第15章

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.