‘Not one? Have you no feeling for me, Sara? Do you suppose that I am happy–that I enjoy my life? Look at me! I look happy, do I not?’
‘I pity you from my soul!’ she replied. ‘And if my pity can be of the least use to you, take it. I should indeed be inhuman if I withheld it.’
She spoke very gently, never losing her expression of pain and aversion. Wellfield saw it; saw that she was bewildered, tortured by his presence. The scorn and the withering contempt he had expected were not there. What was there was far more hopeless for him–much harder for him to bear. He had had wild visions of falling at her feet and forcing her to own that she, too, loved him as he loved her. Such a course was now out of the question. He felt degraded and humbled, and, worse than that–a fool–ridiculous and absurd.
‘At least hear me when I tell you that I shall never cease to repent what I did in my madness. I shall never know happiness again, in feeling that I have destroyed yours, Sara.’
‘You are quite mistaken,’ she replied, suddenly and clearly, as she stood up without support, folding her hands before her, and looking him full in the face. ‘You have not destroyed my happiness; it is out of your power to do so. You turned it into bitter wretchedness for a time, I own. I am not superhuman. I loved you devotedly, and trusted you implicitly; and when you betrayed me, I suffered as I hope few women do have to suffer. But you did not destroy my happiness, for that consists in loving and trying to do what is good and noble and honest, and you are none of them. But you cannot destroy those things, nor my joy in them, do what you will. Surely that is enough. Please leave me now, or I must ring the bell and ask them to show you out.’
‘You mean to tell me that you will be happy married to Rudolf Falkenberg? how do you account for that?’ he asked, unheeding her words, and advancing a step nearer to her, with eyes fixed upon her face, and breath coming and going eagerly.
Sara drew herself up, recoiling a step from before him. Then, looking at him with a glance devoid of the slightest feeling for him, she replied, in a deep, calm voice:
‘Because he is all those things that you are not; he is good and noble and honest; he is faithful, and would be faithful unto death–because he saved me when you had almost killed me and quite driven me mad–and because he is my husband, and I love him.’
‘You love—’ he began, and stopped abruptly; then, with a short, miserable laugh, said: ‘After that I will go, certainly. And for the future I beg you will spare me your pity. I do not need it. Good-night.’
He turned on his heel and left the room. He did not know how he groped his way to the door and opened it, for he could see nothing. At last he found himself in the dank, soft, misty outside air again, just entering the market-square of Lahnburg, repeating her last words to himself over and over again, blankly, vacantly, and mechanically: ‘Because he is my husband, and I love him.’