He said that even Joyce was not to see the third volume—put me on my honour, in fact—and see it she shall not. There is another reason. I read those last chapters and then went through the whole volume from beginning to end. Without exaggeration the effect was overwhelming—his style is so artless, his pathos so unpremeditated. I felt as if I had been re-reading Hardy's most poignant novels—"Tess" and "Jude" and "A Pair of Blue Eyes." It was horrible. I went up to my room, lit the fire and prepared for the holocaust.
Then I was tempted. Yes, he puts me on my honour, depends on my friendship, all that sort of thing.... But I did not burn a sheet. It was a chilly evening, I lit a cigar, and waited for the pyre to burst into destructive flame. As I watched and meditated, Sylvia's little face seemed to look at me out of the fire, the black coals crowning her forehead as I used to see it crowned with her own lustrous hair. I thought of our last meeting when she struggled with her devils of pride and unbelief; and of her meeting with Elsie when she came in hope and left in humiliation. I confess I love Sylvia very dearly—love her as all men love her—for her beauty, her queenliness and clean, passionate pride; love her because I know something of her loneliness, her passion for service, and the repeated rejections of her sacrifices. And I love her a little more on my own account, because she talked to me as if I had been her own sister, and I perhaps know—better than any one—what she must have been through during those sad, mad months in England.
Well, I broke faith with the Seraph and wrote her a line of overture. I was perhaps a fool to do it, as I had already had evidence in plenty of my incompetence to play the rôle of Providence. "I am sending you the MS. of a book," I told her. "It is the third volume of Gordon Tremayne's 'Child of Misery'. I know you have read the first two volumes, for we have discussed and admired them together a dozen times. Did you ever suspect who the author was?
"In telling you it was the Seraph, I am breaking my word to him and running the risk of being branded and disowned. I must tell you, though, to explain the existence of the third volume. I watched it being written, day by day. That evening on the Cher, when he anticipated some words you were going to say, the words had already been written down as part of the current chapter. I saw him brought up short when you were spirited away and the connection was broken. Most wonderful of all, I was present when the connection was re-established and he jumped up like one possessed, exclaiming, 'Sylvia wants me!'
"When you have read these pages, you will not be in a position to doubt any longer. He loves you as no woman was ever loved before, and in him you have found the half that completes and interprets your 'âme incomprise.' Get him back, Sylvia. I don't know how it's to be done, but you must use your woman's wit to find a way. I'm asking for his sake and yours, not for mine—though I would give much to see 'The Child of Misery' growing to happier manhood.
"I am afraid you will say I am hardly the man to ask anything of you or yours. The Rodens and Merivales have hardly made a success of their recent relationship. But I should like to be forgiven. What is my crime? That I helped to keep justice from touching a woman who had done you and your family a great wrong. Well, Sylvia, you'd have done the same thing and told the same lies, had you been in my place and had you wanted Joyce as badly as I wanted her. So will you forgive me and be friends? And if you forgive me, will you forgive the woman who's going to be my wife in a few days' time? I must reconcile myself to the idea of being estranged from the rest of your family, but (between ourselves) I'll let 'em all go if you'll write and say Joyce and I are not quite such monsters of iniquity as you may have thought us.
"One thing more. When you've read the third volume, you will no longer doubt that Mrs. Wylton's presence in Adelphi Terrace was due to charitable impulse towards Joyce and the Seraph. And you ought to think well of any one who played the Good Samaritan to the Seraph. Don't try to rehabilitate her character in public; it can only be done at a risk to the Seraph's personal safety. And in any case you won't convince a man like Nigel or the men he's already told the story to.
"Return me the MS. when you've read it, will you? I was entrusted with its destruction, and put on honour not to let another soul read it. You see how I keep my trust. The worst thing you can say of me is what I've already said of myself—that most damning of all judgments—that I meant well."
I sent that letter to Sylvia nine days ago, and received her reply this morning. She returned me the MS., and I burnt it—with the knowledge that I was destroying one of the greatest literary treasures of this generation.... Well, they had to do the same with some of Ruskin's letters.
"I wish you had not told me to send you back the book," she began. "I should have liked to keep it. Or rather—I don't know—I half wish you hadn't sent it at all. The time that has passed since the beginning of August has been rather hard to bear, and the book has only turned misgiving into certainty.