“I think so and I hate them; though I can not check them. I hate my temper and even myself when in such present moods. De Griffin, pray as thou didst never pray before, that I do not learn to hate thee. I pity thee, because I’ve some love left.”
“Pity?”
“Yes, when I imagine thee wriggling beneath the malignant detestation of which I know I shall soon be capable.”
“My wife, in God’s dear name, banish these moods! They are impious, unnatural; the crisis of thy being falsely accuses thy heart. Be calm!”
“Calm? ‘Be calm!’ Very good; calm me, please, if thou canst. Oh, why didst thou make me thus?”
“The God of all peace forgive me if I did, Rizpah.”
“Thou wert the elder and shouldst have known?”
“What?”
“That to unsettle a woman’s faith, if she be such as I, is to let loose a bundle of blind vagaries and to tumble her, like a drifting wreck, on unknown shores.”
“Oh, wife, as thou hopest for heaven and lovest our unborn child, restrain these moods. Thou’lt mark the one to be, with germs of all evil; for such outbursts of mothers re-act with awful effect upon their offspring. Thou knowest how the old nurse, at Damascus, killed a babe in an instant, merely by giving it her breast after she had yielded to an outbreak of passion. Such tempers hurl poison through all the being!”