“I can offer you nothing, Kate, nothing but a hidden life, a life in the dark. If you come to me you will leave a husband who worships you for one to whom your life can never be joined. You will exchange a life of respect by the side of a good man for a life of humiliation, a life of shame. How can it be otherwise now? It is too late, too late!”
Kate goes, and Pete crushes his grief to defend her honour. The lies he invents, that she has gone to visit his uncle in Liverpool, the letters he writes to himself, purporting to have come from her, the wiles he practises to deceive the neighbours—all intensify his terrible sorrow.
Hearing these words, Pete, his eyes half shut as if dozing in the sunset, wakened himself with a look of astonishment.
“What? For me, is it? A letter, you say? Aw, I see,” taking it and turning it in his hand, “just a line from the mistress, it’s like. Well, well! A letter for me, if you plaze,” and he laughed like a man much tickled.
He was in no hurry. He rammed his dead pipe with his finger, lit it again, sucked it, made it quack, drew a long breath, and then said quietly, “Let’s see what’s her news at all.”
He opened the letter leisurely, and read bits of it aloud, as if reading to himself, but holding the postman while he did so in idle talk on the other side of the gate. “And how are you living to-day, Mr Kelly? Aw, h’m—_getting that much better it’s extraordinary_—Yes, a nice evenin’, very, Mr Kelly, nice, nice—_that happy and comfortable and Uncle Joe is that good_—heavy bag at you to-night, you say? Aw, heavy, yes, heavy—_love to Grannie and all inquiring friends_—nothing, Mr Kelly, nothing—just a scribe of a line, thinking a man might be getting unaisy. She needn’t, though—she needn’t. But chut! It’s nothing. Writing a letter is nothing to her at all. Why, she’d be knocking that off, bless you,” holding out half a sheet of paper, “in less than an hour and a half. Truth enough, sir.” Then, looking at the letter again, “What’s this, though? _P.N._ They’re always putting a P.N. at the bottom of a letter, Mr Kelly. _P.N.—I was expecting to be home before, but I wouldn’t get away for Uncle Joe taking me to the theaytres._ Ha, ha, ha! A mighty boy is Uncle Joe. But, Mr Kelly, Mr Kelly,” with a solemn look, “not a word of this to Cæsar!”