"Don't you realize the rights of a wife?" I persisted. "Your husband can't cast you off like this. He can't despoil you of everything you have and then fling you aside. You're flesh and blood—you're not a garment that is threadbare."
And when I saw her poor white face staring into mine, I gave the wrench its final turn to make her agony of mind more sure. God knows I little thought.
"You're treating yourself as though you were a worthless woman, as though you were property he had bought and might chuck away at will. But you're his wife and if you never see him again—you might thank God if you didn't—you must make him support you with the last penny he has."
It was then she said it—said it in a voice that was colorless and dead; in a voice as when a prisoner pleads guilty to the vilest possibility of crime.
"I'm not his wife," she murmured.
Her voice was low, almost to a whisper and yet, had she shouted it, the silence coming after could not have been so great. The whole house in one moment was made quiet. Even a hansom jangling down the street came to my ears as such a sound is meant to reach you in play.
"I shall remember afterwards," I said to myself, "that I heard a hansom rattling down the street." And I have remembered it; but that thought is the only one that returns to my mind. I can see things as they were. I can see her eyes trying to reach to mine, then falling till her hands had covered them. I can see the little, huddled-up figure, full of pathos, that she presented to my eyes. I can see Mrs. Bullwell coming in through the door with her tray of things, the uncorked bottle of claret standing high and black above the dishes.
But she came too late. As she closed the door behind her, the pathetic little figure before me crumpled up like a garment that can no longer stand upon the firmness of its texture. With a weary sigh that drove a sickness to my throat, Clarissa tumbled from her chair. I found her curled, as Dandy curls himself, into a circle at my feet. But she was so still. Her body was stiller than if she slept.
CHAPTER VIII
"Oh dear! Oh dear!" exclaimed Mrs. Bullwell, "the poor thing's fainted!"