Part 21 (1/2)

”Ah, that is impossible!” she cried. ”We were made for each other. We cannot live apart.”

”Ideala,” I exclaimed, exasperated, ”he never believed in you. He thought you were as so many women of our set are, and he showed it, if only you could have understood, when you saw him at the Hospital on that last occasion. You felt that there was some change, as you say yourself, and that was it. You talked to him of truth then, and it irritated him as the devil quoting Scripture might be supposed to irritate; and when you went back again he showed what he thought of you by his unexplained absence. He thought you were not worth consideration, and he gave you none.”

”It would have been paying himself a very poor compliment if he had thought that only a corrupt woman could care for him,” she answered, confidently. ”But, I tell you, I am sure there is some satisfactory explanation of that business. I only wish I had remembered to ask for it, that I might satisfy you now. And, at any rate,” she added, ”whatever he may have thought, he knows better by this time.”

I could say no more. Baffled and sick at heart, I left her, wondering if some happy inspiration would come before it was too late, and help me to save her yet.

CHAPTER XXV.

I went to consult my sister Claudia. The blow was a heavy one for her also; but I was surprised to find that she did not share my contempt for the person whom I considered responsible for all this trouble.

”Ideala is no common character herself,” Claudia argued; ”and it isn't likely that a common character would fascinate her as this man has done.”

”Will you speak to her, Claudia, and see what your influence will do?”

”It is no use my speaking to her,” she answered, disconsolately.

”Ideala is a much cleverer woman than I am. She would make me laugh at my own advice in five minutes. And, besides, if she be infatuated, as you say she is, she will be only too glad to be allowed to talk about him, and that will strengthen her feeling for him. No. She has chosen you for her confidant, and you had better talk to her yourself--and may you succeed!” she added, laying her head on the table beside which she was sitting, and giving way to a burst of grief.

I tried to comfort her, but I had little hope myself, and I could not speak at all confidently.

”I believe,” Claudia said, before we parted, ”that there is nothing for her now but a choice of two evils. If she gives him up she will never care for anything again, and if she does not, she will have done an unjustifiable thing; and life after that for such a woman as Ideala would be like one of those fairy gifts which were bestowed subject to some burdensome condition that made the good of them null and void.”

I did not meet Ideala again until the evening, and then I was not sorry to see that her manner was less serene. It was just possible that she had been thinking over what I had said, and that some of the doubts I had suggested were beginning to disturb her perfect security.

After dinner she brought the conversation round to those social laws which govern our lives arbitrarily. I did not see what she was driving at, neither did the good old Bishop, who was one of the party, nor a lawyer who was also present.

”You want to know something,” said the latter. ”What is it? You must state your case clearly.”

”I want to know if a thing can be legally right and morally wrong,”

Ideala answered.

”Of course not,” the Bishop rashly a.s.serted.

”That depends,” the lawyer said, cautiously.

”If I signed a contract,” Ideala explained, ”and found out afterwards that those who induced me to become a party to it had kept me in ignorance of the most important clause in it, so that I really did not know to what I was committing myself, would you call that a moral contract?”

”I should say that people had not dealt uprightly with you,” the Bishop answered; ”but there might be nothing in the clause to which you could object.”

”But suppose there _was_ something in the clause to which I very strongly objected, something of which my conscience disapproved, something that was repugnant to my whole moral nature; and suppose I was forced by the law to fulfil it nevertheless, should you say that was a moral contract? Should you not say that in acting against my conscience I acted immorally?”

We all fell into the trap, and looked an encouraging a.s.sent.

”And in that case,” she continued, ”I suppose my duty would be to evade the law, and act on my conscience?”

The Bishop looked puzzled.

”I should only be doing what the early martyrs had to do,” she added.