| CHAPTER XIII. OF A WOMAN ROUSED
Before her father Jane acted a part, lulling his suspicion that something was fundamentally wrong; and she succeeded so well that, when they arrived at Stockton, he went home as soon as he saw her reinstalled at her house.
A day or two after that she telephoned to the office of Carter, Forrest, and Mckay to get Jim's address. She still thought that she must write to him in order to clear their mutual situation.
The operator who answered the call summoned Mr. McKay who told her that Mr. Forrest had gone to the east; the great campaign was on at last; unless it was imperative, he must not be called away from his work.
Jane, sitting at her desk, hesitated and pondered. She fairly saw the man at the other end of the line smiling into the transmitter with his mysterious smile. And suddenly the whole matter appeared to her in a different light. She laughed. "Oh no," she said, "it isn't of the slightest importance." And she replaced the receiver on its hook.
Jim was to be absent for three months; and as day after day and week after week went by, Jane began to feel glad that a chance combination of circumstances had forced this delay on her. All the dim, obscure urgings within her had time to become clarified; she could analyse and dissect her profound revolt. Meanwhile she read his frequent letters with a cool, sardonic smile which, however, now and then gave way to an inner storm of devastating violence. She was fully conscious of the fact that, in carefully answering his letters by brief notes, she was indulging in what, ultimately, must appear to him as the very refinement of cruel revenge. These answers of hers, short, matter-of-fact notes, she composed pains-takingly, reporting nothing but unimportant, actual happenings: an indisposition of Norah's; a change in her domestic arrangements - for she engaged a middle-aged person to take full charge of the household; and the current gossip of the town as far as it might interest him. With an almost consciously
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hypocritical self-satisfaction she told herself that she was merely following out the legal principle of considering the accused innocent, no matter how overwhelming the evidence was for his guilt, till he was otherwise adjudged. She suppressed, in taking this attitude, the fact that all the evidence was in and that she herself was jury and judge.
At first, before things had fully cleared in her own mind, she was occasionally surprised to note that the legal fact of bigamy was not at all the thing which caused her revolt; yet she came to the conclusion that it was the only thing on which she could base her indictment in the coming interview with him. When the real, underlying causes of her attitude were at last, as by a volcanic action, exposed to the probing light, she understood why it must be so; a man who could act as he had acted would never understand what, at bottom, had caused her revolt.
Often, during these months, when she withdrew even from her friends, using
her recent illness as a pretext, she thought with sarcasm of that word of Stephen
Carter's which, for the moment, had made such an impression on her - that life
is an integration, not a disintegration. She felt too distinctly that she was
disintegrating herself; that she was losing her hold on all that was, in her
of God; on all that might, to a fine sensibility in another, have seemed precious
and unique; that at bottom she planned, like Samson, to pull the temple down
over her head and to destroy "him", at the risk of burying herself under the
ruins. One day, while trying to read, she ran across a line written by a great
French poet.
"La femme, enfant malade, et douze fois impure!" She laughed. "If he'd said l'homme!" she muttered. "It would be right." And, with contemptuous emphasis she translated, "A dozen times impure!"
Outwardly, as far it was possible in her condition, her life resumed its placid flow. It went without saying that she attended none of the major social functions when the season opened again. But, when
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Stephen Carter wrote to her, asking to be allowed to drop in again, she did not deny him; and after one or two calls he brought Dr. Inkster, a new assistant at the mental hospital who had literary leanings. Once Jane had reached this stage, excusing herself by saying that, because she had a bigamist husband, was no reason why she should deny herself the consolation of seeing her friends, she began suddenly to feel as if to be alone were the hardest thing for her; and soon Ann Aikins became once more an almost daily caller, coming in the afternoon and staying rather often for supper, especially on days when her own husband attended meetings of club or lodge.
As if Jane's recent experiences had removed a barrier, Ann and she became extraordinarily intimate; so much so that they were conscious of mutual reticences which, however, they respected as a rule. In all other things they seemed to divine each other; each also divined that the other had some small corner of inner experience which she did not only not divine but which the other even guarded against inspection, not without a certain jealousy. Only once or twice did they touch on these things, and then lightly.
