“I would never let him go from me,” she answered, and, leaning over, she impulsively clasped the little Guilbert in her arms.
“There’ll be no need for Guilbert to go from you,” he rejoined, “for when your rights come to you, Philip d’Avranche will not be living.”
“Will not be living!” she said in amazement. She did not understand.
“I mean to kill him,” he answered sternly.
She started, and the light of anger leaped into her eyes. “You mean to kill Philip d’Avranche—you, Maitre Ranulph Delagarde!” she exclaimed. “Whom has he wronged? Myself and my child only—his wife and his child. Men have been killed for lesser wrongs, but the right to kill does not belong to you. You speak of killing Philip d’Avranche, and yet you dare to say you are my friend!”
In that moment Ranulph learned more than he had ever guessed of life’s subtle distinctions and the workings of a woman’s mind; and he knew that she was right. Her father, her grandfather, might have killed Philip d’Avranche—any one but himself, he the man who had but now declared his love for her. Clearly his selfishness had blinded him. Right was on his side, but not the formal codes by which men live. He could not avenge Guida’s wrongs upon her husband, for all men knew that he himself had loved her for years.
“Forgive me,” he said in a low tone. Then a new thought came to him. “Do you think your not speaking all these years was best for the child?” he asked.
Her lips trembled. “Oh, that thought,” she said, “that thought has made me unhappy so often! It comes to me at night as I lie sleepless, and I wonder if my child will grow up and turn against me one day. Yet I did what I thought was right, Ranulph, I did the only thing I could do. I would rather have died than—”
She stopped short. No, not even to this man who knew all could she speak her whole mind; but sometimes the thought came to her with horrifying acuteness: was it possible that she ought to have sunk her own disillusions, misery, and contempt of Philip d’Avranche, for the child’s sake? She shuddered even now as the reflection of that possibility came to her—to live with Philip d’Avranche!
Of late she had felt that a crisis was near. She had had premonitions that her fate, good or bad, was closing in upon her; that these days in this lonely spot with her child, with her love for it and its love for her, were numbered; that dreams must soon give way for action, and this devoted peace would be broken, she knew not how.