Great Possessions Part 40

"Dash it!" he cried, "this is rather too much."

He did not stop to think that Edmund could not have been so idiotic as to write that letter if he had known of the state of the case between him and Miss Dexter. It only seemed at the moment that it was another instance of cruelty and utter unfairness, part of the same treatment he was receiving, which expected a man to be a plaster saint with no thought for himself, no natural feelings, no sense of his own reputation! First of all he was to be buried, torn from his friends, from his work for souls, from the joy of the Good Shepherd seeking the lost sheep. He was to lose all he loved and for which he had given up his life, his career, his position, and, for the first time, he enumerated among his sacrifices the possession of Groombridge. Then he blushed for shame--also for the first time. How little _that_ had been, compared to what he had to do now! What had he to do now? And here the Little Master made his great mistake. He came out of the fog and shadow, he came into the light because he thought it was safe now.

What had Mark to do that was so much harder? To submit to authority and forgive its blunders. He hesitated for a moment; he almost thought it was that. Then came the light, and he saw the real crux. What he had to do was to forgive Molly Dexter. He was startled by the revelation, as men are startled who have been in love without knowing it. He had been nursing hatred and revenge without knowing it, for, until he had become bitter at the treatment of the authorities, he had felt no anger against Molly. She had simply been the patient who would scratch out the eyes of the surgeon. He was surprised into a quiet a.n.a.lysis of the discovery, and then his thoughts stood quite still. It was only necessary for a n.o.ble soul to _see_ such a temptation for him to _fight_ it. But he pa.s.sed back from that to the whole of the wrath and hurt feeling that he recognised too. He was angry with those in authority who expected him to behave like a saint; he had been angry vaguely with Sir Edmund Grosse, but more with circ.u.mstances that also demanded of him that he should behave like a saint and do the very worst thing for himself and confirm the calumny against him by acting as Molly's confidential friend! But he could not be equally angry at the same time with Miss Dexter, with his own authorities, with Edmund Grosse, and with circ.u.mstances. One injury alone might have been different, but taken together they suggested a plot and intention. Whose plot? Whose intention?

And the answer was thundered and yet whispered through his consciousness. Is was G.o.d's plot, G.o.d's Will, G.o.d's demand, that he should do the impossible and behave like a saint!

Mark had said easily enough in the first n.o.ble instinct of bearing his blow well: "We are G.o.d's slaves." But that first light had gradually been obscured. He had not felt then that the impossible was demanded of him. He had come to feel it, and to feel it without remembering that man's helplessness was G.o.d's opportunity. Had he forgotten, erased from the tablets of his mind and heart, all he had loved and trusted most?

Now all was terribly clear. Augustine, in a decadent, delicate age, had not minced matters, and had insisted that all hope must be placed in Him Who would not spare the scourge. "Oftentimes," he had cried, "does our Tamer bring forth His scourge too." Mark took down the old, worn book.

"In Him let us place our hope, and until we are tamed and tamed thoroughly--that is, are perfected--let us bear our Tamer.... Whereas, when thou art tamed, G.o.d reserveth for thee an inheritance which is G.o.d Himself.... For G.o.d will then be _all in all_; neither will there be any unhappiness to exercise us, but happiness alone to feed us.... What multiplicity of things soever thou seekest here, He alone will be Himself all these things to thee.

"Unto this hope is man tamed, and shall his Tamer then be deemed intolerable? Unto this hope is man tamed, and shall he murmur against his beneficient Tamer, if He chance to use the scourge?...

"Whether, therefore, Thou dealest softly with us that we be not wearied in the way, or chastisest us that we wander not from the way, _Thou art become our refuge, O Lord_."

As Mark read, the pain of too great light was softened to him. What had been hard, white light, glowed more rosy until it flushed his horizon with full glory.

It wanted a small s.p.a.ce in time, but a mighty change in the spirit, before Mark read Edmund's letter with a keen wish to enter into its full meaning, and judge it wisely. Having come to himself, he was, as ever, ready to give that self away. He was full of a strange energy; he smiled to feel that the strokes of the lash were unfelt, while consciousness was lost in love. This was G.o.d's anaesthetic. But it thrilled the soul with vitality, and in no sense but the absence of pain did it suspend the faculties. He had no doubt, no hesitation, as to what he must do. He would go to Molly, he must see her at once, but not a word should pa.s.s his lips of what Edmund wanted him to say. Not a moment must be lost.

