Coming near to her, he said in a voice husky with feeling: “Will you be my wife, Guida?”
She stood up, one hand resting on the arm of the great chair, the other half held out in pitying deprecation.
“No, Ranulph, no; I can never, never be your wife—never in this world.”
For an instant he looked at her dumfounded, then turned away to the fireplace slowly and heavily. “I suppose it was too much to hope for,” he said bitterly. He realised now how much she was above him, even in her sorrow and shame.
“You forget,” she answered quietly, and her hand went out suddenly to the soft curls of the child, “you forget what the world says about me.”
There was a kind of fierceness in his look as he turned to her again.
“Me—I have always forgotten—everything,” he answered. “Have you thought that for all these years I’ve believed one word? Secours d’la vie, of what use is faith, what use to trust, if you thought I believed! I do not know the truth, for you have not told me; but I do know, as I know I have a heart in me—I do know that there never was any wrong in you. It is you who forget,” he added quickly—“it is you who forget. I tried to tell you all this before; three years ago I tried to tell you. You stopped me, you would not listen. Perhaps you’ve thought I did not know what has happened to you every week, almost every day of your life? A hundred times I have walked here and you haven’t seen me—when you were asleep, when you were fishing, when you were working like a man in the fields and the garden; you who ought to be cared for by a man, working like a slave at man’s work. But, no, no, you have not thought well of me, or you would have known that every day I cared, every day I watched, and waited, and hoped—and believed!”
She came to him slowly where he stood, his great frame trembling with his passion and the hurt she had given him, and laying her hand upon his arm, she said:
“Your faith was a blind one, Ro. I was either a girl who—who deserved nothing of the world, or I was a wife. I had no husband, had I? Then I must have been a girl who deserved nothing of the world, or of you. Your faith was blind, Ranulph, you see it was blind.”
“What I know is this,” he repeated with dogged persistence—“what I know is this: that whatever was wrong, there was no wrong in you. My life a hundred times on that!”