Si l’on vous a trahi, ce n’est pas la trahison qui importe; c’est le pardon qu’elle a fait na?tre dans votre ame. . . . Mais si la trahison n’a pas accru la simplicité, la confiance plus haute, l’étendue de l’amour, on vous aura trahi bien inutilement, et vous pouvez vous dire qu’il n’est rien arrivé.
— MAETERLINCK.
RACHEL and Hester were sitting in the shadow of the churchyard wall where Hester had so unfortunately fallen asleep on a previous occasion. It was the first of many clandestine meetings. Mr. and Mrs. Gresley did not realise that Hester and Rachel wished to “talk secrets,” as they would have expressed it, and Rachel’s arrival was felt by the Gresleys to be the appropriate moment to momentarily lay aside their daily avocations, and to join Hester and Rachel in the garden for social intercourse. The Gresleys liked Rachel. Listeners are generally liked. Perhaps also her gentle, unassuming manner was not an unpleasant change after the familiar nonchalance of the Pratts.
The two friends bore their fate for a time in inward impatience, and then, not without compunction, “practised to deceive.” Certain obtuse persons push others, naturally upright, into eluding and outwitting them, just as the really wicked people, who give viva voce invitations, goad us into crevasses of lies, for which, if there is any justice anywhere, they will have to answer at the last day. Mr. Gresley gave the last shove to Hester and Rachel by an exhaustive harangue on what he called socialism. Finding they were discussing some phase of it, he drew up a chair and informed them that he had “threshed out” the whole subject.
“Socialism,” he began, delighted with the polite resignation of his hearers, which throughout life he mistook for earnest attention. “Community of goods. People don’t see that if everything were divided up to-day, and everybody was given a shilling, by next week the thrifty man would have a sovereign, and the spendthrift would be penniless. Community of goods is impossible as long as human nature remains what it is. But I can’t knock that into people’s heads. I spoke of it once to Lord Newhaven, after his speech in the House of Lords. I thought he was more educated and a shade less thoughtless than the idle rich usually are, and that he would see it if it was put plainly before him. But he only said my arguments were incontrovertible, and slipped away.”
It was after this conversation, or rather, monologue, that Hester and Rachel arranged to meet by stealth.
They were sitting luxuriously in the short grass, with their backs against the churchyard wall, and their hats tilted over their eyes.
“I wish I had met this Mr. Dick five or six years ago,” said Rachel with a sigh.
Hester was the only person who knew about Rachel’s previous love disaster.
“Dick always gets what he wants in the long run,” said Hester. “I should offer to marry him at once if I were you. It will save a lot of trouble, and it will come to just the same in the end.”
Rachel laughed, but not light-heartedly. Hester had only put into words a latent conviction of her own which troubled her.
“Dick is the right kind of man to marry,” continued Hester, dispassionately. “What lights he has he lives up to. If that is not high praise I don’t know what is. He is good, but somehow his goodness does not offend one. One can condone it. And if you care for such things, he has a thorough-going respect for women, which he carries about with him in a little patent safe of his own.”
“I don’t want to marry a man for his qualities and mental furniture,” said Rachel, wearily. “If I did I would take Mr. Dick.”
There was a short silence.
“I am sure,” said Rachel at last, “that you do not realise how commonplace I am. You know those conventional heroines of second-rate novels who love tremendously once, and then, when things go wrong, promptly turn into marble statues, and go through life with hearts of stone. Well, my dear, I am just like that. I know it’s despicable. I have struggled against it. It is idiotic to generalise from one personal experience. I keep before my mind that other men are not like him. I know they aren’t, but yet — somehow I think they are. I am frightened.”
Hester turned her wide eyes towards her friend.
“Do you still consider after these four years that he did you an injury?”
Rachel looked out upon the mournful landscape. The weariness of midsummer was upon it. A heavy hand seemed laid upon the brow of the distant hills.
“I gave him everything I had,” she said slowly, “and he threw it away. I have nothing left for any one else. Perhaps it is because I am naturally economical,” she added, smiling faintly, “that it seems now, looking back, such a dreadful waste.”
“Only in appearance, not in reality,” said Hester. “It looks like a waste of life, that mowing down of our best years by a relentless passion which itself falls dead on the top of them. But it is not so. Every year I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence which will risk nothing, and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as well. No one ever yet was the poorer in the long run for having once in a lifetime ‘let out all the length of all the reins.’”
“You mean it did me good,” said Rachel, “and that he was a kind of benefactor in disguise. I dare say you are right, but you see I don’t take a burning interest in my own character. I don’t find my mental standpoint — isn’t that what Mrs. Loftus calls it? — very engrossing.”
“He was a benefactor all the same,” said Hester with decision. “I did not think so at the time, and if I could have driven over him in an omnibus I would have done so with pleasure. But I believe that the day will come when you will cover that grave with a handsome monument, erected out of gratitude to him for not marrying you. And now, Rachel, will you forgive me beforehand for what I am going to say?”
“Oh!” said Rachel ruefully. “When you say that I know it is the prelude to something frightful. You are getting out a dagger, and I shall be its sheath directly.”
“You are a true prophet, Rachel.”
“Yes, executioner.”
“My dear, dear friend, whom I love best in the world, when that happened my heart was wrung for you. I would have given everything I had, life itself — not that that is saying much — to have saved you from that hour.”
“I know it.”
“But I should have been the real enemy if I had had power to save you, which, thank God, I had not. That hour had to be. It was necessary. You may not care about your own character, but I do. There is something stubborn and inflexible in you — the seamy side of your courage and steadfastness — which cannot readily enter into the feelings of others or put itself in their place. I think it is want of imagination — I mean the power of seeing things as they are. You are the kind of woman who, if you had married comfortably some one you rather liked, might have become like Sybell Loftus, who never understands any feeling beyond her own microscopic ones, and who measures love by her own small preference for Doll. You would have............