What Paul wrote that night is barely worth chronicling, and may be fairly constructed by anyone who has so far pursued his story. But the Exile, sitting over the embers of the fire at which he had cooked his coarse mid-day meal, threw himself backward on the trodden grass, and, groping behind the flap of the tent, dragged his brown canvas bag towards him, and having made a search among its contents, found a heap of stained, crumpled and disordered papers, one of which he smoothed out upon his knee and read. It had been given to him in that first unspeakably tranquil and happy year which Madge and he had spent together in Europe. It was the first blotted draft of the letter to her mother with which she had accompanied his own, and it ran thus:
‘My darling Mother,
‘I am putting this into a separate envelope, and on the envelope I am writing to ask you to read Mr. Armstrong’s letter to me before you read my own. He has explained everything there, and now I must make my appeal to you. I have promised that I will do nothing without your consent, and I am not very hopeful that I shall secure it. You know that I am not light-minded, or in the habit of saying what I do not mean, and I shall only tell you this: I love him with my whole heart and mind, and if you decide that we are to part I shall accept your decision, but I shall never know a happy day again. Paul is not only a great man but a good one.’
(The reader had faced this blow so often that he was ready for it, but he had no guard against it, and it struck home so heavily that he groaned aloud.)
‘I know now, partly from what I have lately learned from other people, partly from what he told me last night, but mainly from the letter you have read, the story of his life, and I know how profoundly unhappy it has been. I want to comfort and sustain him, and I am not afraid to face all the difficulties which lie before me. I can hear a clear call to duty, and I am sure that his love and mine will strengthen me to do it. You have never known me to be frivolous or foolish in my thoughts about such things as these, and until we can all three meet together, you must have patience with me. It would be wrong and cruel on my side to throw everything upon you, and I shall not ask you to make yourself responsible for what you may think my wrong-doing. There are a hundred thousand things in my heart which I cannot say, and amongst them all there is the dreadful fear that I may have lost your respect. But you ought to know the truth, and the whole truth. I have not lost my own, and I cannot believe that I shall ever have the right to be ashamed.’
There was much more than this. There were half-articulate expressions of affection and fear of an agony of regret for a possible severance. And through it all there beamed like a star, steadfast and unobscured in tempest, the loyal heart, the uncountable soul which, in whatsoever error, knows love and fealty as its only guides.
CHAPTER XXVII
By far the greater part of the theoretical wisdom of the world comes to us in the shape of legacies bequeathed by fools. A fool is not a person without knowledge or understanding—that is an ignoramus. The true fool—the only fool worthy of a wise man’s contemplation—is the man who knows and understands, and habitually refrains from acting according to knowledge and understanding. It is the record of the follies of such people which has built up the world’s wisdom. From that record we have learned amongst many other things that the fool of understanding has one eternal refuge from himself which he seeks with a full knowledge of the fact that the shelter it affords is illusory, and that the path by which it leads him can only conduct him to greater dangers than those from which he is striving to escape. It is too late to go back now, quoth the fool; the business must be gone through to the end. Thus if this brief diagnosis be of any value, the root of folly is to be found in the decay of will. Few men had reason to hold this belief more firmly than Paul Armstrong, and yet even now, when whatever was best in his own nature was more seriously engaged than it had ever been before, he went on to the consummation of a most undoubted and most cruel wrong, on the poor pretence that every stage he passed towards it made the passage of the next stage inevitable.
If ever it had seemed clear to him that it was too late to retire it seemed clearer now, and indeed he had so involved himself that it became to him alike and equally criminal to retreat or to advance. But by-and-by a solace for his miseries brought a solution of perplexity. Since he had taken so tremendous a responsibility upon himself, since there was now no escape from it without an act of brutality at the mere thought of which his heart revolted, there grew up within him such a resolve and such a sense of protective tenderness as had been hitherto impossible for him. Poor little Madge was to be victimized, but the via dolorosa which she would tread unendingly should at least be strewn with flowers, and the victim herself should be beautifully garlanded. His life should be one act of worship in return for her self-sacrifice. His devotion should offer such a challenge to the censure of the world that all reproach should shrink away ashamed. There never had been so complete an atonement as he would offer.