“Then we’ll do it”—savagely. “It’s easy enough for you to sit there moralising, perfectly placid and comfortable. Claire and I have borne all we can. It has been bad enough to care as we care for each other, and to live apart But when it means that Claire is to suffer unspeakable misery and humiliation while I stand by and look on—why, it’s beyond human endurance. You’re not tempted. You’ve no conception what you’re talking about.”
Jean sat very still and silent while Nick stormed out the bitterness of soul, recognising the truth of every word he littered—even of the gibes which, in the heedlessness of his own pain, he flung at herself.
Presently she got up and moved rather slowly across to his side.
“Nick,” she said, and her eyes, looking into his, were very bright and clear and steady. Somehow for Nick they held the semblance of two flames, torches of pure light, burning unflickeringly in the darkness. “Nick, every word you say is true. I’m not tempted as you and Claire have been, and so it seems sheer cheek my interfering. But I’m only asking you to do what I pray I’d be strong enough to do myself in like circumstances. I don’t believe any true happiness can ever come of running away from duty. And if ever I’m up against such a thing—a choice like this—I hope to God I’d be able to hang on... to run straight, even if it half killed me to do it.”
The quick, impassioned utterance ceased, and half shrinkingly Jean realised that she had spoken out of the very depths of her soul, crystallising in so many words the uttermost ideal and credo of her being. In some strange, indefinable fashion it was borne in on her that she had reached an epoch of her life. It was as when a musician, arrived at the end of a musical period, strikes a chord which holds the keynote of the ensuing passage.
She faltered and looked at Nick beseechingly, suddenly self-conscious, as we most of us are when we find we have laid bare a bit of our inmost soul to the possibly mocking eyes of a fellow human being.
But Nick’s eyes were not in the least mocking.
Instead of that, some of the hardness seemed to have gone out of them, and his voice was very gentle, as, taking Jean’s two hands in his, he answered:
“I believe you would run straight, little Jean—even if it meant tearing your heart out of your body to do it. But, you know, you’re always on the side of the angels—instinctively. I’m only a man—just an average earthy man”—smiling ruefully—“and my ideals all tumble down and sit on the ground in a heap when I think of what my girl’s enduring as Latimer’s wife. I believe I might stick my part of the business—but I can’t stick it for her.”
“And yet,” urged Jean, “if you go away together, Nick, it’s she who’ll pay, you know. The woman always does. Supposing—supposing Sir Adrian doesn’t divorce her—refuses to? It would be just like him to punish her that way. What about Claire—then?”