“I don’t understand what you mean. I tried to help you. I’ve begged you again and again to dress decently, to care for your appearance. I——”
“You left me.” The words were perfectly quiet. They were the mere statement of a fact.
“I—I—— Our life together was a misery,” he stammered. “I tried for two years to help you. I——”
“How did you try to help me?” she asked. “By talking calm platitudes through a kind of moral disinfectant sheet—which you held between us, unable, for all your high faluting words, to keep the disgust out of your voice, the loathing out of your eyes. I had offended your fastidious taste—yes, I know I had seemed horrible, that I was horrible; but how ten thousand times more horrible do you think I felt to myself? And yet I knew I had some excuse.”
“Excuse,” he said sternly, strong in his moral self-righteousness, “excuse for lying drunk in the room with our dead child.” He shuddered. The memory of the sight filled him with horror.
She put her hand over her eyes. It was shaking.
“Listen,” she said, “you shall have the truth for once, though I am not speaking it in justification of myself. Have you ever thought of those four days and nights of torture, when every cry of anguish my baby uttered was like a red-hot needle piercing my heart and brain? Have you thought that there were moments when I felt in my wild misery that I must fly from the sound of them, but that her baby-hands were seeking mine, her voice calling in vain to me to help her. You shudder? You shuddered then and fled. The sensitiveness of your nature could not stand the sight and sounds of agony. When at last it ceased, and reason told me my baby was at peace, I still heard her voice. The doctor had sent me to bed. I could not rest. I got up. I saw you. You went to your own room to weep. I had gone through the agony alone. I was to go through the grief alone. I was faint when I took the brandy. I did not know it would affect me as it did. I was worn out, and it went to my head. I heard her voice again. I thought it real that time. I stumbled upstairs to the room where you found me. In the morning I remembered what had happened. I loathed myself. I came to you and saw the same loathing in your eyes. The next few days I drank purposely to gain oblivion, and I hated myself for doing it more than you can ever have hated me. But one night I thought I saw my baby——” she paused. “I never took the stuff again, though there were moments when I longed for it. I wanted to ask your help, to tell you what I had suffered. I could not. I saw the look in your eyes. It kept awake in me the memory of that—that day. Only at night, in the darkness, I forgot it. I could feel my baby in my arms, her hair against my lips——”
She stopped.
For a moment there was a dead silence: Jasper broke it.
“I did not understand,” he said. It was an admission on his part. At the time she did not realize it.