"Oh yes, I know."
"Do you?" she said, sharply. For one moment she thought that Maisie did indeed know, know and understand so perfectly that she forgave. This was forgiveness.
"Of course I do. And so does Jerrold. He knows what a brute you are."
It was not forgiveness. It was Maisie's innocence again, her trust—the punishment. Anne knelt there and took the pain of it.
vi
She lay awake, alone in her shelter. She had given the excuse of a racking headache to keep Jerrold from coming to her. For that she had had to lie. But what was her whole existence but a lie? A lie told by her silence under Maisie's trust in her, by her acceptance of Maisie's friendship, by her acquiescence in Maisie's preposterous belief. Every minute that she let Maisie go on loving and trusting and believing in her she lied. And the appalling thing was that she couldn't be alone in her lying. So long as Maisie trusted him Jerrold lied, too—Jerrold, who was truth itself. One moment she thought: That's what I've brought him to. That's how I've dragged him down. The next she saw that reproach as the very madness of her conscience. She had not dragged Jerrold down; she had raised him to his highest intensity of loving, she had brought him, out of the illusion of his life with Maisie, to reality and kept him there in an immaculate faithfulness. Not even for one insane moment did Anne admit that there was anything wrong or shameful in their passion itself. It was Maisie's innocence that made them liars, Maisie's goodness that put them in the wrong and brought shame on them, her truth that falsified them.
No woman less exquisite in goodness could have moved her to this incredible remorse. It took the whole of Maisie, in her unique perfection, to beat her and break her down. Her first instinct in refusing to know Maisie had been profoundly right. It was as if she had foreseen, even then, that knowing Maisie would mean loving her, and that, loving her, she would be beaten and broken down. The awful thing was that she did love Maisie; and she couldn't tell which was the worse to bear, her love for Maisie or Maisie's love for her. And who could have foreseen the pain of it? When she prayed that she might take the whole punishment, she had not reckoned on this refinement and precision of torture. God knew what he was about. With all his resources he couldn't have hit on anything more delicately calculated to hurt. Nothing less subtle would have touched her. Not discovery; not the grossness of exposure; but this intolerable security. What could discovery and exposure do but set her free in her reality? Anne would have rejoiced to see her lie go up in one purifying flame of revelation. But to go safe in her lie, hiding her reality, and yet defenceless under the sting of Maisie's loving, was more than she could bear. She had brought all her truth and all her fineness to this passion which Maisie's innocence made a sin, and she was punished where she had sinned, wounded by the subtle God in her fineness and her truth. If only Jerrold could have escaped, but he was vulnerable, too; there was fineness and truth in him. To suffer really he had to be wounded in his soul.
If Jerrold was hurt then they must end it.
As yet he had given no sign of feeling; but that was like him. Up to the last minute he would fight against feeling, and when it came he would refuse to own that he suffered, that there was any cause for suffering. It would be like the time when his father was dying, when he refused to see that he was dying. So he would refuse to see Maisie and then, all at once, he would see her and he would be beaten and broken down.
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