SHE sat still without saying anything. It seemed to her as if she were on the platform at Manchester House singing the Italian song. Then the disfigured face of Carey--disfigured by vice as hers now by the accident--had become as nothing to her. She had seen only his eyes. She saw only his eyes now. He remained standing up in the faint light with the oars in his hands looking at her. Round about them tinkled the bells above the nets.
“You heard me call?” he said at last, almost roughly.
“I was there this evening when you came in. I heard your boy singing. I was under the shadow of the woods.”
All this time she was gazing into Carey’s eyes, and had not seen in them that he was looking, for the first time, at her altered face. She did not realise this. She did not remember that her face was altered. The expression in his eyes made her forget it.
He let the oars go, and sat down on the little seat. They were close to each other now. The sides of the boats touched. He did not answer her question.
“I know I’ve no business to speak to you,” he said. “No business to come after you. I know that. But I was always a selfish, violent, headlong brute, and it seems I can’t change.”
Suddenly she remembered--put her hands up to her face with a swift gesture, then dropped them again. What did it matter now? He was the last man who would look upon her in life. And now that she remembered her own condition she saw his. She saw the terror of his life in his marred features, aged, brutalised by excess. She saw, and was glad for a moment, as if she met someone unexpectedly on her side of the stream of fate. Let him look upon her. She was looking upon him.
“I want a saviour,” he said, staring always straight at her, and speaking without tenderness.
For a moment she thought of the Bible, of religion; then of her sensation that she had been caught by a torturer who would not let her go.
“Have you come to me because you think I can tell you of saviour?” she said.
“But don’t you see me?” she exclaimed. “Don’t you see what I am now?”
Suddenly she felt angry with him because his eyes did not seem to see the dreadful change in her appearance.
“Don’t you think I want a saviour too?” she exclaimed.
“I don’t think about you,” he said with a sort of deliberate brutality. “I think about myself. Men generally do when they come to women.”