'In the last three days,' she answered slowly, 'I have been a good deal with some people who are working among the poorest and some of the most depraved in the East-End. Ah, my God, what pictures have burnt themselves into my memory!—what ineffaceable ones of the faces of young girls that still keep something of the dewy innocence of childhood, and yet are engulfed in living death! Women unsexed, men without manhood, youth without purity, childhood that has never known the sanctity of home—yes, always where there are alleys reeking with bad air, are courts full of filth, where there are men sodden with drink and women in shameless rags, there, everywhere, are children in swarms. Two nights ago I could not sleep. They passed before me in endless processions, those maimed, ruined existences, fit only to be huddled out of sight—to be imprisoned like lepers, so as to stamp out the contagion. At last I could bear it no longer. I rose up in the darkness, and fell on my knees. But I could not pray. "O God, dost Thou not care at all?"—that was all I could say over and over, with a stupid, blank amazement. And then, all at once—how can I tell you?...'
The tears forced themselves into her eyes. She was very pale, and her lips were quivering. Yet all the time her face was lit with that grave spiritual light which irradiates the countenance when the heart is quickened with impersonal zeal and thought.
'Try and tell me—I want to know,' said Langdale in a low voice. His eyes were dim with feelings too poignant to be borne with clear sight—too deep to be relieved by words.
'I knew that this, even this wild, cruel anarchy, was not born of chaos. It was the shadow side of the highest possibilities of our nature. Because we have power to aspire to communion with God, so human beings have the power to fall and be submerged in the black eddies of shame and pollution. This was the embodiment of that principle of evil which everyone who turns away from the pitiful egoism of self-seeking must strive against—must fight to subdue.
'Then I saw that other great army of which you have often spoken to me—the men and women sown broadcast over the whole land, who, amid all the moral deformity of life, neither flee from the world nor are sick of it, nor despair of the capacity of our common nature for those things which are good and true and of lovely report. I saw them: women of lonely lives—often undistinguished, unknown—yet firm in the constancy of principle, touched with the gentleness of unweariable love; men of all grades, enfranchised from the corrupt propensities that make our race the willing slaves of evil, steadily, constantly working for the moral renovation of their country—each doing a little, each helping to stem the tide of human misery. Here, a pure-hearted, delicate girl, giving time and thought to hours of intercourse with rough factory lads and girls—wakening in a heart here and there the better impulses that lie dormant, often only because no care nor gentleness has breathed on the timid seeds and wooed them into life.... Yes, even the little I have seen helped me to estimate how true was what you once said, that almost all who have any by-play of time and means take thought for some of those less fortunately placed. To touch one or two minds to finer issues—to rescue one or two lives from the appalling depths ready to swamp them—this is not a very bold or ambitious object; and yet to set it before ourselves, we must be sure that no siren voice has deluded us into making the life of any fellow-creature more open to the temptations which beset him, more callous to belief in the goodness of others. Anselm, when these thoughts swept over me, my heart throbbed with gratitude to you—with pride in your unselfish goodness. It was to you I owed it that the Nessus robe of passion had not scorched and laid waste my life.'
He was too much moved to trust himself to speak for a little time. At last he said slowly:
'I do not think that I will now go to the East.... May we not return to the old footing of friends? ... Let me see you from time to time as long as you are in London....'
There was a pleading tone in his voice to which every fibre of her nature responded. But her victory over herself was too hardly won, too insecure, too bitterly steeped in the struggles that seem to exhaust the very founts of action and resolve. She felt too keenly how impossible the tranquillity of friendship would be for them both for some time to come.
'I think you should go with Amalie—she is very anxious about the boy. I want you to go.... And then,' she added, not meeting his eyes while she said it, 'perhaps in the time to come we may both find that a new plan of life opened to us after this parting.'
'If you wish it very much, I will go for your sake,' he answered.