Who might not betray her danger and destroy her opportunity? Molly must be brought to do this thing of herself without any admixture of fear, without any aim or object but to sacrifice all for what was right. He yearned with utter simplicity that this might be her way out. Let her do it for herself. Let her do it of herself, thought Mark--not because she is afraid, not because her vast possessions appear the least insecure.

And the action would be far more n.o.ble just because, at the moment of renunciation, the world would, for the first time, suspect her guilt. To Mark it seemed now the crowning touch of mercy that the criminal should be allowed to drink deep of the chalice. "Her own affair"--that was what the dying mother had said of the unfortunate child to whom she offered so gross a temptation.

And in the depths of his mind there was the conviction that it was a particular truth as to this individual soul, that not only would the heroic be the only antagonist to the base, but that some such moral revolution alone could be the beginning of cleansing of what had become foul, and the driving out of the noxious and the vile.

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII

NO SHADOW OF A CLOUD

It was in the evening, and Edmund was waiting in Rose's drawing-room until she should come back from a meeting of one of her charitable committees.

He was walking up and down the room with a face at once very grave and very alert. Even his carriage during the last few weeks had seemed to Rose to have gained in firmness and dignity, and perhaps she was right.

Nor had she failed to notice that one or two small, straight pieces of grey hair could now be seen near the temples. He looked a little older, a little more brisk, a little more firm, and distinctly more cheerful since his reverses. It is no paradox to speak of cheerfulness in sorrow, or to say that the whole nature may be happier in grief than in the days of apparent pleasure. It is not only in those who have acquired deep religious peace that this may be true, for even in gaining energy and a balance in natural action, there may be happiness amidst pain.

Rose came in without seeing that anyone was in the room, and gave a start when she saw the tall figure by the window. The evening light showed him a little grey, a little worn in appearance, a little more openly kindly in the dark eyes. Something that she had fancied dim and clouded lately--only once or twice, not always--now shone in his face with its full brightness.

"Has anything happened, Edmund? Have you come to tell me anything?"

He came across the room to her and took her hand in silence, and then said:

"You look tired. Have you had tea?"

"Oh, never mind tea," she answered. "Do tell me! Seriously, something has happened?"

"It is nothing of any consequence--nothing that need disturb you in the least. It is only about my own stupid affairs, and, on the whole, it is very good news. I have just come from the Foreign Office, and they have told me there that I am to have that job in India, and that the sooner I am ready to start the better."

As he spoke he turned from her with a sudden, quick hurt in his heart.

It was, after all, only of great importance to himself. He knew she would be kindly glad that he had got the post he wanted. Had she not always urged him to some real work? Had she not pressed him again and again during the last four years, consciously and unconsciously, to bring out all his talents and to do a man's work in a man's way? So she would be simply glad, and she would wave him "G.o.d speed," and would, no doubt, pray for him at those innumerable services she attended, and write to him long, gentle, feminine letters full of details about all sorts of matters, good or indifferent, and she would ask about his health and press him to take care of himself and tell him of any word that was spoken kindly of him here in England. And she would somehow manage to know, or think she knew, that he was doing great things in the East. And so, no doubt, in the two years in which he was away there would be no apparent break in this very dear intimacy. But what, in reality, would he know of her inmost feelings, of her loneliness, of her sufferings, of any repentance that might come to her, any softening towards himself? He seemed to see all of the two years that were to come in a flash as he stood silent on one side of the neglected tea-table, and Rose stood silent, turning away from him on the other.

When he raised his eyes, he almost felt a surprise that the figure, a little turned away from him, was not dressed in a plain, white frock, and that the shadows and the flickering sunlight making its way through the mulberry leaves were not still upon her; for that was how, through life and in eternity, Rose would be present in the mind of her lover.

Time had gone; it seemed now as nothing. Whatever changes had come between, he felt as if he saw in the averted face that same expression of sorrowful denial and gentle resistance that had baffled him now for over twelve years. It was still that his soul asked something of this other purer, gentler, more unworldly, more loving soul, which she, with all her beneficence would not give him. He did no think of the impracticability of any question of marriage; he did not think in any definite sense of their relations as man and woman. At other times he had known so frequently just the overpowering wish for the possession of the woman he loved best, but now she stood to him as the history of his moral existence here below, and he felt as if, in missing her, he should miss the object and crown of his life.

