“Then you feel as I do?”
“That you must go–-?”
“That this is intolerable!”
The words struck down her last illusion, and she rose and went over to the writing-table. “Yes— go,” she said.
He stood up also, and took both her hands, not in a caress, but gravely, almost severely.
“Listen, Justine. You must understand exactly what this means—may mean. I am willing to go on as we are now…as long as we can…because I love you…because I would do anything to spare you pain. But if I speak I must say everything—I must follow this thing up to its uttermost consequences. That’s what I want to make clear to you.”
Her heart sank with a foreboding of new peril. “What consequences?”
“Can’t you see for yourself—when you look about this house?”
“This house–-?”
He dropped her hands and took an abrupt turn across the room.
“I owe everything to her,” he broke out, “all I am, all I have, all I have been able to give you—and I must go and tell her father that you….”
“Stop—stop!” she cried, lifting her hands as if to keep off a blow.
“No—don’t make me stop. We must face it,” he said doggedly.
“But this—this isn’t the truth! You put it as if—almost as if–-“
“Yes—don’t finish.—Has it occurred to you that he may think that?” Amherst asked with a terrible laugh. But at that she recovered her courage, as she always did when an extreme call was made on it.
“No—I don’t believe it! If he does, it will be because you think it yourself….” Her voice sank, and she lifted her hands and pressed them to her temples. “And if you think it, nothing matters…one way or the other….” She paused, and her voice regained its strength. “That is what I must face before you go: what you think, what you believe of me. You’ve never told me that.”
Amherst, at the challenge, remained silent, while a slow red crept to his cheek-bones.
“Haven’t I told you by—by what I’ve done?” he said slowly.
“No—what you’ve done has covered up what you thought; and I’ve helped you cover it—I’m to blame too! But it was not for this that we…that we had that half-year together…not to sink into connivance and evasion! I don’t want another hour of sham happiness. I want the truth from you, whatever it is.”
He stood motionless, staring moodily at the floor. “Don’t you see that’s my misery—that I don’t know myself?”
“You don’t know…what you think of me?”
“Good God, Justine, why do you try to strip life naked? I don’t know what’s been going on in me these last weeks–-“
“You must know what you think of my motive…for doing what I did.”
She saw in his face how he shrank from the least allusion to the act about which their torment revolved. But he forced himself to raise his head and look at her. “I have never—for one moment—questioned your motive—or failed to see that it was justified…under the circumstances….”
“Oh, John—John!” she broke out in the wild joy of hearing herself absolved; but the next instant her subtle perceptions felt the unconscious reserve behind his admission.
“Your mind justifies me—not your heart; isn’t that your misery?” she said.
He looked at her almost piteously, as if, in the last resort, it was from her that light must come to him. “On my soul, I don’t know…I can’t tell…it’s all dark in me. I know you did what you thought best…if I had been there, I believe I should have asked you to do it…but I wish to God–-“
