And this time, too, it was not the truth. She felt that it was not. It was even less, much less, the truth than what she had written in her letters. No power on earth could have induced her to pain him with every sordid detail. So she told of a long succession of martyrdoms, and in a funereal train let her injuries, humiliations, and insults pass in review before him. All had been darkness around her, unrelieved by a ray of hope or light. She had struggled in vain for deliverance and salvation, had made a dismal sacrifice of herself for no end. So she talked on. And he, half turned to stone, with wide-open eyes, listened. Only at the name "Salmoni," which she dared not withhold, he started and shrank from her.
They had both entirely forgotten the patient in the next room. Constantly she had to wipe tears out of her eyes; she grew indignant with herself and others by fits and starts, skated gingerly over places where the ice was thin, indulged in self-reproaches, and said to herself defiantly as she drew near the end: "This is the truth." And it was, in the sense that it was an inventory of the best in her; the truth as she hoped, with justice, it might shape itself in his perplexed vision.
There was silence. Her glance glided guiltily beyond him and rested on the portrait which leered at her from the writing-table with cynical worldly eyes, as much as to say: "I know you, my dear child, better than you know yourself." Something familiar and confidential lay in those eyes, a sort of reflection from that mad merry world which she had just been representing as a purgatory of tortures.
Fascinated, she dared not look away from them, and their mocking searching gaze stripped her soul bare, and caused every gleam of hope to die within her.
The silence became painful. Their thoughts seemed to vibrate in zigzags through the breathless stillness of the room. Then suddenly it was broken by a low piteous moaning, muffled at first, as if a handkerchief were being thrust into the mouth, then breaking out again more violently and loudly. It came from the next room, where the sick girl who had sinned secretly had been struggling for so many weeks for her young life. Soon, crooning words of comfort mingled with the moans. The girl's mother had come from the room beyond where she slept to ascertain the cause of this fresh outburst of grief.
Their eyes met. "She must have heard everything," their glance seemed to say.
For a moment another's misfortune made them forget their own. The great flood of suffering common to humanity swept over them, softening the sting of their own personal woes. The sobbing now was smothered by the pillows.
"My pet, my own!" entreated the mother's consoling voice, every intonation of it overflowing with love; "be good again, my darling ... it's not so very dreadful.... We will bring up the little one, and even if he doesn't marry you it won't matter so much. Think we shall have the little baby, and what a joy it will be when the baby laughs and says, 'mamma.' You see, it is not so very bad, after all, my pet, is it?"
The sobbing subsided and gave place to a gurgling sigh of content.
"'It's not so very bad, after all.' Ah! I wish someone would say that to me," thought Lilly.