CHAPTER XXIV—THE NEW BOOK OF MARTYRS
IF there was news which Anne must send posthaste to hid him come to hear, and if Effie was neither ill nor dead, he need not overtax his wits to guess it. Yet he had never thought of this very natural sequel to the Marbeck week, and the plain fact is that he did not much want to think of it now.
“I like your Effie,” Anne told him. “I like her very well. She’s going to make a grandmother of me.”
He thought his mother had never been fatuous before: she thought he took the news morosely, and perhaps her expectation had been too high. She assumed that a child was the first consideration of a man’s life; which is not true, even, of all women and true of only a minority of men.
Nor was Sam, in fact, morose. He had never been more intensely and silently alive. In itself, this thing was right with a shining exultant rightness which warmed him to the marrow. It crowned and completed Marbeck and it crowned and completed him. He who was childless was to be a father, and by Effie! He had nothing but a thankful emotion for that, and looked with yearning eyes at Effie, giver of all else, who was now to give him this. He had not known her wonder could increase.
He saw that more was expected of him than that he should look at her adoringly. Anne was on tip-toe with anticipation. Her difficulty, if indeed she had acknowledged to herself that there was any, had been to make these visionaries see that love mattered and that Ada did not; and her success with Effie had been complete. She had never doubted of success with Sam, the weaker vessel, for there was love, sufficient in itself; and there was now the added argument of Effie’s child. She could not see that he had any choice.
He stood there conscious of the expectancy of their regard, and knew that he was failing them. He thought they took a blinkered view, seeing the child and nothing else. To them, apparently, the child came first: they were hypnotized by what was, really, an afterthought, and there was the greater need for him to keep a steadfast eye upon the truth. As he saw it, the truth was that he had put his hand to another plough; on Hartle Pike he had lighted such a candle by Effie’s grace as he trusted would never be put out; and he had gone to Ada. True, Ada had gone from him, but that was temporary and trivial, whereas here was a real distraction and he saw two loyalties before him—to Effie and the idea, and to Effie and her child. It seemed to Sam that the first was the greater of these two.
He had wrestled with an afterthought before, one which hardly yielded in temptation to that which now confronted him, and he had thrown it. He had refused to contest Sandyford because there was not room for politics in a scheme which included Ada, and still less was there room for Effie. He felt faint with discouragement at the thought that Effie, unless appearance belied her, had capitulated to her afterthought, but he stood firmly by their treaty. They had decided that duty came first; he had shouldered duty; and he, at any rate, had no room for afterthoughts.