“Oh, be silent,” she cried out, and hid her face. He looked at her hopelessly.
At last he said: “I don’t know what good it can do to go on talking. I have only one more thing to say. Of course you know that you are free.”
He spoke simply, with a sudden return to his old voice and accent, at which she weakened as under a caress. She lifted her head and gazed at him. “Am I?” she said musingly.
“Kate!” burst from him; but she raised a silencing hand.
“It seems to me,” she said, “that I am imprisoned—imprisoned with you in this dreadful thing. First I must help you to get out—then it will be time enough to think of myself.”
His face fell and he stammered: “I don’t understand you.”
“I can’t say what I shall do—or how I shall feel—till I know what you are going to do and feel.”
“You must see how I feel—that I’m half dead with it.”
“Yes—but that is only half.”
He turned this over for a perceptible space of time before asking slowly: “You mean that you’ll give me up, if I don’t do this crazy thing you propose?”
She paused in turn. “No,” she said; “I don’t want to bribe you. You must feel the need of it yourself.”
“The need of proclaiming this thing publicly?”
“Yes.”
He sat staring before him. “Of course you realize what it would mean?” he began at length.
“To you?” she returned.
“I put that aside. To others—to you. I should go to prison.”
“I suppose so,” she said simply.
“You seem to take it very easily—I’m afraid my mother wouldn’t.”
“Your mother?” This produced the effect he had expected.
“You hadn’t thought of her, I suppose? It would probably kill her.”
“It would have killed her to think that you could do what you have done!”
“It would have made her very unhappy; but there’s a difference.”
Yes: there was a difference; a difference which no rhetoric could disguise. The secret sin would have made Mrs. Peyton wretched, but it would not have killed her. And she would have taken precisely Denis’s view of the elasticity of atonement: she would have accepted private regrets as the genteel equivalent of open expiation. Kate could even imagine her extracting a “lesson” from the providential fact that her son had not been found out.
“You see it’s not so simple,” he broke out, with a tinge of doleful triumph.
“No: it’s not simple,” she assented.
“One must think of others,” he continued, gathering faith in his argument as he saw her reduced to acquiescence.
She made no answer, and after a moment he rose to go. So far, in retrospect, she could follow the course of their talk; but when, in the act of parting, argument lapsed into entreaty, and renunciation into the passionate appeal to give him at least one more hearing, her memory lost itself in a tumult of pain, and she recalled only that, when the door closed on him, he took with him her promise to see him once again.
IV
She had promised to see him again; but the promise did not imply that she had rejected his offer of freedom. In the first rush of misery she had not fully repossessed herself, had felt herself entangled in his fate by a hundred meshes of association and habit; but after a sleepless night spent with the thought of him—that dreadful bridal of their souls—she woke to a morrow in which he had no part. She had not sought her freedom, nor had he given it; but a chasm had opened at their feet, and they found themselves on different sides.
Now she was able to scan the disaster from the melancholy vantage of her independence. She could even draw a solace from the fact that she had ceased to love Denis. It was inconceivable that an emotion so interwoven with every fibre of consciousness should cease as suddenly as the flow of sap in an uprooted plant; but she had never allowed herself to be tricked by the current phraseology of sentiment, and there were no stock axioms to protect her from the truth.
It was probably because she had ceased to love him that she could look forward with a kind of ghastly composure to seeing him again. She had stipulated, of course, that the wedding should be put off, but she had named no other condition beyond asking for two days to herself—two days during which he was not even to write. She wished to shut herself in with her misery, to accustom herself to it as she had accustomed herself to happiness. But actual seclusion was impossible: the subtle reactions of life almost at once began to break down her defences. She could no more have her wretchedness to herself than any other emotion: all the lives about her were so many unconscious factors in her sensations. She tried to concentrate herself on the thought as to how she could best help poor Denis; for love, in ebbing, had laid bare an unsuspected depth of pity. But she found it more and more difficult to consider his situation in the abstract light of right and wrong. Open expiation still seemed to her the only possible way of healing; but she tried vainly to think of Mrs. Peyton as taking such a view. Yet Mrs. Peyton ought at least to know what had happened: was it not, in the last resort, she who should pronounce on her son’s course? For a moment Kate was fascinated by this evasion of responsibility; she had nearly decided to tell Denis that he must begin by confessing everything to his mother. But almost at once she began to shrink from the consequences. There was nothing she so dreaded for him as that any one should take a light view of his act: should turn its irremediableness into an excuse. And this, she foresaw, was what Mrs. Peyton would do. The first burst of misery over, she would envelop the whole situation in a mist of expediency. Brought to the bar of Kate’s judgment, she at once revealed herself incapable of higher action.
Kate’s conception of her was still under arraignment when the actual Mrs. Peyton fluttered in. It was the
