Part 42 (1/2)

”It cannot give you pleasure to see me suffer,” he said. ”Please go away.”

”How can I leave you like this?”

There was despair in her voice, and the sound of tears that would never come to her eyes. He did not answer. She would not go away without trying to appease him, and she made a strong effort to collect her thoughts.

”You are angry with me, of course,” she began. ”You despise me for not having known my own mind, but you cannot say anything that I have not said to myself. I ought to have known long ago. All I can say in self-defence now is that it is better to have told you the truth before we were married than to have been obliged to confess it afterwards, or else to have lied to you all my life if I could not find courage to speak. It is better, is it not? Oh, say that it is better!”

”It would have been much better if neither of us had ever been born,”

Guido answered.

”I only ask you to say that you would rather be suffering now than have had me tell you in a year that I was an unfaithful wife at heart. That is all. Will you not say it? It is all I ask.”

”Why should you ask anything of me, even that? The only kindness you can show me now is to go away.”

He would not look at her. His throat was parched, and he put out his hand to take the tumbler from the little table on the other side of his long chair. Instantly she rose and tried to help him, but he would not let her.

”I am not so weak as that,” he said coldly. ”My hand is steady enough, thank you.”

She sighed and drew back. Perhaps it would be better to leave him, as he wished that she should, but his words recalled Lamberti's warning; his hand was steady, he said, and that meant that it was steady enough to take the pistol from the drawer in the little table and use it. He believed in nothing, in no future, in no retribution, in no G.o.d, and he was ill, lonely, and in despair through her fault. His friend knew him, and the danger was real. The conviction flashed through her brain that if she left him alone he would probably kill himself, and she fancied him lying there dead, on the red tiles. She fancied, too, Lamberti's face, when he should come to tell her what had happened, for he would surely come, and to the end of her life and his he would never forgive her.

She stood still, wavering and unstrung by her thoughts, looking steadily down at Guido's head.

”Since you will not go away,” he said at last, ”answer me one question.

Tell me the name of the man who has come between us.”

Cecilia bit her lip and turned her face from the light.

”Then it is true,” Guido said, after a silence. ”There is a man whom you really love, a man whom you would really marry and to whom you could really be faithful.”

”Yes. It is true. Everything I wrote you is true.”

”Who is he?”

She was silent again.

”Do you hope that I shall ever forgive you for what you have done to me?”

”Yes. I pray heaven that you may!”

”Leave heaven out of the question. You have turned my life into something like what you call h.e.l.l. Do I know the man you love?”

”Yes,” Cecilia answered, after a moment's hesitation.

”Do I often meet him? Have I met him often since you have loved him?”

She said nothing, but stood still with bent head and clasped hands.

”Why do you not answer me?” he asked sternly.

”You must never know his name,” she said, in a low voice.