“I must never forgive him,” said Lady Ingleby, with finality, “because, if I forgave him, I could not let him go.”
“Why let him go, when his going leaves your whole life desolate?”
“Because,” said Myra, “I feel I could not trust him; and I dare not marry a man whom I love as I love Jim Airth, unless I can trust him as implicitly as I trust my God. If I loved him less, I would take the risk. But I feel, for him, something which I can neither understand nor define; only I know that in time it would make him so completely master of me that, unless I could trust him absolutely—I should be afraid.”
“Is a man never to be trusted again,” asked Jane, “because, under sudden fierce temptation, he has failed you once?”
“It is not the failing once,” said Myra. “It is the light thrown upon the whole quality of his love—of that kind of love. The passion of it makes it selfish—selfish to the degree of being utterly regardless of right and wrong, and careless of the welfare of its unfortunate object. My fair name would have been smirched; my honour dragged in the mire; my present, blighted; my future, ruined; but what did he care? It was all swept aside in the one sentence: ‘You are mine, not his. You must come away with me.’ I cannot trust myself to a love which has no standard of right and wrong. We look at it from different points of view. You see only the man and his temptation. I knew the priceless treasure of the love; therefore the sin against that love seems to me unforgivable.”
Mrs. Dalmain looked earnestly at her friend. Her steadfast eyes were deeply troubled.
“Myra,” she said, “you are absolutely right in your definitions, and correct in your conclusions. But your mistake is this. You make no allowance for the sudden, desperate, overwhelming nature of the temptation before which Jim Airth fell. Remember all that led up to it. Think of it, Myra! He stood so alone in the world; no mother, no wife, no woman’s tenderness. And those ten hard years of worse than loneliness, when he fought the horrors of disillusion, the shame of betrayal, the bitterness of desertion; the humiliation of the stain upon his noble name. Against all this, during ten long years, he struggled; fought a manful fight, and overcame. Then—strong, hardened, lonely; a man grown to man’s full heritage of self-contained independence—he met you, Myra. His ideals returned, purified and strengthened by their passage through the fire. Love came, now, in such gigantic force, that the pigmy passion of early youth was dwarfed and superseded. It seemed a new and untasted experience such as he had not dreamed life could contain. Three weeks of it, he had; growing in certainty, increasing in richness, every day; yet tempered by the patient waiting your pleasure, for eagerly expected fulfilment. Then the blow—so terrible to his sensibilities and to his manly pride; the horrible knowledge that his own hand had brought loss and sorrow to you, whom he would have shielded from the faintest shadow of pain. Then his mistake in allowing false pride to come between you. Three weeks of growing hunger and regret, followed by your summons, which seemed to promise happiness after all; for, remember while you had been bringing yourself to acquiesce in his decision as absolutely final, so that the news of Lord Ingleby’s return meant no loss to you and to him, merely the relief of his exculpation, he had been coming round to a more reasonable point of view, and realising that, after all, he had not lost you. You sent for him, and he came—once more aglow with love and certainty—only to hear that he had not only lost you himself, but must leave you to another man. Oh Myra! Can you not make allowance for a moment of fierce madness? Can you not see that the very strength of the man momentarily turned in the wrong direction, brought about his downfall? You tell me you called him coward and traitor? You might as well have struck him! Such words from your lips must have been worse than blows. I admit he deserved them; yet Saint Peter was thrice a coward and a traitor, but his Lord, making allowance for a sudden yielding to temptation, did not doubt the loyalty of his love, but gave him a chance of threefold public confession, and forgave him. If Divine Love could do this—oh, Myra, can you let your lover go out into the world again, alone, without one word of forgiveness?”
“How do I know he wants my forgiveness, Jane? He left me in a towering fury. And how could my forgiveness reach him, even supposing he desired it, or I could give it? Where is he now?”
“He left you in despair,” said Mrs. Dalmain, “and—he is in the library.”
Lady Ingleby rose to her feet.