The Marriage of William Ashe Part 79

"The obligation to the life you took into your own hands--to the soul you vowed to cherish," said the Dean, with an apostolic and pa.s.sionate earnestness.

Ashe stood before him, pale, and charged with resolution.

"That obligation--has been cancelled--by the laws of your own Christian faith, no less than by the ordinary laws of society."

"I do not so read it!" cried the Dean, with vivacity. "Men say so, 'for the hardness of their hearts.' But the divine pity which transformed men's idea of marriage could never have meant to lay it down that in marriage alone there was to be no forgiveness."

"You forget your text," said Ashe, steadily. "Saving for the cause--'"

His voice failed him.

"Permissive!" was the Dean's eager reply--"permissive only. There are cases, I grant you--cases of impenitent wickedness--where the higher law is suspended, finds no chance to act--where relief from the bond is itself mercy and justice. But the higher law is always there. You know the formula--'It was said by them of old time. But _I_ say unto you--'

And then follows the new law of a new society. And so in marriage. If love has the smallest room to work--if forgiveness can find the narrowest foothold--love and forgiveness are imposed on--demanded of--the Christian!--here as everywhere else. Love and forgiveness--_not_ penalty and hate!"

"There is no question of hate--and--I doubt whether I am a Christian,"

said Ashe, quietly, turning away.

The Dean looked at him a little askance--breathing fast.

"But you are a _heart_, William!" he said, using the privilege, of his white hairs, speaking as he might have spoken to the Eton boy of twenty years before--"ay, and one of the n.o.blest. You gathered that poor thing into your arms--knowing what were the temptations of her nature, and she became the mother of your child. Now--alas! those temptations have conquered her. But she still turns to you--she still clings to you--and she has no one else. And if you reject her she will go down unforgiven and despairing to the grave."

For the first time Ashe's lips trembled. But his speech was very quiet and collected.

"I must try and explain myself," he said. "Why should we talk of forgiveness? It is not a word that I much understand, or that means much to men of my type and generation. I see what has happened in this way.

Kitty's conduct last year hit me desperately hard. It destroyed my private happiness, and but for the generosity of the best friends ever man had it would have driven me out of public life. I warned her that the consequences of the Cliffe matter would be irreparable, and she still carried it through. She left me for that man--and at a time when by her own action it was impossible for me to defend either her or myself. What course of action remained to me? I _did_ remember her temperament, her antecedents, and the certainty that this man, whatever might be his moments of heroism, was a selfish and incorrigible brute in his dealings with women. So I wrote to her, through this same consul at Trieste. I let her know that if she wished it, and if there were any chance of his marrying her, I would begin divorce proceedings at once.

She had only to say the word. If she did not wish it, I would spare her and myself the shame and scandal of publicity. And if she left him, I would make additional provision for her which would insure her every comfort. She never sent a word of reply, and I have taken no steps. But as soon as I heard she was at Treviso, I wrote again--or, rather, this time my lawyers wrote, suggesting that the time had come for the extra provision I had spoken of, which I was most ready and anxious to make."

He paused.

"And this," said the Dean, "is all? This is, in fact, your answer to me?"

Ashe made a sign of a.s.sent.

"Except," he added, with emotion, "that I have heard, only to-day, that if Kitty wishes it, her old friend Miss French will go out to her at once, nurse her, and travel with her as long as she pleases. Miss French's brother has just married, and she is at liberty. She is most deeply attached to Kitty, and as soon as she heard Lady Alice's report of her state she forgot everything else. Can you not persuade--Kitty"--he looked up urgently--"to accept her offer?"

"I doubt it," said the Dean, sadly. "There is only one thing she pines for, and without it she will be a sick child crossed. Ah! well--well! So to allow her to share your life again--however humbly and intermittently--is impossible?"

It seemed to the Dean that a shudder pa.s.sed through the man beside him.

"Impossible," said Ashe, sharply. "But not only for private reasons."

"You mean your public duty stands in the way?"

"Kitty left me of her own free will. I have put my hand to the plough again--and I cannot turn back. You can see for yourself that I am not at my own disposal--I belong to my party, to the men with whom I act, who have behaved to me with the utmost generosity."

