The soul passes in a moment from youth to manhood, through the iron
door of a great sorrow. Between past and present stands the bolted
portal, and the event of half an hour has set an eternal barrier
between the thing one is and the thing one was. Kingston Darnley, as
soon as his dazed brain began to understand what had happened, found
that he looked back at his past across the haze of fire as on a drama
played by strangers. Everything had changed; on that drama a curtain of
anguish had descended, and now, when it lifted, the scene had altered,
and the old actors had disappeared for ever. Kingston, no less than
Isabel, had passed through the furnace. Seared and burned and blackened
he emerged from it, changed beyond his own recognition, with passions
killed and passions kindled. Somehow, by some mysterious help, he had
struggled through the agony, and come out alive; but his consciousness
was dazed and bruised, his vitality crushed, his fiery interest in life
turned suddenly to the grey ashes of mere endurance.
The days went by in a dreary dream. Kingston went mechanically about
his duties, and saw the figure of Gundred moving at his side like
something unreal and strange. There were inevitable activities for him
to carry through, and he discharged them steadfastly, with his numbed
mind fixed on other matters. As for Gundred, not having so suffered,
she found herself more alive to the matters in hand. There were
condolences, inquiries to answer, arrangements to be made, restorations
to be seen about. Gundred’s interest in the details of life could never
lie long dormant, and when the first shock had passed with two or three
days of intermittent tears, Gundred dried her eyes carefully, with a
due regard to their appearance, and began to pluck up her sense of
importance once more, thanking Heaven for her powers of self-control.
The fire had confined itself to the old wooden wing and the chapel,
and had made no attempt to devour the stark stone walls of the Castle
itself. Gundred was deeply grateful for the forbearance thus manifested
by Heaven, and was soon immersed in plans for the rebuilding of the
ruins. Her husband, stupefied and calm, was not yet able to give her
any effectual help, and so on her unaided shoulders she triumphantly
supported all the responsibilities of the case. As time passed, and her
first outbreak of genuine sorrow was quelled by the flood of her new
activities, Gundred even began to enjoy the importance which events had
so abruptly conferred upon her. Suddenly she became more conspicuous in
the public eye than ever in her life before. The tragedy of Brakelond
challenged attention and pity up and down the length and breadth of
England. In horror, in picturesqueness, in romance, it possessed all
the titillating qualities best fitted to make it the talk of the
country. And Gundred became the central figure of the picture; sympathy
and admiration were concentrated on her; her courage, her coolness,
her grief, her rapid resumption of self-control, were made the daily
subject of laudation. Of her husband nobody knew much, or cared. Her
own name, her own position, made her the pivot of the drama, to say
nothing of all the other causes that had tended to obscure Kingston
since the catastrophe--his dazed acquiescence in events, his reluctance
to enter the world of new plans in which Gundred was moving so happily.
He sank into the background, and was alone with his sorrow.
Gundred was busy with designs for the new stone wing that should
arise in place of the treacherous old wooden fire-trap, as soon as
the ruins should have been cleared away. Kingston could be moved by
nothing except the hope of finding Isabel’s relics. It was not till
the third day that his wish was fulfilled. Then, buried in the densest
chaos of débris, they found what remained of the dead. Gundred cried
bitterly over the tragic discovery, and then, dabbing her eyes, began
to meditate an epitaph that should compensate everyone for all that
had been suffered. Kingston faced the piteous remains in a stupor. He
could not have told what it was that he had expected the excavations to
reveal, but surely nothing so crude as this mere wreckage of mortality
that came to light. The fire had been merciless: a few fragments of
flaky bone, the blackened crust of a skull, from which the white teeth
gleamed horribly--this was all that it had left of Isabel. Kingston
could never have anticipated the raw ugliness of the revelation. It
stunned him anew. This black, bare globe was dreadful, filled with
dreadful thoughts and associations, a monstrous burlesque of love and
things lovely; its eyeless glare, its obtrusive grin, were ghastly
in their mockery of life’s beauties; the glitter of two gold-crowned
teeth in the lower jaw set the last fine edge on the horror, in their
ironical reminder of the daily life now destroyed for ever. And yet
this was Isabel--the real Isabel--or, rather, it was the earthly
emblem of her. That rounded shape had actually contained her, had
contained the hopes, the fears, the love that had gone to make up
Isabel. And now, where and what was Isabel? Only the outward form had
suffered; how could the mysterious secret passions that had been the
framework of her personality, how could they have any share in the
ruin that had fallen on the outward manifestation of Isabel? And yet,
without that outward manifestation, how could she still be Isabel?
