I am not justifying my conduct and feelings at this ghastly time: I am only recording them, extenuating nothing and setting down naught in malice. I had done once for all with what Fay called "flapdoodle"—that bane of the generation to which Annabel and I belonged. Thenceforth I made up my mind to be what I was, and not what an artificially trained conscience thought that I ought to be.
The characters of the nineteenth century were rather like the gardens of the eighteenth. Their lines were formal, their trees cut into unnatural shapes, and their fruit carefully trained over stiff espaliers. But Fay and Frank taught me to deal with my character, as Annabel had already learned to deal with her garden: I swept away the formal beds, flung the iron espaliers over the wall, and let the trees grow according to their own will. That the result, as far as I was concerned, was not ornamental, I admit: and if the former garden of my soul had been transformed into a waste and horrible place where only thorns and thistles and deadly nightshade grew, surely the responsibility rested with my wife and her brother rather than with me! At least so it appeared to me then.
In time I learned from Blathwayte that Fay and Frank had arrived safely in Melbourne, and were settled in the house of the Sherards, who were only too delighted to have their niece and nephew with them once more: and that my wife and her brother were beginning at once to take up the stage as their profession, Fay acting under her maiden name.
Although Annabel did not say "I told you so" in so many words, the sentiment exuded from her every pore. And, truth to tell, she had told me so. There was no getting away from that fact.
She and Arthur were kind enough to me in their respective ways, but I had no longer any use for kindness. There was nothing now that anybody could do to relieve the utter blankness of my misery.
Though I was bitterly angry with Fay—though I found it impossible to excuse or condone her cruel behaviour towards me, her husband—I nevertheless loved and longed for her with consuming and increasing force. "Let no man dream but that I loved her still": therein lay the bitterest sting of my agony. The more I loved her the more impossible I found it to forgive her: had I cared for her less, I might have been less implacable. That may not be a symptom of ideal love, but anyway it was a symptom of mine.
But if I found it impossible to forgive Fay, I found it still further out of my power to forgive Frank. That Annabel had had her finger in the pie I could not deny: she was by no means free from blame with regard to what had happened: but the chief instigator of the tragedy was Frank; of that I had no manner of doubt whatever. Without his baneful influence Fay would never have dreamed of running away from me: without his practical assistance, she never could have accomplished it.
I sometimes wondered whether Annabel reproached herself too severely for having, by her well-meant interference, made such havoc of my life: had I spoiled hers, as she had spoiled mine, I felt I should have eaten my heart out with unavailing remorse. But one day this doubt was set for ever at rest by her saying to me—
"Do you know, Reggie dear, I am sometimes inclined to blame myself for not having interfered with Fay more than I did, and for letting her have so much of her own way. After all, she was young, and I knew so much better about everything than she did."
After that remark, anxiety about Annabel's conscience no longer troubled me.