Pat-put! pat-put! How long he worked he never knew. There are moments which are not to be measured as time. In the uncertain handling of the chisel and the irregular beat of the mallet something gave way. There was a harsh sound like a groan. A crack like a flash of forked lightning had shot across the face of the stone. He had split it in half. Its great pieces fell to the floor on either side of him. Then he remembered that the stone had been useless. “It doesn't matter now,” he thought. Nothing mattered.
With the mallet hanging from his hand he continued to sit in the drifting moonlight, feeling as if everything in the world had been shivered to atoms. His two idols had been scattered at one blow—his wife and his friend. The golden threads that had bound him to life were broken. When poverty had come, he had met it without repining; when death had seemed to come, he had borne up against it bravely. But wifeless, friendless, deceived where he had loved, betrayed where he had worshipped, he was bankrupt, he was broken, and a boundless despair took hold of him.
When hope is entirely gone, anguish will sometimes turn a man into a monster. There was a fretful cry from the cradle, and, still in the stupor of his despair, he went out to rock it. The fire, which had only slid and smouldered, was now struggling into flame, and the child looked up at him with Philip's eyes. A knife seemed to enter his heart at that moment. He was more desolate than he had thought. “Hush, my child, hush!” he said, without thinking. His child? He had none. That solace was gone.
Anger came to save his reason. Not to have felt anger, he must have been less than a man or more. He remembered what the child had been to him. He remembered what it was when it came, and again when he thought its mother was dead; he remembered what it was when death frowned on it, and what it had been since death passed it by. Flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, bone of his bone, heart of his heart. Not his merely, but himself.
A lie, a mockery, a delusion, a deception! She has practised it. Oh, she had hidden her secret. She had thought it was safe. But the child itself had betrayed it. The secret had spoken from the child's own face.
“Yet I've seen her kneel by the cot and pray, 'God bless my baby, and its father and its mother'——-”
Why had he not killed her? A wild vision rose before him of killing Kate, and then going to the Deemster and saying, “Take me; I have murdered her because you have dishonoured her. Condemn me to death; yet remember God lives, and He will condemn you to damnation.”
But the pity of it—the pity of it! By a quick revolt of tenderness he recalled Kate as he had just seen her, crouching at the back of the cradle, like a hunted hare with uplifted paws uttering its last pitiful cry. He remembered her altered face, so pale even in the firelight, so thin, so worn, and his anger began to smoke against Philip. The flower that he would have been proud to wear on his breast Philip had buried in the dark. Curse him! Curse him!
She had given up all for that man—husband, child, father, mother, her friends, her good name, the very light of heaven. How she must have loved him! Yet he had been ashamed of her, had hidden her away, had been in fear lest the very air should whisper of her whereabouts. Curse him! Curse him! Curse him!
In the heat of his great anger Pete thought of himself also. Jealousy was far beneath him, but, like all great souls, this simple man had known something of the grandeur of friendship. Two streams running into them and taking heaven into their bosom. But Philip had kept him apart, had banked him off, and yet drained him to the dregs. He had uncovered his nakedness—the nakedness of his soul itself.