“Robert, dear,” she said, “if he’s mad enough for that, I should not mind his killing me. I should be glad.”
“Oh, dear child,” he answered, “would that be the way to help you to make a man of him?”
She reflected for a moment.
“Robert,” she said, “how right you always are! I seem to be so wise to myself until you prove how wrong I always am. I thought it the right way for me to speak to Dudley. If I only had.... And oh, Robert,” she said, “how good you are to us! How could we get on without you?”
He said suddenly, as if it were a military command:
“Don’t say that. I forbid it!” He added more softly: “I’ll go to Sir William Wells at once. Katya says he’s the best man of the kind in London.”
“She ought to know,” she said. “Yes; go quickly. I’ve kept you talking only so as to let you know all there is to know. It’s difficult for a wife to talk about these things to a doctor. He might not believe it if I said that Dudley was so fond of me. But you know, and you may make him believe it. For it all turns on that.... But I will have Saunders within call till you come back with him....”
She went into the room, and, having touched the bell, stood looking down upon her husband with a contemplation of an infinite compassion. In the light of the stained glass at the end of a long passage of gloom she brought tears into Grimshaw’s eyes, and an infinite passion and tenderness into his whole being. His throat felt loosened, and he gasped. It was a passion for which there was neither outlet nor expression. He was filled with a desire for action without having any guidance as to what it was that he desired to do.
And the discreet Saunders, coming up the servants’ steps to answer the bell, saw his master’s friend strike himself suddenly on the high white forehead a hard blow with his still gloved hand.
“Ah! I thought it would come to that,” he said to himself.