'Well, any way, I'm sure you and I won't have anything to do with it,' said Lucy positively. 'I don't a bit believe Lady Driffield will have to work in the mills, though Mrs. Shepton did say it would do her good. I shouldn't mind something, perhaps, which would make her and Colonel Danby less uppish.'

She drew her needle in and out with vindictive energy.

'Well, I don't see much prospect of uppish people dying out of the world,' said David, throwing himself back in his chair; 'until--'

He paused.

'Until what?' inquired Lucy.

'Well, of course,' he said after a minute, in a low voice, 'we must always hold that the world is tending to be better, that the Divine Life in it will somehow realise itself, that pride will become gentleness, and selfishness love. But the better life cannot be imposed from without--it must grow from within.'

Lucy pondered a moment.

'Then is it--is it because you think working-men _better_ than other people that you are so much more interested in them? Because you are, you know.'

'Oh dear no!' he said, smiling at her from under the hand which shaded his eyes; 'they have their own crying faults and follies. But--so many of them lack the first elementary conditions which make the better life possible--that is what tugs at one's heart and fills one's mind! How can _we_--we who have gained for ourselves health and comfort and knowledge--how can we stand by patiently and see our brother diseased and miserable and ignorant?--how can we bear our luxuries, so long as a child is growing up in savagery whom we might have taught,--or a man is poisoning himself with drink whom we might have saved,--or a woman is dropping from sorrow and overwork whom we might have cherished and helped? We are not our own--we are parts of the whole. Generations of workers have toiled for us in the past. And are we, in return, to carry our wretched bone off to our own miserable corner!--sharing and giving nothing? Woe to us if we do! Upon such comes indeed the "second death,"--the separation final and irretrievable, as far, at any rate, as this world is concerned, between us and the life of G.o.d!'

Lucy had dropped her work. She sat staring at him--at the shining eyes, at the hand against the brow which shook a little, at the paleness which went so readily in him with any expression of deep emotion. Never had he so spoken to her before; never, all these years. In general no one shrank more than he from 'high phrases;'

no one was more anxious than he to give all philanthropic talk a shrewd business-like aspect, which might prevent questions as to what lay beneath.

Her heart fluttered a little.

'David!' she broke out, 'what is it you believe? You know Dora thinks you believe nothing.'

'Does she?' he said, with evident shrinking. 'No, I don't think she does.'

Lucy instinctively moved her chair closer to him, and laid her head against his knee.

'Yes, she does. But I don't mind about that. I just wish you'd tell me why you believe in G.o.d, when you won't go to church, and when you think Jesus was just--just a man.'

She drew her breath quickly. She was making a first voyage of discovery in her husband's deepest mind, and she was astonished at her own venturesomeness.

He put out a hand and touched her hair.

'I can't read Nature and life any other way,' he said at last, after a silence. 'There seems to me something in myself, and in other human beings, which is beyond Nature--which, instead of being made by Nature, is the condition of our knowing there is a Nature at all. This something--reason, consciousness, soul, call it what you will--unites us to the world; for everywhere in the world reason is at home, and gradually finds itself; it makes us aware of a great order in which we move; it breaks down the barriers of sense between us and the absolute consciousness, the eternal life--"not ourselves," yet in us and akin to us!--whence, if there is any validity in human logic, that order must spring. And so, in its most perfect work, it carries us to G.o.d--it bids us claim our sonship--it gives us hope of immortality!'

His voice had the vibrating intensity of prayer. Lucy hardly understood what he said at all, but the tears came into her eyes as she sat hiding them against his knee.

'But what makes you think G.o.d is good--that He cares anything about us?' she said softly.

'Well--I look back on human life, and I ask what reason--which is the Divine Life communicated to us, striving to fulfil itself in us--has done, what light it throws upon its "great Original." And then I see that it has gradually expressed itself in law, in knowledge, in love; that it has gradually learnt, under the pressure of something which is itself and not itself, that to be gained life must be lost; that beauty, truth, love, are the realities which abide. Goodness has slowly proved itself in the world,--is every day proving itself,--like a light broadening in darkness!--to be that to which reason tends, in which it realises itself. And, if so, goodness here, imperfect and struggling as we see it always, must be the mere shadow and hint of that goodness which is in G.o.d!--and the utmost we can conceive of human tenderness, holiness, truth, though it tell us all we know, can yet suggest to us only the minutest fraction of what must be the Divine tenderness,--holiness,--truth.'

There was a silence.

'But this,' he added after a bit, 'is not to be proved by argument, though argument is necessary and inevitable, the mind being what it is.

