The examination went on, with cruel reiteration of almost the same questions. The Juge d’Instruction was a hard-headed legal machine, who believed that the truth might be wrung out of any criminal by persistent questioning. He suspected Ransome, or deemed it his duty to suspect him, and he ordered him to be arrested on leaving the court; so George Ransome passed the night after his wife’s death in the lock-up at Villefranche.
What a night that was for a man to live through! He sat on a stone bench, listening to the level plish-plash of that tideless sea ever so far beneath him. He heard the footsteps going up and down the steep stony street of that wonderful old seaport; he heard the scream of the gulls and the striking of the clock on the crest of the hill as he sat motionless, with his elbows on his knees, and his head in his hands, brooding over that swift, sudden horror of yesterday.
Could it have been an accident? Did she step backwards unawares and slip over the edge? No; he remembered where she was standing when he last looked at her, some distance from the side of the cliff, standing among the heather and wild thyme which grew down to the edge of the little path. She must have made a rapid rush to the brink after that fatal speech of his. She had flung her life away in a single impulse of blind, mad anger—or despair. She had not paused for an instant to take thought. Alas! he knew her so well; he had so often seen those sudden gusts of passion; the rush of crimson to the pale small face; the quivering lips striving impotently for speech; the fury in the dark eyes, and the small nervous hands clenched convulsively. He had seen her struggle with the demon of anger, and had seen the storm pass swifter than a tempest-driven cloud across the moon. Another moment and she would burst into tears, fling her arms round his neck, and implore him to forgive her.
“I love you too well ever to know happiness,” she said.
That was her favourite apology.
“It is only people without passions who can be happy,” she told him once. “I sometimes think that you belong to that family.”
And she was dead; she whose undisciplined love had so plagued and tried him, she was dead; and he felt himself her murderer.
Alas! doubly a murderer, since she had perished just at that time when her life should have been most precious to him, when he should have made any sacrifice to secure her peace. He who had seen all the evils of a fretful temper exhibited in her character had yet been weak enough to yield to a moment of anger, and to insult the woman whom he ought to have cherished.
A long-familiar line of Byron’s haunted his brain all through the night, and mixed itself with that sound of footsteps on the street of stairs, and the scream of the gulls, and the flapping of the waves against the stone quay.
“She died, but not alone—”