“No,” said Lucian, “I meant to take care of her, and I hoped we should go on, and lead the right sort of lives together.”
“Well, we are each shut up in the bounds of our own nature,” said Sylvester, shortly.
“I think,” said Lucian, after a pause, “that you are trying to make me see that I never was good enough for her.”
“Who could be?”
“If it has been all my fault,” said Lucian, in a shaken voice, “it is a hard thing to know. For—it is not all right with her now. Good-night, Syl,”—for by this time they had reached the lodgings—“I’m going to bed. You think I’m not enough of a fellow for her, but she has all there is of me, and it’s no good to her.”
He hurried away, and shut himself into his room. His words hardly did him justice; for his thoughts were crude and one-sided; but the entire trust in the word once given, the love that had survived even the loss of faith, were feelings of heroic size.
Lucian really had few faults, and such as he had, he guarded against with dutiful, if somewhat formal, technical conscientiousness. Defects of nature, as distinct from acts of sin, he did not recognise.
When he found that he had been led to misjudge Amethyst, his conscience, as well as his heart, was shocked, he felt that he ought not to have been deceived, and, whether he could understand it or no, he knew that she was lost to him for ever. She was not for him. He saw too that she was changed. She was not what he had expected to find her. He was bewildered by her, and he had to live without her.
Lucian’s religion, was as simple as his view of life. Under its dictates, he had abstained from the ordinary sins of school and college life, and had framed his view of what was becoming to a young man of property. Like the young ruler, he kept the Commandments. He distinctly believed that his life was ordered for him, and, in this fresh agony, which had brought a certainty, which, while the separation from Amethyst had been his own doing, he had never really felt, he recognised that he must not throw it away.
The right thing to do, soon, was to go and live at Toppings by himself, or with his mother and sisters. There would never be any one else now. He would go for his three months’ cruise in the Albatross, and get over the worst of his trouble. He thought that he would rather be alone, at first, than with Sylvester. Somehow, his old companion jarred upon him. Perhaps friend, as well as love, had outgrown him.