"I—I don't know what you mean by that," she faltered helplessly, "I always try to please you."
"Try to please me!" he repeated passionately. "Yes, Clary, as a child tries to please a schoolmaster. Do you know, that when I married you I was mad enough to hope the day would come when you would love me—that you loved me a little even then? Do you know how I have waited for that day, and have learned to understand, little by little, that it never can dawn for me upon this earth? You are my wife, and the mother of my child; and yet, God knows, you are no nearer to me than the day I first saw you at Hale Castle—a slim, girlish figure in a white dress, coming in at the door of the library. Not a whit nearer," he went on, to himself rather than to Clarissa; "but so much more dear."
There was a passion in his words which touched his wife. If it had only been possible for her to love him! If gratitude and respect, joined together, could have made up the sum of love; but they could not. She knew that George Fairfax was in all moral qualities this man's inferior; yet, for some indefinable charm, some trick of tone or manner, some curious magic in a smile or a glance, she loved him.
She was silent. Perhaps the sense of her guilt came more fully home to her in this moment than it had ever done before. What words could she speak to bring comfort to her husband's soul—she whose whole life was a lie?
Daniel Granger wandered up and down the room for some minutes in a vague restless way, and then came to his wife's chair, and looked down at her very tenderly.
"My dear, I do wrong to worry you with reproaches," he said. "The mistake has been mine. From first to last, I have been to blame. I suppose in the wisest life there must always be some folly. Mine has been the hope that I could win your love. It has gone now, Clarissa; it is quite gone. Not even my child has given me a place in your heart."
She looked up at him again, with that look which expressed such a depth of remorse.
"I am very wicked," she said, "I am utterly unworthy of all you have done for me. It would have been better for you never to have seen my face."
"Wicked! no, Clary. Your only sin has been to have disappointed a foolish fancy. What right had I to suppose you loved me? Better never to have seen your face?—yes, perhaps that might have been better. But, once having seen you, I would rather be wretched with you than happy with any other woman in the world. That is what love means, Clary."
He stooped down to kiss her.