“True? Yes, of course,” he said brutally.
“That money, then? Robert, husband, it is not ours. You will give it up—everything?”
“Give it up!” he said, laughing. “Not a shilling. They hounded me down most cruelly!”
“For the sake of our old love, Robert,” she whispered, as she clung to him. “Let us begin again, and I will work for you. Let us try, in a future of toil, to wash away this clinging disgrace. My husband, my husband! for the sake of our innocent child!”
“Give up what I have!” he cried. “Now that I have schemed till success is mine! Not a shilling if it were to save old Sir Gordon’s life.”
“But, Robert, for the sake of our child. I am your wife, and I will bear this blow; but let her go on believing in him whom I have taught her to love. Let the past be dead; begin a new life—repentance for that which has gone. Robert, my husband, I have loved you so dearly, and so long.”
“Pish!” he cried, impatiently. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Lead a new life—a life of repentance! I have had a fine preparation for it here. Why, I tell you they would turn a saint here into a fiend! I sinned against their laws, and they sent me here, herded with hundreds, some of whom might have been brought to better lives; but it has been one long course of brutal treatment, and the lash. Hope was dead to us all, and we had to drag on our lives in misery and despair. I tell you I’ve had to do with people who sought to make us demons, and you talk to me now of repentance for the past.”
“Yes, and you shall repent!” she cried, wildly.
“Silence!” he said, fiercely. “You are my wife, and it is your duty to obey. Not a word of this to Julie. I will speak to her; and as to Crellock—oh, I can manage him.”
He thrust her aside, and strode out of the room without another word, leaving her standing with her hands clasped together, gazing into vacancy, as if stunned by the blow that had fallen—as if the savage acceptance of the truth of the charges by her husband had robbed her of her reason.