“Dead!” she said, in a low voice.
“Ah! I thought so; I should scarcely have seen you here again had he been alive. And what do you think is to become of you now?” He asked the question with the bitter savagery of one who sees something that has wronged him in the dust at his feet, helpless, and is gladdened by the sight.
“I do not care,” she said. “It does not matter; can’t you understand that nothing matters? But my child, my baby; that has been the bitter thing through all. Do you think that I would plead to you as I do now for anything else? Do you think that I would kneel at your feet in any other cause?”
The man began to pace up and down the room again, grasping his strong, square chin by one hand, and bending his brows in thought. The woman drew herself slowly to her feet and watched him intently. After a moment the man faced about, leaned his back against the wall, folded his arms, and looked down at her.
“Hysterics, or appeals, or tears are useless in a matter of this kind,” he said; “let us look at it clearly and dispassionately, as though it lay outside ourselves. You have no right here; your part in my life and in the child’s is played out and done with—do you understand that? You cut yourself off from it all long ago; I have set myself to forget your very name, and I do not suppose that the child can remember you. From the standpoint of justice and morality, you have simply ceased to exist; you’re outside the pale—a lost, abandoned woman. Do you understand that?”
The woman did not answer; she stood rocking herself to and fro, like a creature in pain, with her hands pressed tightly to her eyes.
“When I married you,” the man went on, “I gave you everything that a woman could desire—money, culture, a home. No thinking woman wants more than that. You chose to tell me that the life you led was dull and spiritless; that I was always with my books; that my friends did not interest you, and that you found their conversation tedious. I think once—it’s an old forgotten thing, and I’m not quite sure about it—but I think once you told me that you had hoped for something else; I believe you said some foolish schoolgirl nonsense about love. Well, I gave you all I had to offer, and I fail to see how any reasonable woman could ask for more.”
“No, you never would understand that,” she murmured behind her hands.
“Then you made the acquaintance of this other man, a ne’er-do-weel, a child laughing in the sunshine, with no purpose in his life and no character in his face. But,” he went on, sneeringly, “he was the pretty, empty-headed fool you wanted; he could quote rhymes to you, and fill your ears with things that had no substance in them—things such as every man has whispered to the woman he craves since the world first began. Well, you believed him; you caught at the shadow, and lost the substance. Now he’s dead, you think you can come back here, as though nothing had happened.”
“I do not; I only want to see my baby. Give me but an hour with her; let me assure myself that she is well; let me see her only in her sleep if you will. I must see her; this hunger at my heart will drive me mad.”