Sanctuary | Page 8

I feel--that I'm half dead with it."
"Yes--but that is only half."

He turned this over for a perceptible space of time before asking slowly:
"You mean that you'll give me up, if I don't do this crazy thing you
propose?"
She paused in turn. "No," she said; "I don't want to bribe you. You
must feel the need of it yourself."
"The need of proclaiming this thing publicly?"
"Yes."
He sat staring before him. "Of course you realize what it would mean?"
he began at length.
"To you?" she returned.
"I put that aside. To others--to you. I should go to prison."
"I suppose so," she said simply.
"You seem to take it very easily--I'm afraid my mother wouldn't."
"Your mother?" This produced the effect he had expected.
"You hadn't thought of her, I suppose? It would probably kill her."
"It would have killed her to think that you could do what you have
done!"
"It would have made her very unhappy; but there's a difference."
Yes: there was a difference; a difference which no rhetoric could
disguise. The secret sin would have made Mrs. Peyton wretched, but it
would not have killed her. And she would have taken precisely Denis's
view of the elasticity of atonement: she would have accepted private
regrets as the genteel equivalent of open expiation. Kate could even
imagine her extracting a "lesson" from the providential fact that her son
had not been found out.

"You see it's not so simple," he broke out, with a tinge of doleful
triumph.
"No: it's not simple," she assented.
"One must think of others," he continued, gathering faith in his
argument as he saw her reduced to acquiescence.
She made no answer, and after a moment he rose to go. So far, in
retrospect, she could follow the course of their talk; but when, in the act
of parting, argument lapsed into entreaty, and renunciation into the
passionate appeal to give him at least one more hearing, her memory
lost itself in a tumult of pain, and she recalled only that, when the door
closed on him, he took with him her promise to see him once again.
IV
She had promised to see him again; but the promise did not imply that
she had rejected his offer of freedom. In the first rush of misery she had
not fully repossessed herself, had felt herself entangled in his fate by a
hundred meshes of association and habit; but after a sleepless night
spent with the thought of him--that dreadful bridal of their souls--she
woke to a morrow in which he had no part. She had not sought her
freedom, nor had he given it; but a chasm had opened at their feet, and
they found themselves on different sides.
Now she was able to scan the disaster from the melancholy vantage of
her independence. She could even draw a solace from the fact that she
had ceased to love Denis. It was inconceivable that an emotion so
interwoven with every fibre of consciousness should cease as suddenly
as the flow of sap in an uprooted plant; but she had never allowed
herself to be tricked by the current phraseology of sentiment, and there
were no stock axioms to protect her from the truth.
It was probably because she had ceased to love him that she could look
forward with a kind of ghastly composure to seeing him again. She had
stipulated, of course, that the wedding should be put off, but she had
named no other condition beyond asking for two days to herself--two

days during which he was not even to write. She wished to shut herself
in with her misery, to accustom herself to it as she had accustomed
herself to happiness. But actual seclusion was impossible: the subtle
reactions of life almost at once began to break down her defences. She
could no more have her wretchedness to herself than any other emotion:
all the lives about her were so many unconscious factors in her
sensations. She tried to concentrate herself on the thought as to how she
could best help poor Denis; for love, in ebbing, had laid bare an
unsuspected depth of pity. But she found it more and more difficult to
consider his situation in the abstract light of right and wrong. Open
expiation still seemed to her the only possible way of healing; but she
tried vainly to think of Mrs. Peyton as taking such a view. Yet Mrs.
Peyton ought at least to know what had happened: was it not, in the last
resort, she who should pronounce on her son's course? For a moment
Kate was fascinated by this evasion of responsibility; she had nearly
decided to tell Denis that he must begin by confessing everything to his
mother. But almost