He stared at her—“gaped”, she told him some time afterwards. At the moment she laughed with a little embarrassment.
“Dear me, Mr. Trent! Have I said anything dreadful? You surely must know.... I thought everybody understood by now.... I’m sure I’ve had to explain it often enough... if I marry again I lose everything that my husband left me.”
The effect of this speech upon Trent was curious. For an instant his face was flooded with the emotion of surprise. As this passed away he gradually drew himself together, as he sat, into a tense attitude. He looked, she thought as she saw his knuckles grow white on the arms of the chair, like a man prepared for pain under the hand of the surgeon. But all he said, in a voice lower than his usual tone, was, “I had no idea of it.”
“It is so,” she said calmly, trifling with a ring on her finger. “Really, Mr. Trent, it is not such a very unusual thing. I think I am glad of it. For one thing, it has secured me—at least since it became generally known—from a good many attentions of a kind that a woman in my position has to put up with as a rule.”
“No doubt,” he said gravely. “And... the other kind?”
She looked at him questioningly. “Ah!” she laughed. “The other kind trouble me even less. I have not yet met a man silly enough to want to marry a widow with a selfish disposition, and luxurious habits and tastes, and nothing but the little my father left me.”
She shook her head, and something in the gesture shattered the last remnants of Trent’s self-possession.
“Haven’t you, by Heaven!” he exclaimed, rising with a violent movement and advancing a step towards her. “Then I am going to show you that human passion is not always stifled by the smell of money. I am going to end the business—my business. I am going to tell you what I dare say scores of better men have wanted to tell you, but couldn’t summon up what I have summoned up—the infernal cheek to do it. They were afraid of making fools of themselves. I am not. You have accustomed me to the feeling this afternoon.” He laughed aloud in his rush of words, and spread out his hands. “Look at me! It is the sight of the century! It is one who says he loves you, and would ask you to give up very great wealth to stand at his side.”
She was hiding her face in her hands. He heard her say brokenly, “Please... don’t speak in that way.”
He answered: “It will make a great difference to me if you will allow me to say all I have to say before I leave you. Perhaps it is in bad taste, but I will risk that; I want to relieve my soul; it needs open confession. This is the truth. You have troubled me ever since the first time I saw you—and you did not know it—as you sat under the edge of the cliff at Marlstone, and held out your arms to the sea. It was only your beauty that filled my mind then. As I passed by you it seemed as if all the life in the place were crying out a song about you in the wind and the sunshine. And the song stayed in my ears; but even your beauty would be no more than an empty memory to me by now if that had been all. It was when I led you from the hotel there to your house, with your hand on my arm, that—what was it that happened? I only knew that your stronger magic had struck home, and that I never should forget that day, whatever the love of my life should be. Till that day I had admired as I should admire the loveliness of a still lake; but that day I felt the spell of the divinity of the lake. And next morning the waters were troubled, and she rose—the morning when I came to you with my questions, tired out with doubts that were as bitter as pain, and when I saw you without your pale, sweet mask of composure—when I saw you moved and glowing, with your eyes and your hands alive, and when you made me understand that for such a creature as you there had been emptiness and the mere waste of yourself for so long. Madness rose in me then, and my spirit was clamouring to say what I say at last now: that life would never seem a full thing again because you could not love me, that I was taken for ever in the nets of your black hair and by the incantation of your voice—”