“Yes, Herbert Dodd.” She but shook her head, calmly and nobly, in the now gathered dusk, and her memories and her cause and her character—or was it only her arch-subtlety, her line and her “idea”?—gave her an extraordinary large assurance.
She had touched, however, the treasure of his own case—his terrible own case that began to live again at once by the force of her talking of hers, and which could always all cluster about his great asseveration. “No, no, never, never; I had never seen her then and didn’t dream of her; so that when you yourself began to be harsh and sharp with me, and to seem to want to quarrel, I could have but one idea—which was an appearance you didn’t in the least, as I saw it then, account for or disprove.”
“An appearance—?” Kate desired, as with high astonishment, to know which one.
“How shouldn’t I have supposed you really to care for Bill Frankle?—as thoroughly believing the motive of your claim for my money to be its help to your marrying him, since you couldn’t marry me. I was only surprised when, time passing, I made out that that hadn’t happened; and perhaps,” he added the next instant with something of a conscious lapse from the finer style, “hadn’t been in question.”
She had listened to this only staring, and she was silent after he had said it, so silent for some instants that while he considered her something seemed to fail him, much as if he had thrown out his foot for a step and not found the place to rest it. He jerked round to the window again, and then she answered, but without passion unless it was that of her weariness for something stupid and forgiven in him, “Oh, the blind, the pitiful folly!”—to which, as it might perfectly have applied to her own behaviour, he returned nothing. She had moreover at once gone on. “Have it then that there wasn’t much to do—between your finding that you loathed me for another woman or discovering only, when it came to the point, that you loathed me quite enough for myself.”
Which, as she put it in that immensely effective fashion, he recognised that he must just unprotestingly and not so very awkwardly—not so very!—take from her; since, whatever he had thus come to her for, it wasn’t to perjure himself with any pretence that, “another woman” or no other woman, he hadn’t, for years and years, abhorred her. Now he was taking tea with her—or rather, literally, seemed not to be; but this made no difference, and he let her express it as she would while he distinguished a man he knew, Charley Coote, outside on the Parade, under favour of the empty hour and one of the flaring lamps, making up to a young woman with whom (it stuck out grotesquely in his manner) he had never before conversed. Dodd’s own position was that of acquiescing in this recall of what had so bitterly been—but he hadn’t come back to her, of himself, to stir up, to recall or to recriminate, and for her it could but be the very lesson of her whole present act that if she touched anything she touched everything. Soon enough she was indeed, and all overwhelmingly, touching everything—with a hand of which the boldness grew.
“But I didn’t let that, even, make a difference in what I wanted—which was all,” she said, “and had only and passionately been, to take care of you. I had no money whatever—nothing then of my own, not a penny to come by anyhow; so it wasn’t with mine I could do it. But I could do it with yours,” she amazingly wound up—“if I could once get yours out of you.”
He faced straight about again—his eyebrows higher than they had ever been in his life. “Mine? What penny of it was mine? What scrap beyond a bare, mean little living had I ever pretended to have?”
She held herself still a minute, visibly with force; only her eyes consciously attached to the seat of a chair the back of which her hands, making it tilt toward her a little, grasped as for support. “You pretended to have enough to marry me—and that was all I afterward claimed of you when you wouldn’t.”
He was on the point of retorting that he had absolutely pretended to nothing—least of all to the primary desire that such a way of stating it fastened on him; he was on the point for ten seconds of giving her full in the face: “I never had any such dream till you yourself—infatuated with me as, frankly, you on the whole appeared to be—got round me and muddled me up and made me behave as if in a way that went against the evidence of my senses.” But he was to feel as quickly that, whatever the ugly, the spent, the irrecoverable truth, he might better have bitten his tongue off: there beat on him there this strange and other, this so prodigiously different beautiful and dreadful truth that no far remembrance and no abiding ache of his own could wholly falsify, and that was indeed all out with her next words. “That—using it for you and using you yourself for your own future—was my motive. I’ve led my life, which has been an affair, I assure you; and, as I’ve told you without your quite seeming to understand, I’ve brought everything fivefold back to you.”