the early part of the night while Rachel slept. When he had realized that he was doomed--for the conviction that death was upon him had been absolutely sincere and final for a long time--he was panic-stricken, impressed, and strangely proud, all at once. But the panic was paramount. He was afraid, horribly afraid. His cowardice was ghastly, even to himself, shot through though it was by a peculiar appreciation of the grandiosity of his fate as a martyr to clumsy chance. He was reduced by it to the trembling repentant sinner, as the proud prisoner is reduced to abjection by prolonged and secret torture in Oriental prisons. He ranged in fright over the whole of his career, and was obliged to admit, and to admit with craven obsequiousness, that he had been a wicked man, obstinate in wickedness.