‘Do not speak to me,’ he said, his voice sounding like some stranger’s voice in his own ears. ‘I know all you would say. And there is no excuse, no excuse.’
‘Oliver! you have no excuse for not trusting me. I was worthy of your trust. Should I not have chosen for you to do first what was right?’
It seemed to him that once more his brain was giving way; he felt a horrible impulse to laugh out again at the mockery of this speech. Right! there was nothing right! What had it to do with him, a man all wrong, wrong, out of life, out of hope--that there should still be some one left in the world to whom that word meant something? He uncovered his face, however, and looked up at her from out the humiliation of despair. And then he began to see that there were other people in the room, his sister, his brother-in-law, looking on at the spectacle of his downfall. He rose up slowly to his feet, supporting himself against the wall.
‘I am in great distress,’ he said; ‘I am not able to speak. Ford, will you take them away?’
Ford, who was only a man, nobody in particular, gave him a certain sense of protection in the poignancy of the presence of the others, before whom he could not stand or speak.
‘Oliver, old fellow, you needn’t look so miserable; they wouldn’t go, they know everything, they’ve got--news for you. I say they’ve got news for you.’
‘Oh, Tom, God bless you! you have a feeling heart after all. Oliver, it is all over--’
‘Oliver,’ Grace put out her warm hands and took his, which were trembling with an almost palsy of cold; ‘I should have understood, for you told me long ago--you told me there were things I would not understand. But now I do understand. And all that you have done I approve. I do not forgive you--I approve.’
He drew back ever further, shrinking against the wall. ‘I was mad last night,’ he said, ‘and it was horrible: and now I must be going mad again--and this is horrible too, but it is sweet--’
‘Oh, it is horrible,’ cried Grace, with tears; ‘for it comes out of misery and mourning. Oliver, that poor girl--that poor girl, she is dead.’
He fell down once more at her feet, with a great and terrible cry, and fainted like a woman--out of misery, and remorse, and relief, and anguish, and joy, and by reason too, since the body and the soul are so linked together--of his sleepless nights and miserable days.