With failing strength he tried to balance himself on the satanic foothold of revolt. His doubts thickened around him like a cloud. If there was a just God, if there was a God at all, why had he made such a world?
In simple truth, the man’s fatal position was entirely the consequence of his once lack of moral courage.
He had missed the supreme moment, he had lacked the supreme sanction, which would have saved him, even had his danger been twentyfold more desperate than it had been. Instead of standing erect in his own strength, and defying the Evil One, who threatened to hurl him down and destroy him, he had taken the Evil One’s hand and accepted its support. Yes, the devil had helped him, but at what a cost!
‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ he should have said. It was the sheerest folly to say it now.
He cowered in terror at the thought of Alma’s holy indignation. He dreaded not her anger, which he could have borne, but her disenchantment, which he could not bear.
Her trust in him had been so absolute, her self-surrender so supreme; but its motive had been his goodness, her faith in his unsullied truth. She had been his handmaid, as she had called herself, and had trusted herself to him, body and soul. So complete had been his intellectual authority over her, that even had he told her his secret and thereupon assured her that he was morally a free man, though legally fettered, she would have accepted his genial pleading and still have given him her love. He was quite sure of that. But he had chosen a course of mere deception, he had refused to make her his confidant, and she had married him in all faith and fervour, believing there was no corner in all his heart where he had anything to conceal.
It was just possible that she might still forgive him; it was simply impossible that she could ever revere and respect him, as she hitherto had done.
Does he who reads these lines quite realise what it is to fall from the pure estate of a loving woman’s worship? Has he ever been so throned in a loving heart as to understand how kingly is the condition—how terrible the fall from that sweet power? So honoured and enthroned, he is still a king, though he is a beggar of all men’s charity, though he has not a roof to cover his head; so dethroned and fallen, he is still a beggar, though all the world proclaims him king.
Mephistopheles Minor, in the shape of gay George Craik, junior, scarcely slept on his discovery, or rather on his suspicions. He was now perfectly convinced that there was some mysterious connection between the clergyman and Mrs. Montmorency; and as the actress refused for the time being to lend herself to any sort of open persecution, he determined to act on his own responsibility. So he again canvassed Miss Destrange and the other light ladies of his acquaintance, and receiving from them further corroboration of the statement that Mrs. Montmorency had been previously married, he had no doubt whatever that Ambrose Bradley was the man who had once stood to her in the relation of a husband.