"WHO WITH REPENTANCE IS NOT SATISFIED--."
Before the summer came, Mrs. Sydney Campion was well enough to drive out
in an open carriage, and entertain visitors; but it was painfully
apparent to her friends that her health had received a shock from which
it had not by any means recovered. She grew better up to a certain
point, and there she seemed to stay. She had lost all interest in life.
Day after day, when Sydney came home, he would find her sitting or lying
on a sofa, white and still, with book or work dropped idly in her lap,
her dark eyes full of an unspoken sorrow, her mouth drooping in mournful
curves, her thin cheek laid against a slender hand, where the veins
looked strangely blue through the delicate whiteness of the flesh. But
she never complained. When her husband brought her flowers and presents,
as he still liked to do, she took them gently, and thanked him; but he
noticed that she laid them aside and seldom looked at them again. The
spirit seemed to have gone out of her. And in his own heart Sydney raged
and fretted--for why, he said to himself, should she not be like other
women?--why, if she had a grudge against him, should she not tell him
so? She might reproach him as bitterly as she pleased; the storm would
spend itself in time and break in sunshine; but this terrible silence
was like a nightmare about them both! He wished that he had the courage
to break through it, but he was experiencing the truth of the saying
that conscience makes cowards of us all, and he dared not break the
silence that she had imposed.
One day, when he had brought her some flowers, she put them away from
her with a slight unusual sign of impatience.
"Don't bring me any more," she said.
Her husband looked at her intently. "You don't care for them?"
"No."
"I thought," he said, a little mortification struggling with natural
disappointment in his breast, "that I had heard you say you liked
them--or, at any rate, that you liked me to bring them----"
"That was long ago," she answered softly, but coldly. She lay with her
eyes closed, her face very pale and weary.
"One would think," he went on, spurred by puzzled anger to put a long
unspoken thought into bare words, "that you did not care for me
now--that you did not love me any longer?"
She opened her eyes and looked at him steadily. There was something
almost like pity in her face.
"I am afraid it is true, Sydney. I am very sorry."
He stood staring at her a little longer, as if he could not believe his
ears. The red blood slowly mounted to his forehead. She returned his
gaze with the same look of almost wistful pity, in which there was an
aloofness, a coldness, that showed him as nothing else had ever done the
extent of her estrangement from himself. Somehow he felt as though she
had struck him on the lips. He walked away from her without another
word, and shut himself into his study, where he sat for some minutes at
his writing-table, seeing nothing, thinking of nothing, dumbly conscious
that he was, on the whole, more wretched than he had ever been in the
course of a fairly prosperous and successful life.
He loved Nan, and Nan did not love him. Well, there was an end of his
domestic happiness. Fortunately, there was work to be done still,
success to be achieved, prizes to win in the world of men. He was not
going to sit down and despair because he had lost a woman's love. And
so, with set lips and frowning brow he once more set to work, and this
time with redoubled vigor; but he knew all the while that he was a very
miserable man.
Perhaps if he had seen Nan crying over the flowers that she had just
rejected, he might have hoped that there was still a chance of
recovering the place in her heart which he had lost.
But after this short conversation life went on in the old ways. Sydney
appeared to be more than ever engrossed in his work. Nan grew paler and
stiller every day. Lady Pynsent became anxious and distressed.
"Sydney, what are you doing? what are you thinking about?" she said to
him one day, when she managed to catch him for five minutes alone.
"Don't you see how ill Nan is?"
"She looks ill; but she always says there is nothing the matter with
her."
"That is a very bad sign. I hope you have made her consult a good
doctor? There is Burrows--I should take her to him."
"Burrows! Why, he is a specialist!"
"Nan's mother died of decline. Burrows attended her."
Sydney went away with a new fear implanted in his heart.
Dr. Burrows was sent for, and saw his patient; but he did not seem able
to form any definite opinion concerning her. He said a few words to
Sydney, however, which gave him food for a good deal of reflection
during the next day or two.
At the end of that time, he came to Nan's sitting-room with a look of
quiet purpose on his face. "May I speak to you for a minute?" he began
formally--he had got into the way of speaking very formally and
ceremoniously to her now. "Can you listen to me?"
"Certainly. Won't you sit down?"
But he preferred to remain standing at an angle where she could not see
his face without turning her head. "I have been talking to Dr. Burrows
about you. He tells me, I am sorry to say, that you are still very weak;
but he thinks that there is nothing wrong but weakness, though that is
bad enough in itself. But he wishes me also to say--you will remember
that it is he who speaks, not I--that if you could manage to rouse
yourself, Nan, if _you_ would made an effort to get stronger, he thinks
you might do it, if you chose."
