"But don't you see the result? You are thinking of a west-end mansion. My means would not allow me to take a dwelling half so good as this one. That's the simple truth, Louisa."
She flung his hand from her with a defiant laugh of power, as she prepared to rejoin the guests. "You might not, but I would."
And Bede knew that to run him helplessly into debt would have been fun, rather than otherwise, to his wife.
Coffee came in at once, and Bede took the opportunity to escape. There was no formal after-dinner sitting this evening, or withdrawal of the ladies. As he passed along the corridor, Miss Channing was standing at the door of the study. He enquired in a kind tone if she wanted anything.
"I am waiting for Mrs. Greatorex--to ask her if I may go for an hour to my brother's," answered Annabel. "Old Dalla will take me."
"Go by all means, if you wish," he said. "Why did you think it necessary to ask? Do make yourself at home with us, Miss Channing, and be as happy as you can."
Annabel thanked him, and he went downstairs, little supposing how very far from happy it was possible for her to be, exposed to all the caprices of his wife. Halting at the door for a moment he wandered across the street, and stood there in the shade, mechanically listening to the ballad woman's singing, wafted faintly from the distance, just as he mechanically looked up at his own lighted windows, and heard the gay laughter that now and again came forth from them.
"I never ought to have married her," said the voice of conscience, breathing its secrets from the cautious depths of his inmost heart. "Every law, human and divine, should have warned me against it. I was infatuated to blindness: nay, not to blindness; I cannot plead that: but to folly. It was very wrong: it was horribly sinful: and heaven is justly punishing me. The fault was mine: I might have kept aloof from her after that miserably eventful night. I ought to have done so; to have held her at more than arm's distance evermore. Ought!--lives there another man on the face of the earth, I wonder, who would not? The fault of our union was mine wholly, not hers; and so, whatsoever trials she brings on me I will bear, patiently, as I best may. I sought her. She would never have dared to seek me, after that night and the discovery I made the day subsequently in poor John's room: and the complication of ill arising, or to arise, from our marriage, I have to answer for. I am nearly tired of the inward warfare: three years of it! Three years and more, since I committed the mad act of tying myself to her for life: for better or for worse: and it has been nothing for me but one prolonged, never-shifting scene of self-repentance. We are wearing a mask to each other: God grant that I may go to my grave without being forced to lift it! For her sake; for her sake!"
He paused to raise his hat from his brow and wipe the sweat that had gathered there. And then he took a step forward and a step backward in the dim shade. But he could not drive away, even for a moment, the care ever eating away his heart, or turn his vision from the threatening shadow that always seemed looming in the distance.
"Of all the wild infatuation that ever took possession of the heart of man for woman, surely mine for Louisa Joliffe was the worst! Did Satan lead me on? It must have been so. 'Be sure your sin shall find you out.' Since that fatal moment when I stood at the altar with her, those ominous words have never, I think, been quite absent from my memory. Every hour of my life, every minute of the day and night as they pass, does my sin find me. Knowing what I did know, could I not have been content to let her go her own way, while I went mine? Heaven help me! for I love her yet, as man rarely has loved. And when my father, or any other, casts a reflection on her, it is worse to me than a dagger's thrust. So long as I may, I will shield her from----"