Or was it that grief had unhinged the poor lady’s mind?
“I am going to say to you what I have never said to a living soul, and will never say again. . . . I have never even said it to myself. . . . I hated him most utterly and most bitterly. . . .”
Bertram was more shocked than he had ever been in his life. . . This was terrible! . . . He wanted to say, “Oh, hush!” and get up and go away.
“I could not tell you how I hated him,” continued Mrs. Stayne-Brooker, “for he spoilt my whole life. . . . I am not going into details nor am I going to say one word against him beyond that. I repeat that he made me loathe him—from my very wedding-day . . . and I leave you to judge. . . .”
Bertram judged.
He was very young—much younger than his years—and he judged as the young do, ignorantly, harshly, cruelly. . . .
What manner of woman, after all, was this, who spoke of her dead husband? Of her own husband—scarcely cold in his grave. Of her husband of all people in the world! . . . He could have wept with the shame and misery of it, the disillusionment, the shattering blow which she herself had dealt at the image and idol that he had set up in his heart and gratefully worshipped.
He looked up miserably as he heard the sound of a sob in the heavy silence of the room. She was weeping bitterly, shaken from head to foot with the violence of her—her—what could it be? not grief for her husband of course. Did she weep for the life that he had “spoilt” as she expressed it? Was it because of her wasted opportunities for happiness, the years that the locust had eaten, the never-to-return days of her youth, when joy and gaiety should have been hers?
What could he say to her?—save a banal “Don’t cry”? There was nothing to say. He did not know when he had felt so miserable and uncomfortable. . . .
“It is over,” she said suddenly, and dried her tears; but whether she alluded to the unhappiness of her life with her husband, or to her brief tempest of tears, he did not know.