“Don’t overlook the fact that he saved us a funeral in the family,” he reminded her. “You can’t have it both ways. I consider it was providential his being on the spot. George stood to lose in either case.”
“I hope he will take your philosophic view of the matter,” was all she returned. Then she left him to his reflections and went away to see about a meal.
Book Four—Chapter Thirty Seven.
It had been a day of varied experiences of big moments, fraught with terror and relief, joy and sorrow, inextricably interwoven. The eventful day was followed by a night of correspondingly deep emotions, a night of painful revelation and much anguish of mind for Esmé, as well as for the man who was to learn from the lips of the woman he loved, and whom he believed was his wife, that she had never been legally married to him, that her husband was alive, that she and the child, which was his, were leaving him finally.
They talked late into the night, sitting opposite to one another, with a small table between them on which Rose had placed two cups of coffee, before she left them alone together, and went softly upstairs to take a look at the baby, asleep in its improvised cot.
The little house was overcrowded that night, so that John was forced to sling a hammock on the balcony and sleep out in the open air. It was also a very quiet house; a house in which every one walked softly and spoke in whispers and went about with concerned and anxious faces. The master of the house stayed late at his club, and slipped in quietly on his return and crept past the sitting-room door and went softly upstairs to bed.
And the man and the woman within the room talked on fragmentally, heedless of everything beyond the confines of those four walls which gave privacy to their interview, to the man’s grief, and the woman’s unutterable sympathy with his sorrow.
George Sinclair sat forward in his seat, with his hands dropped between his knees, staring before him with blurred unseeing eyes. Occasionally he beat the knuckles of one clenched hand softly with the palm of the other, with an action pitiful to watch, suggesting, as it did, intense emotion hardly repressed. He did not say much. The situation had gone beyond words. He sat there, tense and quiet, trying to grasp the fact that she was not his wife, never had been his wife, that their married life had been a sham. And now he had to give way. There was no course left to him but to pass out of her life altogether. And he loved her, worshipped her. Life without her would be entirely blank. He could not realise living without her. To know that she was in the world somewhere and that he must not see her, speak to her, touch her ever again after to-day...