Consequences

"The obvious course is for you to join Barbara, paying your half of expenses, as you will now be enabled to do."

"Barbara doesn't want me."

"It is the natural arrangement," repeated Cedric inflexibly. "And I must add, Alex, that you seem to me to be terribly unfitted to manage your own life in any way. If what you have told me is the case, I can only infer that your moral sense is completely perverted. I couldn't have believed it of one of us – of one of my father's children."

Alex knew that the bed-rock of Cedric's character was reached. She had come to the point where, for Cedric, right and wrong began and ended – honour.

They would never get any nearer to one another now. The fundamental principle which governed life for Cedric was deficient in Alex.

She got up slowly and began to pull on her shabby gloves.

"Will you forgive me, Cedric?" she half sobbed.

"It isn't a question of forgiveness. Of course I will. But if you'd only asked me for that wretched money, Alex! What you did was to embezzle – it neither more nor less. Oh, good Lord!"

He looked at her with fresh despair and then rang the bell.

"You're going to have a taxi," he told her authoritatively. "You're not fit to go any other way. Alex, my dear, I'd give my right hand for this not to have happened – for Heaven's sake come to me if you want anything. How much shall I give you now?"

He unlocked the writing-table drawer agitatedly. Alex thought to herself hysterically, "He thinks I may steal money, perhaps, from somebody else, if I want it, and perhaps I should." And with a sense of degradation that made her feel physically sick, she put into her purse the gold and the pile of silver that he pushed into her hand.

Cedric straightened himself, and taking off his glasses, wiped them carefully.

"Write to me, Alex, and let me know What you want to do. Barbara will be back soon – you must go to her – at any rate for a time – till after Pamela's wedding. You know that's fixed for December now? And, my dear, for Heaven's sake let's forget this ghastly business. No one on this earth but you and I and Violet need ever know of it."

"No," said Alex.

She looked at him with despair invading her whole being.

"Good-bye, Cedric. You've been very, very kind to me."

"The taxi is at the door, sir."

"Thank you."

Cedric took his sister into the hall, and she gave a curious, fleeting glance round her at the familiar surroundings, and at the broad staircase where the Clare children had run up and down and played and quarrelled together, in that other existence.

"Good-bye, dear. Write your plans, and come and see us as soon as we get back. It won't be more than a week or two now."

Cedric put her into the waiting taxi, and stood on the steps looking after her as the cab turned out of Clevedon Square. And Alex, crouched into a corner of the swiftly-moving taxi, knew herself capable of any treachery, any moral infamy to which she might be tempted, since Cedric had been right when he said that her sense of honour, of fundamental rectitude, was completely perverted.

XXIX

Forgiveness

The weather broke suddenly, and it became cold and rainy. For two or three days Alex sat in her sitting-room at Malden Road and heard the trams and the omnibuses clash past, and the children screaming to one another in the street. She could hardly have said when she had first realized that it was impossible for her to go on living. But the determination, now that it was there, full-grown, had brought with it a sense of utter finality.

For two or three days she felt stunned, and yet driven by a desperate feeling that it was necessary for her to think, to make a plan. But she could not think.

Then one evening Mrs. Hoxton, the landlady, said to her curiously:

"Wouldn't you like a fire, tonight?" She seldom said "Miss" in speaking to Alex. "It's so chilly, all of a sudden, and you look ill, really, now, you do."

Alex felt rather surprised. Perhaps she was ill, which would account for the impossibility of consecutive thought. A fire would be very nice. She shivered involuntarily, looking at her little empty grate crammed with cut paper. She remembered that there was no need to consider expense any more.

"Yes, I'd like a fire, please," she said gently. And that evening she sat close to the pleasant blaze, flickering on the wall, and dimly recalling to her the nursery at Clevedon Square in the old days, and the power of thought came back to her.

It was as though the warmth and companionship of the flames had suddenly unsealed something frozen up within her, and she became more herself than she had been for many months. With the horrible, pressing dread of an unbearable present and an unimaginable future lifted from her heart, Alex felt a pervading lucidity of thought, to which she had for years been a stranger, take possession of her. She knew suddenly that she was, for a little while, to regain faculties that had been atrophied within her since the far, free days of her girlhood. She began to reflect.

Why had life, to which she had looked forward so eagerly, with such confident anticipation of some wonderful happiness, which should be in proportion to the immense capacity for realizing it which she knew to exist within her, have proved to be only a succession of defeats, of receding hopes and of unfulfilled desires?

