“You will be my friend?” she said suddenly and passionately, grasping his hand, “my best and truest friend? and if I tell you all,--everything, you will not cast me from you and hate me?”
Barker felt the same thrill from her warm hand slowly possess his whole being as it had the evening before, but this time he was prepared and answered the grasp and her eyes together as he said breathlessly, “I will be--I AM your friend.”
She withdrew her hand and passed it over her eyes. After a moment she caught his hand again, and, holding it tightly as if she feared he might fly from her, bit her lip, and then slowly, without looking at him, said, “I lied to you about myself and Kitty that night; I did not come with her. I came alone and secretly to Boomville to see--to see the man who is my husband.”
“Your husband!” said Barker in surprise. He had believed, with the rest of the world, that there had been no communication between them for years. Yet so intense was his interest in her that he did not notice that this revelation was leaving now no excuse for his wife's presence at Boomville.
Mrs. Horncastle went on with dogged bitterness, “Yes, my husband. I went to him to beg and bribe him to let me see my child. Yes, MY child,” she said frantically, tightening her hold upon his hand, “for I lied to you when I once told you I had none. I had a child, and, more than that, a child who at his birth I did not dare to openly claim.”
She stopped breathlessly, stared at his face with her former intensity as if she would pluck the thought that followed from his brain. But he only moved closer to her, passed his arm over her shoulders with a movement so natural and protecting that it had a certain dignity in it, and, looking down upon her bent head with eyes brimming with sympathy, whispered, “Poor, poor child!”
Whereat Mrs. Horncastle again burst into tears. And then, with her head half drawn towards his shoulder, she told him all,--all that had passed between her and her husband,--even all that they had then but hinted at. It was as if she felt she could now, for the first time, voice all these terrible memories of the past which had come back to her last night when her husband had left her. She concealed nothing, she veiled nothing; there were intervals when her tears no longer flowed, and a cruel hardness and return of her old imperiousness of voice and manner took their place, as if she was doing a rigid penance and took a bitter satisfaction in laying bare her whole soul to him. “I never had a friend,” she whispered; “there were women who persecuted me with their jealous sneers; there were men who persecuted me with their selfish affections. When I first saw YOU, you seemed something so apart and different from all other men that, although I scarcely knew you, I wanted to tell you, even then, all that I have told you now. I wanted you to be my friend; something told me that you could,--that you could separate me from my past; that you could tell me what to do; that you could make me think as you thought, see life as YOU saw it, and trust always to some goodness in people as YOU did. And in this faith I thought that you would understand me now, and even forgive me all.”