A passionate flood of self-reproachful love was on his lips. He choked it back. It was desecration that her name should be mentioned in that room. But he dropped the hand he held. The fierceness died out of his eyes. His companion stood beside him panting, breathless, afraid.
'Thank God,' he said slowly, 'thank God for yourself and me that I love my wife! I am not worthy of her—doubly unworthy, since it has been possible for any human being to suspect for one instant that I was ungrateful for the blessing of her love, that I could ever forget and dishonour her! But worthy or not—— No!—no matter! Madame de Netteville, let me go, and forget that such a person exists.'
She looked at him steadily for a moment, at the stern manliness of the face which seemed in this half-hour to have grown older, at the attitude with its mingled dignity and appeal. In that second she realised what she had done and what she had forfeited; she measured the gulf between herself and the man before her. But she did not flinch. Still holding him, as it were, with menacing defiant eyes, she moved aside, she waved her hand with a contemptuous gesture of dismissal. He bowed, passed her, and the door shut.
For nearly an hour afterwards Elsmere wandered blindly and aimlessly through the darkness and silence of the park.
The sensitive optimist nature was all unhinged, felt itself wrestling in the grip of dark implacable things, upheld by a single thread above that moral abyss which yawns beneath us all, into which the individual life sinks so easily to ruin and nothingness. At such moments a man realises within himself, within the circle of consciousness, the germs of all things hideous and vile. 'Save for the grace of God,' he says to himself, shuddering, 'save only for the grace of God——'
Contempt for himself, loathing for life and its possibilities, as he had just beheld them; moral tumult, pity, remorse, a stinging self-reproach—all these things wrestled within him. What, preach to others, and stumble himself into such mire as this? Talk loudly of love and faith, and make it possible all the time that a fellow human creature should think you capable at a pinch of the worst treason against both?
Elsmere dived to the very depths of his own soul that night. Was it all the natural consequence of a loosened bond, of a wretched relaxation of effort—a wretched acquiescence in something second best? Had love been cooling? Had it simply ceased to take the trouble love must take to maintain itself? And had this horror been the subtle inevitable Nemesis?
All at once, under the trees of the park, Elsmere stopped for a moment in the darkness, and bared his head, with the passionate reverential action of a devotee before his saint. The lurid image which had been pursuing him gave way, and in its place came the image of a new-made mother, her child close within her sheltering arm. Ah! it was all plain to him now. The moral tempest had done its work.
One task of all tasks had been set him from the beginning—to keep his wife's love! If she had slipped away from him, to the injury and moral lessening of both, on his cowardice, on his clumsiness, be the blame! Above all, on his fatal power of absorbing himself in a hundred outside interests, controversy, literature, society. Even his work seemed to have lost half its sacredness. If there be a canker at the root, no matter how large the show of leaf and blossom overhead, there is but the more to wither! Of what worth is any success, but that which is grounded deep on the rock of personal love and duty?