"Like Mrs. Dombey," said Nan, with a faint, cheerless smile.
"He is afraid," Sydney went on, with the air of one who repeats a
lesson, "that you are drifting into a state of hopeless invalidism,
which you might still avoid. Once in that state you would not die, Nan,
as you might like to do: you would live for years in helpless, useless,
suffering. Nan, my dear, it is very hard for me to say this to you"--his
voice quivering--"but I promised Burrows, for your own sake, that I
would. Such a life, Nan, would be torture to you; and you have still
within your power--you can prevent it if you chose."
"It seems to me very cruel to say so," Nan answered, quietly. "What can
I do that I have not done? I have taken all the doctors' remedies and
done exactly as they bade me. I am very tired of being ill and weak, I
assure you. It is not my fault that I should like to die."
She began to cry a little as she spoke. Her mouth and chin quivered: the
tears ran slowly over her white cheeks. Sydney drew a step nearer.
"No, it isn't your fault," he said, hoarsely, "it is mine. I believe I
am killing you by inches. Do you want to make me feel myself a murderer?
Could you not--even for my poor sake--_try_ to get stronger, Nan, _try_
to take an interest in something--something healthy and reasonable? That
is what Dr. Burrows says you need; and I can't do this thing for you; I,
whom you don't love any longer," he said, with a sudden fury of passion
which stopped her tears at once, "but who love _you_ with all my heart,
as I never loved in all my life before--I swear it before God!"
He stopped short: he had not meant to speak of his love for her, only to
urge her to make that effort over her languor and her indifference which
the great physician said she must make before her health could be
restored. Nan lay looking at him, the tears drying on her pale cheeks,
her lips parted, her eyes unusually bright; but she did not speak.
"If there was anything I could do to please you," her husband went on in
a quieter tone, "I would do it. Would you care, for instance, to live
abroad? Burrows recommends a bracing air. If you would go with me to
Norway or Switzerland--at once; and then pass the winter at Davos, or
any place you liked; perhaps you would care for that? Is there nothing
you would like to do? You used to say you wanted to see India----"
"But your work!" she broke in suddenly. "_You_ could not go: it is
useless to talk of an impossibility."
"If it would make you better or happier, I would go."
"But the House?----"
"Nothing easier than to accept the Chiltern Hundreds," said Sydney.
"And your profession?" said Nan, raising herself on one arm and looking
keenly at him.
She saw that he winced at the question, but he scarcely paused before he
replied.
"I have thought it well over. I could go on practising when I came back
to England; and in the meantime----I suppose you would have to take me
abroad, Nan: I could not well take you," he said with a grim sort of
jocularity, which she could not help seeing was painful to him. "If it
did you good, as Burrows thinks it would, I should be quite prepared to
give up everything else."
"Give up everything else," Nan murmured. "For me?"
He drew a long breath. "Well, yes. The fact is I have lost some of my
old interest in my work, compared with other things. I have come to
this, Nan--I would let my career go to the winds, if by doing so, I
could give you back strength and happiness. Tell me what I can do: that
is all. I have caused you a great deal of misery, I know: if there is
any way in which I can----atone----"
He did not go on, and for a few moments Nan could not speak. There was
color enough in her cheeks now, and light in her eyes, but she turned
away from him, and would not let him see her face.
"I want to think over what you have said. Please don't think me
ungracious or unkind, Sydney. I want to do what is best. We can talk
about it another time, can we not?"
"Any time you like."
And then he left her, and she lay still.
Had she been wrong all the while? Had she of her own free will allowed
herself to drift into this state of languor, and weakness, and
indifference to everything? What did these doctors know--what did Sydney
himself know--of the great wave of disgust and shame and scorn that had
passed over her soul and submerged all that was good and fair? They
could not understand: she said to herself passionately that no man could
understand the recoil of a woman's heart against sensual passion and
impurity. In her eyes Sydney had fallen as much as the woman whom he had
betrayed, although she knew that the world would not say so; and in his
degradation she felt herself included. She was dragged down to his
level--_she_ was dragged through the mire: that was the thought that
scorched her from time to time like a darting flame of fire. For Nan was
very proud, although she looked so gentle, and she had never before come
into contact with anything that could stain her whiteness of soul.
She had told Sydney that she loved him no longer, and in the deadness of
emotion which had followed on the first acuteness of her grief for her
lost idol, and the physical exhaustion caused by her late illness, she
had thought she spoke the truth. But, after all, what was this yearning
over him, in spite of all his errors, but love? what this continual
thought of him, this aching sense of loss, even this intense desire that
he should suffer for his sin, but an awakening within her of the deep,
blind love that, as a woman has said, sometimes
"Stirreth deep below"
the ordinary love of common life, with a
"Hidden beating slow,
And the blind yearning, and the long-drawn breath
Of the love that conquers death"?
