She turned with a little shuddering sigh and raised her white, exhausted face to his. "It was at Cranston," she said, quietly, "one day in July. I did it hastily. My aunts were opposed to it, and—I hated to make them unhappy. But I—I thought I loved him. It was a mistake. I went up to Cranston to meet him, and—we were married. It was in church—there were witnesses, we signed a register—it was all legal, or at least I suppose so. And then—when we came out"——she paused.
"Yes—when you came out?"—Gerard repeated the words hoarsely, his brows drawn together, his eyes fixed upon her in an agonized questioning.—"What then, Elizabeth?"
She hesitated, staring straight before her, as if she were trying to recall the whole thing exactly as it happened. "When we came out of the church, I felt—I don't know why—I felt frightened. I seemed to realize—indeed, I think I had realized all the time—what a mistake it was. He begged me to come away with him, and I—I refused. He had promised me that I should go home, and that he wouldn't claim me for six months, and—I held him to it. He gave in at last, and so—we parted"——
"Ah!"—Gerard drew a long breath.—"You—parted?"
"Yes. I left him and came home. I got there about four—my aunts suspected nothing. He went abroad. And—after a while he stopped writing, I thought he had forgotten me. It all began to seem like a dream. And then—Eleanor Van Antwerp asked me to come to town, and—the rest you know."
"No, not all." Gerard insisted. "When the fellow came home, why didn't he claim you? How have you kept him quiet, all this time?"
"Ah, that was easy."—She spoke listlessly.—"He didn't care anything about me; I used to give him money. I sold my pearls—all my jewelry, in fact. Yes"—as Gerard uttered a horrified exclamation—"it was a terrible bondage, but what could I do? He had me in his power. I used to wonder if the marriage were legal, but there was no one whom I dared ask. And then I thought sometimes that he might die—I had all sorts of wild ideas; but nothing happened, and meanwhile he threatened—to tell you everything. I bought him off twice, and then—this last time"—she paused—"this last time I promised him all my income if he would give me up forever, and never trouble me again. Ah, you think it unpardonable, I see"—she put out her hand with a deprecating gesture—"but you don't know what it is to be tempted—desperate. I was determined I wouldn't ruin my life. And then—then"—her voice faltered—"this evening when you seemed so happy, so trustful—that was what hurt me, Julian—it was easier when you were jealous, suspicious, as you were at first—it came to me suddenly that I couldn't begin the New Year—I couldn't begin our life together with this—this terrible secret weighing on my soul. And so I—I told you"——
Elizabeth's voice faltered, she raised her eyes in a half conscious appeal. It seemed to her for the moment as if the agony of that confession must make amends to some extent even for such deceit as hers. But Gerard's face did not soften. Her whole conduct seemed to him monstrous, incredible. He could not accept as atonement this tardy repentance, the fact that she had told him the truth—at the eleventh hour.
The thought occurred to him, which she had herself suggested, earlier in the evening. He remembered chance gossip of the Neighborhood about her antecedents, listened to vaguely even before he knew her, and haunting him afterwards in the first days of their acquaintance, till love had made him cast it aside, as a thing of no importance. Now it recurred to his mind as the only explanation—he did not accept it as an excuse—of this weakness which seemed otherwise inexplicable. No doubt there must be, he told himself, in the child of such parents,—it would be strange if there were not—some hereditary taint, some lack of moral fibre, which curiously imperceptible in other ways, must needs assert itself in any great moral crisis. The thought, which might have softened him, seemed at the time only to steel him the more against her.
He fell again to pacing up and down, thinking it over; seeing past incidents afresh in the merciless light of his present knowledge; recalling this or that insignificant circumstance which at the time had aroused, unreasonably as it seemed, his distrust;—her occasional uneasiness and distress, that air she had of being on her guard, the look in the picture—ah, he understood it now! It was the shadow of falsehood, which for months had clouded her every thought and action. What a fool he had been, he reflected fiercely—how he had allowed himself to be deceived—made an easy prey by the extent of his infatuation—how she had juggled with the truth, telling him the worst of herself in such a way that he had believed, all the more determinedly, the reverse.