To give the story continuity it will be necessary to piece the events
together as they followed. Many of them only came to my knowledge some
time after they occurred, and even then I was left to surmise a good
deal; but I am able now, with the help of papers that have lately come
into my possession, to verify most of my conjectures and arrange the
details.
The summer weather had begun now. Laburnums and lilacs were in full
flower, the air was sweet with scent and song, and to one who had borne
the heavy winter with a heavy heart, but was able at last to lay down a
load of care, the transition must have been like a sudden change from
painful sickness to perfect health. Ideala went to the Great Hospital
at once. She had written to fix a day, and Lorrimer was waiting for
her. She was not taken to his room, however, as on the previous
occasion, but to another part of the building, a long gallery hung with
pictures, where she found him superintending the arrangement of some
precious things in cabinets. Ideala looked better and younger that day
in her summer dress than she had done in her heavy winter wraps on the
occasion of their first meeting; but when she found herself face to
face with Lorrimer she began to tremble, and was overcome with
nervousness in a way that was new to her. He saw the change in her
appearance and manner at a glance, and, smiling slightly, begged her to
follow him, and led the way through long passages and many doors,
passing numbers of people, to his own room. He spoke to her once or
twice on the way, but she was only able to answer confusedly, in a
voice that was rendered strident by the great effort she had to make to
control it. He busied himself with some papers for a few minutes when
they reached his room, to give her time to recover herself, and then he
said, standing with his back to the fireplace, looking down at her, and
speaking in a tone that was even more musical and caressing than she
remembered it: "Well, and how are you? And how has it been with you
since your return?"
"I am utterly shaken and unnerved, as you see," she answered; then
added passionately: "I cannot bear my life; it is too hateful."
"There is no need to bear it," he said. "Nothing is easier than to get
a separation after what has occurred. Was there any witness?"
"No; and I don't think any one in the house suspects that there is
anything wrong. And none of my friends know. I have never told them. I
wonder why I told you?"
"You wanted me to help you," he suggested.
"I don't think I did," she said. "How could I want you to help me when
I don't mean to do anything? I fancy I told you because I was afraid
you would think me a little mad that day, and I would rather you knew
the truth than think me mad. I don't mean to try for a separation. I
can't leave him entirely to his own devices. If I did, he would
certainly go from bad to worse."
"And if you don't what will become of you? I think much more of such a
life would make you reckless."
She was silent for a little, then she exclaimed: "Help me not to grow
reckless. I am so alone."
He took her hands and looked down into her eyes. A sudden deep flush
spread over his face, smoothing out all the lines, as she had seen it
do once before, and transforming him.
"It is like walking on the edge of a precipice in the dark," he said in
a low voice, and his grasp tightened as he spoke.
There was something mesmeric in his touch that overpowered Ideala. She
felt a change in herself at the moment, and she was never the same
woman again.
"I will help you, if I can," he said, after another pause, and then he
let her go.
After that they talked for some time. He tried to persuade her to
reconsider her decision and leave her husband. He honestly believed it
was the best thing she could do, and told her why he thought so. She
acknowledged the wisdom of his advice, but declined to follow it, and
he was somewhat puzzled, for the reasons she gave were hardly enough to
account for her determination. They wandered away from that subject at
last, however, and talked of many other things. He told Ideala of his
first coming to the Great Hospital as a patient, and gave her some of
the details of his own case, and told her enough of his private history
to arouse her sympathy and interest; but of the nature of these
confidences I know nothing. Ideala felt in honour bound not to repeat
them, as they were made to her in the course of a private conversation,
and she was always scrupulously faithful to all such trusts. I know,
however, that he was a man who had suffered acutely, both from unhappy
circumstances and from those troubles of the mind which beset clever
men at the outset of their career, and sometimes never leave them
entirely at peace. But this man was something more than a clever man;
he was a man in a thousand. He had in a strong degree all that is worst
and best in a man. The highest and most spiritual aspirations warred in
him with the most carnal impulses, and he spent his days in fighting to
attain to the one and subdue the other.
Ideala had never known a man like this man. His talents, his rapid
changes of mood, as sense or conscience got the upper hand, and his
versatility charmed her imagination and excited her interest; and he
had, besides, that magnetic power over her by which it is given to some
men to compel people of certain temperaments to their will. While she
was with him he could have made her believe that black was white, and
not only believe it, but be glad to think that it was so; and he always
compelled her to say exactly what she had in her mind at the moment,
even when it was something that she would very much rather not have
said.
"But I am forgetting my other object in coming," Ideala broke off at
last. "May I look at the books?"
Lorrimer took out his watch. "You ought to have some lunch first," he
said. "If you will come now and have some, we can return and look at
the books afterwards."
Ideala acquiesced, fearing it was his own lunch time, and knowing it
would detain him if she did not accompany him.
Ladies not being allowed to lunch at the Great Hospital, they went, as
before, to the station close by, and sat down side by side, perfectly
happy together, chatting, laughing, talking about their childhood, and
making those trifling confidences which go so far to promote intimacy,
and are often the first evidence of affection. Now and then they
touched on graver matters. He upheld all that was old, and believed we
can have no better institutions in the future than those which have
already existed in the past. Ideala had begun to think differently.
