She sank into silence for a minute, submerged by the weight of memory which no words could represent.
"But yet, all the while I felt that I was getting more wicked. And what had been with me so much, came to me just then--what you once said--about dreading to increase my wrong-doing and my remorse--I should hope for nothing then. It was all like a writing of fire within me. Getting wicked was misery--being shut out forever from knowing what you--what better lives were. That had always been coming back to me then--but yet with a despair--a feeling that it was no use--evil wishes were too strong. I remember then letting go the tiller and saying 'God help me!' But then I was forced to take it again and go on; and the evil longings, the evil prayers came again and blotted everything else dim, till, in the midst of them--I don't know how it was--he was turning the sail--there was a gust-- he was struck--I know nothing--I only know that I saw my wish outside me."
She began to speak more hurriedly, and in more of a whisper.
"I saw him sink, and my heart gave a leap as if it were going out of me. I think I did not move. I kept my hands tight. It was long enough for me to be glad, and yet to think it was no use--he would come up again. And he was come--farther off--the boat had moved. It was all like lightning. 'The rope!' he called out in a voice--not his own--I hear it now--and I stooped for the rope--I felt I must--I felt sure he could swim, and he would come back whether or not, and I dreaded him. That was in my mind--he would come back. But he was gone down again, and I had the rope in my hand--no, there he was again--his face above the water--and he cried again--and I held my hand, and my heart said, 'Die!'--and he sank; and I felt 'It is done--I am wicked, I am lost!--and I had the rope in my hand-- I don't know what I thought--I was leaping away from myself--I would have saved him then. I was leaping from my crime, and there it was--close to me as I fell--there was the dead face--dead, dead. It can never be altered. That was what happened. That was what I did. You know it all. It can never be altered."
She sank back in her chair, exhausted with the agitation of memory and speech. Deronda felt the burden on his spirit less heavy than the foregoing dread. The word "guilty" had held a possibility of interpretations worse than the fact; and Gwendolen's confession, for the very reason that her conscience made her dwell on the determining power of her evil thoughts, convinced him the more that there had been throughout a counterbalancing struggle of her better will. It seemed almost certain that her murderous thought had had no outward effect--that, quite apart from it, the death was inevitable. Still, a question as to the outward effectiveness of a criminal desire dominant enough to impel even a momentary act, cannot alter our judgment of the desire; and Deronda shrank from putting that question forward in the first instance. He held it likely that Gwendolen's remorse aggravated her inward guilt, and that she gave the character of decisive action to what had been an inappreciably instantaneous glance of desire. But her remorse was the precious sign of a recoverable nature; it was the culmination of that self-disapproval which had been the awakening of a new life within her; it marked her off from the criminals whose only regret is failure in securing their evil wish. Deronda could not utter one word to diminish that sacred aversion to her worst self--that thorn-pressure which must come with the crowning of the sorrowful better, suffering because of the worse. All this mingled thought and feeling kept him silent; speech was too momentous to be ventured on rashly. There were no words of comfort that did not carry some sacrilege. If he had opened his lips to speak, he could only have echoed, "It can never be altered--it remains unaltered, to alter other things." But he was silent and motionless--he did not know how long--before he turned to look at her, and saw her sunk back with closed eyes, like a lost, weary, storm- beaten white doe, unable to rise and pursue its unguided way. He rose and stood before her. The movement touched her consciousness, and she opened her eyes with a slight quivering that seemed like fear.