"I have a wife in England." And the lad sank down on the remnants of a broken harrow.
McCloud looked at the bent figure sadly.
"You never told me."
"What was the use?"
McCloud shook his head over this world-old excuse of sinners. It is so much easier to let things drift, to avoid, to trust to events or the mistakes or acts of others. Hal wasn't the first to leave the unsolved problem with the vague, unexpressed, shadowy hope that he would come back to it and somehow find it solved, find the answer staring him in the face.
"And your wife?" probed the inquisitor. "What of her?"
"As to my wife, my conscience is clear, John—absolutely clear." This was said with such boyish frankness and ingenuousness as to bring an almost worldly smile to the face of John McCloud.
"Are you a fair judge of that?"
"I try to be. I think I am. I married Edith because I loved the woman I thought she was. She never loved me. She married me because I was the most available man coming into a title. She was a beautiful woman. Perhaps my vanity was flattered. It was a bad beginning. I won't accuse her or excuse myself. Perhaps she would have been different, married to a different man, or to a man she loved. When I saw what a mess we'd made of it, I put up a fairly decent fight to make the best of it, but she wouldn't let me, or it wasn't possible. Anyway, our marriage ended in being degrading to us both. We were going to hell fast, both of us. I ought to have freed myself before I left England. I owed it to myself."
Though he made some effort to avoid it, this was said with some of the bitterness of the past.