All his life long the same futile story repeated: the same headlong impetuosity, the same want of steadfast force, the same absence of control. And yet, even in the depth of self-reproach, he could not deny to himself some hint of purpose which had an honest meaning in his mind, and, looking back, he saw that he had found an entrance to a purer and better life than he had known before. Had he been worthy of the trust he asked for, he would have blamed himself less for asking. Tears were hot and harsh in his throat as the scene unrolled itself before him.

Paul Armstrong--the Paul Armstrong of those irrevocable bygone years--was striking up and down the sand, and the girl was still weeping without a sound, when the Exile's thought flew back to them. It was as if a curtain had descended for an instant only, and had risen again to reveal the same actors in the same scene.

'I had better leave you now, Madge,' said Paul, half maddened by the sight of the uncomplaining grief he had awakened. 'I will watch you home as soon as you care to go, but I won't intrude upon you any longer.'

The slight figure rose from its seat upon the wrack, and stood before him with downcast and averted head, but he could still see the tears falling like diamond-drops in the clear moonlight. He turned irresolutely away, but he had made only a single step before he was vividly back again with an impulsive and imploring hand upon her shoulder.

'Tell me,' he said, 'that you forgive me. Tell me that you will be able to think of me when I am gone with something--some feeling that will not be all contempt. You won't always despise me, will you, Madge?'

'I shall never despise you,' she answered, in a voice she could barely control; 'I shall always remember this time.'

'And you don't hate me for having spoken?'

She looked up at him with a strange smile, which was so tender and so full of pity that he caught his breath at the sight of it.

'No,' she said, 'I shall never hate you. I must be as truthful as you have been. I must tell you that I had heard something of what you have told me before we left New Zealand. I didn't know if it were true, and I did not even wish to ask.'

He stood still with that unconscious hand upon her shoulder, and his heart gave a leap as he asked:

'You knew I loved you, Madge--you knew I loved you?'

'I was quite sure of that,'she answered 'I have believed it for a long time.'

'Madge,' he said, 'are you strong enough--are you brave enough--can you put such faith in me? Can you believe that I will lay a life's unfailing devotion at your feet--that the very fact that there can be no legal tie between us will make me always all the truer to you? I swear to you that if you trust yourself to me, my whole life shall be one act of grat.i.tude for your faith and courage, and that no act or word of mine shall ever cause you to regret the compact.'

Her tears had ceased to fall, and when she next looked at him her face was grave, and looked in the moonlight as pale as snow.

'If I were alone,' she answered, 'you should have my answer now, but I have others to consider.'

'Oh, who,' he cried, 'can come between us?'

'Let us go home,' she answered simply and bravely. 'I must have time to think. Please say no more to me to-night.' She moved away, and Paul, taking his place beside her, walked in silence 'There is no one,' she said, when they had traversed a hundred yards or more, 'who has a right to dictate what my life shall be; but I have never done anything without my mother's knowledge and consent, and I never shall.'

Paul had pa.s.sed from despair almost to certainty, but this chilled him suddenly.

'Ah,' he said, with a gasping breath, 'is there any mother in the world who would consent to such a scheme?'

'You must write to me,' she answered, 'such a letter as I can send to her. I will write, too, and I will ask her not to answer until she has seen us both.'

'That rings a death-knell,' said Paul 'I have no hope of consent in such a case.'

'I can't tell,' she answered simply, 'but there is no other way.'

'And yet you love me, Madge?' said Paul. She made no answer, and he drew nearer to her, and put an arm about her shoulder. 'You love me, little Madge?' he urged her.

She gave a sigh of acquiescence, a half-breathed 'Yes.'

'And you could deny your own heart and mine? You could let me go away alone, and live alone yourself, with an empty heartache?'

Her answer came, like an echo of a former tone, just the same half-breathed token of a.s.sent. There was a quiet resolution in it, for all it was so softly spoken, which bound him to silence for a time.

