For a long while, after his unwelcome visitor had departed, Charles sat silent and buried in deep thought.
From time to time he glanced vaguely at the letter which Oswyn had abandoned, and he wondered—but quite inconsequently, and with no heart to make the experiment—whether any further perusal of those disgraceful lines could explain or palliate the blunt obloquy of the writer's conduct. His concise, legal habit of mind forbade him to cherish any false illusions.
Lightmark, writing in an hour of intimate excitement, when the burden of his friend's sacrifice seemed for a fleeting moment more intolerable than the wrench of explanation with his wife, had too effectually compromised himself. He had cringed, procrastinated, promised; had been abject, hypocritical, explicit.
It seemed to Sylvester, in the first flush of his honourable disgust, that there was no generous restitution which the man had not promised, no craven meanness to which he had not amply confessed.
He dropped his correct head upon his hands with something like a moan, as he contrasted the ironical silence which had been Rainham's only answer to this effusion—a silence which had since been irrevocably sealed. He had never before been so disheartened, had never seemed so intimately associated with disgrace.
Even the abortive ending of his passion—he knew that this was deep-seated and genuine, although its outward expression had been formal and cold—seemed a tolerable experience in comparison.
But this was dishonour absolute, and dishonour which could never be perfectly atoned.
Had not he in his personal antipathy to Philip Rainham—the tide of that ancient hostility surged over him again even while he vowed sternly to make the fullest amends—had he not seized with indecent eagerness upon any pretext or occasion to justify his dislike?
He had, at least, assisted unjustly to destroy Rainham's reputation, giving his adherence to the vainest of vain lies; and however zealous he might be in destroying this elaborate structure which he had helped to build, however successful the disagreeable task of enlightening his sister and the maligned man's most interested friends might prove, the reproach upon his own foresight would remain.
It was notable that, in the somewhat hard integrity of his character, he did not for a moment seek to persuade himself, as a man of greater sympathy might have done, that Eve was a person to whom the truth could legitimately be spared.