“Compose yourself. I cannot be composed if you are not, for to see you weep distresses me beyond expression. Speak freely to me. Trust me.”
She shaded her face with her veil, and after a little while spoke calmly. Her voice had the ring of Polly’s.
“It is not that my husband’s mind is at all impaired by his bodily suffering, for I assure you that is not the case. But in his weakness, and in his knowledge that he is incurably ill, he cannot overcome the ascendancy of one idea. It preys upon him, embitters every moment of his painful life, and will shorten it.”
She stopping, he said again: “Speak freely to me. Trust me.”
“We have had five children before this darling, and they all lie in their little graves. He believes that they have withered away under a curse, and that it will blight this child like the rest.”
“Under what curse?”
“Both I and he have it on our conscience that we tried you very heavily, and I do not know but that, if I were as ill as he, I might suffer in my mind as he does. This is the constant burden:—‘I believe, Beatrice, I was the only friend that Mr. Jackson ever cared to make, though I was so much his junior. The more influence he acquired in the business, the higher he advanced me, and I was alone in his private confidence. I came between him and you, and I took you from him. We were both secret, and the blow fell when he was wholly unprepared. The anguish it caused a man so compressed must have been terrible; the wrath it awakened inappeasable. So, a curse came to be invoked on our poor, pretty little flowers, and they fall.’”
“And you, Beatrice,” he asked, when she had ceased to speak, and there had been a silence afterwards, “how say you?”
“Until within these few weeks I was afraid of you, and I believed that you would never, never forgive.”
“Until within these few weeks,” he repeated. “Have you changed your opinion of me within these few weeks?”