Dimly, fantastically, he tried to figure her in another shape--as
another woman, as a man. The task was impossible. To his bounded human
outlook, the outward form was an integral part of the real Isabel.
Yet, now he was brought face to face with the obvious fact that, while
the outward form had been reduced to a thing of loathing and horror,
the real Isabel must still be in existence somewhere, incorrupt and
incorruptible. It was unthinkable that she should have suffered the
fate of her body. So he must perforce bring himself to realize that the
thing he loved had had no true connection with the hair, the skin, the
features that it had worn for a while. Hair and skin and features were
gone; but the beloved remained--out of sight, unrecognisable, remote;
yet, for all that, perfect and unalienated. Fire could not touch the
heart that was Isabel, the courage, the loyalty, the devotion that were
Isabel. They were still alive as ever. But where, in what far world,
how to be found again, and how to be known again when found?
Kingston passed insensibly beyond the cheap materialism of orthodoxy.
He could not postulate an infinite gilded space where Isabel might
be eternally walking in her habit as she had lived on earth. This
invincible anthropomorphism, this obstinate survival of the savage
in us, by which we are all prone to imagine the dead as we saw them
in life, and familiar for ever by their earthly features, had now no
hold on Kingston. He knew that, whenever we may meet our dead again,
and wherever that may be, heart will call to heart, and soul be known
again to soul; but the features that we have known and loved, the
bones, the flesh, the softness, will all have passed long since into
other forms of life, merged in the huge kaleidoscope of the universe.
Perhaps, in circumstances less cogent, he might have conceived himself
as meeting the physical Isabel years hence in some glorified state,
yet recognisable to eyes that had known her on earth. The sight of
her relics, however, jarred him once and for all out of the puny,
materialistic dream. The blackened hideousness of them forced on his
attention the irrelevance of all physical forms. For a time they may be
everything, these forms and features; ultimately they go for nothing,
pass utterly, are dropped, discarded, alike by the love that wore
them and by the love that worshipped the spirit they clothed. No, he
had done for ever with the corporeal Isabel. Weaknesses and beauties
of shape were all destroyed, reduced to their native insignificance.
Yet Isabel remained. But he had lost her; she had passed beyond his
knowledge into dim places where, if ever she heard the cry of his soul
far off, she could not make him any answer. Now and then, perhaps, she
might call to him in return; in the whisper of the evening wind, in
the song of a bird; but never again in the accents he had known, from
the lips that he had watched; and, even so, she might call unceasingly
to the hungering ears of his soul, yet never be able to make them
understand whose voice it was that they heard. His deep certainty that
she still lived made the separation more paradoxical, more horrible
than ever to Kingston. To know that she was there, yet to call in vain;
never to see her, never to meet her, to be unable, through all his
days, to open up any means of communication with the thing he knew to
be still existing,--this was the ghastliest instance of Fate’s irony,
giving so much, yet making the gift so nugatory.
Kingston began to feel that, after all, the bill sent in by the
gods had fallen more heavily on him than even on Isabel. Isabel had
passed through agony to glory. But he, he had another agony, longer
and more incurable than hers, though less poignant; and no glory to
compensate, at the end, for the gnawing persistence of his pain.
The grey, sad merit of doing his drudging duty by the world for two
or three more score of years--that, perhaps, lay before him; but a
chilling, colourless glory was this, at once harder and less rewarding
than the sudden flare of martyrdom through which Isabel had passed
upwards on her way. For upwards she had gone, leaving him henceforth
alone on the lower levels where they had first met. Isabel--selfish,
passionate, barbarous Isabel--in one whirling moment had leapt above
all the trammels of false desire and fear--had soared into the great
heights of selflessness, and left far beneath her the outworn husk
of her old struggling egoism. In that other state where she now went
radiant, it must be another Isabel that lived and moved--a purified
Isabel, stripped of many mean and selfish thoughts; an Isabel far
nearer than before to the ultimate radiance towards which the whole
world is inevitably tending through ages of slow purification. How
should he even be able to catch up lost ground and come level with this
glorified Isabel once more? And yet, again, without features--without
the well-remembered features of body (without so many of the mind’s
well-remembered features too)--how, even if chance should be given, was
he to recognise the soul that had once been one with his own?
