She felt her hand doubtfully taken and laid for a moment against his cheek. The cheek was wet. “I’ll listen.”
“Well, then; I won’t reproach you; I won’t argue with you. Why should I,” she exclaimed with a flash of inspiration, “when all the power is mine? If I came in anger, in abhorrence ... well, I feel only pity now. Don’t reject it—don’t reject my pity. This awful thing has fallen on both of us together; as much on me as on you. Let me help you—let us try to help each other.”
He pressed the hand closer to his face and then dropped it. “Ah, you’re merciful.... I think I understand the abhorrence better. I’ve been a cad and a blackguard, and everything else you like. I’ve been living with the thought of it day and night. Only, now—”
“Well, now,” she panted, “let me help you; let me—Chris,” she cried, “let me make it possible for you to go. I know there may be all sorts of difficulties—material as well as others—and those at least—”
He looked up at her sharply, as if slow to grasp her words. Then his face hardened and grew red. “You’re bribing me? I see. I didn’t at first. Well—you’ve the right to, I suppose; there’s hardly any indignity you haven’t the right to lay on me. Only—it’s not so simple. I’ve already told you—”
“Don’t name her again! Don’t make me remember.... Chris, I want to help you as if this were ... were any other difficulty.... Can’t we look at it together in that way?”
But she felt the speciousness of her words. How could one face the Gorgon-image of this difficulty as if it were like any other? His silence seemed to echo her thought. Slowly he rose again from his chair, plunged his hands deeply into his pockets, with a gesture she remembered when he was troubled, and went and leaned in the jamb of the window. What was he thinking, she wondered, as he glanced vacantly up and down the long featureless street? Smiling inwardly, perhaps, at the crudeness of her methods, the emptiness of her threats. For, after all—putting the case at its basest—if the money were really what had tempted him, how, with that fortune at his feet, could any offer of hers divert his purpose?
A clock she had not noticed began to tick insistently. It seemed to be measuring out the last seconds before some nightmare crash that she felt herself powerless to arrest. Powerless, at least—
She saw his expression change, and he turned and moved back quickly into the room. “There’s my mother coming down the street. She’s been to market—my mother does her own marketing.” He spoke with a faint smile of irony. “But you needn’t be afraid of meeting her. She won’t come in here; she never does at this hour. She’ll go straight to the kitchen.”
Kate had begun to tremble again. “Afraid? Why should I be afraid of your mother? Or she of me? It’s you who are afraid now!” she exclaimed.