The game was decided for the time being when the clergyman spoke as follows:—
‘My darling, I am not so utterly lost as to let you share my degradation. I do not deserve your pity any more than I have deserved your love. Your goodness only makes me feel my own baseness twenty-fold. I should have told you the whole truth; I failed to do so, and I grossly deceived you; there fore it is just that I should be punished and driven forth. I have broken the laws of my country as well as the precepts of my creed. I shall leave England to-morrow, never to return.’
‘You must not go,’ answered Alma. ‘I know that we must separate, I see that it is sin to remain together, but over and above our miserable selves is the holy labour to which you have set your hand. Do not, I conjure you, abandon that! The last boon I shall ask you is to labour on in the church I upbuilt for you, and to keep your vow of faithful service.’
‘Alma, it is impossible! In a few days, possibly in a few hours, our secret will be known, and then——’
‘Your secret is safe with me,’ she replied, ‘and I will answer for my uncle and my cousin—that they shall leave you in peace. It is I that must leave England, not you. Your flight would cause a scandal and would destroy the great work for ever; my departure will be unnoticed and unheeded. Promise me, promise me to remain.’
‘I cannot, Alma!—God forbid!—and allow you, who are blameless, to be driven forth from your country and your home!’
‘I have no home, no country now,’ she said, and as she spoke her voice was full of the pathos of infinite despair. ‘I lost these, I lost everything, when I lost you. Dearest Ambrose, there is but one atonement possible for both of us! We must forget our vain happiness, and work for God.’
Her face became Madonna-like in its beautiful resignation. Bradley looked at her in wonder, and never before had he hated himself so much for what he had done. Had she heaped reproaches upon him, had she turned from him in the pride of passionate disdain, he could have borne it far better. But in so much as she assumed the sweetness of an angel, did he feel the misery and selfscorn of a devil.
And, if the truth must be spoken, Alma wondered at herself. She had thought at first, when the quick of her pain was first touched, that she must madden and die of agony; but her nature seemed flooded now with a piteous calm, and her mind hushed itself to the dead stillness of resignation. Alas! she had yet to discover how deep and incurable was the wound that she had received; how it was to fester and refuse all healing, even from the sacred unguents of religion.
‘Promise me,’ she continued after a pause, ‘to remain and labour in your vocation.’