2
It was the harder in that for a little while he seemed to be left absolutely alone. The room was dark save for the leaping light of the fire in the deep stone fireplace, and as he saw Margaret standing there waiting for him, desperately courageous, he only knew that he loved her so badly that, for a little while, he could only stand there staring at her, twisting his hands together, speechless.
"Well," at last she said. "Come and sit down and tell me all about it." But her voice trembled a little and her eyes were wide, frightened, begging him not to hurt her.
He sat down near her, before the fire, and she instinctively, as though she knew that this was a very tremendous matter, stood away from him, her hands clasped together against her black dress.
Suddenly now, before he spoke, he realized what it would mean to him if she could not forgive what he had done. He had imagined it once before—the slow withdrawal of her eyes, the gradual tightening of the lips, the little instinctive movement away from him.
If he must go out into the world, having lost her, he thought that he could never endure, God or no God, the long dreary years in front of him.
At last he was brave: "Margaret—at first I want you to know that I love you with all my heart and soul and body; that nothing that can ever happen to me can ever alter that love—that I am yours, entirely, always. And then I want you to know that I am not worthy to love you, that I ought never to have asked you to love me, that I ought to have gone away the first time that I saw you."
She made a little loving, protecting movement towards him with her hands and then let them drop against her dress again.
"I ought never to have loved you—because—only a day or two before I met you—I had killed Carfax, Rupert's friend."
The words as they fell seemed to him like the screams that iron bolts give as a gate is barred.
He whispered slowly the words again: "I killed Carfax"—and then he covered his eyes with his hands so that he might not see her face.
The silence seemed eternal—and she had made no movement. To fill that silence he went on desperately—
"I had always hated him—there were many reasons—and one day we met in Sannet Wood, quarrelled, and I hit him. The blow killed him. I don't think I meant to kill him, but I wasn't sorry afterwards—I have never felt remorse for that. There have been other things. . . .
"Soon afterwards I met you—I loved you at once—you know that I did—and I could not tell you. Oh! I tried—I struggled, pretty poor struggling—but I could not. I thought that it was all over, that he was dead and nobody knew. But God was wiser than that—Rupert knew. He suspected and then he grew more sure, and at last he was quite certain. Yesterday, after the football match, I told him and I promised him that I would tell you . . . and I have told you."
Silence again—and then suddenly there was movement, and there were arms about him and a voice in his ear—"Poor, poor Olva . . . dear Olva . . . how terrible it must have been!"
He could only then catch her and hold her, and furiously press her against him. "Oh, my dear, my dear—you don't mind!"
They stayed together, like that, for a long time.
He could not think clearly, but in the dim recesses of his mind he saw that they had all—Mrs. Craven, Margaret, Rupert—taken it in the same kind of way. Could it be that Margaret and Rupert living, although unconsciously, in the shadow all their lives of just this crime, breathing the air of it, and breathing it too with the other air of love and affection—that they had thus, all unknowing, been quietly prepared?
Or had they, each of them, their especial reason for excusing it? Mrs. Craven from her great knowledge, Rupert from his great weariness, Margaret from her great love?
At last Margaret got up and sat down in a chair away from him.
"Olva dear, you ought to have told me. If we had married and you had not told me—-"
"I was so terribly afraid of losing you."
"But it gives me now," her voice was almost triumphant, "something to share with you, something to help you in, something to fight with you. Now I can show you how much I love you.
"How could you have supposed that I would mind? Do you think that a woman, if she loves a man, cares for anything that he may do? If you had killed a hundred men in Sannet Wood I would have helped you to bury them. The thing that a woman demands most of love is that she may prove it. I know that murder has a dreadful sound—but to meet your enemy face to face, to strike him down because you hated him—" Her voice rose, her eyes flashed—she raised her arms—"You must pay for it, Olva—but we shall pay together."
He knew now, as he watched her, that he had a harder thing to do than he had believed possible.