She had utterly outstripped him in the race. No test of his endurance
could equal that test of hers--no, not if he lived decently and
honestly all his days, doing the best he could with his duty through
the lagging years that probably lay ahead; why, that would be nothing
to compare with her ordeal, no such swift burning furnace as that
through which Isabel had passed, and from which she had emerged all
gold in the sunlight of her future.
Because duty and honour had seemed to call, he had sacrificed the thing
he loved for the thing he had promised to love. Even in cold blood he
would still have done the thing--must have done it; any other course
would have been impossible, a treason, a horror. But the sacrifice had
been a rending of the heart; his whole soul was strained and bleeding
from the wrench--bleeding to death, he thought. And, while Isabel
had won freedom for herself, he had gained nothing but a lifetime’s
loneliness. Without any peddling notions of striking a bargain with the
gods, he could not but feel the sarcasm of their smile. He had sold his
life’s happiness--to buy a lifetime’s unhappiness and desolation. He
had done what was an agony to do, in order to obtain that which would
be a long agony to endure. So he looked angrily, contemptuously, on
the chilly duty and self-respect which was all that his martyrdom had
gained him. He hated them for what they had cost, and hated them the
more for his inmost knowledge that the purchase had been inevitable.
Life without Isabel! It seemed that his soul had never in all the ages
imagined the possibility of such a thing, yet now he was to envisage it
through every remaining day and hour of his existence. She was gone,
rising on strong wings towards heaven; he remained on earth, alone for
ever, he who had so helped her take her flight.
So time dragged by, and insensibly the first agony of his loneliness
wore down into a calmer sorrow. Isabel’s bones were duly buried, and
honoured with a neat inscription devised by Gundred, and matters
gradually began to fall into a settled course once more. Kingston began
to return to ordinary life, and his private grief no longer claimed
his whole attention. Between himself and Gundred a barrier still rose,
but he grew able to give her his help, and, bit by bit, to share once
more in the superficial interest of her days. She, for her part, went
bravely on her way; with more courage and on a more difficult way than
she or anyone else suspected. The new wing was built; the new wing lost
its raw look of novelty; gradually Isabel and her end became to Gundred
little more than a vague if awful memory. She was not the kind of woman
whose nerves can be thrown permanently out of gear. Self-restraint
had been drilled into her blood through many generations, and she
made imperturbability the test-virtue of good breeding. Only once in
all her life had perfect coolness failed her, and that one momentary
lapse had been the immediate cause of Isabel’s death. For a long time
the knowledge of this was her secret cross. In her heart of hearts,
that last awful instant had showed her that Kingston loved Isabel,
that his care for his wife was mere loyalty. The sudden perception,
the combination of new terrors and responsibilities had been suddenly
too much for her endurance, already sapped and damaged by hidden
anxieties and by the shock of the accident. Not meaning to be selfish,
transported rather with the longing to be unselfish and give up her
own life that her husband might save Isabel’s, she had yet, in the
crisis, helplessly committed the final selfishness. She had killed
Isabel. Nothing at first could quite excuse her to herself. And she
knew that her husband must inevitably feel as she did. This was
the barrier between them--Gundred’s innocent guilt, and Kingston’s
answering knowledge that she, and she alone, had been the real cause of
Isabel’s death. Her weakness had cost him the happiness of his life.
How could he bring himself all at once to look on the poor woman with
a cordial eye? He could not but bear her a grudge--all the more bitter
that he realized how unintentional had been the cowardice that had
had such terrible results. He guessed, in his inmost consciousness,
that Gundred--cool, practical Gundred--would have wished to be no
less heroic than Isabel, would have wished to sacrifice her own life
to his happiness; and this instinct only aggravated his grudge, only
intensified in its first vigour his aching, bitter grief that the
sacrifice had not been achieved or made unnecessary by a brief exercise
of Gundred’s usual calm. Yes, the death of Isabel stood between them
for a while like a sword of fire.
But Gundred was not a woman to suffer exaggerated scruples. Soon she
surmounted the shock, and Bellowes’ Hypophosphates enabled her to
triumph over morbid qualms. She reflected on the goodness and honesty
of her intentions, set remorse in the background, and ere long was
facing Kingston without any more such distressing reserves. He,
meanwhile, was also growing quieter and more sane in his views. After
all, no one was guilty. Everyone had acted for the best. Nature was
not to be blamed. He was too fond of his wife to go on condemning her
for an instant’s lapse. He saw the hysterical injustice of his grudge
against her, and in time succeeded in overcoming it.
Though neither knew it, Isabel’s stormy intervention and terrible
exit had tided them over the difficult preparatory stage of wedlock.