Once Jane was taking a walk west of the city, in the open country; for, by Dr. Halstrom's advice, she was very regular in taking her exercise; in spite of her revolt against Jim and against marriage, and perhaps even because of it, she felt almost religiously subordinated to that unborn child which she was bearing. On this occasion she saw Ann who was driving a little car of her own as she stopped by the side of the road while a dray piled high with barrels occupied the centre of the drive-way.
"Dear," she said the next time they were sitting together before the fire-place in her house, "are you playing with fire?"
Ann looked at her, shook her copper curls, and smiled. "You saw me?"
"I was taking my walk along the west road."
"Playing with fire is a fascinating game."
Jane who, as usual, was reclining in the low arm-chair from which
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she hardly ever stirred when there were guests, said gravely, "I'd be afraid that a spark might catch me."
Ann rose and went with a lilting step through the room. Then she entered the music room, opened the piano, and played the "Wahn" motif from the Meistersingers. When she returned to her friend, she was laughing. "Is there a greater satisfaction in life than deliberately to yield to temptation?"
"I believe," Jane replied, "I have reached the point where I'd rather sit still and not stir. All action means staking your life on unknown factors."
Ann bent over her from behind the chair, her hands folded in front of Jane's throat. "Shall I tell you a suspicion?" she asked.
Jane rested her head against Ann's bosom and closed her eyes as if she were waiting.
"You are concealing something from me. You've become hard at heart and bitter of spirit. The way we become when we have looked more deeply below the surface than is good for us."
Jane smiled. "Dearest, how could you know that unless you had done so yourself?"
"Oh, I!"
"Well, what about you?"
"I don't count. I am not worth very much, at bottom."
"How can you say so!"
"It's true," Ann said with artificial gaiety. "But you were created to live forever on the heights!"
"The heights!" Jane exclaimed bitterly. "Go," she added irrelevantly, "play me the chorus in the finale of the ninth symphony."
Ann betrayed her astonishment at the choice; but from Jane's look she knew that the moment for the expected confidence had gone. So she went and did as she was bidden.
Jane's time was drawing near. Jim wrote exultant letters. The battle was on; the forces were being marshalled in the east. So far, the
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campaign was an enormous success. The country was prosperous; the crops had been good throughout. The harvest of wealth to be garnered by the firm Carter, Forrest, and McKay promised to surpass all expectations. Jim himself hoped to "come out" with a quarter of a million to the good. The moment was drawing near when he must return to Stockton, thence to direct operations in the west. He would be coming home.
Jane pondered. At first the news brought a reawakening of her dull excitement. Her time was so near, a month or two away at the most, that she felt it would have been better if he had stayed away till it was over. The mere thought of the meeting sent waves of revolt through her body, flooding her cheeks with a dusky red. The motions of her long, slender hand, as she touched eyes and lips with her handkerchief, were abrupt and nervous; she was conscious of it. Should she avoid the meeting? No; but she would avoid all explanation. Her condition made it natural that she should withdraw. She would try to contrive that the first encounter should take place with witnesses present. The child must be born at home. Then, later, she would let him know by a word or so, coolly uttered, that she knew.
But the first meeting came unexpectedly; such things always do; she might have known it! Yet, as it happened, a witness was present. The trouble was that, confronted with the sudden fact, she sent the witness away.
After a separation of over four months, following a bridging of the breach between them, Jim was impatient; his hope, not unnatural under the circumstances, of finding her willing to continue peaceful and even amical relations was running high. The last moment he abandoned the plan, indicated at the last writing, of stopping over at Winnipeg.
So, one afternoon, when she thought there would still be time to go away and avoid him, perhaps by simply running out to her father's, he was suddenly standing in the door, big and heavy, for he had still put on weight while in the east where he always "lived high." Ann was
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with Jane, sitting with her back to the door which Jane was half facing. Both were plying the needle, embroidering some linen.
For a moment Jane stared, hardly recognising the dark silhouette, or perhaps unwilling to recognise it. She turned white; her eyes seemed to burn in her head. A cry escaped her.
Ann, startled, turned and rose. The cry had revealed something to her: a depth of horror, an intensity of aversion which made her gasp. Here was Jane's secret!
