Mr. Bashwood had barely completed his report of what had happened at the terminus; Mr. Bashwood's imperious mistress was still sitting speechless under the shock of the discovery that had burst on her--when the door of the room opened; and, without a word of warning to proceed him, Midwinter appeared on the threshold. He took one step into the room, and mechanically pushed the door to behind him. He stood in dead silence, and confronted his wife, with a scrutiny that was terrible in its unnatural self-possession, and that enveloped her steadily in one comprehensive look from head to foot.
In dead silence on her side, she rose from her chair, In dead silence she stood erect on the hearth-rug, and faced her husband in widow's weeds. He took one step nearer to her, and stopped again. He lifted his hand, and pointed with his lean brown finger at her dress.
"What does that mean?" he asked, without losing his terrible self-possession, and without moving his outstretched hand.
At the sound of his voice, the quick rise and fall of her bosom--which had been the one outward betrayal thus far of the inner agony that tortured her--suddenly stopped. She stood impenetrably silent, breathlessly still--as if his question had struck her dead, and his pointing hand had petrified her.
He advanced one step nearer, and reiterated his words in a voice even lower and quieter than the voice in which he had spoken first.
One moment more of silence, one moment more of inaction, might have been the salvation of her. But the fatal force of her character triumphed at the crisis of her destiny, and his. White and still, and haggard and old, she met the dreadful emergency with a dreadful courage, and spoke the irrevocable words which renounced him to his face.
"Mr. Midwinter," she said, in tones unnaturally hard and unnaturally clear, "our acquaintance hardly entitles you to speak to me in that manner." Those were her words. She never lifted her eyes from the ground while she spoke them. When she had done, the last faint vestige of color in her cheeks faded out.
There was a pause. Still steadily looking at her, he set himself to fix the language she had used to him in his mind. "She calls me 'Mr. Midwinter,' " he said, slowly, in a whisper. "She speaks of 'our acquaintance.' " He waited a little and looked round the room. His wandering eyes encountered Mr. Bashwood for the first time. He saw the steward standing near the fireplace, trembling, and watching him.
"I once did you a service," he said; "and you once told me you were not an ungrateful man. Are you grateful enough to answer me if I ask you something?"He waited a little again. Mr. Bashwood still stood trembling at the fireplace, silently watching him.
"I see you looking at me," he went on. "Is there some change in me that I am not conscious of myself? Am I seeing things that you don't see? Am I hearing words that you don't hear? Am I looking or speaking like a man out of his senses?"Again he waited, and again the silence was unbroken. His eyes began to glitter; and the savage blood that he had inherited from his mother rose dark and slow in his ashy cheeks.
"Is that woman," he asked, "the woman whom you once knew, whose name was Miss Gwilt?"Once more his wife collected her fatal courage. Once more his wife spoke her fatal words.
"You compel me to repeat," she said, "that you are presuming on our acquaintance, and that you are forgetting what is due to me."He turned upon her, with a savage suddenness which forced a cry of alarm from Mr. Bashwood's lips.
"Are you, or are you not, My Wife?" he asked, through his set teeth.
She raised her eyes to his for the first time. Her lost spirit looked at him, steadily defiant, out of the hell of its own despair.
"I am _not_ your wife," she said.
He staggered back, with his hands groping for something to hold by, like the hands of a man in the dark. He leaned heavily against the wall of the room, and looked at the woman who had slept on his bosom, and who had denied him to his face.
Mr. Bashwood stole panic-stricken to her side. "Go in there!" he whispered, trying to draw her toward the folding-doors which led into the next room. "For God's sake, be quick! He'll kill you!"She put the old man back with her hand. She looked at him with a sudden irradiation of her blank face. She answered him with lips that struggled slowly into a frightful smile.
"_Let_ him kill me," she said.
As the words passed her lips, he sprang forward from the wall, with a cry that rang through the house. The frenzy of a maddened man flashed at her from his glassy eyes, and clutched at her in his threatening hands. He came on till he was within arms-length of her--and suddenly stood still. The black flush died out of his face in the instant when he stopped. His eyelids fell, his outstretched hands wavered and sank helpless. He dropped, as the dead drop. He lay as the dead lie, in the arms of the wife who had denied him.
She knelt on the floor, and rested his head on her knee. She caught the arm of the steward hurrying to help her, with a hand that closed round it like a vise. "Go for a doctor," she said, "and keep the people of the house away till he comes." There was that in her eye, there was that in her voice, which would have warned any man living to obey her in silence. In silence Mr.
Bashwood submitted, and hurried out of the room.