Now that she was gone, they gradually settled down together in that
elastic bond of mutual tolerance which promises so well for permanent
peace. Neither any longer expected too much from the other. Kingston
grew to acquiesce in Gundred’s limitations, and rejoice in her
perfections, without feeling fretted by the one or satiated by the
other. He did not ask her to be an intellectual companion, to talk,
allure, amuse. She was always cool and pretty to look at, always cool
and pleasant in temper, an admirable hostess, housekeeper, and friend,
altogether level and satisfying as a companion. He had had enough of
vain searchings for the ideal. Nothing could divorce him from the
memory of Isabel. He carried it with him from day to day, shrined in
the depths of his heart, and through the placid duties and happinesses
of his life never ceased to worship that lost part of himself, and
yearn for its recovery. But on the surface he wore a face of perfect
contentment, and his marriage with Gundred soon subsided into a
whole-hearted alliance that was put to no strains, that stood the wear
and tear of intercourse, and was felt to be quite ideal by all that had
the privilege of watching it. And Gundred, now that the storm was over,
gave equal allowances to her husband. The time was gone by now for high
emotions and anguish. Her dim jealousy had vanished with its cause, and
she no longer pined for the perfect intimacy that her nature made it
impossible for her to attain. Instead of being in love with Kingston,
she was now devoted to him, served him loyally and piously, made it
her pride to keep him comfortable and contented. She divined in what
quarter her strength lay, and took pains to cultivate all the qualities
that gave her a hold on her husband. She learned life’s lesson, grew
accommodating instead of exacting, prayed for him instead of preaching
at him, and pressed upon his acceptance nothing that he did not want.
The years had worn down the sharp corners of their characters in the
mill of marriage, until at last their harmony was exact and without any
apparent possibility of discord.
The years glided placidly by, bringing no more great or violent
developments into the lives of Kingston and Gundred. Five years after
the fire at Brakelond Gundred bore a son, but otherwise little occurred
to break the monotonous tenor of their days. Isabel, by now, was
almost forgotten. Only Kingston retained his faithful worship of her,
cherishing it secretly, far down under the loyal surface of his life,
feeling that justice allowed him at least so much of compensation. From
day to day he longed for her and listened unceasingly for some far-off
echo of her voice. It seemed almost as if she had never been, as if
she had left no relic of her existence in the world--except, perhaps,
by a quaint freak of fortune, in the life of that Mrs. Restormel to
whom Gundred had taken her on that fateful visit. For Mrs. Restormel,
overcome with the horror of the news from Brakelond, had been so
excited that her hour had come upon her unawares. Out of due time she
had been delivered of her child, and a boy had made his appearance
in the world only twelve hours after Isabel had quitted it. However,
the Restormel baby prospered and grew strong, was christened by the
family name of Ivor, and passed successfully through the vicissitudes
of childhood. Otherwise, as Kingston Darnley felt, Isabel had come and
gone, leaving no other trace in the world than that persistent image
which her life had established in his own soul.
The restless heat of youth had died down in Kingston as in Gundred. His
son was growing from boyhood towards manhood. Unnoticed the years had
flowed away till almost a quarter of a century had rippled by since
the passing of Isabel. He himself was growing fixed and solid; grey
was developing itself in his heart as in his hair. Life was very level
and very comfortable and very pleasant. It was no longer stimulating.
As for Gundred, the years had less effect either on her nature or on
her appearance. She was one of the women who neither shrink nor swell
with age. She had not grown fat; she had not grown thin. Possibly
she had dried up a little. The freshness was gone from her features,
though not their neat prettiness. They had grown perhaps a trifle
wooden in their clear and rather hard perfection. Tiny lines had drawn
themselves here and there, especially round the mouth. Otherwise her
face had changed wonderfully little. The alteration was in its spirit
rather than in its form. It was still strangely young for its years,
but now it was far more decisive than before, older in experience,
more matronly, more righteous. All her points had intensified, and now
she had turned from a very pretty bride to a very pretty wife, full of
responsibilities well borne, of interests, charities, benevolence. Her
child, her schools, her households, her Primrose League gave abundance
of occupation to her life, and more and more for her growing sense of
excellence to feed on. From duty she never flinched or flagged; the
consciousness of such undeviating rectitude of practice gave her manner
a commanding air of self-confidence. Religion, too, tightened its hold
on her. The better she felt herself becoming, the more useful and
valuable, not only in herself, but as an example of conduct, the more
her intimacy with Celestial Persons grew. Priggishness, self-conceit,
as well as all the other grosser mental errors, were very far from the
well-balanced security of her nature. The worst that an enemy could
have said would be that she was a little slow to admit the possibility
of any limitations in herself. In earlier years she had already been
calmly self-confident. Time had only justified and reinforced the calm
as well as the self-confidence, so she went her methodical way, a model
for all matrons, and had, in the neat garden of her life, no disorderly
plots, no tangles, no weeds. It was a precise arrangement of well-kept
beds--everything in its place, and no profitable herb omitted. Her
husband wandered outside its borders, and roamed the shrubberies of
freedom. But Gundred found all that her nature ever needed to ask in
that daily round, that common task for which her character had been so
perfectly fitted by time and fate.
