And once she said an ugly thing that I did indeed hate her for that I cannot even now quite forgive her.
“Your aunt will rejoice at all this. She never cared for me...”
Into my memory of these pains and stresses comes the figure of Smithie, full-charged with emotion, so breathless in the presence of the horrid villain of the piece that she could make no articulate sounds. She had long tearful confidences with Marion, I know, sympathetic close clingings. There were moments when only absolute speechlessness prevented her giving me a stupendous “talking-to”—I could see it in her eye. The wrong things she would have said! And I recall, too, Mrs. Ramboat’s slow awakening to something in, the air, the growing expression of solicitude in her eye, only her well-trained fear of Marion keeping her from speech.
And at last through all this welter, like a thing fated and altogether beyond our control, parting came to Marion and me.
I hardened my heart, or I could not have gone. For at the last it came to Marion that she was parting from me for ever. That overbore all other things, had turned our last hour to anguish. She forgot for a time the prospect of moving into a new house, she forgot the outrage on her proprietorship and pride. For the first time in her life she really showed strong emotions in regard to me, for the first time, perhaps, they really came to her. She began to weep slow, reluctant tears. I came into her room, and found her asprawl on the bed, weeping.
“I didn’t know,” she cried. “Oh! I didn’t understand!”
“I’ve been a fool. All my life is a wreck!
“I shall be alone!...Mutney! Mutney, don’t leave me! Oh! Mutney! I didn’t understand.”
I had to harden my heart indeed, for it seemed to me at moments in those last hours together that at last, too late, the longed-for thing had happened and Marion had come alive. A new-born hunger for me lit her eyes.
“Don’t leave me!” she said, “don’t leave me!” She clung to me; she kissed me with tear-salt lips.