Tears came into Anne"s eyes. She was overcome, bowed, shaken by the Canon"s incomparable pleading. The Canon was shaken by it himself, his voice trembled in the benediction that followed. No one had a clearer vision of the spiritual city. It was his tragedy that he saw it, and could not enter in. Many, remembering that sermon, counted it, long afterwards, to him for righteousness. It had conquered Anne. The tongues of men and of angels, of all spiritual powers, human and divine, spoke to her in that vibrating, indomitable voice.
The problem it had raised remained with her, oppressed, tormented her.
What she had done had seemed to her so good. But if, after all, she had done wrong? If she had failed in charity?
She had come to a turning in her way when she could no longer see for herself, or walk alone. She was prepared to surrender, meekly, her own judgment. She must ask help of the priest whose voice told her that he had suffered, and whose eyes told her that he knew.
She sent a note to All Souls Vicarage, requesting an interview, at Canon Wharton"s house rather than her own. She did not want Edith or the servants to know that she had been closeted with the Canon. The answer came that night, making an appointment after early Evensong on the morrow.
After early Evensong, Anne found herself in the Canon"s library. He did not keep her waiting, and, as he entered, he held out to her, literally, the hand of help. For the Canon never wasted a gesture. There was no detail of social observance to which he could not give some spiritual significance. This was partly the secret of his power. His face had lost the light that illuminated it in the pulpit, but his eyes gleamed with a lambent triumph. They said, "Sooner or later. But rather sooner than I had expected."
Anne presented her case in a veiled form, as a situation in the abstract.
She scrupulously refrained from mentioning any names.
The Canon smiled at her precautions. "We are working in the dark," said he. "I think I can help you a little bit more if you"ll allow me to come down to the concrete. You are speaking, I fancy, of our poor friend, Mr.
Gorst?"
She looked at him helplessly, startled at his penetration and her own betrayal, but appeased by the pitying adjective which brought Gorst into the regions of pardonable discussion.
"You needn"t be afraid," he said. "I had to be certain before I could advise you. I can now tell you with confidence that you are doing right.
I--know--the--man."
He uttered the phrase with measured emphasis, and closed his teeth upon the last words with a snap. It was impossible to convey a stronger effect of moral reprobation. "But I see your difficulty," he continued. "I understand that he is a rather intimate friend of Miss Majendie."
Anne noticed that he deliberately avoided all mention of her husband.
"She has known him for a very long time."
"Ah yes. And it is your affection, your pity for your sister that makes you hesitate. You do not wish to be hard, and at the same time you wish to do right. Is it not so?"
She murmured her a.s.sent. (How well he understood her!)
"Ah, my dear Mrs. Majendie, we have sometimes to be a little hard, in order that we may not be harder. You have thought, perhaps, that you should be tender to this friendship? Now, I am an old man, and I have had a pretty large experience of men and women, and I tell you that such friendships are unwholesome. Unwholesome. Both for the woman and the man."
"If I thought that--"
"You may think it. Look at the man--What has it done for him? Has it made him any better, any stronger, any purer? Has it made her any happier?"
"I think so. It is all she has--"
"How can you say that, my dear Mrs. Majendie, when she has you?"
"And her brother."
The Canon gave her a keen glance. He seemed to be turning a little extra light on to her secret, to see it the better by. And under that light her mind conceived again a miserable suspicion.
"He knows something," she thought. "What is it that he knows? They all seem to know."
She turned the subject back again to her sister-in-law and Mr. Gorst.
"She thinks she can save him."
"Her brother?"
It was another turn of the searchlight, but this time the Canon veiled his eyes, as if in mercy. He really knew nothing, nothing at all; but, as a man of the world, he felt that there was a great deal more than Mr.
Gorst and Miss Majendie at the back of this discussion, and he was very curious to know what it might be.
Anne recoiled from the veiled condemnation of his face more than she had from its open intimations. She was not clever enough to see that the clever Canon had simply laid a trap for her.
She was now convinced that there was something that he knew. She lifted her head in loyal defiance of his knowledge. "No," said she proudly, "Mr.
Gorst. It was of him I was speaking."
"Ah," said the Canon, as if his mind had come down with difficulty from the contemplation of another and more interesting personality; and again the significance of his manner was not lost upon Anne.
"I do not know Miss Majendie," he went on, still with the air of forcing himself to deal equitably with a subject of minor interest; "but if I am not much mistaken, she is, is she not, a little morbid?"
"She is a hopeless invalid."