It can only be proved by living,--by taking it into our hearts,--by every little victory we gain over the evil self.'

The fire burnt quietly beside them. Everything was still in the house.

Nothing stirred but their own hearts.

At last Lucy looked up quickly.

'I am glad,' she said with a kind of sob--'glad you think G.o.d loves us, and, if Sandy and I were to die, you would find us again.'

Instead of answering, he bent forward quickly and kissed her. She gave a little shrinking movement.

'Oh! that poor cheek!' he said remorsefully; 'did I touch it? I hope Dr. Mildmay won't forget to-morrow.'

'Oh! never mind about it,' she said, half impatiently. 'David!'

Her little thin face twitched and trembled. He was puzzled by her sudden change of expression, her agitation.

'David!--you know--you know what Louie said. I want you to tell me whether she--she meant anything.'

He gave a little start, then he understood perfectly.

'My dear wife,' he said, laying his hand on hers, which were crossed on his knee.

She waited breathlessly.

'You shall know all there is to know,' he said at last, with an effort. 'I thought perhaps you would have questioned me directly after that scene, and I would have told you; but as you did not, I could not bring myself to begin. What Louie said had to do with things that happened a year before I asked you to be my wife. When I spoke to you, they were dead and gone. The girl herself--was married. It was her story as well as my own, and it seemed to concern no one else in the world--not even you, dear. So I thought then, any way. Since, I have often wondered whether I was right.'

'Was it when you were in Paris?' she asked sharply.

He gave a sign of a.s.sent.

'I thought so!' she cried, drawing her breath. 'I always said there was more than being ill. I said so to Dora. Well, tell me--tell me at once! What was she like? Was she young, and good-looking?'

He could not help smiling at her--there was something so childish in her jealous curiosity.

'Let me tell you in order,' he said, 'and then we will both put it out of sight--at least, till I see Louie again.'

His heavy sigh puzzled her. But her strained and eager eyes summoned him to begin.

He told her everything, with singular simplicity and frankness. To Lucy it was indeed a critical and searching moment! No wife, whatever stuff she may be made of, can listen to such a story for the first time, from the husband she loves and respects, without pa.s.sing thereafter into a new state of consciousness towards him.

Sometimes she could hardly realise at all that it applied to David, this tale of pa.s.sion he was putting, with averted face, into these short and sharp sentences. That conception of him which the daily life of eight years, with its growing self-surrender, its expanding spiritual force, had graven on her mind, clashed so oddly with all that he was saying! A certain desolate feeling, too large and deep in all its issues to be harboured long in her slight nature, came over her now and then. She had been so near to him all these years, and had yet known nothing. It was the separateness of the individual lot--that awful and mysterious chasm which divides even lover from lover--which touched her here and there like a cold hand, from which she shrank.

She grew a little cold and pale when he spoke of his weeks of despair, of the death from which Ancrum had rescued him. But any ordinary prudish word of blame, even for his silence towards her, never occurred to her. Once she asked him a wistful question:--

'You and she thought that marrying didn't matter at all when people loved each other--that n.o.body had a right to interfere? Do you think that now, David?'

'No,' he said, with deep emphasis. 'No.--I have come to think the most disappointing and hopeless marriage, n.o.bly borne, to be better worth having than what people call an "ideal pa.s.sion,"--if the ideal pa.s.sion must be enjoyed at the expense of one of those fundamental rules which poor human nature has worked out, with such infinite difficulty and pain, for the protection and help of its own weakness. I did not know it,--but, so far as in me lay, I was betraying and injuring that society which has given me all I have.'

She sat silent. 'The most disappointing marriage.' An echo from that overheard talk at Benet's Park floated through her mind. She winced, and shrank, even as she realised his perfect innocence of any such reference.

Then, with eagerness, she threw herself into innumerable questions about Elise--her looks, her motives, the details of what she said and did. Beneath the satisfaction of her curiosity, of course, there was all the time a pang--a pang not to be silenced. In her flights of idle fancy she had often suspected something not unlike the truth, basing her conjecture on the mystery which had always hung round that Paris visit, partly on the world's general experience of what happened to handsome young men. For, in her heart of hearts, had there not lurked all the time a wonder which was partly self-judgment? Had David, with such a temperament, never been more deeply moved than she knew herself to have moved him?

More than once a secret inarticulate suspicion of this kind had crossed her. The poorest and shallowest soul may have these flashes of sad insight, under the kindling of its affections.

But now she knew, and the difference was vast. After she had asked all her questions, and delivered a vehement protest against the tenacity of his self-reproach with regard to Louie--for what decent girl need go wrong unless she has a mind to?--she laid her head down again on David's knee.