Jim glanced from one to the other. He knew instantly that something enormous had happened; that nothing was any longer as he had thought it to be; that he was faced with the hour of judgment. But he was the only one who kept complete control over himself. Not a flicker of his eyelids betrayed what was going on within his head.
It was wintry outside; a grey, lurid half-light filled the room.
Jane had risen, a wild pain in her sides. She knew all her recent plannings to be futile: she would have to face "this thing" now, at once, while she still had strength, before she broke down - irrespective of the consequences to herself, to the child, to no matter what. It was Samson's moment: the moment when he felt that his arms were clasping the pillars. She must cleanse herself before the child was born.
She nodded to her friend who ran to her side; and with one hand she reached up to her head, bending it down so that she could whisper into her ear, while with the other she supported herself, leaning on the back of a chair.
"Dear, I must ask you to leave us alone."
"Surely not."
"You must! Listen! I promise to remain cool. But you must go. No other ear must hear this, not even yours. I swear to you, it is a matter of life and death. You must go."
"Then I will, of course," Ann said, pressing her hand.
And, with a last look into that eye whose expression she could never
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forget, she turned quickly, brushed past the man who still stood there as if gathered for a spring, staring at his wife, and out into the cloak room. A moment later, in coat and hat, she left the house. For an hour or so she walked up and down outside, on the cement walk skirting the yard, while the dusk of the early winter day thickened. Then, nothing betraying that anything unusual was going on in that house, she was on the point of going home, feeling troubled and upset, when a car came briskly along the avenue, from the centre of the town; she stopped to see where it might be bound; it slowed down, and the moment it passed her she recognised Dr. Halstrom at the wheel; a nurse was with him. So she turned back to re-enter the house.
Meanwhile the much dreaded scene had been played inside.
As soon as the outer door had closed on Ann's receding figure, Jane turned and spoke. "Come to the library, please."
And she preceded him, going to the far end of the small room. She wished to stand while saying what she thought she had to say. But she found that she was unable to do so. So she sat down by the side of her desk, near the window.
Jim had followed her and stood in the door.
"You had better close both doors," she said cuttingly.
He did so, slowly, moving with a heavy, deliberate step as if he were afraid of upsetting and damaging the fine-limbed furniture of this room. Then he returned to the spot where he had been standing, looking at her with a dull, submissive eye.
"I know," she said.
His thoughts flashed this way and that, stabbing into the unknown. Then he understood. "Dolly?"
She nodded, a frown flitting through her pale brow.
He sat down. A silence of several minutes followed. Her eye rested on him, a merciless eye. She seemed to see his thought spread out before her. He was canvassing several lines of possible action; she watched him with an almost detached curiosity. She, too, understood.
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The force of the blow to him did not so much consist in the fact that she knew; it consisted in the fact that "this thing" had followed him, had found him out, would fasten its consequences on to him at this time.
A thin smile appeared on her lips. He had not the slightest inkling of an idea where the real tragedy lay. To him, it was an external thing, like an obstacle appearing unexpectedly before him in the road. And in that, to her, lay the crux of her tragedy.
When he spoke, he did so in an almost matter-of-fact tone which did seem to make things easy for her; her excitement subsided; it would be unnecessary, after all, to touch on the underlying things; unnecessary because useless; he was unable to understand.
What he said was, "Money. She must be kept silent with money. For money she will do anything."
"Indeed she will not!" Jane said sharply.
"You don't know her..."
"I do."
"Have you seen her?"
"She called on me at Banff." Yes, Jane was quieting down. After all, this was not half as terrible as she had expected. She had been afraid that one thing would lead to another till she had explained herself. He would not even ask for an explanation because he could not see that there was anything requiring it. An explanation was possible only between two people who, in addition to speaking the same language, had the same content of thought and feeling to pour into that language. He and she lived in different worlds.
"Well," he went on, looking up at her, "what else should she have done that for? How did she happen to be there, by the way?"
Jane shrugged her shoulders. She would have preferred not to answer. If she did, it would lead her on. But she spoke, against her better judgment. "She was a waitress at one of the hotels."
"Did she mention money?"
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"Yes and no."
"Why did you not let me know at once?"
Jane's voice was cutting with irony. "I knew you were busy making that money which you want to offer her."
