“Yes, my crime,” she responded, her face white and hard set, her clenched hands perceptibly trembling. “Now at least you are aware of the reason that I will not accept your love. I, the woman whom you love, am unworthy, degraded and perverted, a woman who would have suffered a thousand deaths of torture rather than have betrayed myself, but who is now without pity or fear, unconscious, helpless, despair-stricken, although still linked with my sex and with humanity. Death alone would be welcome to me as bridegroom.” Then panting, she added, rising to leave me: “No, Frank, this must all end to-day. I can never love you. It is utterly impossible. You cannot know—you will never know—how I suffer.”
She had gone from me. She was to me a thing terrible, and almost loathsome. Yet she was dear to me. I was ready to give my life to ransom hers.
She stretched out her hand and musingly touched mine. I shrank as if the contact burned me. She saw my involuntary gesture of aversion. It set her heart harder on the thing she meant to do.
Chapter Twenty.
A Night Adventure.
In the silent evening hour, as the dusk darkened and twilight slowly faded into night, I was conscious of a kind of fascination against which my moral sense rebelled, but from which there was no escape. We talked on, I striving ever to learn the truth, she careful to conceal it from me. I saw how unexpected but natural were her transitions of temper and feeling, noted the contest of various passions, the wild hurricane of resentment melting into tears, faintness and languishment, and endeavoured time after time, but always in vain, to obtain a further confession from her lips.
That she existed in deadly fear of some dread secret being revealed was vividly apparent, just as it was also clear that my ill-timed observation regarding her mysterious presence in that house of mystery at Kensington had placed her upon her guard, and proved to her a fact of which before she had no confirmation. Her airy caprice and provoking petulance, which had so attracted me when we had been first introduced, had been now succeeded by a mixture of tenderness with artifice, and fear with submissive blandishment. She quailed before me when I rebuked her tenderly for her lack of confidence in me, partly because of her female subtlety, partly owing to natural feeling.
Nevertheless, when I reviewed the situation, and calmly and deliberately reflected upon her attitude, I saw plainly that she regarded me as something more than a mere acquaintance, even though her character was so complicated that no one sentiment could exist pure and unvarying in such a mind.