Still she remained speechless, motionless, bowed down and awfully pale.
"I don't want to make any unmanly excuses—I would spare him for your sake; but he was all in the wrong, and it would be——"
She stopped him with a quick gesture.
"I can not hear this now—I am too weak and excited. I must go. Excuse me. I must go." She arose almost with a spring and passed swiftly out of the room.
A feeling of desolation swept, like a breath of noisome air, through the breast of Reynolds. It was as if the whole world had become a desert and his life a dreary, void waste. And yet there was a sense of relief, as if a great load had been cast aside. A load indeed, but not all the load he carried. He tried in vain to feel that his whole duty was done. He hid his face in his hands, but he could not shut out the truth. His whole past life lay like a fiercely illuminated panorama under his inward gaze. Ah, by what a zig-zag path, through what torments, had been his course! And how he had always panted for happiness! Must it end here? He raised his head and smiled in a way that would have been terrible to see. He clenched his hands, his eyes flamed. All the melodramatic fierceness and fervor of the old South had come upon him. He was ready with desperate courage to fight all the world.
CHAPTER XVI.
CONVALESCENT.
Mrs. Ransom kept her room for several days. The shock she had received from Reynolds' confession carried with it something more than the predicament might at first view imply. She had loved her husband with all that romantic fervor characteristic of girlhood in a warm climate. He was a handsome youth, bright, impulsive, brave, passionate, reckless, holding her to him by that strange fascination, which we all know but can not account for, exerted by the bad over the good. When he had appeared to desert her she was not surprised, and the news of his death by murder saddened without shocking her beyond endurance. With the lapse of time the effect of her trouble had softened and faded; but she had never ceased to remember with a warmth of devotion, more of the imagination than of the heart, perhaps, the lover and the husband of her romantic girlhood. To be sure it had grown to seem no more than a tender dream, that period of love and happiness ending in gloom, but its memory haunted her.
Reynolds had in some way thrilled her life with something more potent than that girlish adoration with which she had honored her boyish husband. His influence over her was so strange and so new to her experience, so sweet and yet so masterful, so overwhelming. His love had shown her how little she had ever known of love before, love in its highest and perfectest development.
But this dreadful discovery—this dark, strange confession, fell upon her just at the time when it could have the effect of darkening as with the shadow of both crime and death the whole of her life. It seemed a stroke of fate so malignant, so merciless, so far-reaching, so unutterably terrible.