"No," he said, and his eyes could not face hers, "we can't pay together—I must go alone."
She laughed a little. "How can you go alone if we are together?"
"We shall not be together. I go away, alone, to-morrow."
He knew that her eyes were then, very slowly, searching his face. She said, gently, after a moment's pause, "Tell me, Olva, what you mean. Of course we are going together."
"Oh, it is so hard for me!" He was fighting now as he had never fought. Why not, even at this last moment, in spite of yesterday, defy God and stay with her and keep her? In that moment of hesitation he suffered so that the sweat came to his forehead and his eyes were filled with pain and then were suddenly tired and dull.
But he came out, and seemed now to stand above the room and look down on his body and her body and to be filled with a great pity for them both.
"Margaret dear, it's very hard for me to tell you. Will you be patient with me and let me put things as clearly as I can—as I see them?"
She burst out, "Olva, you mustn't leave me, I—-" Then she used all her strength to bring control. Very quietly she ended—"Yes, Olva, tell me everything."
"It is so difficult because it is about God, and we all of us feel, and rightly I expect, that it is priggish to talk about God at all. And then I don't know whether I can give you everything as it happened because it was all so unsubstantial and at the end of it any one might say 'But this is nothing—nothing at all. You've been hysterical, nervous—that's the meaning of it. You've nothing to show.' And yet if all the world were to say that to me I should still have no doubt. I know, as I know that we are sitting here, as I know that I love you, that what I say is true."
She brought her chair close to him and then put her band in his and waited.
"After I had killed Carfax—after his body had fallen and the wood was very silent, I was suddenly conscious of God. I can't explain that better. I can only say that I knew that some one had watched me, I knew that the world would never be the same place again because some one had watched me, and I knew that it was not because I had done wrong, but because I had put myself into a new set of conditions that life would be different now. I knew these things, and I went back to College.
"I had never thought about God before, never at all. I had been entirely heathen. Now I was sure of His existence in the way that one is sure of wood when one touches it or water when one drinks it.
"But I did not know at all what kind of God He was. I went to a Revival meeting, but He was not there. He was not in the College Chapel. He was not in any forms or ceremonies that I could discover. He might choose to appear to other men in those different ways but not to me. Then a fellow, Lawrence, told me about some old worship—-Druids and their altars—but He was not there. And all those days I was increasingly conscious that there was some one who would not let me alone. It fastened itself in my mind gradually as a Pursuit, and it seemed to me too that, as the days passed, I began slowly to understand the nature of the Pursuer—that He was kind and tender but also relentless, remorseless. I was frightened. I flung myself into College things—games and every kind of noise because I was so afraid of silence. And all the time some one urged me to obedience. That was all that He demanded, that I should be passive and obey His orders. I would have given in, I think, very soon, but I met you."
Her hand tightened in his and then, because he felt that her body was trembling, he put his arm round her and held her.
"I knew then when I loved you that I was being urged, by this God, to confess everything to you. I became frightened; I should have trusted you, but it was so great a risk. You were all that I had and if I lost you life would have gone too. Those aren't mere words. . . . I struggled, I tried every way of escape. And then everything betrayed me. Rupert began to suspect, then to be sure. Whether I flung myself into everything or hid in my room it was the same—God came closer and closer. It was a perfectly real experience and I could see Him as a great Shadow—not unkind, loving me, but relentless. Then the day came that I proposed to you and I fainted. I knew then that I was not to be allowed so easy a happiness. Still I struggled, but now God seemed to have shut off all the real world and only left me the unreal one—and I began to be afraid that I was going mad."
She suddenly bent down and kissed him; she stayed then, until he had finished, with her head buried in his coat.
"It wasn't any good—I knew all the time that it could only end one way.
"Everything betrayed me, every one left me. I thought every moment that Rupert would tell me. Then, one night when I was hardly sane, I told a man, Bunning—a queer odd creature who was the last kind of person to be told. He, in a fit of mad self-sacrifice, told Rupert that he'd killed Carfax, and then of course it was all over.