Their life oscillated between London, Ivescar, and Brakelond. In
London Gundred had her factory girls, her hospitals, her educational
societies; at Brakelond there were the tenants to be looked after, the
Castle and all its immense organism to be managed, the Tory Candidate
to be upheld by threats of Gundred’s withdrawal of her custom from all
who should so far presume upon the Ballot as to oppose him. At Ivescar
there were farms, gardens, parishes to be controlled by Gundred’s
masterful eye. For a masterful eye it was. Kingston slid back into
himself, never regained his full vital energies, renounced interest
in his career, and yielded the reins of government into his wife’s
hands. As her sphere widened, and her power increased, Gundred’s
unquestionable majesty increased proportionately, until the habit of
ruling had grown so strong in her that no one would have presumed to
doubt the wisdom or cavil at the commands of that tranquil little
despot, whose voice was never raised in anger, whose orders never
admitted the possibility of dispute. She arranged the lives of all
around her with the serenest certainty, and indomitably shepherded
her army of dependents, factory girls, tenants, and servants along
the path of righteous happiness. As mistress she was a success; as a
hostess the same strenuous qualities, the same self-sufficiency brought
her the same success. She could never hold a room by her talk, but she
could now listen graciously, and disguise her complete inattention by
smiles. Clever people went willingly to her houses in London and the
country. Her well-dressed, pleasant presence made a becoming quiet
background for their conversation, and, as a housekeeper, she was
unsurpassed. She never rivalled their efforts, she never failed to make
them feel both clever and comfortable. A brilliant, ambitious woman
could never have won the popularity that Gundred’s calm indifference
achieved. If not gay, her set was clever and solid, nor did anyone ever
discern that it was only her well-bred stupidity that had had the gift
of gathering it round her by sheer force of apparent colourlessness and
calm.
Gundred loved the power that her position had attained, and, as time
went by, Fate also was kind, and gave her that full measure of glory
which had been denied to her earlier years. London had ignored the
inconspicuous Miss Mortimer, unmarried, and slenderly portioned. But
London showed itself very amenable to the charms of Lady Gundred
Darnley, conspicuously wealthy, and with Brakelond as well as Ivescar
at her back. For the old Duke faded away at last, and Gundred’s father
reigned in his stead--a mild and inoffensive reign, which left all
real dominion to be exercised by his daughter. For the new Duke, like
his predecessor, had slid into a gentle imbecility, and now lived
at Brakelond in contented seclusion; Gundred occupied the house as
mistress, vigorously took up her father’s responsibilities, and was,
to all intents and purposes, the tenth reigning Duchess of March and
Brakelond. She never went in to dinner after a Marchioness without
feeling that such an order of precedence was altogether paradoxical and
out of joint. For was she not herself a Duchess in everything but name?
Her constant energies overshadowed her husband in the public eye. By
the side of his energetic practical wife he spent a peaceful existence
very much alone, very little hampered by the more brilliant cares in
which Gundred took such pleasure. She could not push him into any
prominent position; he had lost, in an hour, all stir of ambition, and
preferred to live on in the company of his dreams and memories and
visions. Their son was his great delight, his most constant occupation.
Gundred was a trifle too multifariously busy, a trifle too excellent
to be a perfectly sympathetic mother. It was to his father that Jim
Darnley carried all his more interesting private matters for sympathy
and discussion. Kingston, as the years brought him increasing calm,
found his world growing narrower, till at last it held only his son
and his memory of that strange intoxicating passion which had ended on
so terrific a final note at Brakelond more than twenty years ago. His
heart still clung to the far-off thought of Isabel, and his life was
always in some mystical sense alert to catch news of her in the shadowy
lands where she might now be dwelling.