"Of course Lady Kitty could no longer share your public life. But at Haggart--in seclusion?"

"You know what her personality is--how absorbing--how impossible to forget! No--if she returned to me, on any terms whatever, all the old conditions would begin again. I should inevitably have to leave politics."

"And that--you are not prepared to do?"

The Dean wondered at his own audacity, and a touch of proud surprise expressed itself in Ashe.

"I should have preferred to put it that I have accepted great tasks and heavy responsibilities--and that I am not my own master."

The Dean watched him closely. Across the field of imagination there pa.s.sed the figure of one who "went away sorrowful, having great possessions," and his heart--the heart of a child or a knight-errant--burned within him.

But before he could speak again the door of the room opened and a lady in black entered. Ashe turned towards her.

"Do you forbid me, William?" she said, quietly--"or may I join your conversation?"

Ashe held out his hand and drew her to him. Lady Tranmore greeted her old friend the Dean, and he looked at her overcome with emotion and doubt.

"You have come to us at a critical moment," he said--"and I am afraid you are against me."

She asked what they had been discussing, though, indeed, as she said, she partly guessed. And the Dean, beginning to be shaken in his own cause, repeated his pleadings with a sinking heart. They sounded to him stranger and less persuasive than before. In doing what he had done he had been influenced by an instinctive feeling that Ashe would not treat the wrong done him as other men might treat it; that, to put it at the least, he would be able to handle it with an ethical originality, to separate himself in dealing with it from the mere weight of social tradition. Yet now as he saw the faces of mother and son together--the mother leaning on the son's arm--and realized all the strength of the social ideas which they represented, even though, in Ashe's case, there had been a certain individual flouting of them, futile and powerless in the end--the Dean gave way.

"There--there!" he said, as he finished his plea, and Lady Tranmore's sad gravity remained untouched. "I see you both think me a dreamer of dreams!"

"Nay, dear friend!" said Lady Tranmore, with the melancholy smile which lent still further beauty to the refined austerity of her face; "these things seem possible to you, because you are the soul of goodness--"

"And a pious old fool to boot!" said the Dean, impatiently. "But I am willing--like St. Paul and my betters--to be a fool for Christ's sake.

Lady Tranmore, are you or are you not a Christian?"

"I hope so," she said, with composure, while her cheek flushed. "But our Lord did not ask impossibilities. He knew there were limits to human endurance--and human pardon--though there might be none to G.o.d's."

"'Be ye perfect, as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,'" cried the Dean. "Where are the limits there?"

"There are other duties in life besides that to a wife who has betrayed her husband," she said, steadily. "You ask of William what he has not the strength to give. His life was wrecked, and he has pieced it together again. And now he has given it to his country. That poor, guilty child has no claim upon it."

"But understand," said Ashe, interposing, with an energy that seemed to express the whole man--"while I live, _everything_--short of what you ask--that can be done to protect or ease her, shall be done. Tell her that."

His features worked painfully. The Dean took up his hat and stick.

"And may I tell her, too," he said, pausing--"that you forgive her?"

Ashe hesitated.

"I do not believe," he said, at last, "that she would attach any more meaning to that word than I do. She would think it unreal. What's done is done."

The Dean's heart leaped up in the typical Christian challenge to the fatal and the irrevocable. While life lasts the lost sheep can always be sought and found; and love, the mystical wine, can always be poured into the wounds of the soul, healing and recreating! But he said no more. He felt himself humiliated and defeated.

Ashe and Lady Tranmore took leave of him with an extreme gentleness and affection. He would almost rather they had treated him ill. Yes, he was an optimist and a dreamer!--one who had, indeed, never grappled in his own person with the worst poisons and corrosions of the soul. Yet still, as he pa.s.sed along the London streets--marked here and there by the newspaper placards which announced Ashe's committee triumphs of the night before--he was haunted anew by the immortal words:

"One thing thou lackest," ... and "Come, follow me!"

Ah!--could he have done such a thing himself? or was he merely the scribe carelessly binding on other men's shoulders things grievous to be borne? The answering pa.s.sion of his faith mounted within him--joined with a scorn for the easy conditions and happy, scholarly pursuits of his own life, and a thirst which in the early days of Christendom would have been a thirst for witness and for martyrdom.