“And yet you gave yourself to me!” he cried. “You put yourself in her place! In Heaven's name, what was to be gained by such an act as that?”
“I wanted to take Matilde's boy away from you,” she hurried on, and for the first time her eyes began to waver. “The idea suggested itself to me the night I met you at the comtesse's dinner. It was a wonderful, a tremendous thought that entered my brain. At first my real self revolted, but as time went on the idea became an obsession. I married you, James Brood, for the sole purpose of hurting you in the worst possible way: by having Matilde's son strike you where the pain would be the greatest. Ah, you are thinking that I would have permitted myself to have become his mistress, but you are mistaken. I am not that bad. I would not have damned his soul in that way. I would not have betrayed my sister in that way. Far more subtle was my design. I confess that it was my plan to make him fall in love with me and in the end to run away with him, leaving you to think that the very worst had happened. But it would not have been as you think. He would have been protected, my friend, amply protected. He———”
“But you would have wrecked him; don't you see that you would have wrecked the life you sought to protect? How blind and unfeeling you were. You say that he was my son and Matilde's, honestly born. What was your object, may I inquire, in striking me at such cost to him? You would have made a scoundrel of him for the sake of a personal vengeance. Are you forgetting that he regarded himself as my son?”
“No; I do not forget, James. There was but one way in which I could hope to steal him away from you, and I went about it deliberately, with my eyes open. I came here to induce him to run away with me. I would have taken him back to his mother's home, to her grave, and there I would have told him what you did to her. If, after hearing my story, he elected to return to the man who had destroyed his mother, I should have stepped aside and offered no protest.
“But I would have taken him away from you in the manner that would have hurt you the worst. My sister was true to you. I would have been just as true, and after you had suffered the torments of hell, it was my plan to reveal everything to you. But you would have had your punishment by that time. When you were at the very end of your strength, when you trembled on the edge of oblivion, then I would have hunted you out and laughed at you and told you the truth. But you would have had years of anguish—years, I say.”
“I have already had years of agony, pray do not overlook that fact,” said he. “I suffered for twenty years. I was at the edge of oblivion more than once, if it is a pleasure for you to hear me say it, Thérèse.”
“It does not offset the pain that her suffering brought to me. It does not counterbalance the unhappiness you gave to her boy, nor the stigma you put upon him. I am glad that you suffered. It proves to me that you secretly considered yourself to be in the wrong. You doubted yourself. You were never sure, and yet you crushed the life out of her innocent, bleeding heart. You let her die without a word to show that you———”
“I was lost to the world for years,” he said. “There were many years when I was not in touch with———”
“But her letters must have reached you. She wrote a thousand of————”
“They never reached me,” he said significantly.