"Yes," said Betty; "it makes me laugh."
When the maid left the room, Betty sat down by the window which overlooked the gardens below, the gardens typical of such houses as the one she was leaving—conventionally laid out, fenced with sharply pointed iron palings, pleasure grounds wherein no person, out of their teens, took any pleasure whatever. Betty could see two children and a gaunt governess walking primly along one of the broad well-swept paths. One child, a nice fat little girl, escaped from bondage, hiding behind a bush. Betty could hear the voice of the governess calling to her, and then a sharp rebuke, as the truant came toddling back to the path.
"If my baby had lived——"
She put the baby out of her thoughts. If it had lived, she and the child might have remained inside iron palings.
Then, very deliberately, she faced the future. Her money was settled on herself. Mark and she could live where they pleased, as they pleased. If one place proved disagreeable they could move on and on; the world was wide.
She smiled happily and contentedly. Many women, at such a moment, would have been distraught by anxiety and fear. But Betty was gladder than she had ever felt before. Indeed, she was triumphant. She told herself that every instinct she had tried to suppress was vindicated gloriously. To such a proud, refined woman the memory that she had flung herself at Mark's head had been always a dire humiliation, the more so because she had never measured the width and depth of his feeling for her. She repeated the phrase, "He has always loved me," again and again, letting the sweetness of it linger upon her lips.
The inevitable sacrifice—the fact which Mark plainly pointed out that she, the woman, had more to lose than the man—was acclaimed. Hitherto, love—whether love of niece for uncle, of friend for friend, of wife for husband—had exacted nothing from her. She had been extremely generous with her money, giving away far more than the tithe. But the signing of cheques had not included one genuine act of self-denial on her part. Whatever she had done had been accomplished without effort, without pain.
Her thoughts turned from herself to Mark. Immediately the smile faded from her face.
How cruelly he had suffered! And with what a pleasant smile, with how gay a laugh he had confronted ill-health, ill-fortune, and disappointment!
"I shall be so good to him," she swore beneath her breath. "I shall make it up to him—and I know how to do it."
Here, again, what had gone before might be reckoned as fuel for the feeding of love's flames. She was no green girl, but a woman who understood men, who could speak the right word at the right time, and had learned to hold her tongue.
"We shall be the happiest pair in the world."
Presently her eye fell upon the small bag she had carried to Weybridge. In it were the two sermons. She rose from her chair, hesitated a moment, and opened the bag. The sermons, she decided, must be locked up in one of the trunks she was leaving behind. The first sermon she had read the night before, but the second she had not read.
She looked at her watch. Then she picked up the Windsor sermon, and sat down to read it, because, reading it, she would hear not Archibald's voice, but Mark's.
The text met her eyes. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
She read no further. The MS. fell from her fingers, and rolled upon the carpet. Betty did not see it, because she saw nothing. The familiar room, the gardens below, the great city beyond, faded from her vision. Darkness encompassed her. And out of the darkness, like the writing upon the wall of Belshazzar's palace in Babylon, flared the words of the text.
Suddenly, with a violence of contrast which convulsed her, the darkness was dispelled, and she saw, even as Saul of Tarsus saw, a great light. If she read Mark's sermon, if she listened to the pleading voice of the priest, she would fail to keep tryst with the man, not because she feared for herself, but because this question could not be evaded: "Will my impurity prove a curse to him?"
Bending down, she picked up the sheaf of papers, and thrust them fiercely into the trunk, which stood open near the window. Then she sank back into the chair, covering her face with her hands....
So sitting, she was transported to the ancient, banner-hung chapel, wherein her husband had preached before his sovereign. But in the pulpit stood Mark, not his brother, and Mark as she remembered him long ago, the Mark of King's Charteris days, thin, pale, strong only in spirit; yet how strong, how valiant in that!
But he was mute, save for the pleading of the eloquent eyes. Beneath the spell of these Betty rose once more, and stood beside the trunk, staring into it.
Thus standing, she heard the clock in the tower of St. Anne's strike four. At that moment David Ross was praying for her and Mark, praying and believing that his prayer would be answered.
Betty picked up the MS., locked the door, fell on her knees, and read the sermon through.
She was still kneeling when the clock struck five. One hour had passed. Mark was nearing Charing Cross. She rose from her knees, and sat down to write a letter: an intolerably difficult task, which must be accomplished in a few minutes. She stared dully at the blank sheet of paper in front of her; then she wrote:—
"I have read your sermon, the one preached at Windsor. Because of that I cannot come to you, and I entreat you not to come to me. Mark, my best beloved, I tempted you. May God forgive me! And I know—I know, I say—that He has stretched forth His hand to save us. And He willed that your words—what is best in you—the greatest thing you ever did—should stand between us. I cannot lower the Mark who wrote that sermon to my level. Oh, Mark, will you curse me as faithless? Or will you know that it is not my wretched soul I seek to save, but yours—yours.
