The two walked slowly and silently along the pavement to the hotel, the
damp wind following them in fitful gusts and chilling them as they went.
They had no words, for they had said all to each other; each knew that
the other was suffering, and both knew that their lives had led them
into a path of sadness from which they could not turn back. They walked
wearily and unwillingly, side by side, and the way seemed long, and yet
too short, as it shortened before them.
At the lighted porch of the hotel they paused, reluctant to part.
"May I see you to-morrow?" asked Wimpole, in a dull voice.
"Yes, I must see you before I go," Helen answered.
In the light of the lamps he saw how pale she was, and how very tired,
and she looked at him and knew from his face how he was suffering for
her. They joined hands and forgot to part them when their eyes had met.
But they had nothing to say, and they had only to bid each other a good
night which meant good-bye to both, though they should meet ever so
often again.
The porter of the hotel stood in the doorway a few steps above them and
watched them with a sort of stolid interest. The lamplight gleamed upon
his gilt buttons, and the reflexion of them made Helen aware of his
presence. Then he went into the entrance, and there was nobody else
about. Voices came with broken laughter from the small garden adjacent
to the hotel, where there was a cafe, and far away, at the end of the
entrance hall, the clerk pored over his books.
Still Wimpole held Helen's hand.
"It is very hard," he said.
"It is harder than you know," she answered.
For she loved him, though he did not know it, and she felt as well as he
did that she was losing him. But because she was Harmon's wife and
meant to stand by her husband, she would not call it love in her heart,
though she knew her own secret. She would hardly let herself think that
it was much harder for her than for Wimpole, though she knew it.
Temptation is not sin. She had killed her temptations that day, and in
their death had almost killed herself.
The sacrifice was perfect and whole-hearted, brave as true faith, and
final as death itself.
"Good night," said Wimpole, and his voice broke.
Helen still had strength to speak.
"Neither you nor I shall ever regret this," she answered, but she looked
long at him, as though she were not to see him again.
He pressed her hand hard and dropped it. Once more she looked at him and
then turned slowly and left him standing there.
The porter of the hotel was facing her on the steps. Neither she nor
Wimpole had noticed that he had come back and was waiting for them to
part. He held a telegram in his hand, and Helen started slightly as she
saw it, for she knew that it must be Harmon's answer to her word of
forgiveness.
"Already!" she exclaimed faintly, as she took it.
She turned back to Wimpole, and met his eyes again, for he had not
moved.
"It is Henry's answer," she said.
She opened the envelope, standing with her back to the light and to the
porter. Wimpole breathed hard, and watched her face, and knew that
nothing was to be spared to either of them on that day. As she read the
words, he thought she swayed a little on her feet, and her eyes opened
very wide, and her lips were white. Wimpole watched them and saw how
strangely they moved, as if she were trying to speak and could not. He
set his teeth, for he believed that even the short message had in it
some fresh insult or injury for her.
She reeled visibly, and steadied herself against one of the pillars of
the porch, but she was able to hold out the thin scrap of paper to
Wimpole as he moved forwards to catch her. He read it. It was a cable
notice through the telegraph office from Brest.
"Your message number 731 Henry Harmon New York not delivered owing to
death of the person addressed."
Wimpole read the words twice before their meaning stunned him. When he
knew where he was, his eyes were still on the paper, and he was grasping
Helen's wrist, while she stood stark and straight against the pillar of
the porch. She lifted her free hand and passed it slowly across her
forehead, opening and shutting her eyes as if waking. The porter stared
at her from the steps.
"Come," said Wimpole. "Let us go out again. We can't stay here."
Helen looked at him, only half comprehending. Even in the uncertain
light he could see the colour returning to her face, and he felt it in
his own. Then her senses came back all at once with her own clear
judgment and decision, and the longing to be alone, which he could not
understand, as he tried to draw her away with him.
"No, no!" she cried, resisting. "Let me go, please let me go! Please!"
He had already dropped her wrist.
"Come to-morrow," she added quickly.
And all her lost youth was in her as she lightly turned and went from
him up the steps. Again he stood still, following her with his eyes, but
an age had passed, with Harmon's life, between that time and this.
He understood better, when he himself was alone, walking far on, through
the damp wind, by the shore of the lake, past the big railway station,
just then in one of its fits of silence, past the wooden piers built out
into the lake for the steamers, and out beyond, not counting his steps,
nor seeing things, with bent head, and one hand catching nervously at
the breast of his coat.
He understood Helen, for he also had need of being alone to face the
tremendous contrast of the hour and to digest in secret the huge joy he
was ashamed to show to himself, because it was for the death of a man
whose existence had darkened his own. Because Harmon was suddenly dead,
the sleeping hope of twenty years had waked with deep life and strength.
Time and age were rolled away like a mist before the morning breeze, the
world was young again, and the rose of yesterday was once more the
lovely flower of to-day.
Yet he was too brave a man, and too good, to let himself rejoice cruelly
in Harmon's death, any more than he would have gloried, in his younger
days, over an enemy fallen in fight. But it was hard to struggle against
this instinct, deep rooted and strong in humanity ages before Achilles
dragged Hector round the walls of Troy. Christianity has made it mean
to insult the dead and their memory. For what we call honour comes to
us from chivalry and knighthood, which grew out of Christian doings when
men believed; and though non-Christian people have their standards of
right and wrong, they have not our sort of honour, nor anything like it,
and cannot in the least understand it.
But Wimpole was made happy by Harmon's death, and he himself could not
deny it. That was another matter, and one over which he had no control.
