“I am telling you this now,” Madame Claire went on, “because I want the time that remains to us to be as perfect as possible. I want you to know that while I was a good and faithful wife to Robert, and made him, I believe, very happy, I loved you. I bear him no ill will. He acted according to his lights, believing, then, that all was fair in love. That doesn’t make his act less detestable, but I must weigh in the scales against that, the fact that he was the best of husbands and fathers. And I forgave him absolutely. But, oh, Stephen——! All those years … all those years were one long struggle against my love for you!”
There are moments too great or too poignant for speech. He did not know, then, whether the pain or the happiness of this new knowledge was the stronger. For a moment the pain had the upper hand.
“It is a tragedy!” he said at last. “A tragedy!”
Presently he turned to her again.
“But when he died?” he asked. “When I came to you again? Why did you say no?”
Madame Claire hesitated before she spoke.
“My reasons,” she said, “may have seemed to you to be poor ones. I pleaded my age, I remember, and the fact—or what I believed was a fact—that it would have been an elderly folly for us to have married then. But there was another reason, and a better one. Stephen … I dreaded an anti-climax. And it would have been that. After loving you all my life, all my youth, to have married you at sixty … it seemed to me a desecration. I hoped for a dear friendship with you. It was that I longed for. But you were angry and hurt. You left me. I thought you would be gone six months, or possibly a year. You were away nearly twenty years!… Oh, Stephen!…”
His eyes begged her forgiveness.
“I always tried to think that you were right, Claire,” he said softly. “Right or wrong, it all belongs to the past now. So does my loneliness. I have been lonely, but I can bear that too, now that I know I have been loved. That sheds a glory on my life … a glory.”
His voice sank. She watched him turning the letter over in his hands, remembering … remembering. Then, with a gesture full of courtliness and charm, he held it out to her.