"Then you will not object to my living on in this way? You will not seek to change anything? You will——" She hesitated and broke off, not impulsively, but with the same clear, sweet voice in which she had put her question.
Lifting his head, he looked up at her from his knees, and the dumb loneliness in his eyes caused her at last to drop her own to the rug upon which he knelt.
"If you will only let me care for you—serve you—work for you," he implored brokenly. "If you will only let me make up, however poorly, something of what you have suffered."
A vague discomfort, produced in her by the intensity of his gaze, moved her to draw slightly away from him, while she turned restlessly on her pillows. At the first shade of perplexity, of annoyance, that showed in her face, he felt, with a terrible power of intuition, that she was seeking in vain to estimate each of his heartbroken words at its full value—to read calmly by the light of experience the passion for atonement to which his lips had tried hopelessly to give expression. The wall of personality rose like a visible object between them. He might beat against it in desperation until his strength was gone, yet he knew that it would remain forever impenetrable, and through its thickness there would pass only the loud, unmeaning sound of each other's voice.
"Have you lost all love for me, Lydia?" he asked. "Have you even forgotten that I am the father of your children?"
As soon as his words were uttered, he stumbled to his feet, horrified by the effect upon her. A change that was like a spasm of physical nausea had shaken her limbs, and he felt rather than saw that she had shrunk from him, convulsed and quivering, until she was crushed powerless against the back of the sofa on which she lay. Her whole attitude, he realised, was the result, not of a moral judgment, but of a purely physical antipathy. Her horror of him had become instinctive, and she was no more responsible for its existence than a child is responsible for the dread aroused in it by the goblins of nursery rhymes. His life as a convict had not only unclassed him in her eyes, it had put him entirely outside and below the ordinary relations of human beings. To his wife he must remain forever an object of pity, perhaps, but of intense loathing and fear also.
The wave of remorse turned to bitterness on his lips, and all the tenderer emotions he had felt when he knelt by her side—the self-reproach, the spiritual yearning, the passion for goodness, all these were extinguished in the sense of desolation which swept over him.
"Don't be afraid," he said coldly, "I shall not touch you."
"It was nothing—a moment's pain," she answered, in a wistful, apologetic voice.
She was playing nervously with the fringe of the silk shawl, and he stood for a minute in silence while he watched her long, slender fingers twine themselves in and out of the tasseled ends. Then turning aside she pushed away the coffee service on the little table as if its fragrance annoyed her.