'This is the best medicine I could get,' he said; 'better nor all doctor's messes. To listen to your heart flowing over, to feel your warm tears trickle, does me good. In spite of everything, Glory! I must love you, and yet, Mehalah! I have every cause to hate you. I have made you, who were nothing, my wife, mistress of my house and estate, with a property and position above everyone else in Salcott and Virley, equal to any of the proud yeomen's wives on Mersea Isle. I have made a home for your mother, and in return you have plunged me in eternal night, and deny me your love.'
'Let us not recriminate,' said Mehalah through her tears, 'or I should have enough to charge you with. I never sought to be your wife. You drove me into the position in spite of my aversion to it; in spite of all my efforts to escape. You have wounded me in a cruel and cowardly manner past forgiveness. You have ruined my life and all my prospects of happiness. George——'
He shook her furiously.
'I will not listen to that name,' he said through his teeth.
'You could bear to hold him in chains there below,' she answered.
'You said, Let us not recriminate, and you pour a torrent of recriminations over me,' he gasped. 'If I have wronged you, you have redressed all with one vial of vitriol in the eyes, where man is most sensitive. With that firejuice you purged away all the past wrongs, I expiated in that liquid flame all the evil I had done you. You don't know what I have suffered. You have had no such experience of pain as to imagine the tortures I have undergone. If the anguish were all, it would be enough atonement; but it is not all. There is the future before me, a future of night. I shall have to trust to someone to do everything for me, to be eyes, and hands, and feet to me. Whom can I trust? How do I know that I shall not be deserted, and left to die in my darkness, a prey to ravenous men? If you loved me, then I could lean on you and be at peace. But you do not love me, and you will leave me when it suits your pleasure.'
'No, Elijah,' said Mehalah sadly; 'that I never will do. I have robbed you of your sight. I did it unwittingly, in self-defence, perhaps also in anger at knowing how cruelly, wickedly, cowardly you had behaved to me and to another whom I loved.'
'Whom you love still!' with a cry of rage.
'One whom I loved,' repeated Mehalah, sadly; 'and I must atone for my mad act as far as lies in my power. I will stay by you. I will never forsake you.'
'Listen to me, Mehalah,' said Elijah, with concentrated vehemence; 'you know what was said—that the person you loved went out in a boat and was lost. The body was never found. Should the man turn up again.'