Page:The Bondman; A New Saga (IA bondmannewsaga00cain).djvu/52

 him. Then the bitter thought came that what she had suffered for him who had given him everything, he could never repay by one kind word or look. Lost she was to him for ever and ever, and parted from him by a yet wider gulf than eight hundred miles of sea. Such was the agony of his shame, and through it all the snore of the sleeping woman pierced like a sword through his head, so that at last he wrapped his arms about it and sobbed out to the dead fire at his feet, "Rachel! Rachel! Rachel!"

All at once he became conscious that the heavy breathing had ceased, that the house was silent, that something had touched him on the shoulder, and that a gaunt shadow stood beside him. It was the woman, who at the sound of his voice had arisen from her drunken sleep, and now gasped, "Who is Rachel?"

At that word his blood ran cold, and shivering in his clothes, he crouched lower at the hearth, neither answering her nor looking up.

Then with eyes of hate she cried again, "Who is Rachel?"

But the only voice that answered her was the voice that rang within him—"I'm a lost man, God help me!"

"Who is Rachel?" the woman cried once more, and the sound of that name from her lips, hardening it, brutalising it, befouling it, was the most awful thing by which his soul had yet been shaken out of its stupor.

"Who is she, I say? Answer me," she cried in a raging voice; but he crouched there still, with his haggard face and misty eyes turned down.

Then she laid her hand on his shoulder and shook him, and cried bitterly, "Who is she, this light o' love—this baggage?"

At that he stiffened himself up, shuddered from head to foot, flung her from him and answered in a terrible voice, "Woman, she is my wife."

That word, like a thunderbolt, left a heavy silence behind it. 'Liza stood looking in terror at Stephen's face, unable to utter a cry.

But next day she went to Parson Gell and told him all. She got small comfort. Parson Gell had himself had two wives; the first had deserted him, and after an interval of six years, in which he had not heard from her, he had married the second. So to 'Liza he said—

"He may have sinned against the law, but what proof have you? None."