“Why speak of those days?” I ventured to say.
“I must speak of them.
In former days, I think you were told that my father’s will provided for my mother and for me.
You know that we have enough to live on?”
I had heard of it, at the time of our betrothal—when the marriage settlement was in preparation.
The mother and daughter had each a little income of a few hundreds a year.
The exact amount had escaped my memory.
After answering her to this effect, I waited to hear more.
She suddenly became silent; the most painful embarrassment showed itself in her face and manner.
“Never mind the rest,” she said, mastering her confusion after an interval.
“I have had some hard trials to bear; I forget things—” she made an effort to finish the sentence, and gave it up, and called to the dog to come to her.
The tears were in her eyes, and that was the way she took to hide them from me.
In general, I am not quick at reading the minds of others—but I thought I understood Stella.
Now that we were face to face, the impulse to trust me had, for the moment, got the better of her caution and her pride; she was half ashamed of it, half inclined to follow it.
I hesitated no longer.
The time for which I had waited—the time to prove, without any indelicacy on my side, that I had never been unworthy of her—had surely come at last.
“Do you remember my reply to your letter about Father Benwell?” I asked.
“Yes—every word of it.”
“I promised, if you ever had need of me, to prove that I had never been unworthy of your confidence.
In your present situation, I can honorably keep my promise.
Shall I wait till you are calmer? or shall I go on at once?”
“At once!”
“When your mother and your friends took you from me,” I resumed, “if you had shown any hesitation—”
She shuddered.
The image of my unhappy wife, vindictively confronting us on the church steps, seemed to be recalled to her memory.
“Don’t go back to it!” she cried.
“Spare me, I entreat you.”
I opened the writing-case in which I keep the papers sent to me by the Rector of Belhaven, and placed them on the table by which she was sitting.
The more plainly and briefly I spoke now, the better I thought it might be for both of us.
“Since we parted at Brussels,” I said, “my wife has died.
Here is a copy of the medical certificate of her death.”
Stella refused to look at it.
“I don’t understand such things,” she answered faintly.
“What is this?”
She took up my wife’s death-bed confession.
“Read it,” I said.
She looked frightened.
“What will it tell me?” she asked.
“It will tell you, Stella, that false appearances once led you into wronging an innocent man.”
Having said this, I walked away to a window behind her, at the further end of the room, so that she might not see me while she read.
After a time—how much longer it seemed to be than it really was!—I heard her move.
As I turned from the window, she ran to me, and fell on her knees at my feet.
I tried to raise her; I entreated her to believe that she was forgiven.
She seized my hands, and held them over her face—they were wet with her tears.
“I am ashamed to look at you,” she said.
“Oh, Bernard, what a wretch I have been!”
I never was so distressed in my life.
I don’t know what I should have said, what I should have done, if my dear old dog had not helped me out of it.
He, too, ran up to me, with the loving jealousy of his race, and tried to lick my hands, still fast in Stella’s hold.
His paws were on her shoulder; he attempted to push himself between us.