“Oh, if that were true, you and I might be spared this shame and agony.”
A low wail escaped her, and she hid her face in her arms.
“Mrs. Gerome, is not your husband dead?”
“Dead to me,—but not yet in his grave. The man I married is still alive.”
She heard a half-stifled groan, and buried her face deeper in her arms to avoid the sight of the suffering she had caused.
For some time the stillness of death reigned around them, 354 and when at last the wretched woman raised her eyes, she saw Dr. Grey standing beside her, with one hand on the back of her chair, the other clasped over his eyes. Reverently she turned and pressed her lips to his cold fingers, and he felt her hot tears falling upon them, as she said, falteringly,—
“Forgive me the pain that I have innocently inflicted on you. God is my witness, I did not imagine you cared for me. I supposed you pitied me, and were only interested in saving my miserable soul. The servants told me you were very soon to be married to a young girl who lived with your sister; and I never dreamed that your noble, generous heart felt any interest in me, save that of genuine Christian compassion for my loneliness and desolation. If I had suspected your feelings, I would have gone away immediately, or told you all. Oh, that I had never come here!—that I had never left my safe retreat, near Funchal! Then I would not have stabbed the heart of the only man whom I respect, revere, and trust.”
Some moments elapsed ere he could fully command himself, and when he spoke he had entirely regained composure.
“Do not reproach yourself. The fault has been mine, rather than yours. Knowing that some mystery enveloped your early life, I should not have allowed my affections to centre so completely in one concerning whose antecedents I knew absolutely nothing. I have been almost culpably rash and blind,—but I could not look into your beautiful, sad eyes, and doubt that you were worthy of the love that sprang up unbidden in my heart. I knew that you were irreligious, but I believed I could win you back to Christ; and when I tell you that, after living thirty-eight years, you are the only woman I ever met whom I wished to call my wife, you can in some degree realize my confidence in the innate purity of your character. God only knows how severely I am punished by my rashness, how profoundly I deplore the strange infatuation that so utterly blinded me. At least, I am grateful that my brief madness has not involved you in sin and additional suffering.”
The burning spots faded from her cheeks as she listened 355 to his low, solemn words, and when he ended, she clasped her hands passionately, and exclaimed,—