He spoke again, soothingly, as he would have spoken to a child; he did not guess that the tears welling up in her eyes were tears of relief, of joy, the reaction from the oppression of dread.
So Ragna told her tale, the terrible discovery that she was about to become a mother--
"Why did you not write to me then?" he interrupted.
"Ah, dear," she answered, "I was too ashamed, I only wanted to hide myself from all who knew me, from you, most of all, because you loved me!"
"The very reason why you should have come to me," he reproved quietly; "Ah, well, you did not, more's the pity. Think of it, Ragna, we might have been so happy."
"God knows I should have been a better woman, at least," she said bitterly, "not the hard cynical creature I have become!"
"Wait until you have heard all, and you will see whether I have not had good reason for it," she rejoined.
The tenderness called forth in response to his own had died away under the bitter memories evoked by the recital of her trials. With growing hardness in her voice, she told of Valentini's offer, of her acceptance and of their marriage--and at this point of her tale she dared not look at Angelescu's face but kept her eyes obstinately fixed on the driver's back, and even as she talked, was curiously conscious of the brown and grey stripes of the man's coat and the deep crease in it where it bulged over the iron rail round the top of the box.
She went on and told of her rapid disillusionment, hiding nothing, using words brutal in their revealing frankness, such as she had often used to herself; then of the birth of Mimmo, of that of Beppino, of the increasing unhappiness of her life, as time went on, and lastly of Carolina's story, the death of Fru Boyesen, the loss of her hopes, and the culminating scene of the morning. She reached this point as the carriage drove past the gate of the Torre al Gallo, where Galileo lived and worked, and through the little town of Arcetri, perched on the hill-top.
Both sat silent as they rattled through the long, narrow stone-paved street, Ragna lost again in the horror of all those awful years, now more unbearable than ever as she compared them to what might have been, Angelescu, his brow drawn into deep furrows of thought, the blaze of indignation in his eyes, a muscle working in his lean cheek, just as he had sat listening to her. As they left the last houses behind them, and came to a piece of undulating sunken road running between high stone walls on the tops of which iris and rose ran riot against the gnarled trunks and silvery leaves of the olives, he drew a long sigh and shrugged his shoulders as though throwing off the weight of some incubus.