He looked up again, speaking abruptly. "I was, of course. You know what is at stake. This is the worst moment for a thing like that to crop up. Another year, and I should have cashed in." He pondered. "I take it that you wish to help me?"
"Help you!"
"You have come back."
"I considered my children; the one that is growing up and the one that is not yet born. I considered my father."
"Did she threaten?"
"Could you blame her if she had threatened?"
He rose heavily. "It's a mess whichever way you look at it."
Jane narrowed her eyes. This was, after all, getting the better of her. "You don't seem to realise," she said, "That you stand indicted."
He winced. But he rallied. "You said you were considering your children."
That he should build on that, even in the merely external thing, was revolting. She laughed a thin, bitter laugh, thin as the blade of a knife. "I am your judge," she said.
He looked at her uncomprehendingly.
Jane realised that she could not be a judge to him unless he understood at least part of the charge. She must explain it, then. But she would not touch on the deeper thing; no, she would not. "Will you answer a few questions?" she asked almost lightly. "This is beginning to interest me."
"If I can."
"Why did you marry her?"
"She was pretty. I was alone. I wanted her. I was young. That sort of thing seemed imperative at the time."
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"What sort of thing if I may ask?"
He raised a hand and dropped it again. "The stirrings of the blood. Women, in short."
"Why did you leave her?"
Again he raised a hand, almost impatiently. "The whole thing was a mistake. You have seen her, you say. You should know. A man makes a mistake. If he has the courage to do so, he rectifies it. Surely, it was better to do as I did than to stay with her. I could neither have been faithful nor even decent to her."
"Yes." Jane nodded. At that moment she felt nothing but a purely intellectual curiosity. He was right in what he said. Perhaps he was honestly trying to lay the case before her. "I understand that."
He looked up, hopefully. "She's not a bad sort; but she's vulgar. And she has no brains. She would not even understand that what she did was liable to an interpretation of blackmail!"
"Blackmail! She's not only not a bad sort as you express it; she's a thoroughly good woman. But I'm not through with my questions. If you can answer the remainder as well as you've answered these, there's hope - for you."
"Let me hear the questions." He was completely caught in the illusion - and she was aware of it - that together they were plotting to find a way out. He sat down again.
"How could you, knowing you were married, marry me?" This question brought the matter dangerously home again. A vibrant note crept into her voice. Emotional tension betrayed itself.
He was aware of it and began to plead his case. "I was hardly myself at the time. I was carried away. So were you, I believe. You should be able to understand that, Jane."
She gripped the arms of her chair. "Why did you not tell me to wait till you could get a divorce."
He bent earnestly forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "Jane," he said, "consider the circumstances. I was on the point of establishing
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myself in business. It was a question whether I was to enter the firm as a partner or as an employee. I had some money to invest, not much, ten thousand dollars. But I brought no prestige with me. I knew that as your husband I should have that prestige. Your father was known as one of the oldest and most successful settlers in the district. You know that it helped me. I thought you knew at the time."
"I did."
"Well. And then there was a doubt in my mind about you. I could see of course that you were in love with me..."
Jane's muscles became taut.
"But I did not feel so sure that you would have agreed to marry me if you knew of that entanglement."
"I should not."
"You see!" he cried. "And it was years since I had left her. The thing seemed dead. I was never going to go back to California. It was utterly unlikely to follow me. For all I knew she might have been dead at the time. I looked upon what I had done as a piece of youthful folly. She had been used to make her living before she knew me. If she lived, I thought, she must have resumed her work. It would not even be hard on her. I scarcely blamed myself..."
"And you did not care to think of the child."
"The child?"
"There was a boy."
"I didn't know, Jane. It must have been born after I had left her. The whole thing didn't last more than a couple of months. Jane, if you'll only believe me!"
"I do."
"Jane,"- he became hopeful - "help me to straighten this out. There's nothing to do but to offer money. Money's no object at present. I've worked hard, terribly hard, during the last few years. You must forget and forgive. I know I've not always been fair to you. But I've honestly tried during the last year or so. For your own sake
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and the sake of your children you must help me, Jane!"
Jane was quite cool again. She began almost to feel for him. The way in which he exposed what she considered his crudity impressed her as outright tragic.
