“I have assured you that I never did.”
“Oh the age that we have spent together under one roof, united yet separated; one in name, apart in soul; years of sorrow to both of us; years of estrangement; years of disappointed love, and broken trust, and embittered home—all this we owe to him!”
Marianne felt his heart beating furiously, and his muscles contracting spasmodically in his face, that was against hers, in his breast, in his arms.
Has it ever chanced to the reader to encounter a married couple blind to each other’s faults, and these faults glaring? One might suppose that daily intercourse would have sharpened the perception of each other’s weaknesses, but instead of that it blunts it. They cannot detect in each other the grotesque, the ugly, the false, that are conspicuous and offensive to everyone else. Love, it is, which has softly dropped the veil over their eyes, or withdrawn from them the faculty of perceiving in each other these blemishes which, if perceived, would make common life unendurable. Love is well painted as blind, but the blindest of all loves is the love of the married. In the case of the Saltrens the blindness was on one side only, because on his side only was there true love. This had dulled his perception, so that he saw not the shallowness, untruthfulness, vanity, and heartlessness of Marianne, qualities which her brother saw clearly enough.
“You have borne your wrong all these years unavenged,” he said. “My God! how I have misjudged you! One word more, Marianne.” He disengaged himself from her. He had been kneeling with his arms enfolding her; now he released his hold, and knelt, bolt-upright, with his hands depending to the floor, gaunt, ungainly, motionless. “Marianne,” he said, slowly, “I know so much that I must be told all. I must know the rest.” He paused for full a minute, looking her steadily in the face, still kneeling upright, stiffly, uncouthly. “Who was he?”
Marianne did not speak. Now in turn agitation overcame her. Had she gone too far with this story, true or false?
She raised her hands deprecatingly. What would the consequences be?
Then, all at once, with a shriek rather than a cry, Saltren leaped to his feet.
“You need not say a word. I know all now, all—without your telling me. You were in the park at the time with the old Lady Lamerton, and—and you had the boy named after him.”
Had there been light in the room, it would have been seen how pale was the face of Mrs. Saltren, but that of her husband, the captain, had turned a deadlier white still.