Thus round and round on one pivot Julia's mind circled, sometimes for hours together, as she lay recovering.
But Julia would not breathe a word of all this to any human being. She had no notion of betraying an iota of her husband's confidence. What she had to say would be said to himself, not to Mrs. Ogilvie or Mr. Fitzalan, least of all to Francesca.
"How soon are we to be allowed to see one another?" she often asked, and Mrs. Ogilvie always answered, "Before long, I hope." Julia knew that Harvey might be expected to come to her before she would be allowed to go to him. She did not know that he already had leave, if he could or would arouse himself to make the effort.
Somehow Harvey seemed very inert, very averse to the said effort. He was so affectionate a husband, so full of solicitude about Julia's state, that those around were puzzled. It would have seemed to them more natural if he had been in a hurry to go to Julia before permission was given, than that he should fail to use the permission when it came. His reluctance was ascribed purely to physical weakness, still it was looked upon as odd.
Nobody knew what had passed between him and Julia just before the accident. Harvey forgot it himself for a short time, but after a few days the whole came back vividly.
Came back, yet with a difference. He was not disposed now to view matters precisely as he had viewed them from the standpoint of immediate danger to life. It is one thing to be willing to give up twenty thousand pounds or so, if one does not expect to have any further use for the money. It is quite another thing to give up the same, if one expects to feel the loss permanently through thirty or forty or more years of earthly existence.
Somehow, too, that old simple question of right and wrong is apt to assume new aspects when looked upon from the bank of a certain dark river, into which one may have immediately to plunge. Right is unequivocal right, and wrong is unequivocal wrong, seen thus. But when a man leaves the said river behind, and gets back into the foggy atmosphere of common life, right and wrong sometimes assume very misty shapes, and so many matters of will and inclination are involved that the question loses a good deal of its simplicity. The question is of course the same, and the answer must be the same, but the mode of viewing it is different.
Not that approaching death necessarily makes a coward of a man, but it clears his eyesight. We are all much given to thinking that life will last indefinitely, and that what is crooked will somehow manage to get straight before the end. Many a deed is done in broad earthly daylight, quite placidly and with scarcely a whisper from conscience, which would not pass muster for an instant if the doer stood face to face with the last enemy.
This was Harvey's experience. As Prince and Emperor rushed madly down the hill, Harvey had very clear views indeed of right and wrong in connection with a certain vexed point. There was no hesitation at all in his mind just then as to what might or might not be Hermione's claims upon himself. The legal aspect of the matter slipped out of his thoughts altogether, as not worth consideration. The great moral question of right and wrong overshadowed all else.
But now Harvey was back in the fogs again. He remembered what he had felt, and he told himself that it was absurd—extravagant—mere over-excitement, and so on.