An odd sort of smile, a smile of more expression than had been common to May's face, passed slowly over it--a smile which would have wrung the heart of any woman who loved her and had been there to see it--as she retreated to a chair by the window, and sank into it wearily.
'No one to stand by me but you,' she repeated, not bitterly, but dreamily, as though she were talking to herself. 'I suppose that is true; and if so, I have less than no one: I am quite, utterly alone.'
'Only for a little while, only until the law will let me claim you.'
'Now, and then, and always, Gustave.' The expression of her face had changed; there was no avoidance, no hesitation in her manner now. She looked at him, she spoke to him steadily, but she looked years older than she had done when Gustave de Tournefort entered the room. The sight of him had changed the dream-like impossibility which had been her prevailing sense during the whole of that day into an overwhelming and awful reality. And yet in that reality he had no share. Ever since the crash had come, May Forestfield's better nature had shaken off the thrall of the guilty infatuation under which she had been held by De Tournefort, and lured to her ruin; and there had succeeded to it a bewildering wonderment as to its former existence. For many days together May never once thought of her 'lover.' Her mind was ever busy with the past, but not with his brief, terrible, fatal share in it; busy with her old home, her dead mother, her dead baby, even her husband as he used to be, with every incident of the every-day life of her lost past; full of a fond regret, agonised, though dreamy, and with intervals of incredulousness concerning her own fate--as if this dreadful thing could not be. But she recognised with melancholy surprise that in these reveries De Tournefort's figure had no place; and sometimes she abhorred herself as the fact forced itself upon her recognition. She had sinned before God, and ruined herself for ever in this world, for a man whom she now never thought of in any sense of association with her present or her future. What part had he had in the musings from which his entrance had roused her? Was there a trace of him among the mementoes of the past which she had collected together in this supreme hour of her life? This truth, and the full significance of it, inspired her words, and lent to her voice the calm tone of conviction as she spoke to him, without the slightest hurry or emotion, he observing her the while with astonishment, and a growing conviction that some extraordinary change had passed over her.
'Now, and then, and always. I am not a wise woman even yet, but I am at least a wiser than when you and I first met; and I know what would come of putting my fate into your hands for the future.'
'Do you mean to say that I am not to be trusted with it? That I should treat you ill? That you no longer love me?'
'I mean all these. Do you or do I deserve trust? Who can possibly know the worthlessness of the other so well as we know it--we two, who are detected accomplices. Would you ill treat me? Why should you not? What reverence or respect have I or you shown for the ties and the rights of marriage that you should observe them towards me, or believe that I would observe them towards you? No, Gustave; a wife who starts fair has little chance in what was our world with a man like you. What chance would a wife have who should face the only world which would give us admittance with a man like you? At least I have learned to calculate those odds since I have been an outsider; at least I have come to know that no loneliness for the future could be so bad as the tremendous and hopeless misery of a marriage with the man who has a right to begin by despising me.'
'You--you utterly reject me, then?' said De Tournefort, in a voice almost inarticulate with anger. 'You think me an utter scoundrel, and you reject me?'
'Let us use no hard words,' said May gently. 'I am not blaming you, or reproaching you, or condemning you, or indeed speaking with any reference to your conduct or character. I am speaking for myself, and of myself, according to my conviction and my unchangeable resolve. Gustave, spare me any more argument or contention, and believe me--I am as firmly determined as ever I was in the days of the self-will which led me to my fate--when I tell you that I will never voluntarily see you, and that I will never, under any circumstances, speak to you again after to-day.'
'I asked you a third question, madam; I asked you whether I am to understand that you no longer love me.'