The silence that greeted this remark was the heaviest of all the silences.
“Why didn’t you tell us before?” said Hazel, in a low, awed voice.
For a moment, Berny could not answer. She was ashamed and angry at the unexpected emotion which made it impossible for her to command her voice, and made things shine before her eyes, brokenly, as through crystal. She was afraid her sisters would think she was fond of Dominick, or would guess the real source of the trouble.
“I was afraid something was wrong,” said Hannah, mechanically picking up the shears, her face pale and furrowed with new anxieties.
The concern in her tone soothed Berny. It was something not only to have astonished her family, but to have disturbed their peace by a forced participation in her woes. It had been enraging to think of them light-heartedly going their way while she struggled under such a load of care.
“It was all right till last autumn,” she said in a stifled voice, “and then it all got wrong—and—and—now it’s all gone to pieces.”
“But what made Dominick change?” said Hazel, with avid, anxious eagerness. “Everything was happy and peaceful a year ago. What got hold of him to change him?”
Berny felt that she had told enough. It had been harder telling, too, than she had imagined. The last and greatest secret that she had determined to keep from her sisters was that of Dominick’s love for another woman—what she regarded as his transfer of affection, not yet having guessed that his heart had never been hers. Now she raised her head and looked at the two solemn-faced women, angrily and bitterly, through the tears that her eyes still held.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care what’s changed him,” she said defiantly. “I stood by my side of the bargain, and that’s all I know. I’ve made him a good wife, as good a one as I knew how. I’ve been bright and pleasant when his family treated me like dirt. I’ve not complained and I’ve made the best of it, staying indoors and going nowhere, when any other woman would have been getting some sort of fun out of her life. I’ve managed that miserable little flat on not half enough money, and tried to keep out of debt, when any one else in the world would have run up bills all over for Mrs. Ryan to pay. Nobody can say I haven’t done my part all right. Maybe I’ve got my faults—most of us have—but I haven’t neglected my duty this time.”
She rose abruptly from her seat, pushing it back and feeling that she had better go before she said too much. She realized that in her hysterical and overwrought state she might become too loquacious and afterward regret it. For the moment she believed all she said. Her sisters, full of sincere sympathy for her, believed it too, though in periods of cooler reflection they would probably question some of her grievances; notably that one as to the small income, three thousand a year, representing to them complete comfort, not to say affluence.