She laid her hand on his arm, as if to draw him to herself in some natural symbolism. Her face was flushed with her womanly modesty. She hid it once more like a shy child on his shoulder. Will looked at her, sore puzzled. How strange that this pure and passionate nature should see things in a light that to him was so unfamiliar! But he remembered what she had said to him in Philippina’s trouble, and began to understand now in what manner she regarded it.
“Well, but, Linnet,” he cried eagerly lifting her head from where she put it, and laying her cheek against his own, “you must see for yourself how much better it would be, if only from the mere worldly point of view, to arrange this matter as the world would arrange it. Granting even that a marriage after an English divorce would mean to you, from the strictly religious standpoint, simply nothing—why, surely, even then, it must be no small matter to set oneself right with the world, to be received and acknowledged as an honest woman, and my wife, in ordinary English society. If we get a divorce, we can do all that; and to get a divorce, we must act now circumspectly. But if we don’t get one, and if you try to stop here with me without it—remember, dear, the penalty; you lose position at once, and become for society an utter outcast.”
Linnet flung herself upon him once more in a perfect fervour of abandonment. Her love and her shame were fighting hard within her. Her passionate Southern nature overcame her entirely. “Will, Will, dear Will,” she cried, hiding her face from him yet again, “you don’t understand; you can’t fathom the depth of the sacrifice I would make for you. I come to you to-day bringing my life in my hand—my eternal life, my soul, my future; I offer you all I have, all I am, all I will be. For you I give up my good name, my faith, my hopes of salvation. For you I will endure the worst tortures of purgatory. I’ve tried to keep away—I’ve tried hard to keep away—Our Dear Lady knows how hard—all these months, all these years—but I can keep away no longer. Two great powers seemed to pull different ways within me. My Church said to me plainly, ‘You must never think of him; you must stop with Andreas.’ My heart said to me no less plainly, but a thousand times more persuasively, ‘You must fly from that man’s side; you must go to Will Deverill.’ I knew, if I followed my heart, the fires of hell would rise up and take hold of me. I haven’t minded for that; I’ve dared the fires of hell; the two have fought it out—the Church and my heart—and, my heart has conquered.”
She paused, and drew a great sigh. “Dear Will,” she went on softly, burying her head yet deeper in that tender bosom, “if I got a divorce, the divorce would be nothing to me—a mere waste paper. What people think of me matters little, very little in my mind, compared to what God and my Church will say of me. If I stop with you here, I shall be living in open sin; but I shall be living with the man my heart loves best; I shall have at least my own heart’s unmixed approval. While I lived with Andreas, the Church and God approved; but my own heart told me, every night of my life, I was living in sin, unspeakable sin against human nature and my own body. Oh, Will, I don’t know why, but it somehow seems as if God and our hearts were at open war; you must live by one or you must live by the other. If I stop with you, I’m living by my own heart’s law; I will take the sin upon me; I will pay the penalty. If God punishes me for it at last—well, I will take my punishment and bear it bravely; I won’t flinch from pain; I won’t shrink from the fires of hell or purgatory. But, at least, I do it all with my eyes wide open. I know I’m disobeying God’s law for the law of my own heart. I won’t profane God’s holy sacrament of marriage by asking a heretical and un-Catholic Church to bless a union which is all my own—my own heart’s making, not God’s ordinance, God’s sacrament. I love you so well, darling, I can never leave you. Let me stop with you, Will; let me stop with you! Let me live with you; let me die with you; let me burn in hell-fire for you!”
A man is a man. And the man within Will Deverill drove him on irresistibly. He clasped her hard once more to his straining bosom. “As you wish,” he said, quivering. “Your will is law, Linnet.”
“No, no,” she cried, nestling against him, with a satisfied sigh of delight. “My law is Will.” And she looked up and smiled at her own little conceit. “You shall do as you wish with me.”
CHAPTER XLII
PRUDENCE
It was a trying position for Will. He hardly knew what to do. Duty and love pulled him one way, chivalry and the hot blood of youth the other. When a beautiful woman makes one an offer like that, it would be scarcely human, scarcely virile to resist it. And Will was not only a man but also a poet—for a poet is a man with whom moods and impulses are stronger than with most of us. As poet, he cared little for mere conventional rules; it was the consequences to Linnet herself he had most to think about. But he saw it was no use talking to her from the standpoint he would have adopted with most ordinary Englishwomen. It was no use pointing out to her what he himself realised most distinctly, that her union with Andreas was in its very essence an unholy one, an insult to her own body, a treason against all that was truest and best in her being. It ran counter from the very first to the dictates of her own heart, which are the voice of Nature and of God within us. But to Linnet, those plain truths would have seemed but the veriest human sophisms. She looked upon her marriage with Andreas as a holy sacrament of the Church; and any attempt to set aside that sacrament by an earthly court, and to substitute for it a verbal marriage that was no marriage at all to her, but a profound mockery, would have seemed to her soul ten thousand times worse than avowed desertion and unconcealed wickedness. Better live in open sin, she thought, though she paid for it with her body, than insult her God by pretending to invoke his aid and blessing on an adulterous union.