We were walking, while these words were passing between us. When I said that, he stopped, and looked at me very earnestly.
"You believed it of her, when you answered my letter," he said.
I admitted that.
"I believed your letter," I replied; "and I shared your opinion of her as long as she was in the same house with me. Her presence fed my anger and my horror of her in some way that I can't account for. Now she has left me—now I have had time to think—there is something in her absence that pleads for her, and tortures me with doubts if I have done right. I can't explain it—I don't understand it. I only know that so it is."
He still looked at me more and more attentively. "Your good opinion of her must have been very firmly rooted to assert itself in this obstinate manner," he said. "What can she have done to deserve it?"
If I had looked back through all my old recollections of her, and had recalled them one by one, it would only have ended in making me cry. And yet, I felt that I ought to stand up for her as long as I could. I managed to meet the difficulty in this way.
"I will tell you what she did," I said, "after I received your letter. Fortunately for me, she was not very well that morning; and she breakfasted in bed. I had plenty of time to compose myself, and to caution Zillah (who read your letter to me), before we met for the first time that day. On the previous day, I had felt hurt and offended with her for the manner in which she accounted for your absence from Browndown. I thought she was not treating me with the same confidence which I should have placed in her, if our positions had been reversed. When I next saw her, having your warning in my mind, I made my excuses, and said what I thought she would expect me to say, under the circumstances. In my excitement and my wretchedness, I daresay I over-acted my part. At any rate, I roused the suspicion in her that something was wrong. She not only asked me if anything had happened, she went the length of saying, in so many words, that she thought she saw a change in me. I stopped it there, by declaring that I did not understand her. She must have seen that I was not telling the truth: she must have known as well as I knew that I was concealing something from her. For all that, not one word more escaped her lips. A proud delicacy—I saw it as plainly in her face, as I now see you—a proud delicacy silenced her; she looked wounded and hurt. I have been thinking of that look, since I have been here. I have asked myself (what did not occur to me at the time) if a false woman, who knew herself to be guilty, would have behaved in that way? Surely a false woman would have set her wits against mine, and have tried to lead me into betraying to her what discoveries I had really made? Oscar! that delicate silence, that wounded look, will plead for her when I think of her in her absence! I can not feel as satisfied as I once did, that she is the abominable creature you declare her to be. I know you are incapable of deceiving me—I know you believe what you say. But is it not possible that appearances have misled you? Can you really be sure that you have not made some dreadful mistake?"
Without answering me, he suddenly stopped at a seat under the stone parapet of the pier, and signed to me to sit down by him. I obeyed. Instead of looking at me, he kept his head turned away; looking out over the sea. I could not make him out. He perplexed—he almost alarmed me.
"Have I offended you?" I asked.
He turned towards me again, as abruptly as he had turned away. His eyes wandered; his face was pale.