She loved Rochester.
All at once that terrific fact appeared before him in its true proportions and its true meaning.
She loved Rochester.
He had to tell her the truth. Yet to tell her the truth he would have to tell her that the man she loved was dead.
Then she would want proofs.
He would have to bring up the Savoy Hotel people, fetch folk from America—disinter Rochester. Horror! He had never thought of that. What had become of Rochester? Up to this he had never thought once of what had become of the mortal remains of the defunct jester, nor had he cared a button—why should he?
But the woman who loved Rochester would care. And he, Jones, would become in her eyes a ghoul, a monstrosity, a horror.
He felt a tinge of that feeling towards himself now. Up to this Rochester had been for him a mechanical figure, an abstraction, but the fact of this woman’s love had suddenly converted the abstraction into a human being.
He could not possibly tell her that he had left the remains of this human being, this man she loved, in the hands of unknown strangers, callously, as though it were the remains of an animal.
He could tell her nothing.