A moment's silence ensued, tense on his part.
Then, when she spoke, she threw her words out lightly. "Well," she said, "if that is all that is worrying you, you can rest assured. I have done what could be done. I must say, you were lucky in your choice, that first time. She, Dolly, had almost to be persuaded to take money. I have paid over to her all I had of my own, four thousand dollars. It goes without saying that I look to you to replace it; and I have twice paid her three hundred and seventy-five dollars, as the quarterly payments of an annuity of fifteen hundred dollars a year which I urged her to accept. For, understand this, she defended herself against it. She did say at first that she thought it was up to you to provide for the boy. But she kept repeating that she had no wish whatever to interfere between you and myself."
His relief had shown in his features; but once more he looked puzzled. "Why, then," he asked, "did she go to see you? If she knew you were my wife, she could have found out where I live; she could have written to me without drawing you into it."
Jane laughed sardonically. Again this was coming dangerously close to her skin. "You don't seem to realise that this thing must have been a tremendous experience to her. A man had come into her life. She must have liked, perhaps loved you. Then you had left her. A child was born to remind her forever after of what should have been the great fact of her life, giving a meaning, a significance to all the rest; and that fact had vanished into thin air; or rather it was as if it had shrunk into a mere episode which yet had left her profoundly changed, so that for all time to come she could never again be what she had been.
"Then, years after, a chance happening, a notice in the local paper
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giving my name, date of arrival, and place of residence, re-evoked the whole thing in her mind. She said she had always felt that she was not the right wife for you; and here, apparently, that right wife was within hail. She could see her, speak to her, find out about her - and you expect her not to go? To her, that episode had meant an enormous thing. You, being a bigamist, probably do not see that the fact of her marriage debarred her, not only from marrying again, but even from forming such ties of friendship as make an ordinary life liveable. For what should she say when asked about her child? The truth? But the truth would have found scant credence in a world which is going mad with sex; in a world where all canons of custom and morality are in a state of decay. That she was a widow? In the first place, that would have been a lie; and she happens to be one of the few remaining to whom it is repulsive to utter a lie. In the second place, that answer might have led to the very thing which she thought she had to avoid, a new proposal of marriage. That the child was not hers? Her very way with him, the way of a mother, would have betrayed her; for she loves that child as she loves nothing else on earth. What remained for her to do? What, except to withdraw from the world as she did; to live the rest of her life in a retirement similar to the forced retirement of a person afflicted with a contagious disease. And that chance happening, when she read the notice in the paper, holding out as it did a possibility of at least finding out about the man who had done all that to her - she should let that escape without stirring a foot?"
Jim was sitting in front of her, his big, square head bowed, one arm resting on the edge of the library table by his side. Her words poured down upon him like so many blows. And yet...
Jane trembled. Her eyes glowed feverishly in her head. She was looking at him; primeval things surged up within her, not to be suppressed. "This thing" was carrying her away; she knew she should not let it; but, once started, it followed laws of its own. She felt
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suddenly as if that man who was sitting there, so different from the man she had married years ago, were a mountain which she were trying to move unaided, with her woman's hands.
He looked up, almost shyly. "Jane," he said. "I am sorry. I am sorry that this should have come at the present time. I am sorry, too, that things are as they are. But I cannot undo the past. I can only try to save the future from going to ruin. Things were not going badly between us of late. I had come to see more in you than I had ever seen before. I have gone through a great experience last summer. Jane, I am a changed man. My eyes have been opened. I know, whatever I may be to you, you will always, for me, remain what you have just called the right wife."
As if stung by an adder, Jane stood, gasping, shaking as the leaves of an aspen shake in the breeze. "Your wife!" she cried. "You have not, from all this, understood that it is merely a question of saving you from going to jail; that between us all is over?"
He blanched; his jaw fell.
