"I did feel like a brute about the money sometimes," he remarked;—"especially that last time; I wanted you to have the house as a sort of salve to my conscience; I've taken almost all your money, you know; it's quite true. As to the rest—what Augustine calls my dissoluteness—I can't pretend to take your view; a nun's view." He looked at her. "How beautiful you are with that white round your face," he said. "You are like a woman of snow."
She looked back at him as though, from the unhesitating steadiness of her gaze, to lend him some of her own clearness.
"Don't you see that it's not real? Don't you see that it's because you suddenly find me beautiful, and because, as a woman of snow, I allure you, that you think you love me? Do you really deceive yourself?"
He stared at her; but the ray only illumined the bewilderment of his dispossession. "I don't pretend to be an idealist," he said, stopping still before her; "I don't pretend that it's not because I suddenly find you beautiful; that's one reason; and a very essential one, I think; but there are other reasons, lots of them. Amabel—you must see that my love for you is an entirely different sort of thing from what my love for her ever was."
She said nothing. She could not argue with him, nor ask, as if for a cheap triumph, if it were different from his love for the later mistress. She saw, indeed, that it was different now, whatever it had been yesterday. Clearly she saw, glancing at herself as at an object in the drama, that she offered quite other interests and charms, that her attractions, indeed, might be of a quality to elicit quite new sentiments from Sir Hugh, sentiments less shadowing than those of yesterday had been. And so she accepted his interpretation in silence, unmoved by it though doing it full justice, and for a little while Sir Hugh said nothing either. He still stood before her and she no longer looked at him, but down at her folded hands that did not tremble at all tonight, and she wondered if now, perhaps, he would understand her silence and leave her. But when, in an altered voice, he said: "Amabel;" she looked at him.
She seemed to see everything tonight as a disembodied spirit might see it, aware of what the impeding flesh could only dimly manifest; and she saw now that her husband's face had never been so near beauty.
It did not attain it; it was, rather, as if the shadow, lifting entirely for a flickering moment, revealed something unconscious, something almost innocent, almost pitiful: it was as if, liberated, he saw beauty for a moment and put out his hands to it, like a child putting out its hands to touch the moon, believing that it was as near to him, and as easily to be attained, as pleasure always had been.
"Try to forgive me," he said, and his voice had the broken note of a sad child's voice, the note of ultimate appeal from man to woman. "I'm a poor creature; I know that. It's always made me ashamed—to see how you idealise me.—The other day, you know,—when you kissed my hand—I was horribly ashamed.—But, upon my honour Amabel, I'm not a bad fellow at bottom,—not the devil incarnate your son seems to think me. Something could be made of me, you know;—and, if you'll forgive me, and let me try to win your love again;—ah Amabel—"—he pleaded, almost with tears, before her unchangingly gentle face. And, the longing to touch her, hold her, receive comfort and love, mingling with the new reverential fear, he knelt beside her, putting his head on her knees and murmuring: "I do so desperately love you."
Amabel sat looking down upon him. Her face was unchanged, but in her heart was a trembling of astonished sadness.
It was too late. It had been too late—from the very first;—yet, if they could have met before each was spoiled for each;—before life had set them unalterably apart—? The great love of her life was perhaps not all illusion.