“I’ve said all I had to say,” returned Mr. Ingle with a dubious laugh. “And if you don’t mind, I believe I’ll wait for you outside, in the machine. I want to look at the gear-box.”
He paused, as if in deference to possible opposition, and, none being manifested, went hastily from the room with a sigh of relief, giving me, as he carefully closed the door, a glance of profound commiseration over his shoulder.
Miss Elizabeth had taken her brother’s hand, not with the effect of clinging for sympathy; nor had her throwing her arms about him produced that effect; one could as easily have imagined Brunhilda hiding her face in a man’s coat-lapels. George’s sister wept, not weakly: she was on the defensive, but not for herself.
“Does the fact that he may possibly escape going to prison”—she addressed her cousin—“make his position less scandalous, or can it make the man himself less detestable?”
Mrs. Harman looked at her steadily. There was a long and sorrowful pause.
“Nothing is changed,” she said finally; her eyes still fixed gravely on Miss Elizabeth’s.
At that, the other’s face flamed up, and she uttered a half-choked exclamation. “Oh,” she cried—“you’ve fallen in love with playing the martyr; it’s SELF-love! You SEE yourself in the role! No one on earth could make me believe you’re in LOVE with this degraded imbecile—all that’s left of the wreck of a vicious life! It isn’t that! It’s because you want to make a shining example of yourself; you want to get down on your knees and wash off the vileness from this befouled creature; you want—”
“Madame!” Keredec interrupted tremendously, “you speak out of no knowledge!” He leaned toward her across the table, which shook under the weight of his arms. “There is no vileness; no one who is clean remains befouled because of the things that are gone.”
“They do not?” She laughed hysterically, and for my part, I sighed in despair—for there was no stopping him.
“They do not, indeed! Do you know the relation of TIME to this little life of ours? We have only the present moment; your consciousness of that is your existence. Your knowledge of each present moment as it passes—and it passes so swiftly that each word I speak now overlaps it—yet it is all we have. For all the rest, for what has gone by and what is yet coming—THAT has no real existence; it is all a dream. It is not ALIVE. It IS not! It IS—nothing! So the soul that stands clean and pure to-day IS clean and pure—and that is all there is to say about that soul!”