“You,” he said, abruptly pausing before her; and taking in his own her white, small hands, he gazed upon them with a smile of bitter mockery. “You would have starved—you would starve, Mabel, without a friend or a hope in this wide world. You would die unheeded at the threshold of him you have forsaken for—your husband.”
She shuddered; not at his words, but at the strange expression within his eye and upon his lip.
“When I took you from your palace-home, Mabel, it was with the love of a man young in the world, and young in sorrow. Now would I give my right hand to place you there again. To part from you Mabel, never more to look upon your face, or to rest upon your bosom and listen to your sweet voice, when my head is throbbing with the weariness and tumult of yon accursed buffoonery. Will you leave me? I bid you go.”
“Leave you?”
“Hark, Mabel, hark! Suppose the hand you clasp and wet with your tears, were double dyed in guilt; that it were red even with the blood of murder, (ay, shudder and grow pale and blench away!) If I told you this, that I was a demon walking hand in hand through earth with an angel, that I had sinned too deeply even to meet your eye or to hear your voice, would I drive you from me?”
“If I could believe.”
“You would cling to me in sorrow, but not in guilt, Mabel,” he said, regarding her with a look of jealous suspicion.
“Through the darkest deeps of shame and misery. I will forsake thee only with death! Yet, oh! my husband, wherefore torture me thus?”
“Because I would drive you from me,” he said, with violence the more exaggerated because unreal; “Go, woman, I love you not! Go! back to your home! Away from one you burthen and weary!”
She looked at him for an instant doubtingly, but his brows were gathered into a heavy frown, and his eyes from beneath their long lashes flashed fire upon her. With a low moan she sunk fainting at his feet.