And Ross sat there, his legs stretched out before him, hands in his pockets, his head sunk, lost in a reverie of wonder, pity, and great dread.
“Her child?” he thought. “Amy’s child? Ives was her husband, and that baby is her child?”
He recalled with singular vividness the phrases of that pitiful, unreasonable letter. “Just let me see you.” “It’s been so long!” “You’re sick of me. All you want is to get rid of me.” He could imagine Ives, that fellow who was about his age, about his build—alone in his furnished room, writing that letter. “How can you be so damned cruel?” And “darling.”
“In a pretty bad state,” Donnelly had said. And he had come, with all his hope and his fear and his pain, to “Day’s End,” and—
“But if—if that was Ives I saw in Mrs. Jones’s room,” thought Ross, “then who was it Amy wanted me to watch for last night?”
This idea gave him immeasurable relief. That man had not been Ives. Ives hadn’t come yet. The whole tragedy was an invention of his own.
“No reason to take it for granted that that letter was meant for Amy,” he thought. “Plenty of other women in Stamford. No; I’ve simply been making a fool of myself, imagining.”
But there was one thing he had not imagined. There was, among all these doubts and surmises, one immutable fact, the man under the sofa. He could, if he pleased, explain away everything else, but not that.
It seemed to him incredible that he had, in the beginning, accepted that fact so coolly. He had thought it was “none of his business.” And now it was the chief business of his life. It was as if that silent figure had cried out to him for justice; as if he had come here only in order to see that man, and to avenge him.
“No!” he protested, in his soul. “I’ve got nothing to do with justice and—vengeance. The thing’s done. It can never be undone. I don’t want to see—any one punished for it. That’s not my business. I’m nobody’s judge, thank God!”