“He will be dead before he knows that they are not to be realized.”
There is a heavy silence; while, before her mental vision, the dreadful programme she has drawn up of their future life unrolls itself. What his thoughts are she cannot tell; nor whether he will accept or reject her offer. Even when he does speak, she remains still in the dark, for he only says—
“And then?”
“And then what?”
“When he is dead?”
She gives a dry sob. It has come to this, then! She has brought it to this—that what ought to be the prime calamity of the death of him to whom she has owed everything but the bare and dubious gift of life, is to be regarded only as a subsidiary incident in the drama of ruin which she has brought upon them all!
“When he is dead!” she repeats automatically; but Rupert treats it as a question.
“You will be saddled with me for perhaps fifty years, and”—with a smile, cruel in its gentleness—“I am afraid I am too great a coward to release you by suicide!”
She starts as if stung by a hornet; and yet taking to herself a sort of horrible comfort from his words. Yes; that is why she has betrayed him; that is why she has never been able to love him really! He is a coward. He has been telling her so for three and twenty years; and there is no reason for disbelieving him! They have been standing still on the high-road; but now she breaks away from him, walking so fast that it is a moment or two before he overtakes her. In wordless wretchedness they step along side by side, the sweet Babel of evening birds in their ears, the acrid sweetness of hawthorn in their nostrils, and death in their hearts.
“Even if I freed you from my presence, as, of course, I should do, there would still be the legal tie,” Rupert resumes presently, in a matter-of-fact voice, whose would-be indifference the dead whiteness of his face and a slight twitching of the lips contradict. “I believe that, under the circumstances, it might be got rid of; but it would involve a publicity that would be painful to you.”