Kingston could never bring himself to feel that Isabel--the real
Isabel, as distinct from the body she had worn--was dead; he knew that
she still lived, somewhere, somehow; he felt it in every fibre of his
life; every nerve vibrated with the knowledge that somewhere, in some
remote corner of the world, that lost half of himself was still alive.
As the years passed his ideas, instead of growing fainter, grew keener,
more fixed, more certain. He lived in mysterious expectation of a call,
the sound of a voice he should recognise, some hint that Isabel had
come back, that their paths through the world had crossed again. Sooner
or later the call would come; it was impossible that it should not.
He and Isabel were so close together; accidents like physical death
could not be any permanent barrier. As the time went by he grew more
and more sure that the call must come soon. Each day he hoped that the
sign might be shown to-morrow, and, deep in his heart, listened in
every conversation for the sound of Isabel’s voice, and looked in every
face for a memory of Isabel’s. Meanwhile he lived out his placid life,
friends with all, popular, suspected no longer of any eccentricities.
The gentle, managing woman at his side had never any notion that
her husband was cherishing such fantastic hopes. To her he had long
been, in reality, a stranger, a stranger very dearly loved, and very
faithfully looked after, but a stranger none the less, as are so many
of us to those who love us best.
As for Isabel, if Gundred ever recalled her name now, it was with
a feeling of wrath that grew steadily towards hatred. Isabel stood
for the one moment in which Gundred had faltered, in which she had
not been sure of herself. Isabel was a painful memory, not only as
recalling that far-off period of unrest, but also as raking back
into recollection that one awful instant in which Gundred’s courage
had failed her--with results so disastrous for poor Isabel. Had the
results not been quite so disastrous for Isabel, Gundred could better
perhaps have borne the recollection. As it was, they convicted her
of inadequacy, and touched her secret pride in its tender point. She
pushed such horrid reflections far back in the most private cupboards
of her consciousness, and hated Isabel anew whenever accident compelled
her to open the locked doors and turn over those dreadful bones of her
one failure.
But Gundred had great skill in ignoring all unwelcome topics; it was
very rarely that she remembered her cousin, and all the dim, remote
unpleasantnesses that Isabel represented. Her first year of married
life now loomed down upon her out of the distant past as a confused
nightmare-mirage of desert wanderings, from which her nice tact and
the favour of Heaven had brought her feet at last out into the Canaan
of prosperity, conjugal and social. The few brief sorrows of the past
assumed gigantic proportions in the haze of memory, and Isabel was
their incarnation. Gundred began to realise how directly Heaven had
intervened to relieve her of her cousin’s threatening presence, and,
though grateful for the service, it was to her credit that she retained
humanity enough to think the means adopted unnecessarily drastic. This
tenderness greatly elevated Gundred in her own eyes. She remonstrated
with Heaven--not acrimoniously, indeed, but with feeling, and devoted
many prayers to Isabel’s happiness in another world. But she rejoiced
over Isabel’s removal from this, and nothing could have given her
serenity a greater shock than any suspicion that her husband ever
remembered the dead woman with tenderness or longing. However, she was
protected from such perceptions as much by her own impermeability to
unwelcome truths as by her husband’s perpetual skill.
He had not come so far through life, safeguarding his wife’s happiness
and trying to behave decently, only to undo all the good by allowing
her now to see that he regretted Isabel. The course of years had
taught him to keep a shut mouth on all his aspirations. His mind was
apparently thrown wide for Gundred, but Isabel’s shrine was hidden
in the very holiest of holies. As Gundred roamed through his mind’s
reception-rooms, comfortable and clean and neatly decorated, she never
had any suspicion of that locked room in the very heart of his soul’s
dwelling, where the memory of Isabel was for ever worshipped. Many of
us, indeed, there are that keep a secret shrine, but few of us suspect
its existence in anyone else’s life. Gundred was perfectly happy in her
monopoly of her husband, perfectly confident that she knew every corner
of his mind. He, for his part, gave thanks for the salutary blindness
which so often makes life tolerable, and continued to make his wife a
visitor in the heart whose tenant was still the dead woman--the dead
woman whom he daily expected to meet again, whom every hour brought
nearer to the renewal of contact with himself. He had done his duty,
played his part, abundantly paid Gundred all he owed and could;
affection, respect, loyalty--of all these he had never failed for one
moment to give her in good measure; the secret impulses of his love
could not be controlled like their formal manifestations; no one could
exact it; not one could expect it. His own inmost heart still yearned
and cried for the return of Isabel, that return in which every day made
him more firmly believe, more immediately look for.