“Hush!” said Grace. It seemed to her excited fancy as if in the darkness, his voice must travel more swiftly than in the light, to the Throne of Him whose justice and righteousness he questioned. “What have any of us done that trouble should not come? But in our eyes it does appear hard,” she went on. “If you like—if it will not pain you—tell me how it all came about.”
“I do not know how it began,” he answered. “I supposed no one ever does. I could no more tell you how it was I came to care for Mrs. Brady than I could tell you how the grass grows, or the sea ebbs and flows. One thing, however, I do know, she never cared for me; never in that way. If she had, I should not be talking to you here now; if she had we would have been far away from Ireland long ago. I did not intend to tell her about it,” he continued, “but one day it slipped out; and then she turned round and laughed in my face, such a mocking, despairing, forsaken sort of laugh, it rung in my ears for many a week after.
“‘Keep that for the next young girl you meet, Mr. Hanlon,’ she said, ‘who knows no better. I have heard it all before. Do you suppose I should ever have left my home, poor as it was, and my friends, few as they were, if he had not first thrown that glamour over me? A woman cannot be deceived twice; and there is no vow you or anybody else could swear, no temptation you could hold out, that could make me trust my future a second time in a man’s hands.’
“She loved her children as I never knew a woman love them before, though she was afraid to show her affection, lest he should find means of punishing her through it; and because I was kind to them, she had a feeling for me—gratitude, friendship, trust—I do not know what to call it—which would have prevented her from making any open breach between us, even if she had dared to tell her husband of the words I had spoken.
“But she did not dare to tell him. It was cowardly, I make no doubt, not to leave a woman so placed; but except for me she was friendless, helpless, in the hands of a demon, and I could not keep from trying to know how things were with her.
“They grew worse and worse. After his attempt to get General Riley’s estate failed, the life he led his wife baffles description, and yet she tried to hide what she suffered from every one, even from me. She wanted him to leave the country; she thought if she could separate him from his bad associates, it might be better for the children at any rate, if not for her. I have seen her wringing her hands about the stories which were told and the ballads that were written and sung; and she used to say she hoped it would be all gone and past, all forgotten and put out of men’s minds before the children grew up.
“‘For if not,’ she asked, ‘what is to become of them?’
“Then I prayed of her again to leave him. I offered to get her and the children away safely by some means if she would let me arrange it all, and take them where he could never find them.
“That time she did not laugh. She began to tremble all over, and said,—
“‘If you were a woman and made me the same offer, I would go this hour; but if I did what you want me, how could I ever look my boys in the face when they grew to be men—how should I teach my girls to be better than their mother had been. I would rather kill myself than do it. Never ask me such a thing again.’