“I saw her yesterday. I was in Chippenham when the Bristol coach passed, and I saw her face for an instant at the window.”
He breathed more quickly; it was evident that the news touched him home. But he would not blench nor lower his eyes. “Well?” he said.
“I saw her for a few seconds only, and she did not see me. And of course—I did not speak to her. But I knew her face, though she was changed.”
“And because”—his voice was harsh—“you saw her for a few minutes at a window, you come to me?”
“No, but because her face called up the old times. And because we are all growing older. And because she was—not guilty.”
He started. This was getting within his guard with a vengeance. “Not guilty?” he cried in a tone of extreme anger. And he rose. But as she did not move he sat down again.
“No,” she replied firmly. “She was not guilty.”
His face was deeply red. For a moment he looked at her as if he would not answer her, or, if he answered, would bid her leave his house. Then, “If she had been,” he said grimly, “guilty, Madam, in the sense in which you use the word, guilty of the worst, she had ceased to be my wife these fifteen years, she had ceased to bear my name, ceased to be the curse of my life!”
“Oh, no, no!”
“It is yes, yes!” And his face was dark. “But as it was, she was guilty enough! For years”—he spoke more rapidly as his passion grew—“she made her name a byword and dragged mine in the dirt. She made me a laughing-stock and herself a scandal. She disobeyed me—but what was her whole life with me, Lady Lansdowne, but one long disobedience? When she published that light, that foolish book, and dedicated it to—to that person—a book which no modest wife should have written, was not her main motive to harass and degrade me? Me, her husband? While we were together was not her conduct from the first one long defiance, one long harassment of me? Did a day pass in which she did not humiliate me by a hundred tricks, belittle me by a hundred slights, ape me before those whom she should not have stooped to know, invite in a thousand ways the applause of the fops she drew round her? And when”—he rose, and paced the room—“when, tried beyond patience by what I heard, I sent to her at Florence and bade her return to me, and cease to make herself a scandal with that person, or my house should no longer be her home, she disobeyed me flagrantly, wilfully, and at a price she knew! She went out of her way to follow him to Rome, she flaunted herself in his company, ay, and flaunted herself in such guise as no Englishwoman had been known to wear before! And after that—after that——”