He had ruthlessly abandoned her—that of course was what he had done.
Stransom made it all out in solitude, at leisure, fitting the unmatched
pieces gradually together and dealing one by one with a hundred obscure
points. She had known Hague only after her present friend’s relations
with him had wholly terminated; obviously indeed a good while after; and
it was natural enough that of his previous life she should have
ascertained only what he had judged good to communicate. There were
passages it was quite conceivable that even in moments of the tenderest
expansion he should have withheld. Of many facts in the career of a man
so in the eye of the world there was of course a common knowledge; but
this lady lived apart from public affairs, and the only time perfectly
clear to her would have been the time following the dawn of her own
drama. A man in her place would have “looked up” the past—would even
have consulted old newspapers. It remained remarkable indeed that in her
long contact with the partner of her retrospect no accident had lighted a
train; but there was no arguing about that; the accident had in fact
come: it had simply been that security had prevailed. She had taken what
Hague had given her, and her blankness in respect of his other connexions
was only a touch in the picture of that plasticity Stransom had supreme
reason to know so great a master could have been trusted to produce.
This picture was for a while all our friend saw: he caught his breath
again and again as it came over him that the woman with whom he had had
for years so fine a point of contact was a woman whom Acton Hague, of all
men in the world, had more or less fashioned. Such as she sat there
to-day she was ineffaceably stamped with him. Beneficent, blameless as
Stransom held her, he couldn’t rid himself of the sense that he had been,
as who should say, swindled. She had imposed upon him hugely, though she
had known it as little as he. All this later past came back to him as a
time grotesquely misspent. Such at least were his first reflexions;
after a while he found himself more divided and only, as the end of it,
more troubled. He imagined, recalled, reconstituted, figured out for
himself the truth she had refused to give him; the effect of which was to
make her seem to him only more saturated with her fate. He felt her
spirit, through the whole strangeness, finer than his own to the very
degree in which she might have been, in which she certainly had been,
more wronged. A women, when wronged, was always more wronged than a man,
and there were conditions when the least she could have got off with was
more than the most he could have to bear. He was sure this rare creature
wouldn’t have got off with the least. He was awestruck at the thought of
such a surrender—such a prostration. Moulded indeed she had been by
powerful hands, to have converted her injury into an exaltation so
sublime. The fellow had only had to die for everything that was ugly in
him to be washed out in a torrent. It was vain to try to guess what had
taken place, but nothing could be clearer than that she had ended by
accusing herself. She absolved him at every point, she adored her very
wounds. The passion by which he had profited had rushed back after its
ebb, and now the tide of tenderness, arrested for ever at flood, was too
deep even to fathom. Stransom sincerely considered that he had forgiven
him; but how little he had achieved the miracle that she had achieved!
His forgiveness was silence, but hers was mere unuttered sound. The
light she had demanded for his altar would have broken his silence with a
blare; whereas all the lights in the church were for her too great a
hush.
She had been right about the difference—she had spoken the truth about
the change: Stransom was soon to know himself as perversely but sharply
jealous. _His_ tide had ebbed, not flowed; if he had “forgiven” Acton
Hague, that forgiveness was a motive with a broken spring. The very fact
of her appeal for a material sign, a sign that should make her dead lover
equal there with the others, presented the concession to her friend as
too handsome for the case. He had never thought of himself as hard, but
an exorbitant article might easily render him so. He moved round and
round this one, but only in widening circles—the more he looked at it the
less acceptable it seemed. At the same time he had no illusion about the
effect of his refusal; he perfectly saw how it would make for a rupture.
He left her alone a week, but when at last he again called this
conviction was cruelly confirmed. In the interval he had kept away from
the church, and he needed no fresh assurance from her to know she hadn’t
entered it. The change was complete enough: it had broken up her life.
Indeed it had broken up his, for all the fires of his shrine seemed to
him suddenly to have been quenched. A great indifference fell upon him,
the weight of which was in itself a pain; and he never knew what his
devotion had been for him till in that shock it ceased like a dropped
watch. Neither did he know with how large a confidence he had counted on
the final service that had now failed: the mortal deception was that in
this abandonment the whole future gave way.
