‘I had thought you my friend,’ the epistle began; ‘you have professed to be something more, and, as ‘have heard you say, the greater should include the less.’
There the writing suddenly changed in character, and the letter went on, as it were, in calmer and more measured cali-graphic accents.
‘How could you treat me so, knowing my friendship and even my foolish fondness? Was it not cruel to urge me as you did? I will confess to you what I have striven in vain to disguise. Had we met in earlier days, had I known you before I was bound in honour to the course I am compelled to run until my footsteps lead me to my grave, I might have been a happy woman. But a woman may love, and may yet place her honour before everything. I shall not care if, when I am dead and gone, you choose to boast that you won a woman’s heart, and I will not even put you on your honour now to keep this silly secret; but you shall not go from me without my assurance of this one fact. When I married, marriage was to me a sacrament, and if it were not for that——— But no more of this, dear Paul Dear, dear, and dearest Paul! I hardly know how I am writing, but the anguish you have caused me is unspeakable, and I am not guarded in my words. A woman’s heart may err, and her principle of honour may yet be strong. I bid you good-bye with an aching heart, and I wish you all good fortune. It would seem that our stars are in opposition to each other, and fighting against each other in their courses. I agree with you in thinking that we are best apart, but I shall watch your career with a more than sisterly devotion, and my heart tells me that I shall have the right to acclaim your future.’
The letter said much more than this so far as the mere extension of the same sentiments might appear to be concerned, but in effect this was all until the final paragraph was reached.
‘I have adhered to duty,’ this ran, ‘and I will. Nothing—neither the thought of your suffering nor of my own—shall draw me from it, but I recognise none the less the kindred soul I should have met had I been fortunate—as I am far from being. Write this in your private memoirs of me: “She loved too well, yet wisely,” and think sometimes that it is possible for a woman to feel sometimes like a man, and to think I “could not love thee, dear, so well, loved I not honour more.”
‘I shall not add another word to this,’ Gertrude concluded, ‘except to say, I wish you all prosperity, all happiness. But just this remember always, that if I were a mischievous influence in your life, I meant it far otherwise, and I am always your devoted friend and well-wisher.
‘G. DEW.’
For some reason or another by no means clear to himself the letter moved Paul less than it seemed to him that it should have done. He read it sitting in his pyjamas on the bedside, kicking his bare heels against the valance, and when he had done with it he tossed it on to the centre table, on which his manuscripts, now too rarely looked at, lay scattered, and said rather grimly:
‘Footlights.’
Then he mused awhile, half desiring to confirm the word, and half recalling it. He had made many desperate efforts to be loyal in his thoughts, but he was less disposed to struggle in that direction than he had been. His mind strayed back to Ralston, and to the bibulous explorer. Memory went further than either of them, and carried him back to the days when he had broken his career in two for the sake of Miss Belmont, old Darco’s Middle Jarley Prown.’ He had played the flat traitor to Darco once already for the sake of one woman, and now, as he began to see, he was once more using him very ill for the sake of another. He sat kicking his heels against the valance of the bed, and thinking. May Gold, Norah MacMulty, the dreadful hour of the lost innocence, Claudia, Annette, Gertrude—what an incredible list of follies for one man to have committed! He grew intensely bitter and self-disdainful.