"It was not what you have said all through," she replied, looking sombrely away from him, her chin on her hand, "it is what you have done."
"What have I done?" he said proudly, bending forward from his seat beside her. "What have I ever done but claim from you that freedom you desire so pa.s.sionately for others--freedom of conscience--freedom of judgment? You denied me this freedom, though I asked it of you with all my soul. And you denied me more. Through these five weeks you have refused me the commonest right of love--the right to show you myself, to prove to you that through all this misery of differing opinion--misery, much more, oh, much more to me than to you!--I was in truth bent on the same ends with you, bearing the same burden, groping towards the same goal."
"No! no!" she cried, turning upon him, and catching at a word; "what burden have you ever borne? I know you were sorry--that there was a struggle in your mind--that you pitied me--pitied _them_. But you judged it all _from above_--you looked down--and I could not see that you had any right. It made me mad to have such things seen from a height, when I was below--in the midst--_close_ to the horror and anguish of them."
"Whose fault was it," he interrupted, "that I was not with you? Did I not offer--entreat? I could not sign a statement of fact which seemed to me an untrue statement, but what prevented me--prevented us.--However, let me take that point first. Would you,"--he spoke deliberately, "would you have had me put my name to a public statement which I, rightly or wrongly, believed to be false, because you asked me?
You owe it to me to answer."
She could not escape the penetrating fire of his eye. The man"s mildness, his quiet self-renouncing reserve, were all burnt up at last in this white heat of an accusing pa.s.sion. In return she began to forget her own resolve to bear herself gently.
"You don"t remember," she cried, "that what divided us was your--your--incapacity to put the human pity first; to think of the surrounding circ.u.mstances--of the debt that you and I and everybody like us owe to a man like Hurd--to one who had been stunted and starved by life as he had been."
Her lip began to tremble.
"Then it comes to this," he said steadily, "that if I had been a poor man, you would have allowed me my conscience--my judgment of right and wrong--in such a matter. You would have let me remember that I was a citizen, and that pity is only one side of justice! You would have let me plead that Hurd"s sin was not against me, but against the community, and that in determining whether to do what you wished or no, I must think of the community and its good before even I thought of pleasing you. If I had possessed no more than Hurd, all this would have been permitted me; but because of Maxwell Court--because of my _money_,"--she shrank before the accent of the word--"you refused me the commonest moral rights. _My_ scruple, _my_ feeling, were nothing to you. Your pride was engaged as well as your pity, and I must give way. Marcella!
you talk of justice--you talk of equality--is the only man who can get neither at your hands--the man whom you promised to marry!"
His voice dwelt on that last word, dwelt and broke. He leant over her in his roused strength, and tried to take her hand. But she moved away from him with a cry.
"It is no use! Oh, don"t--don"t! It may be all true. I was vain, I dare say, and unjust, and hard. But don"t you see--don"t you understand--if we _could_ take such different views of such a case--if it could divide us so deeply--what chance would there be if we were married? I ought never--never--to have said "Yes" to you--even as I was then. But _now_,"
she turned to him slowly, "can"t you see it for yourself? I am a changed creature. Certain things in me are gone--_gone_--and instead there is a fire--something driving, tormenting--which must burn its way out. When I think of what I liked so much when you asked me to marry you--being rich, and having beautiful things, and dresses, and jewels, and servants, and power--social power--above all _that_--I feel sick and choked. I couldn"t breathe now in a house like Maxwell Court. The poor have come to mean to me the only people who really _live_, and really _suffer_. I must live with them, work for them, find out what I can do for them. You must give me up--you must indeed. Oh! and you will! You will be glad enough, thankful enough, when--when--you know what I _am_!"
He started at the words. Where was the prophetess? He saw that she was lying white and breathless, her face hidden against the arm of the chair.
In an instant he was on his knees beside her.
"Marcella!" he could hardly command his voice, but he held her struggling hand against his lips. "You think that suffering belongs to one cla.s.s? Have you really no conception of what you will be dealing to me if you tear yourself away from me?"
She withdrew her hand, sobbing.
"Don"t, don"t stay near me!" she said; "there is--more--there is something else."
Aldous rose.
"You mean," he said in an altered voice, after a pause of silence, "that another influence--another man--has come between us?"
She sat up, and with a strong effort drove back her weeping.
