She could not tell him, then; and, so, what other course? No mid-way steering for this whole-hearted heroine—no hints, no tell-tale sighs, no tearful looks askance to haunt him with half-truths; no lagging partner snivelling unspoken resentment of her burden. She’d bear it all and bravely, the weight, the heat and pressure of the day, and cheer him, smiling, on to self-redemption. That be her mission—by ways of healing grace to guide him to that summit he would never attain alone. Man’s responsibility might be to the civil laws; but woman’s was to love. For love he’d saved her; love should save him. The rest was for his confessor.
Conceive this poor soul, then, with her monstrous self-imposed burden—never to be put down—facing the steeps of life! If her feet would sometimes falter, her eyes grow strained with agony beneath it, her heart never admitted by one false beat a sense of disproportion in their loads. To fend him from the truth, while hiding from him that she knew it; to pay his debts to vile extortion, and suffer the stigma of a parsimony which appeared to grudge him the means to realise their compact of a boundless charity; worse, to suspect sometimes that he guessed her knowledge of the truth, and was content to build upon her loving hypocrisy his house of later peace, was content to let her live the lie while he enjoyed its fruits—these things were the hardest of her task.
Another grief she suffered; but that, she told herself, was in heaven’s withholding of a greater. She was thankful for it—thankful as a martyr, whom great pain has numbed from further feeling—thankful that in all these years no child was born to them to bear the heritage of its father’s sin. And while she praised heaven for its mercy, the starved woman in her hungered for the milk of motherhood, and, fading on that deprivation, made her task of youth a burden. Yet she must bear that too, or pay the penalty to love estranged, since only the gifts of motherhood could compensate for youth and beauty bartered against them.
So she must be young and sweet in spite of ageing conscience; must sing about her duties; must smile away those shadows in her husband’s eyes which she sickened to think were the reflections of her own enforced avarice, her waning beauty, her barrenness.
A sordid destiny for this child of lovely purity; this Yolande of the white hands; this lily light of truth.
And to work out in what unnatural atmosphere—transplanted into what lifeless soil?
She was the mistress of a Golgotha, an old dark windy necropolis, whose massive gates her husband’s hands had closed for ever, shutting her in to consort with its ghosts. In di Rocco had perished the last of his name; in him, the old blotched trunk, his house’s life, slow withering to its roots, had sunk for ever. The branches long were leafless. To her, a stranger, had befallen the heritage of death.
She could have administered it, have justified heaven’s severe choice of her as receiver in that estate such ages bankrupt in charity, have wrung a sombre joy even from dispersing its evil accumulations, had not Fate thus imposed upon her this awful seclusion, paralysing her hands. As antique graveyards are sometimes made the sporting-grounds for little feet, so had she once pictured to herself the joy of budding life at play in these stony corridors and empty gardens, redeeming them from the melancholy of great wrong. It was not to be; and for the withholding of that lovely mercy she could only give heaven praise—give it with weeping eyes in solitude, and, elsewhere, with a bright countenance turned to her husband.
Did he find that inscrutable, nevertheless? Was he so far from sharing her thankfulness for that grace denied as that he could visit upon her—in those shades of altered intimacy, those reserves in confidence, those nuances of alienation which only love can detect—his secret disappointment? She prayed that it was not so; prayed, also, that, in the enforced restraints she must put upon his charities, his sweet and reasonable nature would look for no baser motive than necessity. She was always frank with him as to the extent of what she could command (exclusive of Bonito’s periodic drains upon her, and those of her father, a creature scarcely less abominable), and held all within those limits at his pleasure. Rather she should be whispered for parsimony than that his generosity should suffer in its name. He was so good, so bounteous, so utterly improvident for himself. Though he would not claim one penny that was hers, there was no question of his acting as her almoner. Indeed the money was no more hers than his, but in trust to both of them for God’s good business. She was, by heaven’s grace, but the acting paymaster; and so long as she might bear the whole burden of that duty, she was content that he should enjoy its credit. The question was one between her and love alone; its very exclusiveness made its bliss.
Yet sometimes in her moods of desolation, when, for all her prayers and self-reassurances, that sense of their estrangement would glow a more definite gloom, and the problem of her double life smite sickly on her heart, a dread doubt would arise in her as to the sureness of her guidance of this afflicted soul. The physically blind are apt to become the morally blind, intent only on their self-interests, some people say, because of the consideration with which pity hedges them—of the licence which it allows them for their infirmity. What, then, if love in pity had so rallied this stricken life as to lead it to regard itself as a persecuted thing—a thing privileged, through its own helplessness, to presume on the self-sacrifices of others for its sake? Louis’s apparent obtuseness to the meaning of the atonements her sweet example exacted of him, his apparent ignorance of any provocation to them caused by himself, filled her, when in these moods, with amazement. Had he lost all sense of responsibility to his own deed, in her voluntary acceptance of its consequences? That were to assume that he guessed her part, and could justify it to himself on the score of his own infirmity—an obliquity which surely could not be held to vindicate her self-sacrifice before heaven. Yet sometimes the assumption would arise, to hurt her cruelly—even to sting her to a momentary revolt. He could not be really ignorant of her burden—must have surmised some coincidence between Bonito’s visit and the instant restrictions she had been forced to put upon their expenditure. His terror of the man’s presence on that day; his slow and shaken convalescence from the date of it—these were evidences of his knowledge hard to be discredited. And that, in the face of it, he could expect of her a pledge of their full confidence; could imply a reproach of her for her barrenness!—O, that were an addition to her load beyond her human endurance. The mere shadow of its oppression killed her heart—drove her in her agony to blow cold upon the little chill which already spoke their differences. And then the reaction would come.