"I can't—I can't believe——" she whispered.
"You must, Anne." He paused, and then went on quietly. "It was after that time at Bjura. I was riding home as best I could with a temperature God knows where—I don't tell you that as an excuse, but as a sort of explanation—and I found your father torturing Wickie. I know now that probably he was as mad and irresponsible as I was, but at the moment I thought he was simply a devil. I intervened—I believe I appealed to him I tried to stop him. He struck me repeatedly, but as long as he didn't touch Wickie I didn't care. Then he ran Wickie through with the sharp end of a bamboo stick—and I struck him. I am very strong—and I had no self-control. It was as though all the brakes had given way—and I struck too hard. That was how it happened, Anne."
He waited. He could not have said for what, but he knew that it was something great in her. He had seen this moment many times before and seen it both as an end and as a beginning of a new life between them. It was in her hands. But at the last a kind of proud confidence had swept over him. It did not occur to him to appeal to her. Understanding is above forgiveness. Either she understood, and there would be no need to forgive, or he was simply a murderer, and then her forgiveness would be valueless.
But he had believed that now she would understand. She crouched in her chair, looking at him with horror in her eyes.
"I can't—it's too terrible—to have done that—and then to have shirked the responsibility——"
Still he waited. He had to explain—that was only fair to her and to himself. But he began to lose hope. He saw himself with her eyes and the eyes of her world.
"You know that I was delirious for a long time afterwards. When I recovered the whole thing seemed finished. No one was suspected as far as I knew. Well, your father meant to smash me. I saw that much in his face. And, frankly, Anne, I did not choose to be ruined for his sake. My life—my work—was of value to others to whom I owed more than I did to him. If I made no effort to escape the consequences of what I had done I also did not immolate myself to a false idea of justice——" He broke off. It was not what he had meant to say to her. It was cold and ugly. But her eyes told him that everything he could tell her, of the deliberately accepted burden of silence, of the motive of a great filial love which had chosen to crush the inborn, conventional instincts of honour rather than tread the easy, chivalrous road of self-accusation, of all that the intervening time had held of doubt, and weariness—would be to her so much hypocrisy and cowardly subterfuge. The crisis struck no fire of sympathy in her which might have illuminated his curt and clumsy sentences. To her he was simply a criminal, and before her he became one—tongue-tied, self-distrustful.
She spoke at last and instinctively he braced himself.
"Are you taking shelter behind your mother, or whom?" she asked sneeringly. Then, as he did not answer, she got up. The stupor which had restrained her hitherto gave way. She shivered from head to foot, and her face was twisted and livid with the violence of her feeling. "And then you married me!" she cried out—"just to shield yourself——"
"Anne!"