He was whirled about in a confusing, distorting maze of imagination, misinformation, and some unreadable facts.
He was a guilty man. Ruth Lansing knew that he was guilty. That was why she had acted as she had. He would go to her. He would––! But what was the use? She would not talk to him about this. She would merely deny, as she had done before, that she knew anything at all. What could he do? Where could he turn? They, he and Ruth, could never speak of that thing. They could never come to any understanding of anything. This thing, this wall––with that word written on it––would stand between them forever; this wall of guilt and the secret that was sealed behind her lips. Certainly this was the thing that was stronger than he. There was no answer. There was no way out.
Guilty! Guilty as Rafe Gadbeau!
But Rafe Gadbeau had found a way out. He was not guilty any more. Cynthe had said so. He had gotten past that wall of guilt somehow. He had merely come through the fire and thrown himself at a man’s feet and had his guilt wiped away. What was there in that uncanny thing they called confession, that a man, guilty, guilty as––as Rafe Gadbeau, could come to another man, and, by the saying of a few words, turn over and face death feeling that his guilt was wiped away?
It was a delusion, of course. The saying of words could never wipe away Rafe Gadbeau’s guilt, any more than it could take away this guilt from Jeffrey Whiting. It was a delusion, yes. 324 But Rafe Gadbeau believed it! Cynthe believed it! And Cynthe was no fool. Ruth believed it!
It was a delusion, yes. But––What a delusion! What a magnificent, soul-stirring delusion! A delusion that could lift Rafe Gadbeau out of the misery of his guilt, that carried the souls of millions of guilty people through all the world up out of the depths of their crimes to a confidence of relief and freedom!
Then the soul of Jeffrey Whiting went down into the abyss of despairing loneliness. It trod the dark ways in which there was no guidance. It did not look up, for it knew not to whom or to what it might appeal. It travelled an endless round of memory, from cause to effect and back again to cause, looking for the single act, or thought, that must have been the starting point, that must have held the germ of his guilt.
Somewhere there must have been a beginning. He knew that he was not in any particular a different person, capable of anything different, likely to anything different, that morning on Bald Mountain from what he had been on any other morning since he had become a man. There was never a time, so far as he could see, when he would not have been ready to do the thing which he was ready to do that morning––given the circumstances. Nor had he changed in any way since that morning. What had been essentially his act, his thought, a part of him, that morning was just 325 as much a part of him, was himself, in fact, this minute. There was no thing in the succession of incidents to which he could point and say: That was not I who did that: I did not mean that: I am sorry I did that. Nor would there ever be a time when he could say any of these things. It seemed that he must always have been guilty of that thing; that in all his life to come he must always be guilty of it. There had been no change in him to make him capable of it, to make him wish it; there had been no later change in him by which he would undo it. It seemed that his guilt was something which must have begun away back in the formation of his character, and which would persist as long as he was the being that he was. There was no beginning of it. There was no way that it might ever end.
And, now that he remembered, Ruth Lansing had seen that guilt, too. She had seen it in his eyes before ever the thought had taken shape in his mind.