Chapter 8 - Page 2

least. He was awestruck at the thought of such a
surrender - such a prostration. Moulded indeed she had been by
powerful hands, to have converted her injury into an exaltation so
sublime. The fellow had only had to die for everything that was
ugly in him to be washed out in a torrent. It was vain to try to
guess what had taken place, but nothing could be clearer than that
she had ended by accusing herself. She absolved him at every
point, she adored her very wounds. The passion by which he had
profited had rushed back after its ebb, and now the tide of
tenderness, arrested for ever at flood, was too deep even to
fathom. Stransom sincerely considered that he had forgiven him;
but how little he had achieved the miracle that she had achieved!
His forgiveness was silence, but hers was mere unuttered sound.
The light she had demanded for his altar would have broken his
silence with a blare; whereas all the lights in the church were for
her too great a hush.

She had been right about the difference - she had spoken the truth
about the change: Stransom was soon to know himself as perversely
but sharply jealous. HIS tide had ebbed, not flowed; if he had
"forgiven" Acton Hague, that forgiveness was a motive with a broken
spring. The very fact of her appeal for a material sign, a sign
that should make her dead lover equal there with the others,
presented the concession to her friend as too handsome for the
case. He had never thought of himself as hard, but an exorbitant
article might easily render him so. He moved round and round this
one, but only in widening circles - the more he looked at it the
less acceptable it seemed. At the same time he had no illusion
about the effect of his refusal; he perfectly saw how it would make
for a rupture. He left her alone a week, but when at last he again
called this conviction was cruelly confirmed. In the interval he
had kept away from the church, and he needed no fresh assurance
from her to know she hadn't entered it. The change was complete
enough: it had broken up her life. Indeed it had broken up his,
for all the fires of his shrine seemed to him suddenly to have been
quenched. A great indifference fell upon him, the weight of which
was in itself a pain; and he never knew what his devotion had been
for him till in that shock it ceased like a dropped watch. Neither
did he know with how large a confidence he had counted on the final
service that had now failed: the mortal deception was that in this
abandonment the whole future gave way.

These days of her absence proved to him of what she was capable;
all the more that he never dreamed she was vindictive or even
resentful. It was not in anger she had forsaken him; it was in
simple submission to hard