At last silence became intolerable. He moved as though he wanted to speak and could not, and then he said huskily, almost gruffly:

"It is not 'good-bye' to-day, of course," and then he laughed at the feebleness of his own words.

Rose turned to him at that, and he was not really surprised to see that the tears were flowing rapidly over her cheeks--tears so large that they splashed like big raindrops on the white hands which were clasped as they hung before her. But that made it no easier. He thought very little of those tears; he felt even a little bitter at their apparent bitterness. He hardened at the sight of those tears; they made him feel that he could leave her with more dignity, more firmness in his own mind, than he had ever thought would be possible.

"Vous pleurez et vous etes roi?" He hardly knew that he had muttered the words as he so often muttered a quotation to himself. But Rose did not hear them. She was too preoccupied with her own thoughts and feelings to notice him closely. Ah! if she had but known before what it would be to lose him! She was horrified as she felt her self-control failing her, and an enormous agony entering into possession of all her faculties. She was so startled, so amazed at this revelation of herself. If she had felt less, she would have thought more for him. She did not think for a moment what that silent standing by her side meant for him. She knew at last the selfishness of pa.s.sion. She wanted him as she had never wanted anyone or anything before. She could only think of the craving of her own heart, the extraordinary trouble that possessed it. Those who have had a pa.s.sing acquaintance with love, those who have sown brief pa.s.sages of love thoughts over their early youth, can form no notion of what that first surrender meant to Rose. "Too late!" cried the tyrant love, the only tyrant that can carry conviction by its mere fiat to the innermost recesses of a nature. "Too late!--it might have been, but not now; it is all your own doing; you made him suffer once; you are the only one to suffer now. You are crying now the easy tears of a child, but there are years and years before you when the tears will not come, call for them as you may; they cannot go on coming from a broken heart.

They flow away out of the fissures, and then the dryness and barrenness of daily misery will not let them come again."

"He never cared as I do," thought Rose; "he does not know what it is!"

She called her persecutor "it"; she shrank from its name even now with an unutterable embarra.s.sment. When she did turn to Edmund it was more as if to confide to him what she was suffering from someone else; it was so habitual to her to turn to him. What was the use? what was the use? How could she use him against himself? No, no; she must, she must control herself. She must not tell him; she must let him go quite quietly now; she must make no appeal to the past; he was too generous--she did not want his generosity. She put her hands to her forehead and pushed the hair backwards.

"I'm not well, I think," she said; "the room at the meeting was stuffy.

I--I didn't quite understand what you said--I'm glad."

She sank on to a chair, and then got up again.

"I'm glad you've got what you wanted, but I'm startled--no, I mean I'm not quite well. I don't think I can talk to-day--I don't understand--I----"

She stood almost with her back to him then.

He was so amazed at her words that he could not speak at all. This was not sweetness, kindness, pity; this was something else, something different; it was almost a shock!

"I am so silly," she said, with a most absurd attempt at a natural voice, "I think I must----" Her figure swayed a little.

Edmund watched her with utter amazement. All his knowledge of women was at fault, and that child in the white frock--where was she? Where was that sense of his soul's history and its failure, its mystic tragedy, just now? Gone, quite gone, for he knew now that that long tragedy was ended. But Rose did not know it.

He moved, half consciously, a few feet towards the door.

"Rose," he said, in a very low voice, "if it has come at last, don't deny it! I have waited patiently, G.o.d knows! but I don't want it now unless it is true. For Heaven's sake do nothing in mere pity!"

"But it has come, Edmund; it has come!" she interrupted him, so quickly that he had barely time to reach her before she came to him.

And yet it had been many years in coming--so many years that he could hardly believe it now; could hardly believe that the white hands he had watched so often trembled with delight as they caressed him; could hardly believe that the fair face was radiant with joy when he, Edmund, ventured to kiss her; could hardly believe that it was of her own wish and will that she leant against him now!

"I ought not to have said it was the stuffy room, ought I?"

It was the sweetest, youngest laugh she had ever given. Then she looked up at the ceiling where the sun flickered a little.

"Edmund, it is better than if I had known under the mulberry tree. Tell me you forgive me all I have done wrong. I could not," she gasped a little, "have loved you then as I do now, because I had known no sorrow then."

And Edmund told her that she was forgiven. But one sin she confessed gave him, I fear, unmixed delight; she was so dreadfully afraid that she had lately been a little jealous!