Her voice rose to a shriek; and, falling upon her knees, she beat the soft moss of the pathway with her fists in frenzy.
“Get up, you little fool!” Jim snapped. “I’m not a ghost. I’m alive: look at me.”
She stared at him with her mouth open, crawled forward, and rose to her feet. Suddenly, as the truth seemed to dawn upon her, the colour surged into her cheeks, and there came an expression of hatred into her face which Jim had not seen before, and which wholly surpassed the animosity he himself felt.
“You’re alive?” she gasped. “You weren’t murdered? You’ve just played a trick on me?”
“Yes,” he answered. “I didn’t mean to turn up again, only circumstances have compelled me to.”
“You can’t come back!” she cried, wringing her hands in such desperation that a certain degree of pity was added to Jim’s tumult of emotions. “You’re dead: you can’t come back to life again, you can’t, you can’t!... Spoiling everything like this, you beast!—you devil! Oh, I might have guessed it was all a dirty trick to spite me. You’ve been living with some other woman, I suppose. Well, go back to her. I’ve done with you. Nobody wants you here: we all thanked Heaven when you died. You were always impossible.”
She moved to and fro, now twisting her gloves in her hands, now pointing at him with shaking fingers, and now clutching at her breast and throat.
“Well, there it is,” Jim said, feeling himself to be in the wrong. “I’m sorry about it all, but here I am, alive. I’m not going to bother you. All I want is for you to divorce me for desertion, so that I can be quit of you and Eversfield for the rest of my life.”
“Divorce you?” she repeated, furiously. “Divorce a dead man? Make myself a laughing stock? Why, I’ve only just paid for a memorial tablet for you in the church; a lying tablet, too, in which I’ve called myself your ‘sorrowing widow.’ It isn’t true. I felt no sorrow: I think I always detested you. I should never have married you if it hadn’t been for mother saying you were such a good match. And now, just when I’ve found a real man, a man who will look after me, you come sneaking home again, prowling about like a tramp, or a burglar, or something. I wish to God you were dead!”
Under her lashing tongue, Jim was nonplussed. He wanted to tell her how she had made his life impossible by her shams and pretences, her crude view of marriage, her intrinsic uselessness; but words were not forthcoming. “As far as you are concerned,” he said lamely, “I shall be dead as soon as you divorce me. It will mean postponing your marriage for a few months: that’s all.”