"What!" he shouted, dropped her hand, and ran to the dressing-table, flinging a candle on high to stare. "Why—why!" he stammered, putting down the light. "Pooh, what nonsense is this? You can't put me off like this now. That—why, that's poor English!"
"And I," she cried, walking up to him, "I am Mrs. English. Oh, that was the mistake! You thought I was Lady Gerardine. I never was. You took a dream woman and thought she was your wife. I never was your wife. I am his—his only. Now you understand, do you not?"
Poor Sir Arthur! In proportion as her exaltation mounted, his heat of anger fell away. His bewilderment grew, and his perturbation. For a moment or two he tried to cling to his conviction of her guilt. We are always anxious to vindicate ourselves when we are moved to great wrath; and the more unjust we have been the more loth are we to give up our suspicions. But with these eyes of flame upon him, with these accents of passion in his ears, even he could not maintain his damning judgment. The first hypothesis, that of insanity, came back to him in full force. Then arose a mitigated suggestion. A man of desultory reading, he had a smattering of many subjects. He had heard of that form of mental trouble called auto-suggestion—idée fixe. He looked round the room.
By George, there was another portrait of poor English! And, as he lived, a photograph of him on the chimney-piece. He had passed one on the stairs. And now he remembered the daub in the hall. He drew a long breath. This little damp hole of a place, with the fellow's head staring down at one from every corner—yes, that was it—it had been too much for her in her nervous state of health. The next words she spoke brought confirmation:
"Do not think I blame you! I know—I know. It is my own cowardice, my own baseness of soul that has brought it all upon me. And now it is too late. His papers, his letters, too late they came to me. I am lost—lost!"
She put her hands to her forehead, and reeled. He caught her in his arms.
Those dashed papers! How obstinate she had been about them! He had known it would be too much for her; he had even been ready to take the burden upon himself.
"There, there, Rosamond!" She faintly struggled against his supporting embrace, every inch of her flesh shuddering from his touch. Oh, that voice from the past: "There are things a man cannot contemplate in his living body; things the flesh rebels against. The dead will be quiet." The dead ... but he was not dead. Perhaps now he was looking on them! The horror of the thought paralysed her, as the snake paralyses the bird. Yet, if she had had a knife in her hand she might, in that madness of nausea, have struck it into the breast against which she was clasped.
"Sir James was certainly right," thought Sir Arthur, tightening his grip upon her waist with one hand, while he patted her shrinking shoulder with the other. "What Rosamond wants, poor girl, is soothing."
She wrenched herself free suddenly, with unexpected strength. Sir Arthur staggered. Then she turned upon him a countenance of such livid vindictive menace and at the same time such torture that, speechless, he recoiled before her.