Jem Pound stepped two paces backward, and answered in a loud, harsh tone:
"You fool! she is here!"
Miles stepped forward as if to carry out his threat; but even as he moved he heard a rustle at his side, and felt a light hand laid on his arm. He started, turned, and looked round. There, by his side—poverty-stricken almost to rags, yet dark and comely as the summer's night—stood the woman whom years ago he had made his wife!
A low voice full of tears whispered his name: "Ned, Ned!" and "Ned, Ned!" again and again.
He made no answer, but stood like a granite pillar, staring at her. She pressed his arm with one hand, and laid the other caressingly on his breast; and as she stood thus, gazing up through a mist into his stern, cold face, this topmost hand rested heavily upon him. To him it seemed like lead; until suddenly—did it press a bruise or a wound, that such a hideous spasm should cross his face? that he should shake off the woman so savagely?
By the merest accident, the touch of one woman had conjured the vision of another; he saw before him two, not one; two as opposite in their impressions on the senses as the flower and the weed; as separate in their associations as the angels of light and darkness.
Yet this poor woman, the wife, could only creep near him again—forgetting her repulse, since he was calm the next moment—and press his hand to her lips, so humbly that now he stood and bore it, and repeat brokenly:
"I have found him! Oh, thank God! Now at last I have found him!"
While husband and wife stood thus, silenced—one by love, the other by sensations of a very different kind—the third person watched them with an expression which slowly changed from blank surprise to mortification and dumb rage. At last he seemed unable to stand it any longer, for he sprang forward and whispered hoarsely in the woman's ear:
"What are you doing? Are you mad? What are we here for? What have we crossed the sea for? Get to work, you fool, or——"