"He loves her; he cannot live without her; he is that creature's slave, as you men sometimes are to such women; and though he sees her no more, out of respect for me, he thinks of her and talks of her to you—and that is why he is so silent and grave when he is here. Is it so?"
"Good Heavens! I do not know," he groaned, with mild impatience. "How should I know?"
"But why then does he pretend to love me? Why did he ask me to marry him? Because once, for a moment in Norway, he fancied he could do without her? Because he meant to live a new life, and now finds that he cannot?" She clasped her hands With a gesture of anguish.
"Good God, Eva! say no more—say no more. I do not know, I tell you—I know nothing about it—nothing."
He sank back in his chair with a sigh of exhaustion. She said no more; the tears streamed from her eyes like rain impossible to be restrained.
XI.
And in her misery she thought she had been very clever and cunning, and that she had guessed rightly; while, in truth, as guileless as a child, she had been as it were hypnotised by his magnetic gaze, and had spoken the very words he had intended she should utter.
She felt nothing of this; she saw him still as her brother-friend, fragile, affectionate, and unhappy, dreading to wound her, anxious to screen her from the truth for fear of hurting her, and yet not crafty enough to conceal it when she pressed him too closely. This was how he appeared to her. Not for an instant did she suspect that she was as a fly wrapping itself closer and closer in the spider's toils.
Bertie himself, after this scene, failed to see clearly that he had pulled the wires; that he had been the first to taint her confidence with the poison of suspicion; that he had brought about the catastrophe as they came out of the Lyceum; that he had compelled Eva to follow the clue he had chosen to suggest. Dimness shrouded the clearness of his mental vision, as a breath clouds a mirror; the lucid crisis of his faculties was past. This was all the outcome of circumstances, he thought; no human being of his own free will could work such things out—How easily everything had come about, how simply, without a hitch! It was because Fate had so willed it and had favoured him—he had no part in it. Nor was this self-deception: he really thought so.