These days of her absence proved to him of what she was capable; all the
more that he never dreamed she was vindictive or even resentful. It was
not in anger she had forsaken him; it was in simple submission to hard
reality, to the stern logic of life. This came home to him when he sat
with her again in the room in which her late aunt’s conversation lingered
like the tone of a cracked piano. She tried to make him forget how much
they were estranged, but in the very presence of what they had given up
it was impossible not to be sorry for her. He had taken from her so much
more than she had taken from him. He argued with her again, told her she
could now have the altar to herself; but she only shook her head with
pleading sadness, begging him not to waste his breath on the impossible,
the extinct. Couldn’t he see that in relation to her private need the
rites he had established were practically an elaborate exclusion? She
regretted nothing that had happened; it had all been right so long as she
didn’t know, and it was only that now she knew too much and that from the
moment their eyes were open they would simply have to conform. It had
doubtless been happiness enough for them to go on together so long. She
was gentle, grateful, resigned; but this was only the form of a deep
immoveability. He saw he should never more cross the threshold of the
second room, and he felt how much this alone would make a stranger of him
and give a conscious stiffness to his visits. He would have hated to
plunge again into that well of reminders, but he enjoyed quite as little
the vacant alternative.
After he had been with her three or four times it struck him that to have
come at last into her house had had the horrid effect of diminishing
their intimacy. He had known her better, had liked her in greater
freedom, when they merely walked together or kneeled together. Now they
only pretended; before they had been nobly sincere. They began to try
their walks again, but it proved a lame imitation, for these things, from
the first, beginning or ending, had been connected with their visits to
the church. They had either strolled away as they came out or gone in to
rest on the return. Stransom, besides, now faltered; he couldn’t walk as
of old. The omission made everything false; it was a dire mutilation of
their lives. Our friend was frank and monotonous, making no mystery of
his remonstrance and no secret of his predicament. Her response,
whatever it was, always came to the same thing—an implied invitation to
him to judge, if he spoke of predicaments, of how much comfort she had in
hers. For him indeed was no comfort even in complaint, since every
allusion to what had befallen them but made the author of their trouble
more present. Acton Hague was between them—that was the essence of the
matter, and never so much between them as when they were face to face.
Then Stransom, while still wanting to banish him, had the strangest sense
of striving for an ease that would involve having accepted him. Deeply
disconcerted by what he knew, he was still worse tormented by really not
knowing. Perfectly aware that it would have been horribly vulgar to
abuse his old friend or to tell his companion the story of their quarrel,
it yet vexed him that her depth of reserve should give him no opening and
should have the effect of a magnanimity greater even than his own.
He challenged himself, denounced himself, asked himself if he were in
love with her that he should care so much what adventures she had had.
He had never for a moment allowed he was in love with her; therefore
nothing could have surprised him more than to discover he was jealous.
What but jealousy could give a man that sore contentious wish for the
detail of what would make him suffer? Well enough he knew indeed that he
should never have it from the only person who to-day could give it to
him. She let him press her with his sombre eyes, only smiling at him
with an exquisite mercy and breathing equally little the word that would
expose her secret and the word that would appear to deny his literal
right to bitterness. She told nothing, she judged nothing; she accepted
everything but the possibility of her return to the old symbols.
Stransom divined that for her too they had been vividly individual, had
stood for particular hours or particular attributes—particular links in
her chain. He made it clear to himself, as he believed, that his
difficulty lay in the fact that the very nature of the plea for his
faithless friend constituted a prohibition; that it happened to have come
from _her_ was precisely the vice that attached to it. To the voice of
impersonal generosity he felt sure he would have listened; he would have
deferred to an advocate who, speaking from abstract justice, knowing of
his denial without having known Hague, should have had the imagination to
say: “Ah, remember only the best of him; pity him; provide for him.” To
provide for him on the very ground of having discovered another of his
turpitudes was not to pity but to glorify him. The more Stransom thought
the more he made out that whatever this relation of Hague’s it could only
have been a deception more or less finely practised. Where had it come
into the life that all men saw? Why had one never heard of it if it had
had the frankness of honourable things? Stransom knew enough of his
other ties, of his obligations and appearances, not to say enough of his
general character, to be sure there had been some infamy. In one way or
another this creature had been coldly sacrificed. That was why at the
last as well as the first he must still leave him out and out.