In the clamorous emptiness of the living-room he looked about him; noticed that the table-cover was still crumpled from his mother's hands and smoothed it automatically; then he sat down. He had the sensation, spiritually, that a man might have physically whose face had been violently and repeatedly slapped. The swiftness of the confounding experiences of the last nine hours made him actually dizzy. His thoughts rushed to one thing, then to another. Elizabeth? No, no; he could not think of her yet. His mother? No, he could not think of her, either. It occurred to him that he was cold, and getting up abruptly, he went to the fireplace, and kicked the charred sticks of driftwood together over a graying bed of ashes. Then he heard a chair pushed back overhead and a soft, tired step, and he wondered vaguely if his mother's room was comfortable. Reaching for the bellows, he knelt down and blew the reluctant embers into a faint glow; when a hesitant flicker of flame caught the half-burned logs he got on his feet and stood, his fingers on the mantelpiece, his forehead on the back of his hand, watching the fire catch and crackle into cheerful warmth. He stood there for a long time. Suddenly his cheek grew rigid: some man, some beast, had—my God! wronged Materna! It was the first really clear thought; instantly some other thought must have sprung up to meet it, for he said, under his breath, "No, because I didn't mean . . . it is different with us; quite different!" The thought, whatever it was, must have persisted, for it stung him into restless movement. He began to walk about; once or twice he stumbled over a footstool, that his eyes, looking blindly at the floor, apparently did not see. Once he stood stock-still, the blood surging in his ears, his face darkly red. But his mind was ruthlessly clear. He was remembering; he was putting two and two together. She was a widow; he knew that. Her marriage had been unhappy; he knew that. There had been a man—he dimly remembered a man. He had not thought of him for twenty years! . . . "Damn him," David said, and the tears stood in his eyes. Then again that thought must have come to him, for he said to himself, violently, "But I love Elizabeth, it is different with me!" Perhaps that persistent inner voice said, "In what way?" for he said again, "Entirely different! It is the only way to make him divorce her so we can be married." Again he stood still and stared blindly at the floor. That a man could live who would be base enough to take advantage of—Materna! Between rage and pity, and confusion he almost forgot Elizabeth, until suddenly the whirl of his thoughts was pierced by the poignant realization that his outcry of dismay at his mother's confession had practically told Elizabeth that he was willing to let her do what he found unthinkable in his mother. His whole body winced with mortification. It was the first prick of the sword of shame—that sword of the Lord! Even while he reddened to his forehead the sword-thrust came again in a flash of memory. It was only a single sentence; neither argument nor entreaty nor remonstrance; merely the statement of a fact: "you did not love her enough to accept her money." At the time those ironical words were spoken they had scarcely any meaning to him, and what meaning they had was instantly extinguished by anger. Now abruptly they reverberated in his ears. He forgot his mother; he forgot the "beast," who was, after all, only the same kind of a beast that he was himself. "You, who could not accept a girl's money could take her good name; could urge her to a course which in your mother overwhelms you with horror; could ask her to give you that which ranks a man who accepted it from your mother as a 'beast.'" David had never felt shame before; he had known mortification, and regret, too, to a greater or less degree; and certainly he had known remorse; he had experienced the futile rage of a man who realizes that he has made a fool of himself; these things he had known, as every man nearly thirty years old must know them. Especially and cruelly he had known them when he understood the effect of the reasoning egotism of his letter upon Elizabeth. But the beneficent agony of shame he had never known until this moment.
In the next hour or two, while the flame of the lamp still burning on the table, whitened in the desolating morning light that crept into the room, David Richie did not reason things out consecutively. His thoughts came without apparent sequence; sometimes he wondered, dully, if it were still raining; wondered how he would get a carriage in the morning; wondered if Elizabeth was asleep; wondered if she would go back to Blair Maitland? "No, no, no!" he said aloud; "not that; that can't be." Yet through all this disjointed thought his eyes, cleared by shame, saw Reason coming slowly up to explain and confirm his conviction that, whatever Elizabeth did or did not do, for the present he had lost her. And Reason, showing him his likeness to that other "beast," showing him his arrogance to his mother, his cruelty to his poor girl, his poor, pitiful Elizabeth! showed him something else: his assertions of his intrinsic right to Elizabeth—how much of their force was due to love for her, how much to hatred of Blair? David's habit of corroborating his emotions by a mental process had more than once shackled him and kept him from those divine impetuosities that add to the danger and the richness of life; but this time the logical habit led him inexorably into deeper depths of humiliation. It was dawn when he saw that he had hated Blair more than he had loved Elizabeth. This was the most intolerable revelation of all; he had actually been about to use Love to express Hate!
Up-stairs Elizabeth had had her own vision; it was not like David's. There was no sense of shame. There was only Love! Love, pitiful, heart-breaking, remorseful. When David left her she sank down on the edge of her bed and cried—not for disappointment or dread or perplexity, not for herself, not for David, but for Helena Richie. Once she crept across the hall and listened at the closed door. Silence. Then she pushed it open and listened again. Oh, to go to her, to put her arms about her, to say, "I will be good, I will do whatever you say, I love you." But all was still except for soft, scarcely heard, tranquil breathing. For David's mother slept.
When Elizabeth came down the next morning it was to the crackle of flames and the smell of coffee and the sight of David scorching his face over toasting bread. It was so unheroic that it was almost heroic, for it meant that they could keep on the surface of life. David said, simply, "Did you get any sleep, Elizabeth?" and she said: "Well, not much. Here, let me make the toast; you get something for your mother." But when she carried a little tray of food up to Mrs. Richie, and kneeling by the bedside took the soft mother-hand in hers, she went below the surface.
"I am going back to him," she said; and put Mrs. Richie's hand against her lips.
David's mother gave her a long look, but she had nothing to say.
Later, as they came down-stairs together, Elizabeth, still holding that gentle hand in hers, felt it tremble when Helena Richie met her son. Perhaps his trembled, too. Yet his tenderness and consideration for her, as he told her how he had arranged for her journey to town was almost ceremonious; it seemed as if he dared not come too near her. It was not until he was helping her into the carriage that he made any reference to the night before:
"I have given her up," he said, almost in a whisper, "but she can't go back to him, you know—that can't be! Mother, that can't be?"
But she was silent. Then Elizabeth came up behind him and got into the carriage; there were no good-bys between them.
"I shall come to town to-morrow on the noon train," he told his mother; and she looked at him as one looks at another human creature who turns his face toward the wilderness. There was nothing more that she could do for him; he must hunger and know how he might be fed; he must hear the lying whisper that if he broke the Law, angelic hands would prevent the law from breaking him; he must see the Kingdom he desired, the glory of it, and its easy price. He must save himself.