“God Himself has taken your punishment into His own Hands.”
Again he seemed to hear Catherine’s accusing tones, and the fanatical strain inbred in him answered like a boat to its helm. There must be no more compromise, no longer any evasion of the issues of right and wrong. He had sinned, and both he and the woman for whose sake he had defied his own creed, and that of his fathers before him, must make atonement. He drew himself up, and stood stiff and unbending beside the bed. In his light-grey eyes there shone that same indomitable ardour of the zealot which had shone in Catherine’s.
“No,” he said. “I am not angry that the child is a girl. I accept it as a just retribution.”
No man possessed of the ordinary instincts of common humanity would have so greeted his wife just when she had emerged, spent and exhausted, from woman’s supreme conflict with death. But the fanatic loses sight of normal values, and Hugh, obsessed by his newly conceived idea of atoning for the sin of his marriage, was utterly oblivious of the enormity of his conduct as viewed through unbiased eyes.
The woman who had just fought her way through the Valley of the Shadow stared at him uncomprehendingly.
“Retribution?” she repeated blankly.
“For my marriage—our marriage.”
Diane’s breath came faster.
“What—what do you mean?” she asked falteringly. Suddenly a look of sheer terror leaped into her eyes, and she clutched at Hugh’s sleeve. “Oh, you’re not going to be like Catherine? Say you’re not! Hugh, you’ve always said she was crazy to call our marriage a sin. . . . A sin!” She tried to laugh, but the laugh stuck in her throat, caught and pinned there by the terror that gripped her.
“Yes, I’ve said that. I’ve said it because I wanted to think it,” he returned remorselessly, “not because I really thought it.”