We walked to the far end of the hall. Major Fitz-David opened the door of a long, narrow room built out at the back of the house as a smoking-room, and extending along one side of the courtyard as far as the stable wall.
My husband was alone in the room, seated at the further end of it, near the fire-place. He started to his feet and faced me in silence as I entered. The Major softly closed the door on us and retired. Eustace never stirred a step to meet me. I ran to him, and threw my arms round his neck and kissed him. The embrace was not returned; the kiss was not returned. He passively submitted—nothing more.
“Eustace!” I said, “I never loved you more dearly than I love you at this moment! I never felt for you as I feel for you now!”
He released himself deliberately from my arms. He signed to me with the mechanical courtesy of a stranger to take a chair.
“Thank you, Valeria,” he answered, in cold, measured tones. “You could say no less to me, after what has happened; and you could say no more. Thank you.”
We were standing before the fire-place. He left me, and walked away slowly with his head down, apparently intending to leave the room.
I followed him—I got before him—I placed myself between him and the door.
“Why do you leave me?” I said. “Why do you speak to me in this cruel way? Are you angry, Eustace? My darling, if you are angry, I ask you to forgive me.”
“It is I who ought to ask your pardon,” he replied. “I beg you to forgive me, Valeria, for having made you my wife.”
He pronounced those words with a hopeless, heart-broken humility dreadful to see. I laid my hand on his bosom. I said, “Eustace, look at me.”
He slowly lifted his eyes to my face—eyes cold and clear and tearless—looking at me in steady resignation, in immovable despair. In the utter wretchedness of that moment, I was like him; I was as quiet and as cold as my husband. He chilled, he froze me.
“Is it possible,” I said, “that you doubt my belief in your innocence?”
He left the question unanswered. He sighed bitterly to himself. “Poor woman!” he said, as a stranger might have said, pitying me. “Poor woman!”
My heart swelled in me as if it would burst. I lifted my hand from his bosom, and laid it on his shoulder to support myself.
“I don’t ask you to pity me, Eustace; I ask you to do me justice. You are not doing me justice. If you had trusted me with the truth in the days when we first knew that we loved each other—if you had told me all, and more than all that I know now—as God is my witness I would still have married you! Now do you doubt that I believe you are an innocent man!”
“I don’t doubt it,” he said. “All your impulses are generous, Valeria. You are speaking generously and feeling generously. Don’t blame me, my poor child, if I look on further than you do: if I see what is to come—too surely to come—in the cruel future.”
“The cruel future!” I repeated. “What do you mean?”
“You believe in my innocence, Valeria. The jury who tried me doubted it—and have left that doubt on record. What reason have you for believing, in the face of the Verdict, that I am an innocent man?”
“I want no reason! I believe in spite of the jury—in spite of the Verdict.”
“Will your friends agree with you? When your uncle and aunt know what has happened—and sooner or later they must know it—what will they say? They will say, ‘He began badly; he concealed from our niece that he had been wedded to a first wife; he married our niece under a false name. He may say he is innocent; but we have only his word for it. When he was put on his Trial, the Verdict was Not Proven. Not Proven won’t do for us. If the jury have done him an injustice—if he is innocent—let him prove it.’ That is what the world thinks and says of me. That is what your friends will think and say of me. The time is coming, Valeria, when you—even You—will feel that your friends have reason to appeal to on their side, and that you have no reason on yours.”
“That time will never come!” I answered, warmly. “You wrong me, you insult me, in thinking it possible!”
He put down my hand from him, and drew back a step, with a bitter smile.
“We have only been married a few days, Valeria. Your love for me is new and young. Time, which wears away all things, will wear away the first fervor of that love.”
“Never! never!”
He drew back from me a little further still.
“Look at the world around you,” he said. “The happiest husbands and wives have their occasional misunderstandings and disagreements; the brightest married life has its passing clouds. When those days come for us, the doubts and fears that you don’t feel now will find their way to you then. When the clouds rise in our married life—when I say my first harsh word, when you make your first hasty reply—then, in the solitude of your own room, in the stillness of the wakeful night, you will think of my first wife’s miserable death. You will remember that I was held responsible for it, and that my innocence was never proved. You will say to yourself, ‘Did it begin, in her time, with a harsh word from him and with a hasty reply from her? Will it one day end with me as the jury half feared that it ended with her?’ Hideous questions for a wife to ask herself! You will stifle them; you will recoil from them, like a good woman, with horror. But when we meet the next morning you will be on your guard, and I shall see it, and know in my heart of hearts what it means. Imbittered by that knowledge, my next harsh word may be harsher still. Your next thoughts of me may remind you more vividly and more boldly that your husband was once tried as a poisoner, and that the question of his first wife’s death was never properly cleared up. Do you see what materials for a domestic hell are mingling for us here? Was it............