"You may be right," he said. "All the same——"
And when the future owner of Ruddyford returned home, his wife made ready. She knew full well without words that this was her last visit to Hilary Woodrow; and she braced her mind for the ordeal and all that it must mean. She had long since ceased to fear that he would speak, and when Sarah Jane and Hilary met for the last time it was not necessary for him to inform her that their secret perished with themselves.
"Leave it to be told in the next world, if it is right that it should be told," he said to her. "Sometimes I think it may be a part of my purgation and proper punishment, in some place of learning and cleansing, that I may yet have to confess this terrible sin before my fellow spirits—even to the spirit of Daniel himself, when his turn comes. That seems justice, Sarah Jane, as man pictures justice in his feeble ignorance. But at any rate I'm convinced, so far as this life goes, that the proper course is silence. We've no right to wreck lives by imparting our knowledge to them, if that knowledge can only bring ceaseless suffering along with it. I've confessed my sin to God a thousand times. But I know that both punishment and absolution belong to the world to come, not to this."
"Like a schoolboy called up afore his master—to learn the best or worst," she said.
"Even like that. Nothing's settled down here; nothing is finished down here. Everything has to wait till the light touches it."
"And even good and evil ban't understood down here. Maybe you'll find in that light you won't cut such a poor figure after all. Ban't your many great, good, generous deeds and kindly thoughts to count? Ban't your last years to count? Be it a small thing that you've fought your way to your God through all that thicket of books?"
"Not a small thing for myself, certainly. All the difference between heaven and hell, Sarah Jane."
"Oh, don't let that last word come on your lips, for God's sake," she begged. "I do hate it, like I hate a snake. Sometimes, for all I'm so glad that you are happy and have got God, I can find it in me to wish you was the same as you used to be without Him. You was a deal braver, when you laughed at hell, than you be now. And I'll laugh at hell for ever and ever—laugh at it still, even if I was to find myself in it."
"Think of me as I am, Sarah Jane, and believe what I say now. Don't remember me as I was, or call back the vile things I uttered then. Do you remember that once I said God was only the shadow of man's self reflected against the background of his own self-consciousness? I thought that a very fine idea when I made it up. Now I know 'twas the Devil that prompted it."
"I reckoned nobody believed in God and hell both—except my own dear Daniel. And now he's got you to think the same. But I hoped 'twould be t'other way round, and you'd make him flout it."