"Don't do that," said Lawrence starting: "why do you do that?"
"But I shall love to see you wear it," said Isabel. "It's the sign that you've forgiven them both."
"Have I?"
"Of course you have. You loved them too much not to forgive."
"It is true. But I hate myself for it," said Lawrence. "I hate your etiolated Christian ethics. I don't believe in the forgiveness of sins. The complaisant husband, O God! If I'd had the spirit of a man, I should have shot Arthur the night—that night—. . . .
"But you loved him," said Isabel, "and your wife too. You felt revenge and hate and passion, but love was stronger: and love is nobler than hate. They betrayed you, but you never betrayed them. It wasn't unmanly of you, it was defeat and dishonour for them, not for you, when Rendell, after that great wrong he had done you, when you tried to make it easy for him to go."
"May I—?" said Lawrence.
He leaned his face down on her open palms, and she felt the tears that she could not see. He could not control them, and indeed after the first racking agony, when he felt as though his will were being torn out of him by the roots, he made no effort to control them, releasing Isabel and dropping at full length upon the turf. Nothing else, no torment of his own thoughts, not Rendell's last pangs nor his wife's beauty young again in death had ever made Hyde weep: if Rendell had died hard, Lawrence had lived equally hard, locking up his frightful trouble in his own breast, escaping from it when he could, cursing it and fighting against it when it threatened to overpower him. But now he surrendered to it and acknowledged to himself that it had broken his life. And he felt no shame, not one iota, nothing but a profound soulagement: the proud reticent man, too vain to shed tears in his own room alone, wept voluntarily before Isabel, uncovering for her pity the wounds not only of grief but of rage and humiliation.
Such an outbreak would have been impossible in a man of pure English blood, and in a pure Oriental it would have manifested itself differently, but Isabel had truly said of Hyde that his temperament was not homogeneous: the mixed strain in him betrayed him into strange incongruities of strength and weakness. Isabel shut her eyes to incongruity. She gave him without stint the pitying gentleness he thirsted for. She refused now to contrast him with her brother. Certainly Val's judgment would have been cutting and curt. But just? Hardly. By instinct Isabel felt that her brother's clear, sane, English mind had not all the factors necessary for judging this collapse.
Her imagination was at work in the shadow: "'the night—that night. . . ." How do men live through such hours? She saw Lizzie as a chocolate-box beauty, but redeemed from hebetude by her robust youth: able to attract Hyde by his love of luxury and to hold him by main force: uneducated, coarse, and cruel, but not weak. What a disastrous marriage! doomed from the outset, even if no Rendell had come on the scene. Isabel dismissed Rendell rather scornfully: in that night at Myrtle Villa she felt pretty sure that the duel had been fought out between husband and wife: the very staging of it, picturesque for Lizzie Hyde and tragic for her husband, must for the entrapped lover have taken a frame of ignominious farce. A gleam shot through Isabel's eyes-as she imagined Rendell trying to face Hyde, and Hyde sparing him and sending him away untouched. No, no! as between the two men, the honours lay with Hyde.