‘It is true,’ I said: ‘she has heart-disease: she could scarcely walk the little distance to my house. Had you seen her, as I did, panting, gasping for very breath——’
‘I should have thought it a fiction,’ he said, bitterly, ‘and I know her best.’
‘It was no fiction. Oh, you may have had your wrongs. I say nothing to the contrary,’ I cried: ‘for anything I can tell, you may have been deeply wronged; but she is so beautiful, and so young, and loves pleasure and luxury so——’
I think he heard only the half of what I said, and that struck him like an unexpected arrow. He turned from me and walked a few steps away, and then came back again. ‘So beautiful and so young,’ he cried. ‘Who should know that so well as I?—who should know that so well as I?’
‘You know it, and still you let her sit at your door all through the lonely night? I would not let a tramp shiver at mine if I could help it. You let her perish within reach of you. You condemn her at her age, with her lovely face, unheard——’
He put out his hand to stop me. He was as much agitated as I was. ‘Her lovely face,’ he said to himself,—‘oh, her lovely face!’ That was the point at which I touched him. It woke recollections in him which were more eloquent than anything I could say.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘think of it.’ I do not know by what inspiration I laid hold upon this feature of the story—her beauty; perhaps because it was the real explanation of the power she had acquired over me.
But in a minute more he had overcome his agitation; he came to a sudden pause in front of me and looked at me in the face, though there were signs of a conflict in his. ‘It is vain to attempt to move me,’ he said, hoarsely. ‘I do not know why you should take it in hand, or why you should try to attain your object in this way. I did not expect it from such as you. Her lovely face—does that make her good or true or fit for a man’s wife?’
‘No doubt it was for that you married her,’ said I, with an impulse I could not restrain.
He turned away from me again; he made a few hasty steps and then he came back. ‘I do not choose to discuss my own history with a stranger,’ he said; and then softening into politeness: ‘You said I could do something for you. What can I do?’