The over-strained, over-wrenched nerves gave way and he broke into a flood of tears; the drops ran down the furrows of his thin cheeks and his grey beard and wet her hand as he pressed passionate kisses upon it, rocking himself over it and sobbing convulsively.
Maria had lived through a good deal of suffering and some moments that now seemed too horrible to have been real, but she had never had any emotion forced upon her from without that had been harder to bear calmly than what she felt now.
If anything could strengthen the physical repulsion that made her shrink from her husband’s touch it was the sight of his unmanly tears and the sound of his hysterical sobbing. If anything could make it more difficult to hide her loathing it was the knowledge that she had wronged him and that she owed him gratitude for his free forgiveness. She would much rather have had him turn upon her like a maniac and strike her than be obliged to watch the painful heaving of his thin, bent shoulders, and feel the hot tears that ran down upon her hands.
It was so unutterably disgusting that she felt a terribly strong impulse to throw him off, to scream out that she would not take his forgiveness at any price, that he must let her go back and lead her own life with her child, as she had lived for so many years. He would suffer a little more, but what was a little more or less to a man who seemed half mad?
Then the wave of pity rushed back, and that was even worse. It was the pity a delicate woman feels for some wretched living thing half killed in an accident, so crushed and torn that the mere thought of touching it makes her shrink back and shiver to her very feet because the suffering creature is not her own. If it were hers but ever so little, if it were her dog, she would feel nothing but the instant womanly need of saving it if she could, of helping it to die easily if she could not.
Maria’s hand shrank from the scalding tears and writhed under the man’s frantic kisses. She shut her eyes and threw back her head; her face was drawn and white, and she prayed as she had never prayed in her life, for strength to bear all that was before her.
It had seemed just possible, because she had imposed it upon herself as her honourable duty, and because the husband she remembered had been before all things proud, and as full of a certain exaggerated dignity and self-respect as Spaniards sometimes are, though he was only half-Spanish. She had felt him coming back to her from far away, like a dark instrument of fate, to which she must give herself up body and mind, if she hoped to expiate her sin to the end. It had seemed hard, even dreadfully hard; but this was worse. Instead of the erect and formal figure and the grave dark face that had a certain strength in it which she could at least respect—instead of that, it was a broken-down man who came to her, prematurely old, a neurasthenic invalid no better than a hysterical woman, palsied with unmanly emotion, lacking all strength, self-respect and dignity, and without even a rag of vanity that might have passed for pride.
She was not stronger in her hands than other women, but she was sure that it would be easy to throw him from her; he would fall in a heap on the carpet, and would lie there helpless and sobbing. As she felt the instant contempt for his weakness, she prayed the more for courage to humble her own strength to it; and her eyes were still shut tight and her face was white and drawn. This was but the beginning of what must last for years, ten, twenty, as long as he lived, or until she died of it.
The future stretched out before her in length without end; she forgot everything else, and did not know that the tears ceased to flow and presently dried, nor that Montalto drew back from her into his own chair as the storm subsided within him. His voice woke her from the dream of pain to come.
‘I trust you will forgive my first emotion, my dear,’ he said with all his characteristic formality. ‘I see that I have made a painful impression on you. I shall not allow it to occur again.’