“You know I do,” he cried. “It would be wicked to tell him!”
She stood conning him gravely a little. There had been no thought of tale-bearing a minute ago in her liberal heart. But now, for the first time, it began to consider that policy, in the light of a possible retaliation on a suspected rival. The “demoralising effect” on him, her Cherry, quotha! What, indeed, if she were to try that effect, with the result that it evoked jealousy there, anger, indignation, a declaration of his exclusive and never-foregone property in her, his Molly’s, person? It might serve for the very means to dissipate this sad veil of continence which had come to fall between them, and which, only out of the inherent purity of her love, she had agreed to respect. For spiritual relationships, it must be admitted, were water-gruel to this poor Mollinda, and tinctured with wormwood at that, when, as in the present case, they carried suspicions of the disinterestedness of the party suggesting them.
Should she go and tell him in truth? No, it wasn’t fair to this other fellow, for all the exhibition he had made of himself. But her conscious prettiness was something to blame, no doubt, in that matter; and, after all, he had been guilty of no disloyalty to his friend. Her ethics of the heart were Nature’s ethics, founded on a frank recognition of the logic of feminine lures, and the reasonableness of wanting to pluck inviting fruit when one was thirsty. A parched man could not be expected to drink water when wine was going.
Nevertheless, he deserved a measure of punishment, less for his fault than for his mean attempt to escape its consequences. A little suspense, she decided, just a moderate spell on the rack, would do him no harm—might even prove salutary.
“I’ll promise naught,” she said. “It would just amount to my allowing a secret between us; and you aren’t the man for my confidence—no, nor for any part of me. Besides, if you didn’t mean nothing, why should you be afraid? I’ll do as I think fit, and speak or hold as it suits me.”
She whisked away, leaving the adorable fragrance of a dream unfulfilled to clinch the poor creature’s damnation. She did not know, could not know, how thorough that was at this last. She would have been horrified, kind heart, to realise how her balmy breath had blown a smouldering fire into devouring flame; how it had sentenced this victim of “little-ease” to be transferred to the pillory. For indeed in that sorry yoke did she leave Louis-Marie exposed to himself, and, as he thought, to all the world.
There is a form of morbid self-consciousness which is characterised by a perpetual turning inward of the patient’s moral eye. The man subject to it sees—especially during the wakeful hours of the night—his own past deeds and words imbued with a meaning of which they had appeared quite innocent when acted or spoken. He writhes in the memory of mistakes of self-commission or omission, which no one other than himself, probably, is troubling to recall, or is even capable of recalling. What an ass somebody must have thought him under such and such circumstances, is the reflection most distressingly constant to his mind. Nevertheless, while eternally holding himself the irreclaimable fool of untactfulness, he remains to his own appreciation a thing of price, which he himself is for ever giving away for nothing Modesty is no part of his equipment though he is so sensitively conscious of his own failings. He cannot detach himself from himself, in fact, or, even once in a way, realise comfortably his own insignificance in the serene philosophy of the Cosmos.
So far for his tortured memory of solecisms, real or imaginary, committed by himself. When it comes to the question with him of a genuine conscience-stricken introspection, his reason is in the last danger of overthrow.
Now, Louis-Marie’s was a temperament a little of this order. It was the temperament of a man at once thin-skinned and bigoted, righteous and passionate. It had all the conceit and the sensitiveness of conscious virtue. The fellow could never forget himself, in the abstract sense—believe that people were not incessantly thinking and talking of him. A morbid diathesis is the inevitable result of such self-centralisation. Acutely sentient, it will learn to inflame to the least thrust of criticism, and to brood eternally over the pointlessness of its own ripostes. Then, at last, when it comes to sin, as it is bound some time to do, it will take its lapses with a self-same seriousness as it took its merits. It is always, in its own vanity, a responsible example; people are always regarding it. Its attitude, as a consequence, will become a pose; but by now it is a fair rind hiding a rotting kernel. The devastating grub has entered, and it dare not reveal itself by expelling it. It hugs its disease in secrecy, hoping against hope for some interior process of healing. How can self-centredom heal itself? There comes a day when the last film cracks, and its emptiness stands exposed to the world.
Louis-Marie, abandoned to his reflections, thought that that day had arrived for him. His hollow pretence was on the point of being laid bare; he was to be made the subject of a universal contempt and execration. A moment’s temptation had revealed him to himself for the sham thing he was—would reveal him to Gaston—would reveal him, in the certain course of scandal, to Yolande. For ever more now he must be an outcast from social respectability. His life, for all that it was worth, was virtually at an end.