She had spoken in a low, monotonous voice, staring haggardly at the fire, while I knelt by her side. I murmured some banal apologia, miserably aware that one set of words is as futile as another when one has broken a woman’s heart.
“You never knew I loved you?” she went on in the same bitter undertone. “What kind of woman did you take me for? I have accepted help from you to enable me to live in this flat—do you imagine I could have done such a thing without loving you? I should have thought it was obvious in a thousand ways.”
The fire getting low, she took up the scoop for coals. Mechanically I relieved her of the thing and fulfilled the familiar task. Neither spoke for a long time. She remained there and I went to the window. It had begun to rain. A barrel-organ below was playing some horrible music-hall air, and every vibrant note was like a hammer on one’s nerves. The grinder’s bedraggled Italian wife perceiving me at the window grinned up at me with the national curve of the palm. She had a black eye which the cacophonous fiend had probably given her, and she grinned like a happy child of nature. Men in my position do not blacken women’s eyes; but it is only a question of manners. Was I, for that, less of a brute male than the scowling beast at the organ?
The sudden sound of a sob made me turn to Judith, who had broken down and was crying bitterly, her face hidden in her hands. I bent and touched her shoulder.
“Judith—”
She flung her arms around my neck.
“I can’t give you up, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” she cried, wildly.
For the first time in my life I heard a woman give abandoned, incoherent utterance to an agony of passion; and it sounded horrible, like the cry of an animal wounded to death.
A guilt-stricken creature, scarce daring to meet her eyes, I bade her farewell. She had recovered her composure.
“Make me one little promise, Marcus, do me one little favour,” she said, with quivering lip, and letting her cold hand remain in mine. “Stay away from her to-day. I couldn’t bear to think of you and her together, happy, love-making, after what I’ve said this morning. I should writhe with the shame and the torture of it. Give me your thoughts to-day. Wear a little mourning for the dead. It is all I ask of you.”