“That is the symbol of my married life,” she said with a curious enforced calm. She let her sleeve fall back into its place. “Did you never hear? Dene drank—it was no secret. He was quite mad at times.”
“And he—ill-treated you?”
“When it amused him. He had a passion for cruelty. I never knew it till I married him. I found out afterwards he had been the same even as a child. He loved torturing things.” She paused, then added with a simplicity that was infinitely pitiful: “So you see, I had my punishment.”
“I was abroad. I never knew,” said Eliot, as though in extenuation of something of which he inwardly accused himself. “I never knew,” he repeated resentfully. “By God!”—with a sudden suppressed violence which was the more intense by reason of its enforced restraint—“if I’d known, I’d have freed the woman I once loved from degradation such as that!”
Used so unconsciously, without intent, the word “once” wounded her more cruelly than any of his deliberately harsh and bitter utterances had had power to do. It set her definitely outside his life, relegated her to a past that was dead and done with—made her realise more completely than anything else could have done that, as far as Eliot was concerned, she no longer counted in his scheme of existence.
“The woman I once loved”—Cara clenched her hands, and bit back the cry of pain which fought for utterance. For an instant she felt sick with pain—as though some one had turned a knife in a raw wound. Then, with an effort, she regained her self-control.
“Thank you,” she said gently. “But no one could have helped me—least of all you, even had you been in England.”
They fell silent for a while. Eliot stood staring out across the moon-flecked waters, and in the silver radiance which made the night almost as light as day Cara could see the harsh lines which the years had graved upon his, face, the grim closing of the lips, and the weariness that lay in his eyes. Half timidly she laid her hand on his arm.
“I wish I could give you back your happiness,” she said unevenly.
He turned and looked at her, and now there was neither pity nor compassion in his gaze—only that hardness of granite with which she was all too familiar.