“I oughtn’t to have left the child unowned; I oughtn’t to have kept it from you. But I couldn’t bear to give you up, Nancy. I was led away into marrying her; I suffered for it.”
Still Nancy was silent, looking down; and he almost expected that she would presently get up and say she would go to her father’s. How could she have any mercy for faults that seemed so black to her, with her simple, severe notions?
But at last she lifted up her eyes to his again and spoke. There was no indignation in her voice; only deep regret.
“Godfrey, if you had told me this six years ago, we could have done some of our duty by the child. Do you think I’d have refused to take her in, if I’d known she was yours?”
At that moment Godfrey felt all the bitterness of an error that was not simply futile, but had defeated its own end. He had not measured this wife with whom he had lived so long. But she spoke again, with more agitation.
“And—oh, Godfrey—if we’d had her from the first, if you’d taken to her as you ought, she’d have loved me for her mother—and you’d been happier with me; I could better have bore my little baby dying, and our life might have been more like what we used to think it ’ud be.”
The tears fell, and Nancy ceased to speak.
“But you wouldn’t have married me then, Nancy, if I’d told you,” said Godfrey, urged, in the bitterness of his self-reproach, to prove to himself that his conduct had not been utter folly. “You may think you would now, but you wouldn’t then. With your pride and your father’s, you’d have hated having anything to do with me after the talk there’d been.”
“I can’t say what I should have done about that, Godfrey. I should never have married anybody else. But I wasn’t worth doing wrong for; nothing is in this world. Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand; not even our marrying wasn’t, you see.” There was a faint, sad smile on Nancy’s face as she said the last words.
“I’m a worse man than you thought I was, Nancy,” said Godfrey rather tremulously. “Can you forgive me ever?”