He stopped. His eyes looked past her, on into the world he had never seen where they could begin life together. The darkness hid his face or she would at once have wept and rejoiced at its look of half-boyish exaltation. He had had to wait and work and fight for things all his life; but they had come to him. Unconsciously from childhood he had waited and worked and fought for this—so surely it was his.
Voiceless still, she swayed in his slackened clasp, and he bent down, wondering. His voice softened.
"Still nothing to say for yourself, Eve? Won't you even tell me that you're glad? Try to understand. It's you who are living a lie, not I. Real adultery is to live your life with the wrong man, as you are now. You're made for me, and I for you. The world shan't dare to throw a stone at you—I'll see to that. We'll win through everything, hands down. Love's the fulfilling of the law. Sinning against it is the one unpardonable crime. It's when a man does that, that he deserves the hell to which he's probably already sent the woman who loves him."
"Wait," said Evelyn at last. "Let me think—I must think." She put out her hand to warn him back. She was face to face with naked facts; it had never been Farquharson's way to lie to those he trusted; he was not lying now. There would be no concealment in his actions now or ever, so far as she was concerned; he would take and keep her in view of the world, because he thought she was his by right of love. So strong, indeed, was he that he might even wrest a certain sympathy from the world for his courage and daring.
His words had driven away her faintness; they were, after all, but the echo of those she had already stifled in her own heart. Weakened and unnerved by the day's fast, they sounded in her ear like a trumpet call. Here, beside him, away from husband and friends and priests and confessors, there swept before her a sudden glorious vision of they two together defying the world and yet trampling upon it. Were they strong enough to point the way, to sacrifice themselves openly and without shame that the great truth behind his words might reach mankind and help others, weaker than they, to see the exquisite sanctity of a tie that would be to them for ever sacred?
But what of faith, what of religion? She might defy the world's judgment, there was still God's to confront. Hell would be to bring punishment on another; her own soul might go, but what if she plunged his into everlasting fires? Suddenly Cummings' words came back to her; the boy's words, not the priest's.
"You're not playing the game, Evelyn," he had said once, more gravely than occasion seemed to warrant, when she had just successfully evaded some trivial rule he had been at pains to teach her. "One must always play the game in life, however trivial it may seem."
"One must always play the game in life, however trivial it may seem."
Perhaps she said the words aloud; she never knew. He started.
"My dear, my dear," she said, "I can't!" She hid her head on his shoulder, not daring to face him. She heard him draw a deep breath, and stand tense and rigid. She drew back. "You don't want heroics, nor do I. I am not afraid of the world or you. You'd be good to me for ever, and the best of our friends would be friends still, whatever happened. As for you, you're too big a man for me to harm you here—your career, I mean. But that's not all. There's God and there's eternity. They frighten me, not for myself, but you."