Alex did not question that the fault lay with herself. From her baby days, under the unvarnished plain speaking of old Nurse, she had known herself to be the black sheep of every flock. And she had not sinned splendidly, dramatically, either. Her sins had been those of petty meanness, of shirking and evading, of small self-indulgences and childish tyranny at the expense of others, of vulgar lies and half-truths.

Those sins which find little or no place in the decalogue, and which stand lowest in the scale by which the opinion of others is meted out to us.

Those are the things which are not forgiven. That was it, Alex told herself, with a feeling of having suddenly struck the keynote. Forgiveness.

Forgiveness was the key to everything. Alex, in the sudden surety of vision that had come to her, did not doubt that her own interpretation of the word was the right one. Forgiveness meant understanding – not condemnation and subsequent pardon. It did not mean the bewildered, scandalized, and yet regretful oblivion to which Cedric would consign her memory and that of her many failings, it did not mean Barbara's detached, indifferent kindness, carefully measured in terms of material resources, nor Pamela's and Archie's good-natured patronage, half-stifled in mirth, of which the very object was the gulf that separated them from their sister. It did not even mean Violet's soft pity and unresentful acceptance of facts that amazed her. Looking further back, Alex knew that it did not mean either the serious, perplexed pardon that Sir Francis had tendered to his troublesome daughter, or Lady Isabel's half-complaining, half-affectionate remonstrances.

It did not in any way occur to her to blame them for a lack of which she had all her life been subconsciously aware in all their forbearance. She told herself, with a fresh sense of enlightenment, that they had not understood because it was in none of them to have yielded to those temptations which had beset and mastered her so easily. Measuring her frailty by their own strength, they had only seen her utter failure in resistance, and been shamed and grieved by it. Alex knew that in herself was another standard of forgiveness; she could never condemn, for the simple reason that she herself had failed, in every sense of the word. Unresentfully, she was able to sum it all up, as it were, when she told herself, "People who would have resisted temptation themselves, can't understand those who fall – so they can't really forgive. But the bad ones, who know that they have given way all along the line, know that any temptation would have been too strong for them – it's only chance whether it comes their way or not – so they can understand."

She felt oddly contented, as at having reached a solution.

Later on, her thoughts turned to the past again, and to the childish days when she had been the leading spirit in the Clevedon Square nursery. But the memory of that past, incredible, security and assurance, made her begin to cry, and she wiped away blinding tears and told herself that she must not give way to them. She did not at first quite know why she must reserve the tiny modicum of strength still left her, but presently she realized that the end which had become inevitable could not be reached without decisive action of her own.

Alex' logic was elementary, and its directness left her no loophole for doubt.

She could endure the plane of existence on which she found herself no longer. If she fled in search of other conditions, it was with full certainty that these could not be less tolerable than those from which she was flying, and at the back of her mind was a strange, growing hope that perhaps that forgiveness of which her mind was full, might be found beyond the veil.

"After all," thought Alex, "it's even chances. If religion is all true, then I must go to hell, whether I kill myself or not, and if it isn't, then perhaps I shall just go out and know nothing more – ever – or perhaps it will be really a new beginning, and there will be somebody or something who will forgive me, and let me start over again."

She began to feel rather excited, as though she were about to try an experiment that might best be described as a gamble.

Mrs. Hoxton, coming in with the small supper-tray, looked at her sharply two or three times, and when she had gone away again, Alex, turning to the glass, saw that her eyes were shining and looking enormously large and wide-pupilled.

"I believe I am happy tonight," she thought wonderingly.

While she ate her supper she tried to make a plan, but the excitement within her was growing steadily, and she could only think out eager self-justification for her own decision.

"It won't hurt any one else – nobody will mind. In fact, when they've got over the first shock, it will be a relief to them all. They've been very kind – Violet and Cedric – Violet most of all – but they haven't understood. They'd have understood better if I'd been a bad woman – lived with wicked men, or things like that. I suppose I should have done that too, if it had come my way – but then I never had the temptation. I had only little, mean, horrible temptations – and I didn't resist any of them. The other sort of sin would have made me happier – it would have meant a sort of success in a way – but I have been a failure at everything – always."

Her heart hammering against her side, Alex resolved that in this, her last disgrace, she would not fail.

Making no preparations, no written farewells, she rose presently and went to her room, where she put on her thickest coat and tied a woollen scarf over her head.

Then she went out.

It had stopped raining, and the air was soft and moist. It was a starless night, and when Alex got to the Heath and away from the lighted streets, it was very dark. Underneath her sense of adventure she was conscious of terror – sheer physical terror – and also of the deeper dread that her resolution might fail her.