Francis learned the truth from Mr. Clibran-Bell. Mrs. Folyat was not told, neither was Jessie. Queer things were rumoured, however, and Mrs. Folyat began to feel—not absolutely without foundation—that she was looked upon askance. She went into deep mourning and raised Frederic to sainthood, and surrounded herself with relics from among his personal belongings. She brooded over the past and began to piece together her scattered memories. Nothing took clear shape except, what she had not seen at the time, the long coolness between her husband and her son, and she began to charge and reproach Francis with it. By vilifying Francis she had the illusion that she was exalting Frederic. She kept insisting that Francis must be sorry now that her poor angel was dead. Francis was remorseful. He was probing deeper and deeper into the unillumined past, groping his way through tortuous mole-galleries. The perpetual false deification of Frederic bothered him, his wife’s voice, lachrymose and thin, dinning in his ears, was an exasperation. He was busy, frantically busy, forcing his way with all the strength of his nature out of the slough of despond into which he had fallen, and she seemed intent on thrusting him out of the slough into a sea of treacly mud. At length, one day, when she had raised Frederic a peg higher in her idolatrous beatification, suddenly the truth was wrenched from him:
“Can you not see that he meant to kill himself?”
“Oh! Frank . . . !”
He could despitefully have bitten his tongue out for having said it, but, having done so, he owed it to her to go on. It might prove her salvation. It might bring her back to him so that together they might perceive and win to the ways of brightness.
“He took the pistol with him in his pocket. He had no luggage with him. He had locked the door of his office and paid up his clerks’ wages and the premiums of his pupils.”
“Oh! Frank . . . Oh! Frank!”
And Francis hoped that she would turn to him and understand, but her very anguish of sorrow she must turn to self-indulgence, and she moved from the luxury of worship to the luxury of self-accusation:
“We drove him to it. All of us. We never understood him.”
She told Jessie, who was prostrated by the knowledge, and Mr. Clibran-Bell refused ever to enter the Folyats’ house again.
Francis passed through the very blackest hours of all after that. He prayed to his God but was not comforted; his mind would run only in the harshest channels of the faith he had spent his life in teaching. The God he found was a jealous God, a God of cruelty and vengeance and punishment. In vain he told himself that this was the just visitation of sins. He could not believe it. All his spirit craved for the belief in mercy, the living eternity, the life everlasting. He was hemmed in by the habit of years, and long familiarity with things sacred, all the vocabulary of paradox that had flowed so easily from his lips week in, week out, year after year. He wanted the truth of it, but it was all words, words, words, a rain of fine dust falling upon his intelligence, blinding his eyes. He needed that in his religion which could square with and illuminate the facts of his existence, but ever the darkness grew more impenetrable.