A certain amount of blundering is allowable to a man who cares for a
woman and sees her wretched. I offer only this excuse for myself. I
expected no happiness, but it seemed to me some one should have the
right to look after her and protect her.
It was Ellice who told me later where the fallacy lay in my reasoning.
“When a woman is childless,” she said, “she makes her man her child. You
might as well have asked Anne to give up a son. And of course this being
a bad child made no difference.”
For that is what I did.
She was very gentle with me, but from the moment I began I saw it was
hopeless. He needed her. She did a good many things for him that he
thought were done by the servant. Everything in the house had its own
place, so he could find it, and was never moved from that place. She
read to him, too. Only the night before she had had a bad time; she was
reading aloud.
“Last night, ah yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head.
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”
She had tried to stop when she found what it was, but he made her read
on. Then she had heard him laugh, rather dreadfully. And the next moment
he had taken the book from her and flung it into the fire.
She had been composed enough up to that, but there she broke. It seemed
that she had heard him outside her door later that night, and she had
thought perhaps he meant to kill her and then himself. He had stood
there, very still, for some time, and then had gone away.
But I was not to worry. She had only been over-wrought. He had really
been much gentler with her lately.