And now she had told him she loved him.
Only Dickie was too numb to recognise the form her confession of love had taken; love, as always, was clamouring to be clearly seen—naked, if need be, blood-guilty, if need be—but seen ... and then swept up, sin and all, by another love big enough to accept this truth, also, as essentially part of her.
Ruth waited several seconds for Dickie to speak. Then she got up, and strolled over to the picture, and said, examining intently, as though for the first time, the woman in the doorway: "I'm not sorry, Dickie. That is to say, I'm sorry, of course, if I've shattered an illusion of yours, but—I can't be melodramatic, you know, not even to the extent of using the word 'murderess' on myself. If I hadn't killed Lucas—"
"He would have killed you?" So he was able to utter quite natural and coherent sounds! Dickie was surprised.
"Yes—" But Ruth found that, after all, she could not tell Dickie much about Lucas. Lucas had not been a pleasant gentleman to live with—and there were things that Dickie was too fine himself, and too innocent, to realise. The only comprehension in this thoroughly well-groomed atmosphere of soft carpets and dim silken panels and miniatures and rare frail china might have come from the woman in the doorway of that incongruous picture ... a woman sullenly patient, brutalised, but—yes, her man might quite easily have been another Lucas.
For that which Dickie had always thought of as mysterious, elusive, was, to Ruth's eyes, only sorrowful wisdom.
"Come here, Ruth."
She dragged her eyes away from the picture; crossed the room; broke down completely, her head on his knees, her shuddering body crouched closely to the floor: "When you've—been frightened—and have to live with it—and it doesn't even stop at night—for weeks and months and years—one's nerves aren't quite reliable.... They've no right to call that murder, have they? have they, Dickie? When you've been afraid for a long time—and there's no one you can tell about it except the person who makes the fear...."
But Dickie was all that she had perilously dared to hope he would be at this crisis. He soothed her and healed her by his loyalty; promised, without her extorting it, that he would never tell a soul what she had just told him; pixie-shy, yet he spoke of his personal need of her—and more than anything else she had desired to hear this. He mentioned some trivial intimate plans for their unbroken, unchanged future together, so as to reassure her of its continuance. He even made her laugh.
In fact, for a last appearance in the rôle of a gallant little gentleman, Dickie did not do so badly.