She began to feel a strange interest in her distant cousin. “And his wife--did she know what he had done?”
Mr. Orme stared. His moral pointed, he had returned to the contemplation of his own affairs.
“His wife? Oh, of course not. The secret has been most admirably kept; but her property was put in trust, so she’s quite safe with him.”
Her property! Kate wondered if her faith in her husband had also been put in trust, if her sensibilities had been protected from his possible inroads.
“Do you think it quite fair to have deceived her in that way?”
Mr. Orme gave her a puzzled glance: he had no taste for the by-paths of ethical conjecture.
“His people wanted to give the poor fellow another chance; they did the best they could for him.”
“And--he has done nothing dishonourable since?”
“Not that I know of: the last I heard was that they had a little boy, and that he was quite happy. At that distance he’s not likely to bother _us_, at all events.”
Long after Mr. Orme had left the topic, Kate remained lost in its contemplation. She had begun to perceive that the fair surface of life was honeycombed by a vast system of moral sewage. Every respectable household had its special arrangements for the private disposal of family scandals; it was only among the reckless and improvident that such hygienic precautions were neglected. Who was she to pass judgment on the merits of such a system? The social health must be preserved: the means devised were the result of long experience and the collective instinct of self-preservation. She had meant to tell her father that evening that her marriage had been put off; but she now abstained from doing so, not from any doubt of Mr. Orme’s acquiescence--he could always be made to feel the force of conventional scruples--but because the whole question sank into insignificance beside the larger issue which his words had raised.
In her own room, that night, she passed through that travail of the soul of which the deeper life is born. Her first sense was of a great moral loneliness--an isolation more complete, more impenetrable, than that in which the discovery of Denis’s act had plunged her. For she had vaguely leaned, then, on a collective sense of justice that should respond to her own ideas of right and wrong: she still believed in the logical correspondence of theory and practice. Now she saw that, among those nearest her, there was no one who recognized the moral need of expiation. She saw that to take her father or Mrs. Peyton into her confidence would be but to widen the circle of sterile misery in which she and Denis moved. At first the aspect of life thus revealed to her seemed simply mean and base--a world where honour was a pact of silence between adroit accomplices. The network of circumstance had tightened round her, and every effort to escape drew its meshes closer. But as her struggles subsided she felt the spiritual release which comes with acceptance: not connivance in dishonour, but recognition of evil. Out of that dark vision light was to come, the shaft of cloud turning to the pillar of fire. For here, at last, life lay before her as it was: not brave, garlanded and victorious, but naked, grovelling and diseased, dragging its maimed limbs through the mud, yet lifting piteous hands to the stars. Love itself, once throned aloft on an altar of dreams, how it stole to her now, storm-beaten and scarred, pleading for the shelter of her breast! Love, indeed, not in the old sense in which she had conceived it, but a graver, austerer presence--the charity of the mystic three. She thought she had ceased to love Denis--but what had she loved in him but her happiness and his? Their affection had been the _garden enclosed_ of the Canticles, where they were to walk forever in a delicate isolation of bliss. But now love appeared to her as something more than this--something wider, deeper, more enduring than the selfish passion of a man and a woman. She saw it in all its far-reaching issues, till the first meeting of two pairs of young eyes kindled a light which might be a high-lifted beacon across dark waters of humanity.