A blush slowly covered his face. They both sat silent. Only the fire
crackled lustily. Edwin thought, as his agitation increased and
entirely confused him, "No other woman was ever like this woman!" He
wanted to rise masterfully, to accomplish some gesture splendid and
decisive, but he was held in the hollow of the easy chair as though by
paralysis. He looked at Hilda; he might have been looking at a
stranger. He tried to read her face, and he could not read it. He
could only see in it vague trouble. He was afraid of her. The idea
even occurred to him that, could he be frank with himself, he would
admit that he hated her. The moments were intensely painful; the
suspense exasperating and excruciating. Ever since their last encounter
he had anticipated this scene; his fancy had been almost continuously
busy in fashioning this scene. And now the reality had swept down upon
him with no warning, and he was overwhelmed.
She would not speak. She had withdrawn her gaze, but she would not
speak. She would force him to speak.
"I say," he began gruffly, in a resentful tone, careless as to what he
was saying, "you might have told me earlier what you told me on
Wednesday night. Why didn't you tell me when I was at Brighton?"
"I wanted to," she said meekly. "But I couldn't. I really couldn't
bring myself to do it."
"Instead of telling me a lie," he went on. "I think you might have
trusted me more than that."
"A lie?" she muttered. "I told you the truth. I told you he was in
prison."
"You told me your husband was in prison," he corrected her, in a voice
meditative and judicial. He knew not in the least why he was talking in
this strain.
She began to cry. At first he was not sure that she was crying. He
glanced surreptitiously, and glanced away as if guilty. But at the next
glance he was sure. Her eyes glistened behind the veil, and tear-drops
appeared at its edge and vanished under her chin.
"You don't know how much I wanted to tell you!" she wept.
She hid her half-veiled face in her hands. And then he was victimised
by the blackest desolation. His one desire was that the scene should
finish, somehow, anyhow.
"I never wrote to you because there was nothing to say. Nothing!" She
sobbed, still covering her face.
"Never wrote to me--do you mean--"
She nodded violently twice. "Yes. _Then!_" He divined that suddenly she
had begun to talk of ten years ago. "I knew you'd know it was because I
couldn't help it." She spoke so indistinctly through her emotion and
her tears, and her hands, that he could not distinguish the words.
"What do you say?"
"I say I couldn't help doing what I did. I knew you'd know I couldn't
help it. I couldn't write. It was best for me to be silent. What else
was there for me to do except be silent? I knew you'd know I couldn't
help it. It was a--" Sobs interrupted her.
"Of course I knew that," he said. He had to control himself very
carefully, or he too would have lost command of his voice. Such was her
power of suggestion over him that her faithlessness seemed now scarcely
to need an excuse.
(Somewhere within himself he smiled as he reflected that he, in his
father's place, in his father's very chair, was thus under the spell of
a woman whose child was nameless. He smiled grimly at the thought of
Auntie Hamps, of Clara, of the pietistic Albert! They were of a
different race, a different generation! They belonged to a dead world!)
"I shall tell you," Hilda recommenced mournfully, but in a clear and
steady voice, at last releasing her face, which was shaken like that of
a child in childlike grief. "You'll never understand what I had to go
through, and how I couldn't help myself"--she was tragically
plaintive--"but I shall tell you... You _must_ understand!"
She raised her eyes. Already for some moments his hands had been
desiring the pale wrists between her sleeve and her glove. They
fascinated his hands, which, hesitatingly, went out towards them. As
soon as she felt his touch, she dropped to her knees, and her chin
almost rested on the arm of his chair. He bent over a face that was
transfigured.
"My heart never kissed any other man but you!" she cried. "How often
and often and often have I kissed you, and you never knew! ... It was
for a message that I sent George down here--a message to you! I named
him after you... Do you think that if dreams could make him your
child--he wouldn't be yours?"
Her courage, and the expression of it, seemed to him to be sublime.
"You don't know me!" she sighed, less convulsively.
"Don't I!" he said, with lofty confidence.
After a whole decade his nostrils quivered again to the odour of her
olive skin. Drowning amid the waves of her terrible devotion, he was
recompensed in the hundredth part of a second for all that through her
he had suffered or might hereafter suffer. The many problems and
difficulties which marriage with her would raise seemed trivial in the
light of her heart's magnificent and furious loyalty. He thought of the
younger Edwin whom she had kissed into rapture, as of a boy too
inexperienced in sorrow to appreciate this Hilda. He braced himself to
the exquisite burden of life.