The shades of the drama grew darker and darker. The spectator listened with unspeakable excitement and curiosity; there was a silence which seemed to throb with suspense and pain; but the figure in the background neither moved nor spoke—a large motionless figure, doubled upon itself, the shaggy head held between the hands, the face invisible, the elbows on the knees.
‘You see?’ she said, with a faint movement of her hands, as though calling his attention to that silence. There was a painful flicker of a smile about her lips; perhaps her pride, perhaps her heart, desired even at this moment a protest. She went on again: ‘It is—as I say; you will see how this—complicates—all that one thinks of—as duty. What am I to do?’
‘Mrs. Blencarrow,’ said the clergyman—then stopped with a painful sense that even this name could be no longer hers, a perception which she divined, and responded to with again a faint, miserable smile—‘what can I say to you?’ he burst out. ‘I don’t know the circumstances; what you tell me is so little. If you are married a second time——’
She made a movement of assent with her hand.
‘Then, of course—it is a commonplace; what else can I say?—your duty to your husband must come first; it must come first. It is the most primitive, the most fundamental law.’
‘What is that duty?’ she said, almost sharply, looking up; and again there was a silence.
The clergyman laboured to speak, but what was he to say? The presence of that motionless figure in the background, had there been nothing else, would have made him dumb.
‘The first thing,’ he said, ‘in ordinary circumstances—Heaven knows I speak in darkness—would be to own your position, at least, and set everything in its right place. Nature itself teaches,’ he continued, growing bolder, ‘that it is impossible to go on living in a false position, acting, if not speaking, what can be nothing but a lie.’
‘It is commonplace, indeed,’ she cried bitterly, ‘all that: who should know it like me? But will you tell me,’ she said, rising up and sitting down in her excitement, ‘that it is my duty to leave my children who want me, and all the work of my life which there is no one else to do, for a useless existence, pleasing no one, needed by no one—a life without an object, or with a hopeless object—a duty I can never fulfil? To leave my trust,’ she went on, coming forward to the fire, leaning upon the mantelpiece, and speaking with her face flushed and her voice raised in unconscious eloquence, ‘the office I have held for so many years—my children’s guardian, their steward, their caretaker—suppose even that I had not been their mother, is a woman bidden to do all that, to make herself useless, to sacrifice what she can do as well as what she is?’
She stopped, words failing her, and stood before him, a wonderful noble figure, eloquent in every movement and gesture, in the maturity and dignity of her middle age; then suddenly broke down altogether, and, hiding her face, cried out: