He wasn’t acting—it was the absurd truth. “She didn’t tell you——-”
“Nothing about Hugh Vereker.”
I was stupefied; the room went round. It had been too good even for that! “Upon your honour?”
“Upon my honour. What the devil’s the matter with you?” he demanded.
“I’m astounded—I’m disappointed. I wanted to get it out of you.”
“It isn’t in me!” he awkwardly laughed. “And even if it were——”
“If it were you’d let me have it—oh yes, in common humanity. But I believe you. I see—I see!” I went on, conscious, with the full turn of the wheel, of my great delusion, my false view of the poor man’s attitude. What I saw, though I couldn’t say it, was that his wife hadn’t thought him worth enlightening. This struck me as strange for a woman who had thought him worth marrying. At last I explained it by the reflection that she couldn’t possibly have married him for his understanding. She had married him for something else. He was to some extent enlightened now, but he was even more astonished, more disconcerted: he took a moment to compare my story with his quickened memories. The result of his meditation was his presently saying with a good deal of rather feeble form:
“This is the first I hear of what you allude to. I think you must be mistaken as to Mrs. Drayton Deane’s having had any unmentioned, and still less any unmentionable, knowledge about Hugh Vereker. She would certainly have wished it—if it bore on his literary character—to be used.”
“It was used. She used it herself. She told me with her own lips that she ‘lived’ on it.”
I had no sooner spoken than I repented of my words; he grew so pale that I felt as if I had struck him. “Ah, ‘lived’—!” he murmured, turning short away from me.