Red Pottage Part 62

"I am glad you have thrown him over," said the Bishop, slowly, "for you never loved him."

"I deceived myself in that case," said Rachel, bitterly. "My only fear was that I loved him too much."

The Bishop's face had become fixed and stern.

"Listen to me, Rachel," he said. "You fell desperately in love with an inferior man. He is charming, refined, well-bred, and with a picturesque mind, but that is all. He is inferior. He is by nature shallow and hard (the two generally go together), without moral backbone, the kind of man who never faces a difficulty, who always flinches when it comes to the point, the stuff out of which liars and cowards are made. His one redeeming quality is his love for you. I have seen men in love before. I have never seen a man care more for a woman than he cares for you. His love for you has taken entire possession of him, and by it he will sink or swim."

The Bishop paused. Rachel's face worked.

"He deceived you," said the Bishop, "not because he wished to deceive you, but because he was in a horrible position, and because his first impulse of love was to keep you at any price. But his love for you was raising him even while he deceived you. Did he spend sleepless nights because for months he vilely deceived Lord Newhaven? No. Rect.i.tude was not in him. His conscience was not awake. But I tell you, Rachel, he has suffered like a man on the rack from deceiving you. I knew by his face as soon as I saw him that he was undergoing some great mental strain. I did not understand it, but I do now."

Rachel's mind, always slow, moved, stumbled to its bleeding feet.

"It was remorse," she said, turning her face away.

"It was not remorse. It was repentance. Remorse is bitter. Repentance is humble. His love for you has led him to it. Not your love for him, Rachel, which breaks down at the critical moment; his love for you which has brought him for the first time to the perception of the higher life, to the need of G.o.d's forgiveness, which I know from things he has said, has made him long to lead a better life, one worthier of you."

"Don't," said Rachel. "I can't bear it."

The Bishop rose, and stood facing her.

"And at last," he went on--"at last, in a moment, when you showed your full trust and confidence in him, he shook off for an instant the clogs of the nature which he brought into the world, and rose to what he had never been before--your equal. And his love transcended the lies that love itself on its lower plane had prompted. He reached the place where he could no longer lie to you. And then, though his whole future happiness depended on one more lie, he spoke the truth."

Rachel put out her hand as if to ward off what was coming.

"And how did you meet him the first time he spoke the truth to you?"

continued the Bishop, inexorably. "You say you loved him, and yet--you spurned him from you, you thrust him down into h.e.l.l. You stooped to him in the beginning. He was nothing until your fancied love fell upon him.

And then you break him. It is women like you who do more harm in the world than the bad ones. The harm that poor fool Lady Newhaven did him is as nothing compared to the harm you have done him. You were his G.o.d, and you have deserted him. And you say you loved him. May G.o.d preserve men from the love of women if that is all that a good woman's love is capable of."

"I can do nothing," said Rachel, hoa.r.s.ely.

"Do nothing!" said the Bishop, fiercely. "You can do nothing when you are responsible for a man's soul G.o.d will require his soul at your hands. Scarlett gave it into your keeping, and you took it. You had no business to take it if you meant to throw it away. And now you say you can do nothing!"

"What can I do?" said Rachel, faintly.

"Forgive him."

"Forgiveness won't help him. The only forgiveness he would care for is to marry me."

"Of course. It is the only way you can forgive him."

Rachel turned away. Her stubborn, quivering face showed a frightful conflict.

The Bishop watched her.

"My child," he said, gently, "we all say we follow Christ, but most of us only follow him and his cross--part of the way. When we are told that our Lord bore our sins, and was wounded for our transgressions, I suppose that meant that He felt as if they were His own in His great love for us. But when you shrink from bearing your fellow-creature's transgressions, it shows that your love is small."

Rachel was silent.

"If you really love him you will forgive him."

Rachel clinched and unclinched her hands.

"You are appealing to a n.o.bility and goodness which are not in me," she said, stubbornly.

"I appeal to nothing but your love. If you really love him you will forgive him."

"He has broken my heart."

"I thought that was it. It is yourself you are thinking of. But what is he suffering at this moment? You do not know or care. Where is he now, that poor man who loves you? Rachel, if you had ever known despair, you would not thrust a fellow creature down into it."

"I have known it," said Rachel, hoa.r.s.ely.

"Were not you deserted once? You were deserted to very little purpose, if after that you can desert another. Go back in your mind, and--remember. Where you stood once he stands now. You and his sin have put him there. You and his sin have tied him to his stake. Will you range yourself for ever on the side of his sin? Will you stand by and see him perish?"

Silence; like the silence round a death-bed.

"He is in a great strait. Only love can save him."

Rachel flung out her arms with an inarticulate cry.

"I will forgive him," she said. "I will forgive him."

CHAPTER LII

"Les ames dont j'aurai besoin, Et les etoiles sont trop loin; Je mourral dans un coin."

How Hugh shook off Lady Newhaven when she followed him out of the Palace he did not know. There had been some difficulty. She had spoken to him, had urged something upon him. But he had got rid of her somehow, and had found himself sitting in his bedroom at the Southminster Hotel. Anything to be alone! He had felt that was the one thing in life to attain. But now that he was alone, solitude suddenly took monstrous and hideous proportions, and became a horror to flee from. He could not bear the face of a fellow-creature. He could not bear this ghoul of solitude.

There was no room for him between these great millstones. They pressed upon him till he felt they were crushing him to death between them. In vain he endeavored to compose himself, to recollect himself. But exhaustion gradually did for him what he could not do for himself.

Rachel had thrown him over. He had always known she would, and--she had.

They were to have been married in a few weeks; three weeks and one day.

He marked a day off every morning when he waked. He had thought of her as his wife till the thought had become part of himself. Its roots were in his inmost being. He tore it out now, and looked at it apart from himself, as a man bleeding and shuddering looks upon a dismembered limb.

The sweat broke from Hugh's forehead. The waiting and daily parting had seemed unbearable, that short waiting of a few weeks. Now she would never be his. That long, ever-growing hunger of the heart would never be appeased. She had taken herself away, taking away with her her dear hands and her faithful eyes and the low voice, the very sound of which brought comfort and peace. They were his hands and eyes. She had given them to him. And now she had wrenched them away again, those faithful eyes had seared him with their scorn, those white hands, against which he had leaned his forehead, had thrust him violently from her. He could not live without her. This was death, to be parted from her.

"I can't, Rachel, I can't," said Hugh, over and over again. What was any lesser death, compared to this, compared to her contempt?

She would never come back. She despised him. She would never love him any more. He had told her that it must be a dream that she could love him, and that he should wake. And she had said it was all quite true.

How sweetly she had said it. But it was a dream, after all, and he _had_ waked--in torment. Life as long as he lived would be like this moment.

"I will not bear it," he said, suddenly, with the frantic instinct of escape which makes a man climb out of a burning house over a window-ledge. Far down is the pavement, quiet, impa.s.sive, deadly. But behind is the blast of the furnace. Panic staggers between the two, and--jumps.