“There was something else, though, in his mind at the moment—something I read out of his face that I knew he would not have put into words for anything; but I did for him. I said, ‘You are thinking she is free, and I am bound. I am bound, and she is free!’”
“Have mercy, Georgina!”—It was Phemie who entreated this boon. She was turning faint and sick at such a thought being put before him in its naked deformity; but Georgina’s answer made her stand erect and defiant once more.
“Do you think, if I had not mercy on him, I am going to take pity on you?” she asked. “I told him his thought in so many words. I taunted him with it, and then we had a fearful quarrel—the first of our new series, which has never ceased from that day to this. It was then he informed me of the pleasant ban you had laid upon him—almost exultingly he spoke of how your words had come true—of how, although you might never be to him what I was, yet that still you would always be something nearer and dearer by far. He did not spare me a pang, you may depend upon it. Then I learned what was in my husband; I have never unlearned that knowledge since.”
“I am very sorry,”—Phemie uttered this sentence humbly—“forgive me, Georgina, my share in your misery. What you tell me is very terrible—it must have been dreadful for you to bear.”
“I did not bear it,” was the quick reply; “I did not even regard it as payment for breaking the heart of a better man, than ever you were a woman. I battled against it; I was hard, and he was harder; I would not accept my position, and he scoffed at me when I tried to alter it. We came back to England, and he wanted to travel down to Marshlands alone; but I had a suspicion we should find you there, and I was resolved not to lose the sight of that interview at any rate. I had the advantage, so far as he was concerned, for he really felt afraid to meet you, and it was a triumph for the time being. Next to getting the thing one wants for one’s self, the greatest pleasure in life is seeing another disappointed in getting it also. Altogether,” proceeded Mrs. Basil Stondon, “I fancy I got the best in that matter. Had I not been present, there would have been opportunity for some tender passages between Basil and yourself. What is wrong, now?” she added, as Phemie suddenly moved aside, and drew her hand away, and shook her dress, seeming to think there must be contagion in the very touch of her companion’s garments.
CHAPTER XII.
PHEMIE EXPRESSES HER OPINIONS.
“What is wrong?” repeated Mrs. Stondon, her indignation breaking bounds at last, “only this, Georgina, that if you marvel why you have never been able to win Basil’s love, I do not. How one woman could speak to another as you have spoken to me this day I cannot comprehend. What you must be made of to say the things, to utter the taunts, to inflict the wounds you have done, passes my understanding. I used to blame your husband for his neglect and unkindness. I do not blame him now. My sole wonder is that he has stayed with you at all. I should not have done it had I been in his place.”
“You know nothing about me,” returned Georgina, who was more astonished and subdued by the foregoing speech than she would have cared to acknowledge—“and therefore you cannot understand my feelings. You never loved him as I did.”
“No, I never did,” Phemie answered, “and I thank Heaven for it. All the love you are capable of feeling for any one is very poor and mean and selfish; and, as I said before, if you think a nature such as yours is one calculated to win love from man, woman, or child, you are greatly mistaken. The man is not in existence, at least I hope he is not, who would not come in time to hate a woman that could deliberately inflict such suffering on another woman as you have forced me to endure to-day, and many a day before—many and many a day.”
Was it true—were these words, which, in the very extremity of her passion and anguish, escaped from Mrs. Stondon’s lips, as true as Heaven? Georgina had heard similar words before spoken by her husband, and the very remembrance of the fact lent additional bitterness to her tone as she exclaimed—