“I know you had not.”
It was not in the least true. Many were the pungent snubs that, on her first visit, Miss Ransome had heard administered by Felicity to her mate, and many the nettled retorts with which he had answered. But she saw that he believed in the perfect truth of his statement, and that it gave him a sort of relief from his misery to raise his lost wife to the clouds and depress himself to the pit.
“Just look round,” he went on, turning his streaming and reddened eyes about the room upon the evidences of Felicity’s labours. “This was her life—always working for others; never giving a thought to herself; working herself to death for other people; but all on the quiet! You never would have known it from her! Never a word of boasting; just doing it for the love of the thing, not wanting any credit or glory for herself!”
He paused, not because his Cornucopia of praises was empty, but because tears strangled him. Bonnybell listened in covert wonder. Was it possible that he believed all that? Could not he have found something a little nearer the truth to say of her?
“And there was I all the time, in my beastly selfishness, thinking of nothing but my own amusements; shirking everything disagreeable; laying everything on her shoulders; never profiting in the least by her example; disregarding her advice; wasting my time in doing things that I knew she disapproved of!”
The picture was to the full as overcharged as the companion portrait had been, but it was not yet highly coloured enough to suit the painter’s fancy; and since it gave a little relief to the poor man’s remorse, Bonnybell took care not to interrupt him.
“I often hurt her feelings by the things I did, even making much of other people under her very eyes! She never took the least notice, or gave me one word of reproach; but I am sure it hurt her, though she must have known how little I cared about them, about anybody, or anything, in comparison of her!”
In the bewildered agony of his mind, poor Tom had evidently clean forgotten how prominent a place in the group alluded to the lady before him had taken; but she herself was somewhat acutely conscious of it, and since she had always been able to laugh at her own expense, a dreadful sense of amusement tinged the distress and awkwardness of the situation.
“She was a wonderfully handsome woman to her last day, wasn’t she? I never went into a room with her that she was not the best-looking woman there; but you have no conception what she was when I married her; her beauty was quite—quite—unearthly.”
“I can well believe it!”