“No,” she repeated. “I was weak and cruel, but I was not yours.”
She had been incredibly near so short a time ago before. Now, looking at him, with her difficult breaths and gentle, inflexible eyes, she was incredibly remote. “I am his, only his,” she said. “I love him and I shall always love him. It makes no difference. He loves Nancy, but it makes no difference. He is my husband. The father of my baby.”
She tried to speak on steadily while she thus gave him the truth that ended all his hope; but the desperate emotion with which he received it made real and overpowering to her her outlived yet living sorrow. With all that she must relinquish laid bare to her in the passion of his eyes she could measure all that she had lost, as she had, perhaps, till then, never measured it. “Don’t you know?” she said. “Don’t you see? My heart is broken, broken, broken.”
She put her head down on her arms as she said the words and he heard her bitter weeping.
He knew, as he listened, that it was all over with him. Dimly, in the terrible suffering that wrenched at him, he received his further revelation of the nature already nearer him than any in the world. Her strength would be in all she did and felt. She had loved Barney and she would always love him. Her marriage had been to her an ultimate and indissoluble experience. That was why she had been so blind. She could not have thought of herself as a woman to be again loved and wooed.
Her hair lay against his hands, still holding hers, and he found himself stroking it, without tenderness or solicitude it seemed. It seemed to be only automatically that his fingers passed across it, while he noted its warmth and fineness and bright, lovely colour, remembering that he had thought it at the first her one indubitable beauty.
They sat there thus for a long time. The gilt clock paused, choked, then in a voice of hurrying, hoarsened silver rang out eleven strokes. Footsteps passed and faded up the corridor; doors closed. A tramway on the quai clashed and clanged, came to a noisy standstill, and moved on again with a rattling of cables and raucous blasts from a horn; and in the profound silence that followed he seemed to hear the deep old river flowing.
“Really, you see, it’s broken,” said Adrienne. She had ceased to weep, but she still leaned forward, her head upon her folded arms. “You saw it happen,” she said. “That night when you found me in the rain.”
“I’ve seen everything happen to you, haven’t I?” said Oldmeadow.
“Yes,” she assented. “Everything. And I’ve made you suffer, too. Isn’t that strange; everybody who comes near me I make suffer.”