O pellucid Eve: O rib of Adam, how naked hast thou made the man for whom thou wast formed! And this without in the least intending it, or knowing what she had done.
It was true that, even now, she had not found him out; but she had revealed to him with fatal clearness the fact that the shirking of a cold bath and the wearing of a yellow halo were incompatible. And this was the worst thing she had against him, this trivial doubt; but it was enough. Down came his castle. A horrid blush went over him—down even into his clothes; it went farther, had he only known.
‘Thou, Lord, seest me!’ he said to himself, got up, and went swiftly out into the starlit dusk carrying a red light.
And then the thought of Davidina, coming on the top of this, struck him cold. He remembered that he had upon him a letter from her which he had not yet read; opening it, he drew out the contents. There was no need to go indoors to get a light; that which he had was sufficient. The letter was very brief and to the point. ‘Found you out! but no matter: you did the honest thing with your eyes open—for once.’ Enclosed was an old envelope, cut open across the top, still bearing its seal, addressed to Davidina in Uncle Phineas’s handwriting. Minutely examining the seal, he found—what Davidina also had found—traces of his own handiwork, a scar showing where it had been removed and put on again.
‘Idiot!’ he said to himself—why hadn’t he covered up the breakage with a larger seal? Or why, again, after all those years had he troubled to tell a lie about it? But the reason for that he knew; it was so that he might stand well—better than he had ever stood before—in Davidina’s eyes. Just that once, so simply, so easily, by so slight a departure from the truth—he had got the better of her; and now her clutch was upon him again. She was coming through the dark night; he must meet her face to face, and hear her asking in hard matter-of-fact tone: ‘Well, what’s the matter now?’
Through the house he heard a knock at the front door; the thought that it might possibly be Davidina, come earlier than she was expected, drove him down the garden in flight and out by the back way. He was suffering badly. The double buffet—Caroline’s, followed by Davidina’s, had left him dazed; he had no spirit left. If there had ever been doubt of him in his wife’s easy-going and utterly domesticated mind, how could he meet the all-seeing eye of Davidina, in the expectation that his shining certificate of virtue would, even for a moment, divert her from common sense? All the haloes in the world would not convince Davidina that he really took his bath of a cold morning: it would convince her of nothing of which he would like her to be convinced, but only of other things that he would rather she did not know.
And yet the thought stuck to him, ‘I am good, sometimes.’ To that anchor he clung like a drowning man who happens also to be a little drunk. If he could only have let the anchor go it would have given him a better chance. But no—a sense of his sometimes exceeding goodness still clung to him. Out into the night he went, and his blush went with him—extending farther than he knew.
All the mercury of his composition had gone down into his boots; and though he still believed in himself he was very, very miserable. The fact that he attracted moths, added to his depression. It was merely one more indication of the futility of the moral emblem which had fastened in on him. Coming to a stile leading into fields, he made it his prie-Dieu, and kneeling on the foot-rest bowed his head and prayed: ‘O Lord, take away my life; thou hast laid on me a burden too heavy for me to bear!’ So, characteristically—I had often heard him do it before—still shifting the blame from himself to others.
One did for him what one could—stirred memories he had striven to make dormant, suggested to him interpretations of his action in the past which at other times he would have denied vehemently. All I could do I did to make him shake off for good that halo of self-worship with which he had surrounded himself. But, as always when he took to his knees, he left me with a peculiar sense of helplessness. His tendency to defend himself in prayer not only from the imputations the world made against him, but from the imputations of his own conscience, was just as much in evidence as ever; and familiarity with the Scriptures continued to make sincerity of speech difficult. Quotations from the Old Testament kept coming into his head to be hurled at mine, as though, from such a source, they must needs be true statements of fact.
‘I have been very zealous for the Lord God,’ he cried; and then having chosen his prophet, started upon variations. ‘The priests of Baal I have slain; I have broken down their altars; and I, only I, am left, desolate.’ He was not arguing, he was telling me.