“Dearest Lionel: For reasons which I will explain when I see you, I have thought best to call myself Mr. Petersen’s wife. I want you to come back with him and I will explain everything. He thinks you are my brother, named Alec. Don’t say anything to him, but wait until you have seen me. I am very ill. I cannot write any more.
Minnie.”
Even then he hadn’t been much impressed; he did not realise what her words implied. Simply another piece of her tiresome chicanery; posing as someone’s wife to make herself more important, or something of that sort. Treachery to himself he never suspected, or that she could possibly be actually guilty of bigamy.... Until Mr. Petersen told him of the baby that was expected. Minnie was to be the mother of another man’s child!
Oh, even she couldn’t explain that away, couldn’t make him swallow that! He might be contemptible, a tool in her hands, but there was a limit, an end! He walked beside the innocent other man in the dark, smiling grimly to himself, filled with a curiously impersonal thirst for revenge. That woman must be exposed, disgraced, crushed. He was savagely delighted to do it. A long repressed and unrecognised wish came struggling to the surface of his mind, the wish to be free of her and her domination. So long as she loved him and was faithful to him, worked and schemed for him, he couldn’t even wish to be rid of her. Only falseness in her could justify him, and he rejoiced now in finding her false.
“It’s the end of her,” he reflected, “of her and her beastly trickery!”
But it was not. When he got to the house, and actually saw her, ill, tortured with anxiety, when he once more heard her voice, his resolution failed him. It was not so much through pity or affection, either; it was the woman’s uncanny plausibility, the preposterous air of respectability she threw over all she did. He could not see her as a criminal.
Fate had reserved curious sufferings for him, unique pains. To live through that night, with honest Mr. Petersen, to be in his house, while Minnie bore his child.... And then, still at Mr. Petersen’s side, to go in to her, and look at her son....
He was in a state of utter chaos. His little girl didn’t know him. In a year and a half she had quite forgotten him, was growing up contentedly under another man’s roof. It hurt him beyond measure. He had no idea how he had changed, what with his beard, and the ravages of his illness. It gave him a sensation of being already dead and buried and forgotten.
He couldn’t make himself feel as he believed he should feel. He could not hate Minnie, and he actually liked Mr. Petersen. And pitied them both. He thought, more seriously than he had ever thought before in his life, and came to a conclusion which was quite at variance with his tradition.
“I’m no good to Minnie or Sandra,” he said to himself, “I’ll go away, and leave them to the man who can take care of them.”