"I am sure it is a mistake to be for ever looking back to the past for
precedents," she said. "The past has its charm, of course, but it is
the charm of the charnel house--it is the dead past, and what was good
for one age is bad for another."
"As one man's meat is another man's poison?" he said.
"Proverbs prove nothing," she answered lightly. "Have you noticed that
they go in pairs? There is always one for each side of an argument.
'One man's meat is another man's poison' is met by 'What is sauce for
the goose is sauce for the gander'--and so on. But don't you think it
absurd to cling to old customs that are dying a natural death? Learn of
the past, if you like, but live in the present, and make your laws to
meet its needs. It is this eternal waiting on the past to copy it
rather than to be warned by its failures, to do as it did, under the
impression, apparently, that we must succeed better than it did,
following in its footsteps though we know they led to ruin once, and,
because the way was pleasant, being surprised to find that it must end
again in disaster--it is this abandonment of all hope of finding new
and efficacious remedies for the old diseases of society that has
checked our progress for hundreds of years, and will keep the world in
some respects just as it was at the time of the Crucifixion. For my own
part, I cannot see that history does repeat itself, except in trifling
details, and in the lives of unimportant individuals.
"I think," he rejoined, "if you have studied the decline of the Roman
Empire, you must have seen a striking analogy between that and our own
history at the present time. With the exception of changes of manners,
which only affect the surface of society, we are in much the same state
now as the Romans were then."
"I know many people say so, and believe it," Ideala answered; "and
there is evidence enough to prove it to people who are trying to arrive
at a foregone conclusion; but it is not the resemblances we should look
to, but the differences. It is in them that our hope lies, and they
seem to me to be essential. Take the one grand difference that has been
made by the teaching for hundreds of years of the perfect morality of
the Christian religion! Do you think it possible for men, while they
cling to it, to 'reel back into the beast and be no more'?"
"But are men clinging to it?"
"Yes, in a way, for it has insensibly become a part of all of us, and
has made it possible for us to show whole communities of moral
philosophers now in a generation; the ancients had only an occasional
one in a century."
"But such a one!"
"The old moral philosophers were grand, certainly, but not grander than
our own men are, of whom we only hear less because there are so many
more of them."
"But do you mean to say society is less sinful than it was?"
"There is one section of society at the present day, they tell me,
which is most desperately wicked. It is worse than any class was when
the world was young, because it knows so much better. But I believe the
bulk of the people like right so well that they only want a strong
impulse to make them follow it. I feel sure sometimes that we are all
living on the brink of a great change for the better, and that there is
only one thing wanting now--a great calamity, or a great teacher--to
startle us out of our apathy and set us to work. We are not bold
enough. We should try more experiments; they can but fail, and if they
do, we should still have learnt something from them. But I do not think
we shall fail for ever. What we want is somewhere, and must be found
eventually."
"They tried some experiments with the marriage laws in France once,"
Lorrimer observed, tentatively.
"Yes, and failed contemptibly because their motive was contemptible.
They did not want to improve society, but to make self-indulgence
possible without shame. I think our own marriage laws might be
improved."
"People are trying to improve them," he said, with a slight laugh. "A
friend of mine has just married a girl who objected to take the oath of
obedience. How absurd it is for a girl of nineteen to imagine she knows
better than all the ages." "I think," said Ideala, "that it is more
absurd for 'all the ages' to subscribe to an oath which something
stronger than themselves makes it impossible for half of them to keep.
Strength of character must decide the question of place in a household
as it does elsewhere; and it is surely folly to require, and useless to
insist on, the submission of the strong to the weak. The marriage oath
is farcical. A woman is made to swear to love a man who will probably
prove unlovable, to honour a man who is as likely as not to be
undeserving of honour, and to obey a man who may be incapable of
judging what is best either for himself or her. I have no respect for
the ages that uphold such nonsense. There was never any need to bind us
with an oath. If men were all they ought to be, wouldn't we obey them
gladly? To be able to do so is all we ask."
"Well, it is a difficult question," he answered, "and I don't think we
need trouble ourselves about it any way. Do you like flowers?"
"Yes," she burst out in another tone; "and easy chairs, and pictures,
and china, and everything that is beautiful, and all sensual
pleasures."
She said it, but she knew in a moment that she had used the wrong word,
and was covered with confusion.
Lorrimer looked at her and laughed.
"And so do I," he said.
"Oh! if only I could unsay that!" thought Ideala; but the word had gone
forth, and was already garnered against her.
Then came an awful moment for her--the moment of going and paying. It
was hateful to let him pay for her lunch, but she could not help it.
She was seized with one of those fits of shyness which made it just a
degree less painful to allow it than to make the effort to prevent it.
They returned to Lorrimer's room and pored together over a catalogue,
looking up the books she wanted. When they had found their names and
numbers Lorrimer sent for them from the library, but it was too late to
do anything that day, and so she rose to go.
Lorrimer walked with her to the station, and saw her into the train. On
the way they talked of little children. He loved them as she did.
"A friend of mine," he said, "has the most beautiful child I ever saw.
Just to look at it makes me feel a better man."