His satisfaction was in the main disinterested, being on Helen's behalf;
for though he hoped, he was very far from believing that she would marry
him, now that she was a widow. He had not even guessed that she had
loved him long. It was chiefly because his whole nature had been
suffering so sincerely for her sake during the long hours since he had
read the paragraph in the paper, that he was now so immensely happy. He
tried to call up again the last conversation in the dark, by the river;
but though the words both he and she had spoken came back in broken
echoes, they seemed to have no meaning, and he could not explain to
himself how he could possibly have stood there, wrenching at the cold
iron rail to steady his nerves, less than half an hour ago. It was
incredible. He felt like a man who has been in the delirium of a fever,
in which he has talked foolishly and struck out wildly at his friends,
and who cannot believe such things of himself when he is recovering,
though he dimly remembers them, with a sort of half-amused shame for his
weakness.
Wimpole did not know how long he wandered by the lake in the windy
darkness, before he felt that he had control of speech and action again
and found himself near the bridge, going towards his hotel. It was less
than half an hour, perhaps, but ever afterwards, when he thought of it,
he seemed to have walked up and down all night, a hundred times past the
railway station, a hundred times along the row of steamboat piers,
struggling with the impression that he had no right to be perfectly
happy, and fighting off the instinct to rejoice in Harmon's death.
But Helen had fled to her own room and had locked the door upon the
world. To her, as to Wimpole, it would have seemed horrible to be
frankly glad that her husband was dead. But she had no such instinct.
She had been dazed beyond common sense and speech by the sudden relief
from the strain she had borne so strongly and bravely. She had been
dazzled by the light of freedom as a man let out of a dark prison after
half a lifetime of captivity. She had been half stunned by the instant
release of all the springs of her nature, long forced back upon
themselves by the sheer strength of her conscience. And yet she was
sorry for the dead man.
Far away in her past youth she remembered his handsome face, his bright
eyes, his strong vitality, his pleasant voice, and the low ringing tone
of it that had touched her and brought her to the ruin of her marriage,
and she remembered that for a time she had half loved him and believed
love whole. She is a hard and cruel woman who has not a little pitiful
tenderness left for a dead past,--though it be buried under a hideous
present,--and some kind memory of the man she has called dear.
Helen thought of his face as he was lying dead now, white and stony, but
somehow, in her kindness, it became the face of long ago, and was not
like him as when she had seen him last. The touch of death is strangely
healing. She had no tears, but there was a dim softness in her eyes,
for the man who was gone; not for the man who had insulted her, tortured
her, struck her, but for the husband she had married long ago.
The other, the incarnate horror of her mature life, had dropped from
existence, leaving his place full of the light in which she was
thereafter to live, and in the bright peace she saw Wimpole's face, as
he waited for her.
In the midst of her thoughts was the enigmatic spectre of the world, the
familiar tormentor of those with whom the world has anything to do--a
vast, disquieting question-mark to their actions. What would the world
say, when she married Wimpole?
What could it say? It knew, if it knew anything of her, that her
husband had been little better than a beast--no better; worse, perhaps.
It knew that Wimpole was a man in thousands, and perhaps it knew that he
had been faithful to her mere name in his heart during the best of his
years. She had no enemies to cast a shadow upon her future by slurring
her past.
Yet she had heard the world talk, and the names of women who had married
old friends within the first year of widowhood were rarely untouched by
scandal. She did not fear that, but in her heart there was a sort of
unacknowledged dread lest Wimpole, who was growing old in patience,
should be patient to the end out of some over-fine scruple for her fair
name.
Then came the thought of her new widowhood and rebuked her, and with the
old habit of fighting battles against her heart for her conscience, she
turned fiercely against her long-silent love that was crying freedom so
loudly in her ears. Harmon just dead, not buried yet, perhaps, and she
already thinking of marriage! Said in those words, it seemed
contemptible, though all her loyalty to her husband had been for a
word's sake, almost since the beginning.
But then, again, as she closed her eyes to think sensibly, she set her
lips to stay the smile at her scruples. Her loyalty had been all for
the vow, for the meaning of the bond, for the holiness of marriage
itself. It had not been the loyalty of love for Harmon, and Harmon
being dead, its only object was gone. The rest, the mourning for the
unloved dead, was a canon of the world, not a law of God. For decency,
she would wear black for a short time, but in her heart she was free,
and free in her conscience.
To the last, she had borne all, and had been ready to bear more. Her
last word had gone at once, with the message of forgiveness he had
asked, and though he had been dead before it reached him he could not
have doubted her answer, for he knew her. If she had been near him, she
would have been with him to the end, to help him, and to comfort him if
she could. She had been ready to go back to him, and the letter that was
to have told him so was already gone upon its fruitless journey, to
return to her after a long time as a reminder of what she had been
willing to bear. She could not reproach herself with any weakness or
omission, and her reason told her plainly that although she must mourn
outwardly to please the world, it would be folly to refuse her heart the
thought of a happiness for which she had paid beforehand with half a
lifetime of pain.
When that was all at once and unmistakably clear to her, she let her
head sink gently back upon the cushion of the chair, her set lips
parted, and she softly sighed, as though the day were done at last and
her rest had come. As she sat there, the lines of sorrow and suffering
were smoothed away and the faint colour crept slowly and naturally to
her cheeks, as her eyes closed by slow degrees under the shaded light of
the lamp. One more restful sigh, her sweet breath came slower and more
evenly, one hand fell upon her knee with upward palm and loosened
fingers that did not move again; she was asleep.