He turned on his heel and went to the other side of the summer house, and flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the scrub below. A frog took a leap. When he spoke again it was with his back to her. "Don't you think you'd better rejoin Mrs. Jekyll? She may be impatient to get off."
But Alice took her courage in both hands. If this was to be the end she must know it. Uncertainty was not to be endured any longer. All her sleepless nights and fluctuations of hope and despair had marked her, perhaps for life. Hers was not the easily blown away infatuation of a debutante, the mere summer love of a young girl. It was the steady and devoted love of a wife, ready to make sacrifices, to forgive inconstancies, to make allowances for temporary aberrations and, when necessary, to nurse back to sanity, without one word or look of reproach, the husband who had slipped into delinquency. Not only her future and his were at stake, but there were the children for whom she prayed. They must be considered.
And so, holding back her emotion, she followed him across the pompous summer house in which, with a shudder, she recognized a horrible resemblance to a mausoleum, and laid her little hand upon his arm.
"Gilbert," she said, "tell me the truth. Be frank with me. Let me help you, dear."
Poor little wife. For the third time she had said the wrong thing. "Help"—the word angered him. Did she imagine that he was a callow youth crossed in love?
He drew his arm away sharply. There was something too domestic in all this to be borne with patience. Humiliating, also, he had to confess.
"When did I ever give you the right to delve into my private affairs?" he asked, with amazing cruelty. "We're married,—isn't that enough? I've given you everything I have except my independence. You can't ask for more than that,—from me."
He added "from me" because the expression of pain on her pretty face made him out to be a brute, and he was not that. He tried to hedge by the use of those two small words and put it to her, without explanation, that he was different from most men,—more careless and callous to the old-fashioned vows of marriage, if she liked, but different. That might be due to character or upbringing or the times to which he belonged. He wasn't going to argue about it. The fact remained. "I'll take you back," he added.
But she blocked the way. "I only want your love," she said. "If you've taken that away from me, nothing else counts."
He gave a sort of groan. Her persistence was appalling, her courage an indescribable reproach. For a moment he remained silent, with a drawn face and twitching fingers, strangely white and wasted, like a man who had been through an illness,—a caricature of the once easy-going Gilbert Palgrave, the captain of his fate and the master of his soul.