“I'm glad,” said Jimmie.
Morland made no reply, but continued to stare out of the window and meditate upon the many injuries that fate had done him. He arraigned himself before the bar of his wounded vanity. He had broken the moral law and deserved a certain penalty. The magnanimous verdict received the applause of an admiring self. He was willing to undergo an adequate punishment—the imposition of a fine and the hard labour of setting devious things straight. But the alternative sentence to which he saw himself condemned—on the one hand, the ruin of his political career, his social position, and his marriage with Norma, to all of which he clung with a newly found passion, and on the other, ignoble shelter behind an innocent man who had done him a great wrong—he rebelled against with all his average, sensual Briton's sense of justice. It was grossly unfair. If there had been a spiritual “Times,” he would have written to it.
The opening of the door caused him to turn round with a start. It was Aline, anxious and pale from an all-night sitting by Jimmie's bedside, but holding her slim body erect, and wearing the uncompromising air of a mother who has found her child evilly entreated at the hands of strangers. She glanced at the bed and at Morland; then she put her finger to her lip, and pointed at Jimmie, who lay fast asleep. Morland nodded and went on tiptoe out of the room. Aline looked round, and being a sensitive young person, shivered. She threw open the window wide, as if to rid the place of his influence. Jimmie stirred slightly. She bent down and kissed his hair.
During the dark and troubled time that followed, Morland fell away from Jimmie like the bosom friend of a mediaeval artist stricken with the Black Death. At first, common decency impelled him to send the tainted one affectionate messages, invitations to trust him awhile longer, and enlarged, with the crudity of his mental habit, on the noble aspects of Jimmie's sacrifice. But after Jimmie left the Hardacres' house, which happened as soon as he could bear the journey, Morland shrank from meeting him face to face; and when public exposure came, the messages and the invitations and the protestations ceased, and Jimmie was left in loneliness upon a pinnacle of infamy. Morland, in the futile hope of the weak-willed man that he could, by some astonishing chance, sail a middle course, did indeed give himself peculiar pains to keep the story out of the newspapers, and his ill-success was due to other causes than his own lack of effort. It was a tale too picturesque to be wasted in these days of sensation-hunger. The fact of the dénouement of the tragedy having taken place in the presence of royalty lent it a theatrical glamour. A sardonic press filled an Athenian public with what it lusted after. Indeed, who shall say with authority that the actual dramas re-enacted before our courts and reported in our newspapers have not their value in splashing with sudden colour the drab lives of thousands? May it not be better for the dulled soul to be occasionally arrested by the contemplation of furious passions than to feed contentedly like a pig beside the slaughtered body of its fellow?
Be that as it may. The press paid no heed to Morland or the smart fellows of solicitors whom he employed. It published as many details as it could discover or invent. For the tragical business did not end with the scene on the Hardacres' lawn. There was an inquest on the dead girl. There was the trial of Daniel Stone for attempted murder. The full glare of publicity shed itself upon the sordid history. In the one case the jury gave a verdict of suicide during temporary insanity; in the other the prisoner was found to be insane and was sent to an asylum. These were matters of no great public interest. But letters to the dead girl in a disguised handwriting were discovered, and Stone gave his crazy evidence, and a story of heartless seduction under solemn promise of marriage and of abandonment with cynical offer of money was established, and the fashionable portrait-painter, who was supposed to be the hero of the tale, awoke one morning and found himself infamous. The thing, instead of remaining a mere police-court commonplace, became a society scandal. Exaggeration was inevitable, not only of facts but of the reprobation a virtuous community pronounces on the specially pilloried wrongdoer. The scapegoat in its essential significance is by no means a thing of legendary history. It exists still, and owes its existence to an ineradicable instinct in human nature. The reprobation aforesaid is due not entirely to hypocrisy, as the social satirist would have it, but in a great measure to an unreasoning impulse towards expiation of offences by horrified condemnation of some notorious other. Thus it came to pass that upon Jimmie's head were put all the iniquities of the people and all their transgressions in all their sins, and he was led away into the social wilderness. After that, the world forgot him. He had been obscure enough before he burst for a day into the blaze of royal patronage; but now blackest darkness swallowed him up. Only Aline remained by his side.
Morland wrote to Jimmie once after the exposure. As he had been the cause, said he, of the probable ruin of Jimmie's professional prospects, it was only right that he should endeavour to make some compensation. It was, besides, a privilege of their life-long friendship. He enclosed a cheque for two thousand pounds. Jimmie returned it.
“My dear Morland,” he wrote in answer, “loyalty can only be repaid by loyalty, love by love. If I accepted money, it would dishonour both yourself and me. It is true that I took upon me a greater burden than I was aware of. The world, if it knew the facts, would, as you say, call me a quixotic fool. But if I took your money it would have the right to call me a mercenary knave. I have always suffered fools gladly, myself the greatest. I can go on doing so. Meanwhile you can make full compensation in the only way possible. Devote your life and energies to the happiness of the woman you are about to marry.” This was a stern letter for Jimmie to write. After he had posted it he reproached himself for not having put in a kind word.