"How cruel you are to me, Miss Soudin! The very softness of your voice but adds to the bitterness of your words!" Then coming a little nearer and speaking still lower; "Vera!--I must call you Vera, just to hear the word--if you could but know for one moment what it is to be a man and to see such loveliness, and yet not to be able to approach it; to have to stand off and to be told that it belongs to another. If you could only know, you would have pity before you send me from you for ever! How can you be so cruel?"
"Oh, Lord Vancome!" said Vera, "I wish you would not talk like that; you know I do not wish to be unkind, but you must remember I am engaged, and it would be very wrong to let any one kiss me."
"Wrong! You dear innocent thing!" he answered; "how small is your knowledge of the world! Do you think girls never let any but one man kiss them? And what harm would it do? Do you fancy a kiss leaves any mark behind that would betray us? No, the only mark will be upon my life, a mark of brightness in the gloom!"
"Oh! but I really could not!" she replied; but even as she said the words, her up-turned face, her eyes, her lips, denied them, and she knew it; and the spirits of evil and of good knew it; and the man who stood trembling with passion over her, knew and took advantage of it. As he did so the scene vanished.
Sydney turned on the light, and then said--"That is what I saw; but what I felt it is impossible to describe. The girl lying there listening to the stage-learned sentimental drivel of a half-drunken blackguard--that she could not see through it--that she was unable to distinguish the laugh behind the scenes, or know that at some future date the details exaggerated would be retailed to a club audience--that she should let him even kiss her!
"I came-to from that trance little better than a madman, with one only hope, that it might not be true; one determination to find out for certain, and if so to be revenged--revenged on the man. My love for the girl was unchanged, and I realized with something akin to horror that nothing could alter it; that from the moment when I made my vow, her fate and mine were woven together; and in this first vision of her damnation I felt driven from the face of God, a thing accursed. I had taken her sin upon me, as we must ever take the sins of those we truly love; and I had then perhaps for the first time some faint idea of the meaning of the word substitution, and could understand how one perfect in love, and therefore perfect in holiness, must in a world like this bear the sin and carry the sorrows of humanity.
"As every man born into the world becomes a unit, influenced by all that preceded him and influencing all future life, so must each be a saviour or destroyer through self-renunciation or through egotism. To One alone can we give the title, the noblest and the grandest for us to conceive, of the Saviour. He, who possessing fully the spirit of God's order and of God's love, was ordained to reflect them once perfectly upon earth so that He might show to the wanderers of all time the possibility of man's nature, and the only path by which we may return to peace. Men waste time in disputing if this Saviour was God. What know we of God but by his attributes? Which of these attributes can we conceive bound down in human form which was not manifest in the Christ? Could love exceed His love, or meekness His humility, whose unselfishness asked no reward of gratitude, and the exercise of whose power was ever restrained by the hand of a far-seeing compassion? Is all we read true? Perhaps not; the hand of imperfect devotion often, through want of insight, may have touched and marred the picture, but the portrait remains, if somewhat soiled through the fingers of adoration. On the other hand, if the painter of our picture had no living model, a thing well nigh impossible, then must he have been the Christ, for no soul can rise to a sustained ideal beyond the possibility of his own nature.
"How wretched and partial a thing my love was, may be seen at once by the bitter feeling of revenge that took possession of me. I fully believe that at that moment I could have murdered my enemy in cold blood. It is a humiliating reflection that there is virtually no crime of which the best of us could not be guilty if the temptation were only strong enough and the circumstances propitious.
"The next morning I walked to Heather Lodge, and asking to see Mr. Soudin, was shown into his library. The old gentleman was sitting there dressed for shooting, and did not seem very pleased to see me.
"'I must apologize,' I began, 'for coming up before the week is expired, but I have good reason to believe that Lord Vancome is making love to your daughter, and feel that it is impossible to let things go on as they are. I must therefore ask you to release me from my promise and allow me to have an interview with her at once.'