In the afternoon she received the following letter:—
Dearest Alma.—For so I must still call you, since my spirit shrinks from addressing you under any more formal name. I have heard that you are ill, and I know the cause is not far to seek, since it must lie at the door of him whose friendship has brought you so much misery. Pray God it is only a passing shadow in your sunny life! An eternity of punishment would not adequately meet my guilt if it should seriously imperil your happiness or your health! Write to me, since I dare not, must not, come to you—just one word to tell me you are better, and that my fears on your account are without foundation. In the pulpit to-day, when I missed your dear face, I felt terror-stricken and utterly abandoned. Hell itself seemed opening under my feet, and every word I uttered seemed miserable blasphemy. I knew then, if I did not know it before, that my faith, my religion, my eternal happiness or misery, still depend on you. A. B.
Two hours later Bradley received this reply
‘Do not distress yourself, dearest. I shall soon be quite well again. I have been thinking it all over in solitude, and I feel quite sure that if we are patient God will help us. Try to forget your great persecution, and think rather of what is more solemn and urgent—your position in the Church, and the justification of your faith before the world.’
Ambrose Bradley read the above, and thought it strangely cold and calm; he was himself too distracted to read between the lines and perceive the bitter anguish of the writer. He still lacked the moral courage to make a clean breast of the truth, and confess to Alma that his change had come through that sad discovery in London. He dreaded her sorrow more than her anger; for he knew, or feared, that the one unpardonable sin in her eyes would be—to have loved another woman. She had no suspicion of the truth. An entanglement of a disgraceful kind, involving the life of a person of her own sex, was the last thing to occur to her mind in connection with her lover. She attributed everything, his change of manner, his strange passion, his unreasoning despair, to the exquisite sensitiveness of a proudly intellectual nature. How deluded she was by her own idolatry of his character the reader knows. What cared he for the Church’s inquisition now? What cared he for dogmatic niceties, or spiritual difficulties, or philosophic problems? He was sick of the whole business, The great problem troubled him no longer, save that he felt more and more in revolt against any kind of authority, more and more tired of the sins and follies and blind fatalities of the world. Even her tender appeals to his vanity seemed trivial and beside the question. His ambition was dead.
Again and again he tried to summon up courage enough to make a complete explanation; but his heart failed him, and so he temporised. He could not say the word which, in all probability, would sunder them for ever. He would wait; perhaps Heaven, in its mercy, might relieve him, and justify him. In his own mind he felt himself a martyr; yet he could escape the sense of contamination consequent on the possession of so guilty a secret. The pure currents of his life seemed poisoned,—as indeed they were.
The situation was a perilous one. Behind all Alma’s assumption of tender acquiescence, she was deeply wounded by her lover’s want of confidence in her devotion. His manner had shocked her inexpressibly, more even than she yet knew, yet it only drew her more eagerly towards him. In her despair and anger, she turned to the topic which, from the first moment of their acquaintance, had been constantly upon his tongue, and she tried to persuade herself that her strongest feeling towards him was religious and intellectual. In reality, she was hungering towards him with all the suppressed and suffocating passion of an unusually passionate nature. Had he been a reckless man, unrestrained by moral sanctions, she would have been at his mercy. So implicit was her faith in the veracity of his perception, and so strong at the same time was his personal attraction for her, that she might have been ready, for his sake, had he told her the whole truth, to accept as right any course of conduct, however questionable, which he might sanctify as right and just.
From all this it will be gathered that Miss Alma Craik was in a position of no inconsiderable peril. She had long been dwelling far too much in the sphere of ideas, not to say crotchets, for a young lady without protectors. Her one safeguard was her natural purity of disposition, coupled with her strength of will. She was not the sort of woman to be seduced into wrong-doing, as weak women are seduced, against her conscience. Any mistake she might make in life was certain to be the result of her own intellectual acquiescence,—or of wilful deception, which indeed was imminent.
So the days passed on, in deepening gloom; for the situation was a wretched one. Many other letters were interchanged, but the two seldom met, and when they did it was only briefly and in the presence of other people.
It was a life of torture, and could not last.