“Do you mind coming in?” she asked. “This is where I was making for. I’ll tell you why, inside.”
“Anthony is having the banns put up on Sunday,” she announced abruptly, when they stood in the dimness of the ancient church, looking up, past the stone pillars and the gloom of the screen, to the Dutch lamps swinging before carved mullion and mellow glass. “I can’t stay on at Crump, now that Christian is all right again, and Heaven knows I’m glad enough to go but for him! But there’s a step to be crossed before I get to Dockerneuk, and oh, Deb, I’m afraid to put out my foot!”
She drew her up the aisle and stopped, pointing down; and under her finger Stanley’s name rose to them from the stone slab before the chancel-steps. Over the family vault where Slinkin’ Lyndesay lay buried, Nettie his widow would have to pass to her joy.
“I wanted to be married in a registry-office,” she went on—“another church—anywhere—but Anthony’s mother has set her heart on being present, and she’s too infirm to go far. How can I refuse anything to his mother? But I’m frightened—fool that I am!—frightened that Slinker will rise up and come between us, even at the last! Oh, Deb, if I should never get to Anthony, after all!”
She sank into a seat, covering her face with her hands, but Deb stayed in her place, looking down quietly at the freshly-lettered stone. Here, in the stillness of the sanctuary, she found again the Stanley whom she, and she alone, had known, and for whose sake she had been justified in her own eyes, and on account of whose memory she had never spoken a single bitter word against the man who had so basely deceived her. Only in his own sinister little room did the evil side of him, somehow kept fiendishly alive by his tortured mother, show her to herself as something for ever degraded and unclean. But, standing beside his grave, the balance of things swung true again; she saw her act as dangerous indeed, but not ignoble, misjudged, perhaps, but never sordid, and she took back her self-respect as a gift from the Altar.
Through her abstraction she heard Nettie’s voice, tense and low, like that of one upon whom light has flashed, white and blinding.
“Perhaps it is because I wronged him that I am afraid! I never realised it before, or perhaps I never cared. I married him rashly, I left him heedlessly, and the vows I made are clamouring for their unpaid toll. Looking back, it seems as if all this trouble and tragedy should be laid at my door. If I had taken up my burden, you at least would have been saved your share. I might have saved his mother—she had some curious feeling for me; and—who knows?—I might have saved Stanley, too!”
But Deb, in that moment of readjustment, without jealousy and without resentment, knew that Stanley would never have touched the highest for any but herself.
“I can’t atone—it isn’t possible. Anthony said there was never any going back in this world, and I thought I had proved him wrong, but every day I see more clearly what he meant. There’s no getting away from the past. All my life Slinker will stand between me and the man I love!”
She rose and slipped her arm through Deborah’s.