In the stress of her feeling she forgot the impression that her eagerness might make; but it had not been lost upon the rector, who pondered all these things in his heart as he went homeward.
When he had given the letter to Nora, and she had taken it to her mistress, he wondered if he had done well. Bettina had not pretended that she had really loved the man to whom she had first engaged herself. The preoccupied interest and affection which she had given him then were not misrepresented in her confession to the rector, and she had been absolutely silent as to her subsequent and present feeling toward him. All that she said, the whole burden of her song, was that she had so wronged him in that past time; never once had she hinted at the possibility of any renewal of relations between them.
In spite of all this, the rector knew Bettina well, and he recognized the fact that she was under the dominion of some larger and deeper feeling than he had ever known her to have except her affection for her mother. And had even that, he asked himself, so permeated her whole being—mind, soul, and character—as this feeling in which he now saw her so absorbed? He answered that it had not. It was, therefore, taking a certain responsibility upon himself to show this letter. But he was acting in the interest of truth and justice, and he could not find it in his heart to regret what he had done.
Temperate, judicious, deliberate as the rector was in all his mental processes, he could not imagine that any result could come from the course which he had taken, except some very remote one. Bettina had shown plainly her determination never to divulge to Horace the contents of Mr. Cortlin’s letter; he was under promise to keep the secret also, so there was no ground upon which the intercourse between them could be renewed. Besides this, Bettina was but recently become a widow. The proprieties of the situation demanded absolute seclusion for a year at least, and, in Mr. Spotswood’s consciousness, propriety was supreme. He never took count of the fact that conventions could be disregarded by any right-minded person, and to this extent at least he conceived Bettina to be right-minded.
CHAPTER XVII
The reading of that letter from Horace to the rector was a crisis in Bettina’s life. Its effect upon her was singular. When she eagerly took in those pages filled with such anguish as possesses the heart but once or twice in a lifetime, the consciousness that it was she, Bettina, who had created such a love in the heart of the man that Horace Spotswood was to her now, so exhilarated her that she was capable of but one feeling—exultation. To have had this love, though now she had it not, seemed to glorify her life. To have caused him such sorrow—how greatly he had cared! In spite of all there was rapture in it!
That mood was followed by one of intense regret—an excoriating self-accusation that made her spirit writhe before her own bar of justice. Then, by degrees, when there came a moment of comparative calm, she forced herself to recognize the fact that it was the Bettina of the past who had been so loved, and that the man who had so loved her was that youthful and impulsive Horace. Was not the present Bettina, the slightingly treated widow of his cousin, a very different being—as different as was the present Lord Hurdly from that old and outgrown other self? Surely the change in both was great—a change which she construed as absolutely to her own disadvantage as it was to his advantage.