"If I could say to you only this," she began at last, with long pauses, ""I mistook myself and my part in life. I did wrong, but forgive me, and let me go for both our sakes"--that would be--well!--that would be difficult,--but easier than this! Haven"t you understood at all?
When--when Mr. Wharton came, I began to see things very soon, not in my own way, but in his way. I had never met any one like him--not any one who showed me such possibilities in _myself_--such new ways of using one"s life, and not only one"s possessions--of looking at all the great questions. I thought it was just friendship, but it made me critical, impatient of everything else. I was never myself from the beginning.
Then,--after the ball,"--he stooped over her that he might hear her the more plainly,--"when I came home I was in my room and I heard steps--there are ghost stories, you know, about that part of the house.
I went out to see. Perhaps, in my heart of hearts--oh, I can"t tell, I can"t tell!--anyway, he was there. We went into the library, and we talked. He did not want to touch our marriage,--but he said all sorts of mad things,--and at last--he kissed me."
The last words were only breathed. She had often pictured herself confessing these things to him. But the humiliation in which she actually found herself before him was more than she had ever dreamed of, more than she could bear. All those great words of pity and mercy--all that implication of a moral atmosphere to which he could never attain--to end in this story! The effect of it, on herself, rather than on him, was what she had not foreseen.
Aldous raised himself slowly.
"And when did this happen?" he asked after a moment.
"I told you--the night of the ball--of the murder," she said with a shiver; "we saw Hurd cross the avenue. I meant to have told you everything at once."
"And you gave up that intention?" he asked her, when he had waited a little for more, and nothing came.
She turned upon him with a flash of the old defiance.
"How could I think of my own affairs?"
"Or of mine?" he said bitterly.
She made no answer.
Aldous got up and walked to the chimney-piece. He was very pale, but his eyes were bright and sparkling. When she looked up at him at last she saw that her task was done. His scorn--his resentment--were they not the expiation, the penalty she had looked forward to all along?--and with that determination to bear them calmly? Yet, now that they were there in front of her, they stung.
"So that--for all those weeks--while you were letting me write as I did, while you were letting me conceive you and your action as I did, you had this on your mind? You never gave me a hint; you let me plead; you let me regard you as wrapped up in the unselfish end; you sent me those letters of his--those most misleading letters!--and all the time--"
"But I meant to tell you--I always meant to tell you," she cried pa.s.sionately. "I would never have gone on with a secret like that--not for your sake--but for my own."
"Yet you did go on so long," he said steadily; "and my agony of mind during those weeks--my feeling towards you--my--"
He broke off, wrestling with himself. As for her, she had fallen back in her chair, physically incapable of anything more.
He walked over to her side and took up his hat.
"You have done me wrong," he said, gazing down upon her. "I pray G.o.d you may not do yourself a greater wrong in the future! Give me leave to write to you once more, or to send my friend Edward Hallin to see you.
Then I will not trouble you again."
He waited, but she could give him no answer. Her form as she lay there in this physical and moral abas.e.m.e.nt printed itself upon his heart. Yet he felt no desire whatever to s.n.a.t.c.h the last touch--the last kiss--that wounded pa.s.sion so often craves. Inwardly, and without words, he said farewell to her. She heard his steps across the room; the door shut; she was alone--and free.
BOOK III.
"O Neigung, sage, wie hast du so tief Im Herzen dich verstecket?
Wer hat dich, die verborgen schlief, Gewecket?"
CHAPTER I.
"Don"t suppose that I feel enthusiastic or sentimental about the "claims of Labour,"" said Wharton, smiling to the lady beside him. "You may get that from other people, but not from me. I am not moral enough to be a fanatic. My position is simplicity itself. When things are inevitable, I prefer to be on the right side of them, and not on the wrong. There is not much more in it than that. I would rather be on the back of the "bore" for instance, as it sweeps up the tidal river, than the swimmer caught underneath it."
"Well, that is intelligible," said Lady Selina Farrell, looking at her neighbour, as she crumbled her dinner-roll. To crumble your bread at dinner is a sign of nervousness, according to Sydney Smith, who did it with both hands when he sat next an Archbishop; yet no one for a good many years past had ever suspected Lady Selina of nervousness, though her powers had probably been tried before now by the neighbourhood of many Primates, Catholic and Anglican. For Lady Selina went much into society, and had begun it young.
"Still, you know," she resumed after a moment"s pause--"you _play_ enthusiasm in public--I suppose you must."