"As soon as this is sent off I shall go to a friend's till Archibald returns. I must tell him the truth."
Archibald Samphire returned from the Midlands to find a new house set in order and his wife awaiting him. He advanced to greet her with a warm word of affection and congratulation. But she held up her hand, and before the distress in her eyes he recoiled, astonished and dismayed.
Although Betty knew that the lapse from honour involved in preaching another's sermon was as nothing compared with the sin she had contemplated, still she felt that the charge against her husband must be dealt with first. In a few words she told him of the breaking open of his desk and the discovery of Mark's MSS. He exhibited no confusion, but his expression changed and in a manner so amazing that Betty let fall a sharp exclamation.
"I am glad you know," he said simply.
His voice, his face, his fine massive figure expressed relief. She repeated his words:
"You are glad that I know?"
She had made sure that he would excuse himself blandly, with dignity, looking down upon her; and she had told herself that his carefully chosen words would flood her with contempt, the stronger because her own speech would prove halting and unrestrained.
"Yes, yes. I was a coward. I meant to tell you: I swear it, but I couldn't." Then he repeated the phrase he had used to Mark: "God knows it has been a secret sore."
"Why couldn't you tell me?" she asked.
"Because the right moment for doing so slipped by me."
"You married me under false pretences."
"Eh?"
"You wooed me with Mark's words."
"Wooed you with—Mark's—words? I can't follow you."
And here he stated a fact. He had neither the ability nor the intuition to follow a woman down the tortuous path of her feelings and aspirations. But at this moment he became aware that something dreadful remained to be said. Betty's pale, haggard face, her trembling fingers, her panting bosom, revealed an agitation which communicated itself to him. Let us be fair to a man with inexorable limitations. He had always believed that Betty married him for love. And he too had married for love—and other things which he valued; but the other things without love would not have tempted him to a mere marriage of convenience. And marriage with Betty had seemed at the time and afterwards the one thing needful: rounding a life too square, lending colour and sparkle to a profession whose habit is sable. If at times he had been vouchsafed a glimpse of barriers between his wife and himself, he attributed these to difference of sex. But till this minute he had believed her love as much an inalienable possession as his name. There was no love in the face half turned from his.
"You can't follow me," she repeated slowly. "That is true enough. Years ago, when we were children—babies—I loved Mark, and he loved me."
"Paul and Virginia!"
"Yes, yes, Paul and Virginia."
"We all knew that. At one time I thought you would marry Mark."
"He never asked me," she replied, with blazing cheeks. "If he had, I should have married him, sick or well. I supposed that he didn't want me."
"Why, so did I."
She met his eyes fiercely.
"You swear that?"
"Certainly. Great heavens! You don't think that if I had thought otherwise I should have tried to supplant him. He went away and left the field open to all comers—Jim Corrance, Harry Kirtling—and me."
"I have done you an injustice," Betty faltered.
At this Archibald's sense of what was fitting asserted itself. "Come, come," he said, "I regret profoundly that I did not frankly avow those two sermons to be Mark's. I do not expect you to forgive me in a minute, but you are generous, sensible, and my wife. We must take up our lives where we left them less than a week ago."
"That is impossible," said Betty.
She felt a great pity for him. The blow must fall with hideous violence, shattering the man's just pride in what he had accomplished. His extraordinary success seemed of a sudden to be transformed into an immense bubble about to be pricked by a word.
And when the word was spoken, when he knew everything, Betty saw what Mark had seen upon the night that the baby was born—the collapse of a personality. The big man who was to fill Lord Vauxhall's Basilica dwindled into a boy with the puzzled, wondering eyes of youth confronted for the first time with what it cannot understand. Betty felt old enough to be his mother, when he stammered out: "You—you have done this thing?"
"I might have done it," she answered gently.
He broke down.
"I have lost my brother and my wife," he groaned. "my brother and my wife."
Instantly Betty realised what Mark had always known—the weakness of the colossus. And this knowledge that she was the stronger took the chill from her heart, restoring magically her moral circulation. Looking at him, she wondered how she could have blinded herself to his true proportions. She had deemed him a Titan!
"What are you going to do?" he asked presently.
"That is for you to say. If you choose to put me from you——"
He interrupted her.
"You would go to him."
"No."
He rose up and began to pace the room, glancing furtively at his wife, who never moved. Suddenly, seizing her arm, and speaking in a loud, trembling voice, he exclaimed: "Mark is dead—you understand that? Say it; say it!"
"Mark is dead," she repeated sombrely.