“We cannot judge her,” said Irene.
They were nearer in thought than they had ever been, as they held silent communion over the pitiful tragedy that had shaken their lives. For each felt that its cause lay not altogether in despair at having betrayed a vital secret to a deadly enemy, who would use it to deprive her of her fortune; that it lay deeper in the roots of a human soul. For a woman, heart-poisoned by the cup of life that she drank, with its seething ingredients of love, jealousy, bitterness, fear, despair, avarice, self-contempt, hate, weariness, remorse, sense of wrong received and dealt, the curse of race, the taint of wantonness, the flavours of nobler things, late added—curdling sourly in the draught—a woman so sickened to her death, is capable of many inconsistencies, and claims at least the grave pity of the merciful.
“Will you forgive me for saying those cruel words?” asked Irene, at last. “They came from me, I don’t know how.”
He took her in his arms.
“It is I that need the forgiveness.”
“There is only one thing I would not forgive you for.”
“And that?”
“Ceasing to love me,” she replied.
And so they passed together out of the shadows, into the light of day. But it was the day of April greys and sunlight that is Life, and not the June glory that is Illusion. Irene’s eyes were opened; but if her outlook was more sombre, the ground beneath her feet was more secure. A sense, too, of aloneness came, but, womanlike, she hid it in her heart, and the man walked with her unwitting, with regained buoyancy of step. An erring, faulty woman, yet of stronger stuff than the impetuous man she loved so deeply, she felt at times a pathetic longing for the old blind worship. At such times she would look wistfully at her boy, asking herself a foolish question; and her sweet human frailty sought to read the answer in the child’s unfathomable eyes.