“You must go back, dear.” The words fell from Clemence’s lips tender, distinct, immutable as the laws of right and wrong. “You must take the consequences of what you’ve done, and through that pain and shame you’ll get above it to begin again.”
Julian’s lips, white now as ashes, moved stiffly.
“The consequences?” he whispered. “The consequences, Clemmie?”
“The consequences,” she replied, and in the ring of her voice, in the clasp with which her hands closed over his, was all the courage and conviction with which she sought to nerve him. “Ah, I don’t know—I don’t understand—but are there no innocent people who may suffer for your fault unless you are there to take it on yourself? Besides, how else, dear? How can you begin again without having made amends? How can you free yourself of the past without acknowledging what’s black and bad in it? And if you acknowledge what’s black and bad, how can you hesitate to take its punishment?”
And as if that struggling life in him were growing and stirring under her influence, a strange flickering light crept into Julian’s face and the struggle in his eyes grew into a faint suggestion of victory. He paused a moment, his breath coming thick and fast.
“But suppose—suppose it isn’t any good?” His voice, tense, hardly audible, seemed to catch and strain like that of a man at the very crisis of his life. “Suppose it’s in me and I must——”
“It isn’t so!” she cried, and as she spoke she drew away from him as though carried beyond herself, beyond her womanly love for him, in that supreme declaration of the truth that was her very being. “You know it isn’t so! There is no ‘must’ except God’s ‘must’ to us that we should follow Him. There is no power can tear us from His hand unless we throw ourselves away by saying that His hand is without strength to save us. Good and evil lie before every one of us, and we must all choose. And nothing else is real and living in this life except that choice and the end to which it leads us!”
Through all the limitations of the phraseology in which her faith was clothed, the great truth which makes the mystery of humanity, the truth which words can only belittle and obscure, which lives not in words but in the silent consciousness of each man’s soul, rang out, all-penetrating and all-dominating. And as she faced him, her eyes shining, her whole face radiant, Julian caught her in his arms with a great cry.
“I will,” he cried. “Clemence, I choose. Help me! I will go back.”