“Thank you,” he said in a voice so cold and bitter that she could hardly believe it to be his. “As you probably see, I have been a fool. I shall know better how to trust a woman in the future.”
“Oh, Tom,” she cried. “Don't let it—”
He interrupted her.
“I don't wish to talk,” he said. “Least of all to one who has adopted the religion which Miss Fane-Smith has been brought up in a religion which of necessity debases and degrades its votaries.”
Her eyes filled with tears, but she new that Christianity would in this case be better vindicated by silence than by words however eloquent. She just kissed him and wished him good night. But as she reached the door, his heart smote him.
“I don't say it has debased you,” he said; “but that that is its natural tendency. You are better than your creed.”
“He meant that by way of consolation,” thought Erica to herself as she went slowly upstairs fighting with her tears.
But of course the consolation had been merely a sharper stab; for to tell a Christian that he is better than his creed is the one intolerable thing.
What had been the extent of the understanding with Rose, Erica never learned, but she feared that it must have been equivalent to a promise in Tom's eyes, and much more serious than mere flirtation in Rose's, otherwise the regret in the letter was, from one of Rose's way of thinking, inexplicable. From that time there was a marked change in Tom; Erica was very unhappy about him, but there was little to be done except, indeed, to share all his interests as much as she could, and to try to make the home life pleasant. But this was by no means easy. To begin with, Raeburn himself was more difficult than ever to work with, and Tom, who was in a hard, cynical mood, called him overbearing where, in former times, he would merely have called him decided. The very best of men are occasionally irritable when they are nearly worked to death; and under the severe strain of those days, Raeburn's philosophic calm more than once broke down, and the quick Highland temper, usually kept in admirable restraint, made itself felt.
It was not, however, for two or three days after Haeberlein's funeral that he showed any other symptoms of illness. One evening they were all present at a meeting at the East End at which Donovan Farrant was also speaking. Raeburn's voice had somewhat recovered, and he was speaking with great force and fluency when, all at once in the middle of a sentence, he came to a dead pause. For half a minute he stood motionless; before him were the densely packed rows of listening faces, but what they had come there to hear he had not the faintest notion. His mind was exactly like a sheet of white paper; all recollection of the subject he had been speaking on was entirely obliterated. Some men would have pleaded illness and escaped, others would have blundered on. But Raeburn, who never lost his presence of mind, just turned to the audience and said quietly: “Will some one have the goodness to tell me what I was saying? My memory has played me a trick.”