He hesitated. “She spared me the pain of proposing any—I had only to accept hers.”
“Hers?”
“That she should disappear altogether from my sight—and from the child’s, naturally. Good heaven, I should like to include Amherst in that! But I’m tied hand and foot, as you see, by Cicely’s interests; and I’m bound to say she exonerated him completely—completely!”
Mrs. Ansell was again silent, but a swift flight of thoughts traversed her drooping face. “But if you are to remain on the old terms with her husband, how is she to disappear out of your life without also disappearing out of his?”
Mr. Langhope gave a slight laugh. “I leave her to work out that problem.”
“And you think Amherst will consent to such conditions?”
“He’s not to know of them.”
The unexpectedness of the reply reduced Mrs. Ansell to a sound of inarticulate interrogation; and Mr. Langhope continued: “Not at first, that is. She had thought it all out—foreseen everything; and she wrung from me—I don’t yet know how!—a promise that when I saw him I would make it appear that I cleared him completely, not only of any possible complicity, or whatever you choose to call it, but of any sort of connection with the matter in my thoughts of him. I am, in short, to let him feel that he and I are to continue on the old footing—and I agreed, on the condition of her effacing herself somehow—of course on some other pretext.”
“Some other pretext? But what conceivable pretext? My poor friend, he adores her!”
Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. “We haven’t seen him since this became known to him. She has; and she let slip that he was horror-struck.”
Mrs. Ansell looked up with a quick exclamation. “Let slip? Isn’t it much more likely that she forced it on you—emphasized it to the last limit of credulity?” She sank her hands to the arms of the chair, and exclaimed, looking him straight in the eyes: “You say she was frightened? It strikes me she was dauntless!”
Mr. Langhope stared a moment; then he said, with an ironic shrug: “No doubt, then, she counted on its striking me too.”
Mrs. Ansell breathed a shuddering sigh. “Oh, I understand your feeling as you do—I’m deep in the horror of it myself. But I can’t help seeing that this woman might have saved herself—and that she’s chosen to save her husband instead. What I don’t see, from what I know of him,” she musingly proceeded, “is how, on any imaginable pretext, she will induce him to accept the sacrifice.”
Mr. Langhope made a resentful movement. “If that’s the only point your mind dwells on–-!”
Mrs. Ansell looked up. “It doesn’t dwell anywhere as yet—except, my poor Henry,” she murmured, rising to move toward him, and softly laying her hand on his bent shoulder—“except on your distress and misery—on the very part I can’t yet talk of, can’t question you about….”
He let her hand rest there a moment; then he turned, and drawing it into his own tremulous fingers, pressed it silently, with a clinging helpless grasp that drew the tears to her eyes.
Justine Brent, in her earliest girlhood, had gone through one of those emotional experiences that are the infantile diseases of the heart. She had fancied herself beloved of a youth of her own age; had secretly returned his devotion, and had seen it reft from her by another. Such an incident, as inevitable as the measles, sometimes, like that mild malady, leaves traces out of all proportion to its actual virulence. The blow fell on Justine with tragic suddenness, and she reeled under it, thinking darkly of death, and renouncing all hopes of future happiness. Her ready pen often beguiled her into recording her impressions, and she now found an escape from despair in writing the history of a damsel similarly wronged. In her tale, the heroine killed herself; but the author, saved by this vicarious sacrifice, lived, and in time even smiled over her manuscript.
It was many years since Justine Amherst had recalled this youthful incident; but the memory of it recurred to her as she turned from Mr. Langhope’s door. For a moment death seemed the easiest escape from what confronted her; but though she could no longer medicine her despair by turning it into fiction, she knew at once that she must somehow transpose it into terms of action, that she must always escape from life into more life, and not into its negation.
She had been carried into Mr. Langhope’s presence by that expiatory passion which still burns so high, and draws its sustenance from so deep down, in the unsleeping hearts of women. Though she had never wavered in her conviction that her act had been justified her ideas staggered under the sudden comprehension of its consequences. Not till that morning had she seen those consequences in their terrible, unsuspected extent, had she understood how one stone rashly loosened from the laboriously erected structure of human society may produce remote fissures in that clumsy fabric. She saw that, having hazarded the loosening of the stone, she should have held herself apart from ordinary human ties, like some priestess set apart for the service of the temple. And instead, she had seized happiness with both hands, taken it as the gift of the very fate she had herself precipitated! She remembered some old Greek saying to the effect that the gods never forgive the mortal who presumes to love and suffer like a god. She had dared to do both, and the gods were bringing ruin on that deeper self which had its life in those about her.
