The slave of sin—yes—for though he hated the sin, he went on sinning. He loved her—he loved her with a passion that the Water of Life could not quench. How vain were those supplications for grace, those confessions of guilt which broke from his convulsed lips, while her image filled his heart. How vain his cry to Christ for help, while her voice sounded in his ears, and the thought of her indignation, her scorn, her icy indifference, reigned supreme in the fiery tumult of his brain.
Oh, how he loathed himself for his folly; how he writhed under a proud man's agony of humiliation at the thought of his fatuous self-delusion! Something in her look, something in her tone when she protested against a second marriage, had thrilled him with the conviction that his love had found its answer in her heart. When did that fatal love begin? He knew not how the insidious poison stole into his senses; but he could recall his first consciousness of that blissful slavery, his first lapse from honour. He could remember the hour and the moment, they two walking through the squalid street in the winter twilight, her gloved hand resting lightly on his arm, her eyes looking up at him, sapphire-blue under the long dark lashes, her low voice murmuring words of pity for the dying child that she had nursed in her lap, for the broken-hearted mother they had just left, and in his heart a wild rapture that was new and sweet.
"I love her, I love her," he had told himself in that moment. "But she will never know. It is as if I loved an angel. She is as far from me. My conscience can suffer no stain from so pure, so distant a love."
Self-deluded sinner! Hypocrite to himself! He knew now that this moment marked the beginning of apostasy, the law of sin warring against the inward light. He knew now that this woman—noble-minded, chaste, charitable, a creature of kindly impulses and generous acts, for him represented Antichrist, and that from the hour in which he proved her stubborn in unbelief, he should have renounced her friendship. He had paltered with truth, had tried to reconcile the kingdom of darkness with the kingdom of light, had been satisfied with the vague hope of a deferred conversion, and had made his bosom friend of the woman who denied his Master.
He loved her—with a love not to be repented of—a love that ran in his veins and moved his heart, and seemed as much a part of his being as the nerves and bones and flesh and blood that made him a man. He might lie in dust and ashes at the foot of the cross, scourge himself to death with the penitent's whip; but while the heart beat and the brain could think the wicked love would be there; and he would die adoring her, die and perish everlastingly, lost to salvation, cut off from Christ's compassion, by that unhallowed love.
There was the agony for him, the believer. To abhor sin, to believe in everlasting punishment, and to feel the impossibility of a saving repentance, to know himself a son of perdition; since what could avail the pangs of remorse for the man who went on sinning, whose whole life was coloured by a guilty passion?
The Divine Teacher's stern denunciation of such sin rang in his ears, as he crouched with folded arms on the stone parapet, alone in the summer darkness, an outcast from God.
"He that looketh upon a woman!" On his adulterous heart that sentence burnt like vitriol upon tender flesh. Only by ceasing to love her could he cease to sin; and, looking forward through the long vista of the coming years, he saw no possibility of change in his guilty heart, no hope of respite from yearning and regret. Six years of repentance for the sins and follies of his youth; six years of faithful service; six years of peace and self-approval; and now behold him thrust outside the gate, a soul more lost than in those unregenerate days when the consciousness of sin was first awakened in his mind, when remorse for a youthful intrigue, in which he had been the victim and sport of a vile woman, and for a duel that had ended fatally, first became intolerable. For him, the earnest believer, to whom religion was a terrible reality, the fall from a state of grace meant the loss of that great hope which alone can make life worth living, that "hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began." For him sin unrepented of meant everlasting despair, the pains of hell, the companionship of devils.
He left the bridge, and wandered along the river bank, past his own house, past the Archbishop's Palace, to the dreary marshes between Lambeth and Battersea—wandered like a man hunted by evil spirits; and it was not till daylight that he turned his steps slowly homeward, dejected and forlorn.