"I know she is" (his voice dropped pity). "Poor thing--poor thing! And she thinks that she can save him? Mark me, I put no limit to the saving grace of G.o.d, and I would not like to say whom He may not choose as His instrument. But before we presume to act for Him, we should be very sure about the choice. Judging by the fruits--the fruits of this friendship"--he paused, as if seeking for a perfect justice--"Yes. That is what we must look at. I imagine Miss Majendie has been morbid on this subject. Morbid; and, perhaps, a little weak?"
Anne flushed. She was distressed to think she had given such an impression. "Indeed, indeed she isn"t. You wouldn"t say that if you knew her."
"I do not know her. But the strongest of us may be sometimes weak. You must be strong for her. And I"--he smiled--"must be strong for you. And I tell you that you have been--so far--wise and right. As long as this man continues in his evil courses, go on as you are doing. Do not encourage him by admitting him to your house and to your friendship. But"--(the Canon stood up, both for the better emphasis of his point, and as a gentle reminder to Mrs. Majendie that his dinner-hour was now approaching)--"but let him repent; let him give up his most objectionable companions; let him lead a pure life--and _then_--accept him--welcome him--"(the Canon opened his arms, as if he were that moment receiving a repentant sinner) "rejoice over him"--(the Canon"s face became fairly illuminated) "as--as much as you like."
The peroration was rapid, valedictory, complete. He thrust out his hand, displaying the whole palm of it as a sign of openness, honesty, and good-will.
"G.o.d bless you."
The solemn benediction atoned for any little momentary brusquerie.
Anne went away with a conscience wholly satisfied, in an exalted mood, fortified by all the ramparts of the spiritual life.
She was very gentle with Edith that evening. She said to herself that her love must make up to Edie for the loss her conscience had been compelled to inflict. "After all," she said to herself, "it"s not as if she hadn"t me." Measuring her services with those of the disreputable Mr. Gorst, it seemed to her that she was amply making up. She had a hatred of moral indebtedness, as of any other, and she loved to spend. In reckoning the love she had spent so lavishly on Edie, she had not allowed for the amount of forgiveness that Edie had spent on her. Forgiveness is a gift we have to take, whether we will or no, and Anne was blissfully unaware of what she took.
Majendie watched her ministrations curiously. Her tenderness was the subtlest lure to the love in him that still watched and waited for its hour. That night, in the study, he was silent, nervous, and unhappy. She shrank from the unrest and misery in his eyes. They followed or were fixed on her, rousing in her an obscure resentment and discomfort. She was beginning to be afraid of him. It had come to that.
She left him earlier than usual, and went very miserably to bed. She prayed, to-night, with her eyes fixed on the crucifix. It had become for her the symbol of her life, and of her marriage, which was nothing to her now but a sacrifice, a martyrdom, a vicarious expiation of her husband"s sin.
As she lay down, the beating of her pulses told her that she was not to sleep. She longed for sleep, and tried to win it to her by repeating the Psalm which had been her comfort in all times of her depression. "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth."
She closed her eyes under the peace of the beloved words. And as she closed them she felt herself once more in the arms of the green hills, the folding hills of Westleydale.
She shook off the obsession and prayed another prayer. She longed to be alone; but, to her grief, she heard the opening and shutting of a door and her husband"s feet moving in the room beyond.
A few blessed moments of solitude were left her during Majendie"s undressing. She devoted them to the final expulsion of all lingering illusions. She had long ago lost the illusion of her husband"s immaculate goodness; and now she cast off, once for all, the dear and pitiful belief that had revived in her under her brief enchantment in the wood at Westleydale. She told herself that she had married a man who had, not only a lower standard than her own, but an entirely different code of morals, a man irremediably contaminated, dest.i.tute of all perception of spiritual values. And she had got to make the best of him, that was all.
Not quite all; for she had still to make the best of herself; and the two things seemed, at moments, incompatible. To guard herself from all contact with the invading evil; to take her stand bravely, to raise the spiritual ramparts and retire behind them, that was no more than her bare duty to herself and him. She must create a standard for him by keeping herself for ever high and pure. He loved her still, in his fashion; he must also respect her, and, in respecting her, respect goodness--the highest goodness--in her.
Accustomed to move in a region of spiritual certainty, Anne was untroubled by any misgivings as to the soundness of her att.i.tude. It was open to no criticism except the despicable wisdom of the world.
Her chief difficulty was poor Majendie"s imperishable affection. She tried to protect herself from it to-night by feigning drowsiness. She lay still as a stone, stiff with her fear. Once, at midnight, she felt him stir, and turn, and raise himself on his elbow. She was conscious through all her unhappy being of the adoring tenderness with which he watched her sleep.