“At last they abandoned hope,” he concluded. “The expedition is now on its way home.”
She had turned her back upon him, and he waited in misery to hear her sob, to see her shoulders shake with her weeping; but, instead, the whole figure seemed to stiffen, and, wheeling round, she faced him with blazing eyes.
“The cowards!” she cried. “To abandon a man to starvation! What are they made of to do such a barbarous thing!”
“We must not judge them unheard,” Stephen ventured. “Their search may have been exhaustive—they may have risked their own lives gladly—and you know,” he added, gently, “that beyond a certain time it would have been useless from the standpoint of saving life.”
“It was inhuman to sail away and leave him,” she went on, beating her hands together in a sort of rage. “How can you defend them! You, who sent him off on this horrible journey—how can you sleep in your bed when you know Simeon in perishing by inches! I should think you would be on your way now—this moment—to search for him! Oh, do something—don’t just accept it in this awful way. Haven’t you any pity?” Unconsciously she laid her hand on his shoulder, as if she would push him from the room.
Stephen bore her reproaches with a meekness that exasperated her.
“Are there no cables to Magellan?” she asked. “There must be somebody there who for money would do your bidding. Don’t waste time,” she answered, stamping her foot.
Stephen kept his temper. Perhaps he was shrewd enough to see that it was pity rather than love that gave the fierceness to her mood. It was the frenzy of a tender-hearted woman at hearing of an act of cruelty rather than the agony of one who suffers a personal bereavement.
“Deena,” he said, not even knowing he had used her name, “do you really want me to go on this hopeless errand? Think of its utter uselessness—the time that has elapsed, the impossibility of penetrating into such a country in the advancing winter. It is the first of February, and I could not get there before March; it would be already their autumn. By this time he has either reached help or he is beyond it.”
At the beginning of his speech Deena’s pale face flushed, but as he went on setting forth the obstacles to his going she seemed to harden in her scorn.