He threw himself violently upon the couch, face downward, shuddering from head to foot.
“My poor boy, it is the truth,” said Keredec, kneeling beside him and putting a great arm across his shoulders. “It is what a thousand men are doing this night. Nothing is more common, or more unexplainable—or more simple. Of all the nations it is the same, wherever life has become artificial and the poor, foolish young men have too much money and nothing to do. You do not understand it, but our friend here, and I, we understand because we remember what we have been seeing all our life. You say it is not you who did such crazy, horrible things, and you are right. When this poor woman who is so painted and greasy first caught you, when you began to give your money and your time and your life to her, when she got you into this horrible marriage with her, you were blind—you went staggering, in a bad dream; your soul hid away, far down inside you, with its hands over its face. If it could have once stood straight, if the eyes of your body could have once been clean for it to look through, if you could have once been as you are to-day, or as you were when you were a little child, you would have cry out with horror both of her and of yourself, as you do now; and you would have run away from her and from everything you had put in your life. But, in your suffering you must rejoice: the triumph is that your mind hates that old life as greatly as your soul hates it. You are as good as if you had never been the wild fellow—yes, the wicked fellow—that you were. For a man who shakes off his sin is clean; he stands as pure as if he had never sinned. But though his emancipation can be so perfect, there is a law that he cannot escape from the result of all the bad and foolish things he has done, for every act, every breath you draw, is immortal, and each has a consequence that is never ending. And so, now, though you are purified, the suffering from these old actions is here, and you must abide it. Ah, but that is a little thing, nothing!—that suffering—compared to what you have gained, for you have gained your own soul!”
The desperate young man on the couch answered only with the sobbing of a broken-hearted child.
I came back to my pavilion after midnight, but I did not sleep, though I lay upon my bed until dawn. Then I went for a long, hard walk, breakfasted at Dives, and begged a ride back to Madame Brossard’s in a peasant’s cart which was going that way.
I found George Ward waiting for me on the little veranda of the pavilion, looking handsomer and more prosperously distinguished and distinguishedly prosperous and generally well-conditioned than ever—as I told him.
“I have some news for you,” he said after the hearty greeting—“an announcement, in fact.”
“Wait!” I glanced at the interested attitude of Mr. Earl Percy, who was breakfasting at a table significantly near the gallery steps, and led the way into the pavilion. “You may as well not tell it in the hearing of that young man,” I said, when the door was closed. “He is eccentric.”
“So I gathered,” returned Ward, smiling, “from his attire. But it really wouldn’t matter who heard it. Elizabeth’s going to marry Cresson Ingle.”
“That is the news—the announcement—you spoke of?”
“Yes, that is it.”