It was so sudden, so amazing, and so cruel that, turning to her, he literally stared, open-eyed and open-mouthed. 'I don't know what you mean, Helen,' he said.
'Of course you don't,' she continued in her measured voice, 'of course you don't know what I mean; you never have. I don't blame you; you are not imaginative, and all my life I've taken care that you should know very little of what I meant. The only bit of me that you've known has been the bit that has always been at your service. There is a good deal more of me than that.'
'But—what have you meant?' he stammered, almost in tears.
Her face, white and cold, was bent on him, and in her little pause she seemed to deliberate—not on what he should be told, that was fixed—but on how to tell it; and for this she found finally short and simple words.
'Can't you guess, even now, when at last I've become desperate and indifferent?' she said. 'Can't you see, even now, that I've always loved you?'
They confronted each other in a long moment of revelation and avowal. It grew like a great distance between them, the distance of all the years through which she had suffered and he been blind. Gerald saw it like a chasm, dark with time, with secrecy, with his intolerable stupidity. He gazed at her across it, and in her face, her strange, strong, fragile, weary face, he saw it all, at last. Yes, she had loved him all her life, and he had never seen it.
She had moved, in speaking to him, away from her place near the fire, and he now went to it, and put his arms on the mantelpiece and hid his face upon them. 'Fool—fool that I am!' he uttered softly. He stood so, his face hidden from her, and his words seemed to release some bond in Helen's heart. The worst of the bitterness against him passed away. The tragedy, after all, was not his fault, but Fate's, and to suggest that he was accountable was to be grotesquely stupid. That he had not loved her was the tragedy; that he had never seen was, in reality, the tragedy's alleviation. Absurd to blame poor Gerald for not seeing. When she spoke again it was in an altered voice.
'No, you're not,' she said, and she seemed with him to contemplate the chasm and to make it clear for him—she had always made things clear for him, and there was now, with all the melancholy, a peacefulness in sharing with him this, their last, situation. Never before had they talked over one so strange, and never again would they talk over any other so near; to speak at last was to make it, in its very nearness, immeasurably remote, to put it away, from both their lives, for ever. 'No, you're not; I shouldn't have said that you were not imaginative; I shouldn't have said that you had never considered me; you have—you have been the best of friends; I was letting myself be cruel. It's only that I'm not a fool. A woman who isn't can always keep a man from imagining; it's the one thing that even a stupid woman can do. And my whole nature has been moulded by the instinct for concealment.' She looked round mechanically for a seat while she spoke; she felt horribly tired; and she sank on a straight, high chair near the writing-table. Here, leaning forward, her arms resting on her knees, her hands clasped and hanging, she went on, looking before her. 'I want to tell you about it now. There are things to confess. I haven't been a nice woman in it all; I've not taken it as a nice woman would. I've hated you for not loving me. I've hated you for not wanting anything more from me and for your contentment with what I gave you, and for caring as much as you did, too, for being fonder of me than of any one else in the world, and yet never caring more. Of course I understood; it was a little comfort to my pride to understand. Even if I'd been the sort of woman you would have fallen in love with, I was too near. I had to make myself too near; that was my shield. I had to give you everything you wanted because that was the sure way to hide from you that I had so much more to give. And for years I went on hoping—not that you would see—I should have lost everything then—but that, of yourself, you would want more.'
Gerald had lifted his head, but his hand still hid his eyes. 'Helen, dear Helen,' he said, and she did not understand his voice—it was pain, but more than pain; 'why were you so cruel? why were you so proud? If you'd only let me see; if you'd only given me a hint. Don't you know it only needed that?'
She paused over his question for so long that he put down his hand and looked at her, and her eyes, meeting his unfalteringly, widened with a strained, suffering look.