But Anna’s grief could not find its way to words. How could her mother, in her sober, ordered existence, her decorous and righteous experiences of life and love and death, comprehend what it was to live with shadows of faithlessness, even of blood-guiltiness, for perpetual company? For to Anna’s thought Keith had been driven to his lonely death by the hardness of Gregory, by words which had issued from the white heat of his passion for her, a passion unrebuked by her,—nay, rather, shared to the full. Was she then guiltless of her husband’s death?
Not for a moment could Anna divide herself from Gregory in responsibility for the action which Oliver had characterized as “moral murder.” Unsparingly just to herself, she bore to the very limit of reason all the fellowship which was imposed upon her by the mastery of a love so long lived in its unconsciousness and silence, so soon cut off, once perceived and acknowledged. It has been said that “all great loves that have ever died, dropped dead.” Anna’s mighty passion had been stillborn, slain by the words which had sent Keith on his dim way to death. For she had never doubted that Oliver’s rehearsal of the scene in the woods between Gregory and Keith had been substantially true. She knew there had been spiritual violence done, and her soul recoiled from the very strength and power which had once enchained her. Something of diabolical pride seemed to her now to invest even the austere morality of Gregory. He would have spurned a yielding to the weakness of the flesh, his moral fastidiousness would have made it impossible; but he fought the fire of love fiercely with the fire of pride, not humbly with the weapons of prayer. No shield of faith nor sword of the spirit had been his in the hour of temptation, for all his high ideals, but the sheer, elemental force of human will. He had conquered, or rather had grappled with, the one passion; but the very force by which he had conquered turned again and conquered him, and his very power became his undoing.
Beside this conception of Gregory which had now taken possession of Anna’s mind, Keith’s gentleness, his faithful, patient life, above all, the greatness of the silent sacrifice which he had made for her sake when he embarked on the Fraternia adventure, became sacred and heroic. She saw at last what his leaving his normal life had been; she believed, as she had said to Everett, that he had literally given his life for her, and the sense of his devotion, so little understood, so scantily recognized, wore ceaselessly at her heart. Her one drop of balm was the memory of Keith’s last smile of triumphant love and faith; the bitterest drop in her Cup of Trembling that not one last word had been given her to show her by what paths his soul had fared, and whether thoughts of peace had lightened his sufferings. Having loved her, he had loved her to the end,—this only she knew. His faithfulness had not failed.
Words which her father had spoken to her shortly before his death, vaguely comprehended at the time, haunted her now, “With greatness we have nothing at all to do; faithfulness only is our part.”
If only she had earlier discerned their meaning!
Such shape did these two men take to Anna now; the one who had moulded all her outward life and touched her inner life hitherto so faintly, the other who had mastered her in her innate longing for power and freedom, and controlled her inner life for many years: Keith seemed to her now like some spirit of gentle ministration, humble, faithful, undefiled; Gregory, like some proud spirit, even as Lucifer, son of the morning, who had said, ‘I will ascend into heaven,’ but who had been brought down to hell, dragging with him all that was highest and holiest. And she had thought him so different! Like another, her heart would cry out:—
“I thought that he was gentle, being great;
O God, that I had loved a smaller man!
I should have found in him a greater heart.”
Once, some weeks earlier, there had come to her a brief note from Gregory, written soon after his return to Fraternia. It said only:—