“Sin is lawlessness,” he quoted in a low tone.
“Yes, yes,” she said quickly. “But this law that parts us, that makes our lives a hell—you say it is an unjust law and ought to be reformed. You said that in your letter.”
“I long for its reform with all my heart,” he replied. “And the greatest of living statesmen and the most devoted of English Churchmen did his utmost in 1857 to prevent this wicked double standard of morality from ever finding a place in the Divorce Law. He said he would deliberately prefer an increase in the number of cases of divorce to the acceptance of this shameful inequality between men and women.”
“And are we patiently and tamely to go on enduring it?” she cried. “Why, surely, all reforms have been won by those who were not afraid to break the bad laws that had no business to exist. Think of your Covenanters who gloriously broke the law and saved their country from tyranny! Almost all heroes and martyrs have broken the law when it deserved to be broken.”
“Yes, that is true,” he said. “But they only broke it out of obedience to a higher law, they did not break it for their own gain. My dearest,” he took her hand and held it closely in his, “though this law cries aloud for reform, let us be law-abiding citizens, and wait.”
Her eyes filled with tears, her voice quivered pitifully when after awhile she spoke.
“You talk of waiting, but when one sees how truth and justice are set at naught in parliament,—how with people agonising and dying, and with so much that is wrong to be righted our representatives will haggle miserably for months and years over useless questions, how from sheer spite they will waste the time of the nation, how from party jealousy they will thwart measures,—the thought of waiting grows intolerable.”
“But reform is bound to come,” said Macneillie, “most of the fair minded people who have studied the matter and who know anything of practical life desire it, we have against us only the narrow minded and the men of vicious life.”
“You say only!” exclaimed Christine with a laugh that was a sob. “But it is just the narrow good and the vicious bad who work all the misery of the world. Oh, Hugh! I am not strong and brave like you, I am weak and tired and worn out. I cannot live longer without you. I have tried to bear it but I have come to the end of my strength.”
She covered her face with her hands, he could see great tears slowly falling between her slender white fingers, and the sight wrung his heart. Yet he did not respond to her appeal. It was not because he failed to understand that bitter cry of exhaustion, it was because he understood it so well, had been indeed for the last few weeks so drearily conscious of just that same feeling that he could endure no longer, that his strength was gone. It was well that Christine could not see his face, for the agonising struggle which was going on within him was only too clearly visible. In the intense stillness of the calm sunny afternoon it seemed to him that all nature was at rest save themselves, and as in moments of great physical pain some very slight detail will attract the sufferer’s attention, so now, while he passed through the most cruel ordeal of his life, Macneillie was watching half unconsciously the pretty movements of a little water-rat which had run up the stem of a bush growing close to the river, and was evidently enjoying itself to the best of its ability. The birds, too, were singing as though in a perfect ecstasy of joy.