"Agnes, Agnes, what is the matter?" Reynolds exclaimed in that startled, rasping voice which is common to all men when confronted by an overwhelming trouble. He asked this question involuntarily, aimlessly, for he well understood what all this quiet, terrible scene was about. He knew this man now. It was hard to comprehend how such a thing could be; but this was Ransom standing here, Ransom alive and confronting his wife. Agnes made two or three fruitless efforts before she was able to exclaim:
"Oh, John—Mr. Reynolds, go away! Go away! This is—this is my husband!" She did not say this demonstratively or noisily—her voice was low and quite calm, save that she seemed to falter a little. "Oh, I have always thought you were not dead and that you would come back!" she added, turning toward the man with something like a shudder in her tones.
"Ransom, is this indeed you?" demanded Reynolds, gathering enough force to crush down his bewilderment.
The man turned his eyes upon his interrogator for a second. His stare had in it a mingling of surprise and insolent bravado. Then with a slight start he ejaculated:
"Reynolds!"
Mrs. Ransom clasped her hands and looked helplessly and beseechingly from one to the other. Her lips quivered pitifully.
The two men stared at each other as if unwilling to accept the situation and yet unable to escape it. Each seemed waiting for the other to explain why he was there. It did not once occur to Reynolds that this man had the legal right to Agnes, and that henceforth she must be as lost as if dead. He went no further than to recognize that here was a mystery and a trouble. The catastrophe had been so peculiar and sudden, so lacking in those melodramatic features common to such scenes, that it had a dulling, numbing effect upon his faculties. Ransom was not so bewildered. It surprised him to see Reynolds and it displeased him as well, but he had prepared himself, before coming, for any kind of a scene with his wife; therefore, although excited, he was quite deliberate after the first little start of recognition had spent its force.
"I was not expecting to see you," he said with peculiar emphasis. "Nor you me, I suppose."
The man's whole manner was sinister and crafty, and yet, at the same time, there was something subdued, something suggestive of long suffering and unmerited injury, in the expression of his face and the attitude of his person. He appeared to Reynolds' startled and distorted vision an incarnate accusation. The situation might have had a touch of the supernatural in it, if its realism had not been so peculiarly pronounced and unmistakable. The whole affair was a cold, dull, immitigable affair. It did not even rise to the level of romance. It had come as death comes, a stark, overpowering, repulsive result of perfectly inexplicable causes, bearing down before it every thought of resistance or escape.
Reynolds had ready no response. The predicament was one which seemed to him malign in its whole bearing, with no room for words of inquiry or of explanation. A sense of suffocation assailed him, as if all those dreams and hopes and delightful anticipations that he had been so luxuriating in lately, had fallen dead in a wilted heap upon his heart.