“Why have you told me now?”
“Those rumours. I didn't want any one else to tell you.”
“Or else it wouldn't have mattered?”
“No.”
She turned her eyes from me to the fire. Then for a moment she looked
about the room she had made for me, and then quite silently, with a
childish quivering of her lips, with a sort of dismayed distress upon
her face, she was weeping. She sat weeping in her dress of cloth of
gold, with her bare slender arms dropped limp over the arms of her
chair, and her eyes averted from me, making no effort to stay or staunch
her tears. “I am sorry, Margaret,” I said. “I was in love.... I did not
understand....”
Presently she asked: “What are you going to do?”
“You see, Margaret, now it's come to be your affair--I want to know what
you--what you want.”
“You want to leave me?”
“If you want me to, I must.”
“Leave Parliament--leave all the things you are doing,--all this fine
movement of yours?”
“No.” I spoke sullenly. “I don't want to leave anything. I want to stay
on. I've told you, because I think we--Isabel and I, I mean--have got to
drive through a storm of scandal anyhow. I don't know how far things may
go, how much people may feel, and I can't, I can't have you unconscious,
unarmed, open to any revelation--”
She made no answer.
“When the thing began--I knew it was stupid but I thought it was a
thing that wouldn't change, wouldn't be anything but itself, wouldn't
unfold--consequences.... People have got hold of these vague rumours....
Directly it reached any one else but--but us two--I saw it had to come
to you.”
I stopped. I had that distressful feeling I have always had with
Margaret, of not being altogether sure she heard, of being doubtful
if she understood. I perceived that once again I had struck at her and
shattered a thousand unsubstantial pinnacles. And I couldn't get at
her, to help her, or touch her mind! I stood up, and at my movement she
moved. She produced a dainty little handkerchief, and made an effort to
wipe her face with it, and held it to her eyes. “Oh, my Husband!” she
sobbed.
“What do you mean to do?” she said, with her voice muffled by her
handkerchief.
“We're going to end it,” I said.
Something gripped me tormentingly as I said that. I drew a chair beside
her and sat down. “You and I, Margaret, have been partners,” I began.
“We've built up this life of ours together; I couldn't have done it
without you. We've made a position, created a work--”
She shook her head. “You,” she said.
“You helping. I don't want to shatter it--if you don't want it
shattered. I can't leave my work. I can't leave you. I want you to
have--all that you have ever had. I've never meant to rob you. I've made
an immense and tragic blunder. You don't know how things took us, how
different they seemed! My character and accident have conspired--We'll
pay--in ourselves, not in our public service.”