For the first time she was conscious of the existence of love that was
beyond the region of spoken words, or caresses, or the presence of the
beloved: love that intertwined itself with the fibres of her whole
being, so that if it were smitten her very life was smitten too. This
was the explanation of her weariness, her weakness, her distaste for
everything: the best part of herself was gone when her love seemed to be
destroyed. The invisible cords of love which bind a mother to her child
are explicable on natural grounds; but not less strong, not less
natural, though less common, are those which hold a nature like Nan's to
the soul of the man she loves. That Sydney was unworthy of such a love,
need not be said; but it is the office of the higher nature to seek out
the unworthy and "to make the low nature better by its throes."
Nan lay still and looked her love in the face, and was startled to find
that it was by no means dead, but stronger than it had been before. "And
he is my husband," she said to herself; "I am bound to be true to him. I
am ashamed to have faltered. What does it matter if he has erred? I may
be bitterly sorry, but I will not love him one whit the less. I could
never leave him now."
But a thought followed which was a pain to her. If she loved him in
spite of error, what of her own sense of right and wrong? Was she not in
danger of paltering with it in order to excuse him? would she not in
time be tempted to say that he had not erred, that he had done only as
other men do?--and so cloud the fair outlines of truth which had
hitherto been mapped out with ethereal clearness for her by that
conscience which she had always regarded, vaguely but earnestly, as in
some sort the voice of God? Would she ever say that she herself had been
an ignorant little fool in her judgment of men and men's temptations,
and laugh at herself for her narrowness and the limitation of her view?
Would she come to renounce her high ideal, and content herself with what
was merely expedient and comfortable and "like other people"? In that
day, it seemed to Nan that she will be selling her own soul.
No, the way out of the present difficulty was not easy. She could tell
Sydney that she loved him, but not that she thought him anything but
wrong--wrong from beginning to end in the conduct of his past life. And
would he be content with a love that condemned him? How easy it would be
for her to love and forgive him if only he would give her one little
sign by which to know that he himself was conscious of the blackness of
that past! Repentance would show at least that there was no twist in his
conscience, no flaw in his ethical constitution; it would set him right
with the universe, if not with himself. For the moment there was nothing
Nan so passionately desired as to hear him own himself in the wrong--not
for any personal satisfaction so much as for his own sake; also that she
might then put him upon a higher pedestal than ever, and worship him as
a woman is always able to worship the man who has sinned and repented,
rather than the man who has never fallen from his high estate; to
rejoice over him as angels rejoice over the penitent more than over the
just that need no repentance.
* * * * *
Sydney was a good deal startled when his wife said to him a few days
later, in rather a timid way:
"Your sister has never been here. May I ask her to come and see me?"
"Certainly, if you wish it." He had not come to approve of Lettice's
course of action, but he did not wish his disapproval to be patent to
the world.
"I do wish it very much."
Sydney glanced at her quickly, but she did not look back at him. She
only said:
"I have her address. I will ask her to come to-morrow afternoon."
"Very well."
So Nan wrote her note, and Lettice came.
As it happened, the two had never met. Lettice's preoccupation with her
own affairs, Sydney's first resentment, now wearing off, and Nan's
subsequent illness, had combined to prevent their forming any
acquaintance. But the two women had no sooner clasped hands, and looked
into each other's eyes, than they loved one another, and the sense of
mental kinship made itself plain between them.
They sat down together on the couch in Nan's private sitting-room and
fell into a little aimless talk, which was succeeded by a short,
significant silence. Then Nan put out her hand and look Lettice's in her
own.
"_You know!_" she said, in a whisper.
"I know--what?"
"You know all that is wrong between Sydney and myself. You know what
made me ill."
"Yes."
"And you know too--that I love him--very dearly." The words were broken
by a sob.
"Yes, dear--as he loves you."
"You think so--really?"
"I am quite sure of it. How could you doubt that?"
"I did doubt it for a time. I heard the man say that he married me
because I was--rich."
"And you believed it?"
"I believed anything--everything. And the rest," said Nan, with a rising
color in her face, "the rest was true."
"Dear," said Lettice, gently, "there is only one thing to be said
now--that he would be very glad to undo the past. He is very sorry."
"You think he is?"
"Can you look at him and not see the marks of his sorrow and his pain
upon his face? He has suffered a great deal; and it would be better for
him now to forget the past, and to feel that you forgave him."
