“And I?” said he.
“Dear Louis, let us understand each other at last. Of what do you accuse me? Let us, at any rate, know each other’s thoughts on this matter, of which each of us is ever thinking.”
“I make no new accusation.”
“I must protest then against your using words which seem to convey accusation. Since marriages were first known upon earth, no woman has ever been truer to her husband than I have been to you.”
“Were you lying to me then at Casalunga when you acknowledged that you had been false to your duties?”
“If I acknowledged that, I did lie. I never said that; but yet I did lie—believing it to be best for you that I should do so. For your honour’s sake, for the child’s sake, weak as you are, Louis, I must protest that it was so. I have never injured you by deed or thought.”
“And yet you have lied to me! Is a lie no injury;—and such a lie! Emily, why did you lie to me? You will tell me tomorrow that you never lied, and never owned that you had lied.”
Though it should kill him, she must tell him the truth now. “You were very ill at Casalunga,” she said, after a pause.
“But not so ill as I am now. I could breathe that air. I could live there. Had I remained I should have been well now—but what of that?”
“Louis, you were dying there. Pray, pray listen to me. We thought that you were dying; and we knew also that you would be taken from that house.”
“That was my affair. Do you mean that I could not keep a house over my head?” At this moment he was half lying, half sitting, in a large easy chair in the little drawing-room of their cottage, to which he had been carried from the adjoining bedroom. When not excited, he would sit for hours without moving, gazing through the open window, sometimes with some pretext of a book lying within the reach of his hand; but almost without strength to lift it, and certainly without power to read it. But now he had worked himself up to so much energy that he almost raised himself up in his chair, as he turned towards his wife. “Had I not the world before me, to choose a house in?”
“They would have put you somewhere, and I could not have reached you.”
“In a madhouse, you mean. Yes;—if you had told them.”
“Will you listen, dear Louis? We knew that it was our duty to bring you home; and as you would not let me come to you, and serve you, and assist you to come here where you are safe—unless I owned that you had been right, I said that you had been right.”
“And it was a lie—you say now?”
“All that is nothing. I cannot go through it; nor should you. There is the only question. You do not think that I have been—? I need not say the thing. You do not think that?” As she asked the question, she knelt beside him, and took his hand in hers, and kissed it. “Say that you do not think that, and I will never trouble you further about the past.”
“Yes;—that is it. You will never trouble me!” She glanced up into his face and saw there the old look which he used to wear when he was at Willesden and at Casalunga; and there had come again the old tone in which he had spoken to her in the bitterness of his wrath:—the look and the tone, which had made her sure that he was a madman. “The craft and subtlety of women passes everything!” he said. “And so at last I am to tell you that from the beginning it has been my doing. I will never say so, though I should die in refusing to do it.”
After that there was no possibility of further conversation, for there came upon him a fit of coughing, and then he swooned; and in half-an-hour he was in bed, and Dr. Nevill was by his side. “You must not speak to him at all on this matter,” said the doctor. “But if he speaks to me?” she asked. “Let it pass,” said the doctor. “Let the subject be got rid of with as much ease as you can. He is very ill now, and even this might have killed him.” Nevertheless, though this seemed to be stern, Dr. Nevill was very kind to her, declaring that the hallucination in her husband’s mind did not really consist of a belief in her infidelity, but arose from an obstinate determination to yield nothing. “He does not believe it; but he feels that were he to say as much, his hands would be weakened and yours strengthened.”
“Can he then be in his sane mind?”
“In one sense all misconduct is proof of insanity,” said the doctor. “In his case the weakness of the mind has been consequent upon the weakness of the body.”
Three days after that Nora visited Twickenham from Monkhams in obedience to a telegram from her sister. “Louis,” she said, “had become so much weaker, that she hardly dared to be alone with him. Would Nora come to her?” Nora came of course, and Hugh met her at the station, and brought her with him to the cottage. He asked whether he might see Trevelyan, but was told that it would be better that he should not. He had been almost continually silent since the last dispute which he had with his wife; but he had given little signs that he was always thinking of the manner in which he had been brought home by her from Italy, and of the story she had told him of her mode of inducing him to come. Hugh Stanbury had been her partner in that struggle, and would probably be received, if not with sullen silence, then with some attempt
