In times of great duress, he tended to speak like a solicitor, or like the chairman of the rules committee of a men’s club. But that was his nature. If Mary knew and understood him as a wife should know her husband, she would recognize that beneath the carefully chosen phrases, the mask of composure, there were depths of anger, jealousy, love, resentment, and pain.
How often, since the day she disappeared from Thornton Lacey, had he pictured this day, this moment! Sometimes she begged him for forgiveness, in floods of tears. Sometimes she and Lord Elsham appeared together and laughed in his face. Sometimes he had raised his voice to her, although doing such a thing in waking life would have been abhorrent to him.
He heard the parlour door open behind him.
“Edmund.”
He turned, and there she stood, after an unnatural interval of two years.
Mary, usually so eloquent, so voluble, said only “Edmund,” again, with tenderness and something like reproach in her voice. She studied his face intently. No doubt she was measuring his appearance today and reconciling it with the memory she had carried for these two years, for he was doing the same.
She was beautiful, perhaps even more beautiful than he recalled. To see each other again, to be in the same room again, exerted the most powerful sensations in his breast. There was a confusion of feeling between them, of love and bitterness, longing and anger, that Edmund felt must be almost visible.
She came slowly toward him. Would they embrace? Kiss? Did she want him too? He could not tell what she wanted; he could not even judge of his own feelings. She began to extend her hand but paused when she saw him stiffen slightly. He gave her a slight bow and she stopped in the middle of the room, and inclined her head in return.
Mary motioned him to the settee and she took a seat on the other side of the fireplace. A space of only five feet separated them.
“Edmund, I am happy to see you,” she began.
“Thank you, Mary, for giving me this opportunity to speak with you.”
He saw her react to the coolness of his address.
“Before I begin, Mary, is there something in particular you would like to say to me?”
“You look wonderful, Edmund, even more handsome than I remembered.”
“Can that be all you have to say to me, Mary?”
“Oh no, of course not, but darling, you know I am never any good at serious moments. Are you not pleased to see me as well, Edmund? I think you are.”
“Mary, on occasions like this, at the outset of their first conversation in two years, I believe a wife who has been unfaithful to her husband ought to apologize. I am not even speaking of the morality of the thing. I am speaking of common courtesy.”
“Oh! Well, of course!” Mary leapt up from her chair, and knelt at his side, looking up at him with anguish in her dark eyes. “Regret! Sorrow! Edmund, could you not feel my despair, even when we were separated by hundreds of miles? You must know how often I laid in my bed and wept from remorse, and shame and grief, at having thrown away the best husband in all of England. Can you not imagine how I have passed the last two years, a miserable wandering spirit, with no place to call my own? My feelings have so overpowered me, all these months, that it seems incredible you should not know them. Could you possibly think me indifferent? How could you not know my heart, after what we have been to one another?”
She looked up at him, beseechingly. Though he tried to shield his expression, a look of pain, even despair, crossed his face.
“Mary, please, take your seat again. Please.”
She looked surprised, but nodded humbly and resumed her chair.
“Mary, I attended very carefully to what you said. Will you likewise give me all of your attention in return?
She tilted her head enquiringly but remained silent.
“I do believe you feel regret, Mary. But I observed, while you expressed your sorrow for—for what has occurred, you spoke only of the difficulties it caused for you. You said nothing about me—no word of apology—or even acknowledgement, for what I have suffered. In fact, you reproached me, for not being sufficiently alive to your suffering.”
Her eyes opened wide in consternation. She drew breath to speak, but he continued, calmly and deliberately.
“No word, about what your sudden departure meant to me. No reflection on what it must have been like for me, to take the pulpit every Sunday, one Sunday after another, to see the eyes of all the parishioners on me. They all know my wife left me, and I know they would much rather hear about the mystery of my unhappy marriage, rather than anything I had to say concerning St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatians.
“It was a matter of no small weight with me to know if you were capable of apologizing to me, spontaneously and without equivocation. To me, Mary. In the event you do not recollect what you just said, permit me to inform you, that you did not apologize to me, and if it did not occur to you to do so on this occasion, what must I conclude?
“Although I had, upon our first acquaintance, given you credit for being a kind-hearted and thoughtful person, the first six months of our marriage did much to
