At the same time, she realized that his words had value. Is it, she asked herself, the cut and dried opinion of those who walk safely along a beaten path in company with myriads of their fellow beings, which really counts in this world? or is it the knowledge that comes of bitterness and experience? It is so easy to formulate high-sounding phrases; but what do these phrases amount to when one is confronted with life? In the past three years, what downward steps had she taken upon that pathway—she whose whole ideal had been to keep herself untainted from the common world and to walk serenely and gracefully along those heights where all the training of childhood and the instincts of heredity had made her believe that her path lay? When had she missed it? And then, like a flash, she saw in retrospect her conduct for years past; saw herself stopping here, twisting there, trying, at every instant, to evade the fate and the suffering allotted to her in life. Suddenly she realized how much she and John Kingsnorth had in common, for each was a coward. Neither had strength to take sorrow to his heart, and to bear it uncomplainingly. She was doing what he had done, failing as he had failed.
The letter dropped from her shaking fingers, and she raised her eyes to his with a look so hopeless, shamed, and grief-stricken, that he shrank back and winced as if he had seen a gaping wound.
“I can’t,” she said. “Something has snapped. I have changed. I can’t be Martin Collingwood’s wife again. If the weight of my own self-contempt could crush me, I should be dead. Oh, why did they destroy my faith? There would have been the religious life at least.”
“You must not talk that way,” Kingsnorth said. “Your path is as plain as a pikestaff. You married Martin Collingwood,—why, only you and your Maker know,—but you did marry him, and you have got to stay with him. He needs you.”
“Oh, you men!” she cried scornfully. “And if he did not need me—if only I needed him—it would be equally my duty to leave him. However you arrange the scale of duties, they are always to suit your own interests.”
“I am thinking of this from yours,” Kingsnorth said firmly. “I tell you, and I know, that the one thing the human soul can’t stand is to live on compromising with its own self-contempt. A woman of your brains can’t take the liberties with her conscience that her frivolous sisters do. You can’t stand the self-contempt. You’ll disintegrate under it. Convince yourself that you are a martyr if you can, and hug your martyrdom. They got something out of it when it was boiling oil, and melted lead, and crucifixion, and all the rest of those horrors. Be a martyr if you must, but do not try living under the weight of your own self-contempt. Of all failures that is the weakest, saddest, most loathsome. Dear lady, I’ve carried mine with me like an atmosphere. People have felt it; you did. I’ve seen you shrink from me as if I were a leper. And you were right. I am loathsome to myself.”
He stopped, wiped his brow, and settled back into his chair with a heavy sigh. Charlotte sat on, her trembling fingers tightly clasped, her eyes fixed on the sea. She turned at last and shook her head.
“I can’t. I can’t take up that thread of life. I don’t know how I got myself here—it is all a nightmare—but I must go away and work—by myself again.”
Kingsnorth leaned forward, his hands loosely clasped between his knees.
“Will you listen to the story of my life, Mrs. Collingwood?” he said with more of sharpness in his tone than was characteristic of him.