What the whole station knew! Aye, there was the rub—the blistering rub to her woman’s pride and shame, the galling, smarting rub to the man’s. How often life’s chasms could be bridged, even its cesspools purged and sweetened, if only no others knew. Lucilla said it not unnastily, all the more so for the high-bred quality of civility and self-control with which she spoke. A husband’s faults—not even the unbearable fault of infidelity—never in themselves bear on a woman so crushingly and painfully as does having others know of them. For a husband’s sins and malodorous peccadilloes are the damnable hall-mark of a wife’s failure, branded on her soul and her flesh in a festering sore that never heals, and that all can see. Thousands of women go to the scaffold of the divorce court because what others know compels them. Lucilla Crespin knew what it had cost her that the whole station knew, but she gave no thought at all to what it had cost Antony. Only the highest souls realize and accept that he who sins is far more to be pitied, aye, and loved, if love is what the highest human passion should be, than is the one against whom the sinner has sinned.
“And what does the whole station know?” Crespin demanded. His eyes blazed through their blear, and the hand on his knee trembled. “What does the whole station know? Why, that your deadly coldness drives me to drink!” His voice broke just a little. “I’ve lived for three years in an infernal clammy fog like that we’ve passed through. Who’s to blame if I take a whiskey peg now and then, to keep the chill out? Who?”
“Oh, Antony, why go over it all again?” She half rose, and then, as if it were not worth while to move, sank back as she’d been. “You know very well it was drink—and other things—that came between us; not my coldness, as you call it, that drove you to drink.”
“Oh,” Crespin cried in a rasping voice, “you good women! You patter after the parson, ‘Forgive us as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ But you don’t know what forgiveness means. ‘Plaster saints’ every one of you, your vaunted Christianity to be shattered at the first hammer-tap of what you don’t like. Blind to every fault of your own, fiendish and merciless to every fault of another, if it happens to nick you on your own petty raw. Damn such ‘good women’ I say. You’ll make a fine show on Judgment Day when you file up one by one to have your sins forgiven even as you have forgiven us poor rotten scum that have trespassed against you. You—you don’t know your own faults, I tell you. You take them for virtues, even when they smell to heaven. You have no faults, you, you scourgers of others, not a fault of your own. Forgiveness! You don’t know what it means. You’re not fit to know!”
Never had Antony Crespin spoken to her so before. The force of his terrible passion reached her, but not its meaning. She heard the storm, and she saw its wreck: knotting muscles, quivering nostrils, wild, agonized eyes. But its pathos never reached her. He cried out to her for bread—new, clean, white bread, and she pitched a stone of contempt into his outstretched hand. Perhaps, if Basil Traherne had not been there behind the rock—perhaps, if she and Traherne had never met—Antony Crespin’s wife might have heard his appeal and responded to it in his hour of utmost need, utmost abasement—for that was what his outburst of rage and accusation was: shame, longing, the old, old cry for one more chance.
But Lucilla was dead now to any need or appeal of his. Well, he had earned it. Alas, for life’s heaviest tragedy—we usually have. We earn what we get—most of us—and, sweet heaven help us! we get it God does not always pay on Saturday—but He pays.
Mrs. Crespin, her eyes strained for what might come from the Raja’s castle, her ears strained to catch Traherne’s returning footsteps, answered his words, but only his words.
“What’s the use of it, Antony?” she said drearily. “Forgive? I have forgiven you. I don’t try to take the children from you, though it might be better for them if I did. But to forgive is one thing, to forget another. When a woman has seen a man behave as you have behaved, do you think it is possible for her to forget it, and to love afresh? There are women in novels, and perhaps in the slums, who have such short memories; but I am not one of them.”
“No, by God, you’re not!” And at the passion in the Englishman’s voice, Yazok the priest, still watching them steadily, moved a little. “So a whole man’s life is to be ruined—”
“Do you think yours is the only life to be ruined?” She, too, moved as she spoke, and left an inch or two more space between them on the stone where they both still sat, Crespin too shaken to rise, she too indifferent.