"No man wants to marry a woman that's been living with him," he blurted
out defiantly. "I suppose that isn't a nice thing to say to you, but any
man would understand."
I was silent at first, in mere amazement and indignation. The thing
seemed so monstrous, so indelicate, so cruel to the woman. She had
deceived him and hidden the fact that she had been married, but there
was no justice in this horrible way of looking at it, as if her
ignorance had been a crime. I could hardly believe he realized what he
was saying. Before I could think what to say, he went on.
"Very likely you think I'm hard, Ruth; and perhaps I shouldn't feel so
if it hadn't come about through her own fault. If she'd told me the
truth"--
"George!" I burst out. "You don't know what you are saying! You didn't
take her as your wife for a week or a month, but for all her life."
"She never was my wife," he persisted stubbornly.
I looked at him with a feeling of despair,--not unmixed, I must confess,
with anger. Most of all, however, I wanted to reach him; to make him see
things as they were; and I wanted to save the poor woman. I leaned
forward, and laid my fingers on his arm. My eyes were smarting, but I
would not cry.
"But if there were no question of her at all," I pleaded, "you must do
what is right for your own sake. You have made her pledges, and you
can't in common honesty give them up."
"She set me free from all that when she lied to me. I made pledges to a
girl, not to another man's wife."
"But she didn't know. She thought she was free to marry you. She
believed she was honestly your wife."
"She never was, she never was."
He repeated it stubbornly as if the fact settled everything.
"She was!" I broke out hotly. "She was your wife; and she is your wife!
When a man and a woman honestly love each other and marry without
knowing of any reason why they may not, I say they are man and wife, no
matter what the law is."
"Suppose the husband had lived?" he demanded, with a hateful smile. "The
law really settles it."
"Do you believe that?" I asked him. "Or do you only wish to believe it?"
He looked at me half angrily, and the blood sprang into his cheeks. Then
he took a step forward.
"She came between us!" he said, lowering his voice, but speaking with a
new fierceness.
I felt as if he had struck me, and I shrank back. Then I straightened
up, and looked him in the eye.
"You don't dare to say that aloud," I retorted. "You left me of your own
accord. You insult me to come here and say such a thing, and I will not
hear it. If you mean to talk in that strain, you may leave the house."
He was naturally a good deal taken aback by this, and perhaps I should
not--Yes, I should; I am glad I did say it. He stammered something about
begging my pardon.
"Let that go," interrupted I, feeling as if I had endured about all that
I could hear. "The question is whether you are not going to be just to
your wife."
"You fight mighty well for her," responded George, "but if you knew how
she"--
"Never mind," I broke in. "Can't you see I am fighting for you? I am
trying to make you see you owe it to yourself to be right in this; and
moreover you owe it to me."
"To you?" he asked, with a touch in his voice which should have warned
me, but did not, I was so wrapped up in my own view of the situation.
"Yes, to me. I am your oldest friend, don't you see, and you owe it to
me not to fail now."
He sprang forward impulsively, holding out both his hands.
"Ruth," he cried out, "what's the use of all this talk? You know it's
you I love, and you I mean to marry."
I know now how a man feels when he strikes another full in the face for
insulting him. I felt myself growing hot and then cold again; and I was
literally speechless from indignation.
"I went crazy a while for a fool with a pretty face," he went rushing
on; "but all that"--
"She is your wife, George Weston!" I broke in. "How dare you talk so to
me!"
He was evidently astonished, but he persisted.
"We ought to be honest with each other now, Ruth," he said. "There's too
much at stake for us to beat about the bush. I know I've behaved like a
fool and a brute. I've hurt you and--and cheated you, and you've had
every reason to throw me over like a sick dog; but when you made up the
money I'd lost and didn't let Mr. Longworthy suspect, I knew you cared
for me just the same!"
"Cared for you!" I blazed out. "Do you think I could have ruined any
man's life for that? I love you no more than I love any other man with a
wife of his own!"
"That's just it," he broke in eagerly. "Of course I knew you couldn't
own you cared while she"--
The egotism of it, the vulgarity of it made me frantic. I was ashamed of
myself, I was ashamed of him, and I felt as if nothing would make him
see the truth. Never in my whole life have I spoken to any human being
as I did to him. I felt like a raging termagant, but he would not see.
"Stop!" I cried out. "If you had never had a wife, I couldn't care for
you. I thought I loved you, and perhaps I did; but all that is over, and
over forever."
"You've said you'd love me always," he retorted.
Some outer layer of courtesy seemed to have cracked and fallen from him,
and to have left an ugly and vulgar nature bare. The pathos of it came
over me. The pity that a man should be capable of so exposing his baser
self struck me in the midst of all my indignation. I could not help a
feeling, moreover, that he had somehow a right to reproach me with
having changed. Thinking of it now in cooler blood I cannot see that
since he has left me to marry another woman he has any ground for
reproaching me; but somehow at the moment I felt guilty.
"George," I answered, "I thought I was telling the truth; I didn't
understand myself."
The change in his face showed me that this way of putting it had done
more to convince him than any direct denial. His whole manner altered.
"You don't mean," he pleaded piteously, "you've stopped caring for me?"
I could only tell him that certainly I had stopped caring for him in the
old way, and I begged him to go back to his wife. He said little more,
and I was at last released from this horrible scene. All night I thought
of it miserably or I dreamed of it more miserably still. That poor
woman! What can I do for her? I hope I have not lost the power of
influencing George, for I might use it to help her.