A GOLDEN BRIDGE ACROSS AN ABYSS OF SHAME.
When Leonard awoke to find her bending over him, the anxiety in her eyes
looked to him like fear. He had no perception of the fact that hours had
passed since in the meeting in the hall he had seen the same eyes
dancing with the light of joy, and had heard from the drawing-room the
fond murmurs of forbidden love. In his first awakening the scene he had
witnessed and the murmurs he had heard swayed before his eyes and
sounded still in his ears. Fresh from dalliance with her lover, she
might well tremble to find her husband here! With this thought
uppermost, he staggered to his feet.
She started back. He glared upon her with a gaze so furious that she was
in truth afraid.
For the burden of her guilty dream weighed heavily upon her, justifying
the hatred in his eyes, a hatred born of the ascription of all his woes
to her, and while she saw abhorrence, the suffering he had endured was
no less plainly written in his haggard face, accusing her even as she
accused herself. Her sins against this man, her husband, the father of
her dead child, crushed her with the burden of the humiliation born of
them.
"My husband!" In her self-abasement she sank upon her knees. The action
was instinctive in her of Gallic training; to Leonard, bred to less
dramatic display of emotion, it was proof of guilt far deeper than he
had until now suspected.
"Get up," he said harshly, and taking her by the arm he led her to the
doorway, pushing her from the room and, with unconscious violence,
almost throwing her against the opposite wall. He returned to the room
and rang the bell. His rudeness had given him a sense of mastery in his
own house, and had dissipated his dread of meeting the servants. He
asked the maid if breakfast would soon be ready, and was surprised to
learn that it was long past noon.
Ordering a meal to be prepared he went upstairs, boldly and with
something not unlike a swagger in the perception that there were sinners
as bad as he, and having bathed, being clothed in fresh garments, and
having eaten almost ravenously, he felt, he said to himself, like a new
man.
Which indeed he was, if new thoughts make a new man. That dreadful load
of regret for his own misdeeds had been lifted from his shoulders. His
violence toward his wife had somewhat shocked himself, and while
attending to his physical needs, he had had time to regret his hasty
outbreak; and this fact led him to resolve to consider the situation
calmly and judicially.
To know all is, if the French adage be true, to pardon all, which is
perhaps the reason why we find it easier to forgive our own sins than
those of others. We presumably know what motives actuated us in
evil-doing, and being aware of the strength of the force that drove us,
we are conscious of the fact that had the incentive to sin been less
powerful than our rectitude we would not have been guilty. In other
words, we sin because we can't help sinning, a logical and soothing
conclusion, converting our wickedness into misfortune and rendering us
objects of self-commiseration rather than of self-condemnation.
But in that contemplation of the iniquity of others, to which
circumstances sometimes impel us, and which is always so painful, the
strength of temptation which we have not personally experienced is less
obvious, while at the same time the sense of our own rectitude is
naturally in the ascendant. And as, in such contemplation, our judgment
is inevitably swayed by our morality in its sternest mood, especially if
the crimes under consideration have wronged ourselves, our indignation
is naturally fervent. It is also true that our vision is clarified, our
memory sharpened, and we recall incidents, now corroborative of guilt,
though heretofore unremarked, or regarded as innocent.
Leonard recalled so many of such incidents that at last nearly every
remembered act of his wife assumed a semblance of guilt. There were
those visits to churches mentioned by Berthe, the woman who truly loved
him, and who, doubtless, had minimized the truth to spare him, and the
same habit had been indulged in after marriage. It was not to pray that
she went to the churches; he remembered that she had herself said so.
No; it was to dream of the old unhallowed meetings in the hallowed
precincts. To dream! Why not to meet her lover? During much of their
sojourn in Paris, Mark had been supposed to be in London--what was a
passage between London and Paris to Mark? He remembered now that in
Natalie's bearing toward himself there had always been a vague and
undescribable something which he could not define, but which he had
felt. It was easy now to fix the date of the commencement of this
aloofness (he had found this word for it); it had been during the visit
in Paris. He recalled a thousand instances with which to torture his
mind and prove his suspicions true. The aloofness had increased; after
the birth of the child it had even been noticed by others--and then as a
blow came the conviction that the inferences she had drawn from his
belief in hell and her consequent resolve to live a celibate life were
all pretense, a ghastly role played in obedience to her lover's command.
