“‘Your questions are an insult! Your looks are an insult!’ I burst out. ‘Do you think I tried to poison him?’
“The words rushed out of my lips in spite of me. They were the last words under heaven that any woman, in such a situation as mine, ought to have spoken. And yet I spoke them!
“He rose in alarm and gave me my smelling-bottle. ‘Hush! hush!’ he said. ‘You, too, are overwrought—you, too, are overexcited by all that has happened to-night. You are talking wildly and shockingly. Good God! how can you have so utterly misunderstood me? Compose yourself—pray, compose yourself.’
“He might as well have told a wild animal to compose herself. Having been mad enough to say the words, I was mad enough next to return to the subject of the lemonade, in spite of his entreaties to me to be silent.
“‘I told you what I had put in the glass, the moment Mr. Armadale fainted,’ I went on; insisting furiously on defending myself, when no attack was made on me. ‘I told you I had taken the flask of brandy which you kept at your bedside, and mixed some of it with the lemonade. How could I know that he had a nervous horror of the smell and taste of brandy? Didn’t he say to me himself, when he came to his senses, It’s my fault; I ought to have warned you to put no brandy in it? Didn’t he remind you afterward of the time when you and he were in the Isle of Man together, and when the doctor there innocently made the same mistake with him that I made to-night?’”
[“I laid a great stress on my innocence—and with some reason too. Whatever else I may be, I pride myself on not being a hypocrite. I was innocent—so far as the brandy was concerned. I had put it into the lemonade, in pure ignorance of Armadale’s nervous peculiarity, to disguise the taste of—never mind what! Another of the things I pride myself on is that I never wander from my subject. What Midwinter said next is what I ought to be writing about now.”]
“He looked at me for a moment, as if he thought I had taken leave of my senses. Then he came round to my side of the table and stood over me again.
“‘If nothing else will satisfy you that you are entirely misinterpreting my motives,’ he said, ‘and that I haven’t an idea of blaming you in the matter—read this.’
“He took a paper from the breast-pocket of his coat, and spread it open under my eyes. It was the Narrative of Armadale’s Dream.
“In an instant the whole weight on my mind was lifted off it. I felt mistress of myself again—I understood him at last.