Jane hesitated a moment, as if collecting her strength. Then she took a step forward, to lean against a book-case for support and to rest her hand on its top. "Oh!" she said between a laugh and a sob. "It is hardly worth trying to make you grasp what you have done. I have spoken of what you have done to that poor, good woman; and yet that is nothing as compared with what you've done to me. She is good and honest; but she is coarse. Not even she, so she said, would take you back. And you can talk of my being the right wife for you. Listen, if I am anything to you from now on, I am your doom. You asked me just now whether I should have married you had I known of that entanglement. No, you didn't ask me. Some sense of the fitness of things saved you from that. You said you had doubted. That is the one thing which might make one suppose that you are not entirely too coarse to understand what I am going to say. That woman told me she had known when she married you that she was not the first woman you had
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'had'. I mean that quite literally, in its coarse, animal, bestial sense. She married you in spite of that. I don't know whether you can grasp the mere fact - not the feeling from which it springs; that you cannot - but the mere, baldly stated fact that I could never have had the slightest weakness for you had I even suspected that you were not pure. The mere legal entanglement is nothing to me. If, instead of finding out what I have found out, you had come to me and told me that you had come into conflict with the law, I should have stood by you without reserve; I should have lived as a widow had you gone to jail. For at the altar I took you for better or worse.
"But you were impure. Through centuries and millennia you men have hammered it into us women that, in order to please you, we must be pure. That teaching at last turns against you.
"A few days or weeks before our marriage the first suspicion came to me. Not consciously. Not so that I could have explained; not even to the point where I could recoil with sufficient force to break the match off as I should have done. I was too innocent for that. But your eagerness, the quality of your touch when you put your arm about me made me dimly divine that there were mysteries in this relationship of marriage, between man and woman, of which you knew while I did not. The fact made me pause. On the day of our wedding the suspicion became a certainty; and I acted as I did. I shrank from you. I thought and thought and tortured myself.
"And then - I will tell you all now - I met another man who somehow did not seem unclean to me - oh no, never mind his name; it does not need to concern you in the least - and I felt that under certain conditions which were never realised something might arise in me, too: an instinctive knowledge which might have led me to act as you did. So I thought that perhaps I had wronged you after all; and I gave myself to you in the way which you know.
"Still, after that, your intellectual dullness, your brutality, your cynicism repelled me. An outward breach ensued. But I did not
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deny myself. I thought I had no right to do so. And from time to time even that outward breach was bridged. Yet, in that respect, it was only last summer, when you told me of that night on the prairies in the west, that I fully forgave you for being what you were. I felt myself mother; and I made up my mind that my second child was going to have a father. My first one has neither father nor mother; it is an orphan; and I can't help it. It will suffer through life from the fact which I can only deplore. I do what I can do for her; but I cannot give her what I do not have.
"As I said, last summer I forgave you; I accepted you; because, feeling myself mother, I felt myself happy, for the first time since our marriage."
She stopped, breathless, hardly able to stand, holding on to the book-case.
The man rose and took a step forward, humbly. "Jane," he said, dully, "I swear to you by all you hold sacred, I have been faithful to you since I first shared your bed."
She raised a fluttering hand. "He doesn't see it! He doesn't see it yet!" This she exclaimed to things unseen above her and in profound distress. And, turning almost fiercely upon him, she added, "You broke your faith to me, to the woman whom one day you expected to love, before you knew me!"
"Before I knew you..." he stammered.
"Yes," she cried. "When I think of the fact that I am mother, through you, I feel defiled; defiled so that I shudder, so that I am nauseated at myself. Because that instinct which made me shrink from you before our wedding, was not sure, not clear, not persistent enough to keep me away from you forever. Because I mistrusted that instinct till, at last, I fought it down. There is nothing left to me but for the rest of my life to mourn over what has happened to me; to bewail my marriage because it has vilely cheated me out of my birth-right and robbed me of all that life seemed to promise.
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"I have little to add. For my children's sake, and for my father's sake I shall continue to live in this house. I shall even consent to meet you at the table and where else it cannot be avoided. But you will never touch me; never even make any attempt to approach me. If you do, I shall at once leave this house and never see you again."
"There are other conditions. I shall entrust a lawyer with making them known to you."
"And now I have no strength left. You will call one of the maids to attend to me; and then, till this is over, you will leave this house. You've been away a great deal; you'll be away a few days more."
With bowed head, accepting it all, and partly because he saw more of her side than she believed, he turned, opened the door, hesitated, and went out.
When the maid came, she found her mistress on the floor. Her labour had commenced,
brought on by excitement.
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