“Why do you always show me that I must despise myself?” she said. “How can I know what I want?”
“Dear Tony,” he said gently, “what you want, what you really want, is me. And I don’t despise you for that.”
“Oh—it’s not so simple, Bevis;—oh, it’s not! I want you; but if he were here I’d go to him and leave you without a pang.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” he smiled grimly. “You’d leave me, of course, because he has been far more in your life than I have;—and he is your husband. But it wouldn’t be without a pang.”
“With a pang, then,” she was brave and faced it. “But that would pass when I had told him everything and been forgiven. Malcolm, I know, would forgive me.”
“I should rather say he would!” Still the young man laughed a little grimly. “Why shouldn’t he? If a man returns from the dead, he must expect to find that the world has gone on without him, mustn’t he? After all, Tony dear, Malcolm hasn’t merely gone to Australia or Patagonia; he’s dead; and that does make a difference.”
She was the most generous and unresentful of creatures. A warm flood of recognition filled him as he saw how he still hurt her and how she took it. And he was harsh and crabbed. He had always had an ironic tongue and an ironic eye for reality, in himself and in others. And now, entangled in his own passion and in the webs of her dreams and difficulties, he recognized something perfidious in his nature, something that, while it adored her, yet found pleasure, or relief, in dealing her now and then, as a punishment for what she made him suffer, the light lash of his unentangled and passionless perception. And who was he to lash Tony?
“Forgive me,” he said, leaning over and looking down at her. “I am a brute, as I told you. Why am I not more merely grateful to you for loving any one so useless? I’ll help you in any way I can, Tony. What do you really want to ask me? Perhaps what makes me so odious to you is that I’ve got no help for you.”
Perhaps it was. A shrinking from the issue she put before him had been in him from the first.
And poor Tony did not suspect what he meant; did not, for all her attempt at clearness, see in what way she really wanted him to help her.