“I don’t know how it would have been then,” said Mrs. Wortle, who was by this time sobbing aloud in tears.
“No; nor I, nor I. I should have been dead;—but he? He is a sinner now, so that he may not preach in your churches, or teach in your schools; so that your dear husband has to be ruined almost because he has been kind to him. He then might have preached in any church—have taught in any school. What am I to think that God will think of it? Will God condemn him?”
“We must leave that to Him,” sobbed Mrs. Wortle.
“Yes; but in thinking of our souls we must reflect a little as to what we believe to be probable. He, you say, has sinned—is sinning still in calling me his wife. Am I not to believe that if he were called to his long account he would stand there pure and bright, in glorious garments—one fit for heaven, because he has loved others better than he has loved himself, because he has done to others as he might have wished that they should do to him? I do believe it! Believe! I know it. And if so, what am I to think of his sin, or of my own? Not to obey him, not to love him, not to do in everything as he counsels me—that, to me, would be sin. To the best of my conscience he is my husband and my master. I will not go into the rooms of such as you, Mrs. Wortle, good and kind as you are; but it is not because I do not think myself fit. It is because I will not injure you in the estimation of those who do not know what is fit and what is unfit. I am not ashamed of myself. I owe it to him to blush for nothing that he has caused me to do. I have but two judges—the Lord in heaven, and he, my husband, upon earth.”
“Nobody has condemned you here.”
“Yes;—they have condemned me. But I am not angry at that. You do not think, Mrs. Wortle, that I can be angry with you—so kind as you have been, so generous, so forgiving;—the more kind because you think that we are determined, headstrong sinners? Oh no! It is natural that you should think so—but I think differently. Circumstances have so placed me that they have made me unfit for your society. If I had no decent gown to wear, or shoes to my feet, I should be unfit also;—but not on that account disgraced in my own estimation. I comfort myself by thinking that I cannot be altogether bad when a man such as he has loved me and does love me.”
The two women, when they parted on that morning, kissed each other, which they had not done before; and Mrs. Wortle had been made to doubt whether, after all, the sin had been so very sinful. She did endeavour to ask herself whether she would not have done the same in the same circumstances. The woman, she thought, must have been right to have married the man whom she loved, when she heard that that first horrid husband was dead. There could, at any rate, have been no sin in that. And then, what ought she to have done when the dead man—dead as he was supposed to have been—burst into her room? Mrs. Wortle—who found it indeed extremely difficult to imagine herself to be in such a position—did at last acknowledge that, in such circumstances, she certainly would have done whatever Dr. Wortle had told her. She could not bring it nearer to herself than that. She could not suggest to herself two men as her own husbands. She could not imagine that the Doctor had been either the bad husband, who had unexpectedly come to life—or the good husband, who would not, in truth, be her husband at all; but she did determine, in her own mind, that, however all that might have been, she would clearly have done whatever the Doctor told her. She would have sworn to obey him, even though, when swearing, she should not have really married him. It was terrible to think of—so terrible that she could not quite think of it; but in struggling to think of it her heart was softened towards this other woman. After that day she never spoke further of the woman’s sin.
Of course she told it all to the Doctor—not indeed explaining the working of her own mind as to that suggestion that he should have been, in his first condition, a very bad man, and have been reported dead, and have come again, in a second shape, as a good man. She kept that to herself. But she did endeavour to describe the effect upon herself of the description the woman had given her of her own conduct.
“I don’t quite know how she could have done otherwise,” said Mrs. Wortle.
“Nor I either; I have always said so.”
“It would have been so very hard to go away, when he told her not.”
“It would have been very hard to go away,” said the Doctor, “if he had told her to do so. Where was she to go? What was she to do? They had been brought together by circumstances, in such a manner that it was, so to say, impossible that they should part. It is not often that one comes across events like these, so altogether out of the ordinary course that the common rules of life
