“Dearest, don’t! We both suffer. We must keep strong. We must help each other.”
“Geoff, you warned me. You said it would be bad. It was against your wish ... It’s my fault!”
“Darling, darling, don’t make it worse!” He pressed her head against his shoulder with tender, soothing touches. “No one could have foreseen. I feared for excitement only; there was no thought of danger. We have enough to bear, sweetheart. Don’t torture yourself needlessly.”
“It’s my doing, it’s my punishment; I brought it about. I’ve been cold, and selfish, and ungrateful. I had so much I ought to have been so thankful, but I was discontented—I made you wretched. God gave me a chance—” she pushed him away with frenzied hands and paced wildly, up and down the room—“a chance of salvation by happiness, and I was too mean, too poor to take it. Geoff, do you remember that poem of Stevenson’s, ‘The Celestial Surgeon’? They have been rinking in my head all night, those last lines, those dreadful lines. I was ‘obdurate.’ All the blessings which had been showered upon me left me dead; it needed this ‘darting pain’ to ‘stab my dead heart wide awake!’” She repeated the words with an emphasis, a wildness which brought an additional furrow into Geoffrey’s brow.
He sighed heavily and sank down on a corner of the sofa. All night long body and mind had been on the rack; he was chill, faint, wearied to death. The prospect of another hysterical scene was almost more than he could endure, yet through all his heart yearned over his wife, for he realised that, great as was his own sorrow, hers was still harder to bear. He might reason with her till doomsday, he might prove over and again that for the night’s catastrophe she was as free from blame as himself, yet Esmeralda, being Esmeralda, would turn her back on reason and persist in turning the knife in her own wound. Speech failed him; but the voiceless prayer of his heart found an answer, for no words that he could have spoken could have appealed to his wife’s heart as did his silence and the helpless sorrow of his face.
She came running to him, fell at his feet, and laid her beautiful head upon his knee.
“Geoff, it’s so hard, for I was trying! In my own foolish way I was trying to please, you. I may have been hasty, I may have been rash, but I did mean to do right.—I did try! I’ve loved you all the time, Geoff, but I was spoiled. You were too good to me. My nature was not fine enough to stand it. I presumed on your love. I imagined, vain fool! that nothing could kill it, and then you opened my eyes. You said yourself that I had worn you out.—It killed me, Geoff, to think you had grown tired!”
“Joan, darling, let’s forget all that. I’ve been at fault too; there were faults on both sides, but we have always loved each other; the love was there just as surely as the sun is behind the clouds. And now ... we need our love... I—I’m worn out, dear. I can’t go through this if you fail me. Bury the past, forget it. You are my wife, I am your husband—we need each other. Our little child!”
They clung together, weeping. In each mind was a great o’ershadowing dread, but the dread was not the same. The father asked of himself—Would the boy die? The mother—Would he live, blinded, maimed, crippled?
The door opened, a small face peered in and withdrew. Pixie had seen the entwined arms, the heads pressed together, and realised that she was not needed. She crept away, and sat alone watching the slow dawn.