"I suddenly yielded. It was as though God caught me and held me. I saw Him, I heard Rim—yesterday—in the middle of the football. I know that it was so. After that there could be only one thing—Obedience. I knew that I must tell you. I have told you. I know, too, that I must go out into the world, alone, and work out my duty . . . and then, oh! then, I will come back."
When he had finished, on his shoulder he seemed to feel once more a hand gently resting.
At last she raised her head, and clutching his hand as though she would never let it go, spoke:—
"Olva, Olva, I don't understand. I don't think I believe in any God. And, dear, see—it is all so natural. Thinking about what you had done, thinking of it all alone, preyed on your nerves. Because Rupert suspected you made it worse. You imagined things—everything. That is all—Olva, really that is all."
"Margaret, don't make it harder for both of us. I must go. There is no question. I don't suppose that any one can see any one else's spiritual experiences—one must be alone in that. Margaret dear, if I stayed with you now—if we married—the Pursuit would begin again. God would hold me at last—and then one day you would find that I had gone away—I would have been driven—there would be terror for both of us then."
She slipped on to her knees and caught his hands.
"This is all unreal—utterly unreal. But our love for each other, that is the only thing that can matter for either of us. You have lived in your thoughts these weeks, imagined things, but think of what you do if you leave me. You are all I have—you have become my world—I can't live, I can't live, Olva, without you."
"I must go. I must find what God is."
"But listen, dear. You come to me to confess something. You find that what you have done matters nothing to me. You say that you love me more than ever, and, in the same moment, that you are going to leave me. Is it fair to me? You give no reason. You do not know where you are going or what you intend to do. You can give no definite explanation."
"There is no explanation except that by what I did in Sannet Wood that afternoon I put myself out of touch with human society until I had done something for human society. God has been telling me for many days that I owe a debt. I have tried to avoid paying that debt. I tried to escape Him because I knew that he demanded that I must pay my debt before I could come to you. I see this as clearly as I saw yesterday the high white clouds above the football field. God now is as real to me as you are. It is as though for the rest of my life I must live in a house with two persons. We cannot all live together until certain conditions are granted. I go to make those conditions possible. Because I have broken the law I am an outlaw. I am impelled to win my way back to citizenship again. God will show me."
"But this is air—all nerves. God is nothing. God does not exist."
"God does exist. I must work out His order and then I will come back to you."
She began to be frightened. She caught his coat in her hands, and desperately pleaded. Then she saw his white set face, and the way that his hands gripped the chair, and it was as though she had suddenly found herself alone in the room.
"Olva, don't leave me, don't leave me, Olva. I can't live without you. I don't care what you've done. I'll bear everything with you. I'll come away with you. I'll do anything if only you will let me be with you."
"No, I must go alone."
"But it can't matter—it can't matter. I'm so unimportant. You shall do what you feel is your duty—only let me be there."
"No, I must go alone."
She began to cry, bitter, miserable, sobbing, sitting on the floor, away from him. Her crying was the only sound in the room.
He bent and touched her—"Margaret dear—you make it so hard."
At last, in that strange beautiful way that she had, control seemed suddenly to come to her; she stood up and looked as though she had, in that brief moment, lived a thousand years of sorrow.
"You will come back?"
"I swear that I will come back to you."
"I—I—will—wait for you."
There, in the dim, unreal room, as they had stood once before, now, standing, they were wrapt together. They were very young to feel such depths of tragedy, to touch such heights of beauty. They were a long time there together.
"Margaret darling, you know that I will come back."
"I know that you will come back."
"Olva!"
"Margaret!"
He left her.
Then, standing with outstretched arms, alone there, she who had but now denied the Pursuer, cried to the dark room—
"God, God—send him back to me!"
Some one promised her.