The tears came with a rush to Mary’s eyes, and began to roll down her cheeks.
“No, no, David, no,” she said. Her left hand went out towards him gropingly. “Oh, no, David, you mustn’t. You haven’t thought—indeed you haven’t. Innocent people can’t always prove that they are innocent. They can’t. There’s a book—a dreadful book. I’ve just been reading it. There was a man who was quite, quite innocent—as innocent as Edward—and he couldn’t prove it. And they were going to hang him—David!”
Mary’s voice broke off with a sort of jerk. Her face became suddenly ghastly. There was an extremity of terror in every sharpened feature. Elizabeth stood quite straight and still by the window. She was all in shadow, her brown dress lost against the soft brown gloom of the half-drawn velvet curtain. She felt like a shadow herself as she looked and listened. The numbness was upon her still. She was conscious as it were of a black cloud that overshadowed them all—herself, Mary, Edward. But not David. David stood just beyond, and Mary was trying to hold him and to draw him into the blackness. Something in Elizabeth’s deadened consciousness kept saying over and over again: “Not David, not David.” Elizabeth saw the black cloud with a strange internal vision. With her bodily eyes she watched David’s face. She saw it harden when Mary looked at him, and quiver with pain when she looked away. She saw his hand go out and touch Mary’s hand, and she heard him say:
“Mary, I can’t. Don’t ask me.”
Mary put her other hand suddenly on David’s wrist. A bright colour flamed into her cheeks.
“David, you used to be fond of me—once—not long ago. You said you would do anything for me. Anything in the world. You said you loved me. And you said that nowadays a man did not get the opportunity of showing a woman what he would do for her. You wanted to do something for me then, and I had nothing to ask you. Aren’t you fond of me any more, David? Won’t you do anything for me now?—now that I ask you?”
David pulled his hand roughly from her grasp. He pushed past her, and crossed the room.
“Mary, you don’t know what you are asking me,” he said in a tone of sharp exasperation. “You don’t know what you are talking about. You don’t seem to realise that you are asking me to become an accessory after the fact in a case of murder.”
Mary shuddered. The word was like a blow. She spoke in a hurried whispering way.
“But Edward—it’s for Edward. What will happen to Edward? And to me? Don’t you care? We’ve only been married six months. It’s such a little time. Don’t you care at all? I never knew such dreadful things could happen—not to one’s self. You read things in papers, and you never think—you never, never think that a thing like that could happen to yourself. I suppose those people don’t all die, but I should die. Oh, David, aren’t you going to help us?”