Nan brushed away some falling tears, but did not speak at once.
"Lettice," she said at last, in a broken whisper, "I believe I have been
very hard and cold all these long months. I thought I did not care--but
I do, I do. Only--I wish I could forget--that poor girl--and the little
child----"
She burst into sudden weeping, so vehement that Lettice put both her
arms round the slight, shaken figure, and tried to calm her by caresses
and gentle words.
"Is there nothing that I could do? nothing Sydney could do--to make
amends?"
"Nothing," said Lettice gently, but with decision. "They are happy now,
and prosperous; good has come out of the evil, and it is better to
forget the evil itself. Don't be afraid; I hear from them, and about
them, constantly, and if ever they were in need of help, our hands would
be the ones stretched out to help them. The good we cannot do to them we
can do to others for their sakes."
And Nan was comforted.
* * * * *
Sydney came home early that evening; anxious, disquieted, somewhat out
of heart. He found that Lettice had gone, and that Nan was in her
sitting-room. He generally went up to her when he came in, and this time
he did not fail; though his lips paled a little as he went upstairs, for
the thought forced itself upon him that Lettice might have made things
worse, not better, between himself and his wife.
The daylight was fading as he entered the room. Nan was lying down, but
she was not asleep, for she turned her head towards him as he entered.
He noticed the movement. Of late she had always averted her face when he
came near her. He wished that he could see her more plainly, but she was
wrapped in shadow, and the room was almost dark.
He asked after her health as usual, and whether Lettice had been and
gone. Then silence fell between them, but he felt that Nan was looking
at him intently, and he did not dare to turn away.
"Sydney," she said at last. "Will you come here? Close to me. I want to
say something----"
"Yes, Nan?"
He bent down over her, with something like a new hope in his heart. What
was she going to say to him?
"Sydney--will you take me to Switzerland?"
"Certainly." Was that all? "When shall we go?"
"When can you leave London?"
"To-morrow. Any time."
"You really would give up all your engagements, all your prospects, for
me?"
"Willingly, Nan."
"I begin to believe," she said, softly, "that you do care for me--a
little."
"Nan! Oh, Nan, have you doubted it?"
Her hand stole gently into his; she drew him down beside her.
"Dear Sydney, come, here. Put your arm right round me--so. Now I can
speak. I want to tell you something--many things. It is Lettice that has
made me think I ought to say all this. Do you know, I have felt for a
long, long time as if you had killed me--killed the best part of me, I
mean--the soul that loved you, the belief in all that was good and true.
That is why I have been so miserable. I did not know how to bear it. I
thought that I did not love you; but I have loved you all the time; and
now--now----"
"Now?" said Sydney. She felt that the arm on which she leaned was
trembling like a leaf.
"Now I could love you better than ever--if I knew one thing--if I dared
ask----"
"You may ask what you like," he said, in a husky voice.
"It is not such a very great thing," she said, simply; "it is only what
you yourself think about the past: whether you think with me that it is
something to be sorry about, or something to be justified. I feel as if
I could forget it if I knew that you were sorry; and if you justified
it--as some men would do--oh, I should never reproach you, Sydney, but I
would much rather die!"
There was a silence. His head was on the cushion beside her, but his
face was hidden, and she could gather only from his loud, quick
breathing that he was deeply moved. But it was some time before he
spoke. "I don't try to justify myself," he said, at last. "I was
wrong--I know it well enough--and--well if you must have me say it--God
knows that I am--sorry."
"Ah," she said, "that is all I wanted you to say. Oh Sydney, my darling,
can anything now but death come between you and me?"
And she drew his head down upon her bosom and let it rest there, dearer
in the silent shame that bowed it before her than in the heyday of its
pride.
* * * * *
So they were reconciled, and the past sin and sorrow were slowly blotted
out in waters of repentance. Before the world, Sydney Campion is still
the gay, confident, successful man that he has always been--a man who
does not make many friends, and who has, or appears to have, an
overweening belief in his own powers. But there is a softer strain in
him as well. Within his heart there is a chamber held sacred from the
busy world in which he moves: and here a woman is enshrined, with all
due observance, with lights burning and flowers blooming, as his patron
saint. It is Nan who presides here, who knows the inmost recesses of his
thought, who has gauged the extent of his failures and weakness as well
as his success, who is conscious of the strength of his regrets as well
as the burdensome weight of a dead sin. And in her, therefore, he puts
the trust which we can only put in those who know all sides of us, the
worst side even as the best: on her he has even come to lean with that
sense of uttermost dependence, that feeling of repose, which is given to
us only in the presence of a love that is more than half divine.