A GOLDEN BRIDGE ACROSS AN ABYSS OF SHAME.
When Leonard awoke to find her bending over him, the anxiety in her eyes looked to him like fear. He had no perception of the fact that hours had passed since in the meeting in the hall he had seen the same eyes dancing with the light of joy, and had heard from the drawing-room the fond murmurs of forbidden love. In his first awakening the scene he had witnessed and the murmurs he had heard swayed before his eyes and sounded still in his ears. Fresh from dalliance with her lover, she might well tremble to find her husband here! With this thought uppermost, he staggered to his feet.
She started back. He glared upon her with a gaze so furious that she was in truth afraid.
For the burden of her guilty dream weighed heavily upon her, justifying the hatred in his eyes, a hatred born of the ascription of all his woes to her, and while she saw abhorrence, the suffering he had endured was no less plainly written in his haggard face, accusing her even as she accused herself. Her sins against this man, her husband, the father of her dead child, crushed her with the burden of the humiliation born of them.
"My husband!" In her self-abasement she sank upon her knees. The action was instinctive in her of Gallic training; to Leonard, bred to less dramatic display of emotion, it was proof of guilt far deeper than he had until now suspected.
"Get up," he said harshly, and taking her by the arm he led her to the doorway, pushing her from the room and, with unconscious violence, almost throwing her against the opposite wall. He returned to the room and rang the bell. His rudeness had given him a sense of mastery in his own house, and had dissipated his dread of meeting the servants. He asked the maid if breakfast would soon be ready, and was surprised to learn that it was long past noon.
Ordering a meal to be prepared he went upstairs, boldly and with something not unlike a swagger in the perception that there were sinners as bad as he, and having bathed, being clothed in fresh garments, and having eaten almost ravenously, he felt, he said to himself, like a new man.
Which indeed he was, if new thoughts make a new man. That dreadful load of regret for his own misdeeds had been lifted from his shoulders. His violence toward his wife had somewhat shocked himself, and while attending to his physical needs, he had had time to regret his hasty outbreak; and this fact led him to resolve to consider the situation calmly and judicially.
To know all is, if the French adage be true, to pardon all, which is perhaps the reason why we find it easier to forgive our own sins than those of others. We presumably know what motives actuated us in evil-doing, and being aware of the strength of the force that drove us, we are conscious of the fact that had the incentive to sin been less powerful than our rectitude we would not have been guilty. In other words, we sin because we can't help sinning, a logical and soothing conclusion, converting our wickedness into misfortune and rendering us objects of self-commiseration rather than of self-condemnation.
But in that contemplation of the iniquity of others, to which circumstances sometimes impel us, and which is always so painful, the strength of temptation which we have not personally experienced is less obvious, while at the same time the sense of our own rectitude is naturally in the ascendant. And as, in such contemplation, our judgment is inevitably swayed by our morality in its sternest mood, especially if the crimes under consideration have wronged ourselves, our indignation is naturally fervent. It is also true that our vision is clarified, our memory sharpened, and we recall incidents, now corroborative of guilt, though heretofore unremarked, or regarded as innocent.