So far I had forced myself to listen to him. At those last words the picture of the future that he was placing before me became too hideous to be endured. I refused to hear more.
"You are talking horribly," I said. "At your age and at mine, have we done with love and done with hope? It is blasphemy to Love and Hope to say it!"
"Wait till you have read the Trial," he answered. "You mean to read it, I suppose?"
"Every word of it! With a motive, Eustace, which you have yet to know."
"No motive of yours, Valeria, no love and hope of yours, can alter the inexorable facts. My first wife died poisoned; and the verdict of the jury has not absolutely acquitted me of the guilt of causing her death. As long as you were ignorant of that the possibilities of happiness were always within our reach. Now you know it, I say again--our married life is at an end."
"No," I said. "Now I know it, our married life has begun--begun with a new object for your wife's devotion, with a new reason for your wife's love!"
"What do you mean?"
I went near to him again, and took his hand.
"What did you tell me the world has said of you?" I asked. "What did you tell me my friends would say of you? 'Not Proven won't do for us. If the jury have done him an injustice--if he is innocent--let him prove it.' Those were the words you put into the mouths of my friends. I adopt them for mine! I say Not Proven won't do for me. Prove your right, Eustace, to a verdict of Not Guilty. Why have you let three years pass without doing it? Shall I guess why? You have waited for your wife to help you. Here she is, my darling, ready to help you with all her heart and soul. Here she is, with one object in life--to show the world and to show the Scotch Jury that her husband is an innocent man!"
I had roused myself; my pulses were throbbing, my voice rang through the room. Had I roused him? What was his answer?
"Read the Trial." That was his answer.
I seized him by the arm. In my indignation and my despair I shook him with all my strength. God forgive me, I could almost have struck him for the tone in which he had spoken and the look that he had cast on me!