As this hideous thought took possession of him all semblance of judicial
summing up was put aside. He laid his head between his hands and wept
aloud in his great misery. He had loved her; she had been the light of
his life. He remembered her now (and the vision he recalled was
strangely clear and vivid) as she had stood at the entrance to the cave
where dwelt the echo of Forellenbach; she laughing a little at the
strange American boy who thought wine-drinking an evil; he standing
within the cave, half shy, half proud, and longing to wake the echoes
with the pretty name, on that day first heard by him. Yes; he had loved
her then and always, while she,--and he groaned and his hot tears fell
fast as he remembered that Berthe had said--Berthe who knew--that his
wife had never loved him!
The thoughts that racked him were base and unworthy, but he believed
them. It may be that at the bottom of his heart he wished to believe,
even while the belief rent him with actual anguish. He needed
justification for his own sins, and true to his human nature, found it
where he could. Again, perhaps dim as yet, but only dim because he
closed his eyes, was the desire to be driven to a step which he had
hardly dared contemplate, which he had refused to contemplate when it
had been suggested to him, but toward which now he was making his way as
certainly as he who, lost in the gloom of some dark forest, makes his
way toward a rift of light.
He took Mrs. Joe's cheque from his pocket and looked at it. He recalled
a suggestion of Berthe that they cash it and go to France together. The
suggestion had startled, yet had fascinated him. He had put it aside.
Now its fascination returned with tenfold power--to put the ocean
between him and the past; to be a denizen of that land where man can be
free; to be one of those who, being damned, refuse to accept misery in
this life as well--he had recognized it then as a picture painted by the
devil; it now assumed a worthier aspect. There would be boldness in such
a step, a certain picturesqueness as well, and a dramatic ending to the
play in which he had enacted the role of dupe. The curtain would be rung
down upon a scene not contemplated by the authors of the drama--a scene
in which he alone would retain some dignity, to the discomfiture of
those whose puppet he had been.
No thought of financial dishonesty was in his mind. The peculiar
fascination in the cheque was the facility it afforded for complete and
sudden rupture of every tie. He could secure the maker of the cheque
against loss; that could be done at his leisure; meanwhile, there it
lay, a golden bridge for passage across an abyss of shame, beyond which
lay a region of beauty and content.
Yet even while he mused, finding a balm for wounded pride and love
betrayed in visions, of which the central figure was the woman who had
parted from him in despair, and whose pleading eyes even now besought
him, while his own lonely heart called out to her--even now, when
despair on the one hand, and passion on the other, strove for mastery,
even now he turned from the devil's beckoning finger, resolving to be
just.
Yes; the accused should have a hearing. He would confront his wife and
demand an explanation of that meeting in the hall. She was probably
aware that he had witnessed it, for she had crouched in fear before him
when she had unexpectedly found him in the library. If she had not known
of his presence he would inform her and warily watch her, and carefully
weigh whatever she had to offer in explanation. He would not be
deceived, but she should meet the accusation face to face, himself
accuser, judge and witness.
He looked at his watch. It was after nine o'clock. Natalie could hardly
be in bed. He would see her now in her own room, away from the chance of
eavesdropping servants.
He prepared to put his intention into effect and was already in the
hall, when a maid handed him a sealed note.
He read the letter. It commenced abruptly, without address:
"Your violence has so agitated me that it has only been after a
long struggle that I have brought myself to write you. But I
persuade myself, as indeed I must, that you were unconscious of
your harshness. I will not, therefore, offer you my forgiveness
for an offense which was unintentional. But I think it better
that we do not meet immediately. I am the more urgent in this
because I wish your spirit to be soothed and your anger against
me to be mitigated, so that you shall hear me calmly. For, I
have much to say to you--a sad confession to make which may be
even harder for you to bear than the sorrow you have already
borne. But I have hope that if you will hear it calmly you will
recognize that if I did not love you I could not open my heart
to you, as I shall do. My husband, I have not been that which I
so long to be in future, a true wife to you. But I know, for I
know your goodness of heart, that when you have heard all you
will pardon all, and that our future shall be cloudless; that
your love shall help me to be that which I have failed in
being--your faithful wife."
No need now, having read this confession, to consider his future course.
It was fixed. He looked at his watch. The train left at midnight. He
would write the necessary answer to the letter at once.
He wrote swiftly and without pause. His brain had never been clearer,
his heart never lighter.
A few minutes before midnight he quietly left the house. When he had
crossed the street to the Square he looked back at the only home he had
ever known. For good or for evil he was about to leave it, never to
return the husband of the woman who watched in the dimly lighted
chamber. A sob shook him as he turned from the light toward the
darkness.