There was more strength of resolution, more power and purpose, expressed thus simply than he had ever been conscious of himself, and he recognised that fact quite clearly.

They walked from this time forth in silence, until at the outskirts of the town they reached the small and retired hotel at which the girl had taken lodgings, and there they parted formally enough.

'You will write?' she asked, holding out her hand to him in token of dismissal.

'I will write,' he answered, taking her hand, and bowing over it.

There were some Sabbath loiterers in the street, and it was necessary that the two should part undemonstratively.

Paul, as he walked to his own more pretentious hostel, recognised the fact that for good or evil he had shot his bolt There was nothing at that hour of which he was more certain than that his present destiny and the destiny of Madge lay in the hands of a woman he had never seen, and he did not even attempt to disguise from himself the overwhelming probability against an affirmative answer to his hopes. He was very miserably certain that he had no right to hope, and that accusing conscience of his which never permitted him to stray without rebuke, and yet had never been worth a farthing to him in his whole career, worried him without ceasing. But he knew enough of himself already to have learned that the fault of character which had wrecked him was half made up of reluctance to add pain to pain. It is not always the wholly selfish wrongdoer who is answerable for the greater sorrows of life. It is a.s.suredly not he who suffers in his own person; but, worse than that, the tender-hearted, conscience-worried man of feeble will is always afraid of causing a slight grief by retracing a mistaken step, and so goes on inevitably to the creation of troubles which appal him when he comes to contemplate them in after-hours. And to have a full theoretical knowledge of this fact enforced by years of experience is to be gifted with no safeguard. 'To be weak'--there is no wiser saying among the utterances of the wise--'to be weak is to be miserable.' To be a fool and to know it is the extreme of misery, and this extreme does not fall to the lot of those who are extremest in folly.

What Paul wrote that night is barely worth chronicling, and may be fairly constructed by anyone who has so far pursued his story. But the Exile, sitting over the embers of the fire at which he had cooked his coa.r.s.e mid-day meal, threw himself backward on the trodden gra.s.s, and, groping behind the flap of the tent, dragged his brown canvas bag towards him, and having made a search among its contents, found a heap of stained, crumpled and disordered papers, one of which he smoothed out upon his knee and read. It had been given to him in that first unspeakably tranquil and happy year which Madge and he had spent together in Europe. It was the first blotted draft of the letter to her mother with which she had accompanied his own, and it ran thus:

'My darling Mother,

'I am putting this into a separate envelope, and on the envelope I am writing to ask you to read Mr. Armstrong's letter to me before you read my own. He has explained everything there, and now I must make my appeal to you. I have promised that I will do nothing without your consent, and I am not very hopeful that I shall secure it. You know that I am not light-minded, or in the habit of saying what I do not mean, and I shall only tell you this: I love him with my whole heart and mind, and if you decide that we are to part I shall accept your decision, but I shall never know a happy day again. Paul is not only a great man but a good one.'

(The reader had faced this blow so often that he was ready for it, but he had no guard against it, and it struck home so heavily that he groaned aloud.)

'I know now, partly from what I have lately learned from other people, partly from what he told me last night, but mainly from the letter you have read, the story of his life, and I know how profoundly unhappy it has been. I want to comfort and sustain him, and I am not afraid to face all the difficulties which lie before me. I can hear a clear call to duty, and I am sure that his love and mine will strengthen me to do it.

You have never known me to be frivolous or foolish in my thoughts about such things as these, and until we can all three meet together, you must have patience with me. It would be wrong and cruel on my side to throw everything upon you, and I shall not ask you to make yourself responsible for what you may think my wrong-doing. There are a hundred thousand things in my heart which I cannot say, and amongst them all there is the dreadful fear that I may have lost your respect. But you ought to know the truth, and the whole truth. I have not lost my own, and I cannot believe that I shall ever have the right to be ashamed.'

There was much more than this. There were half-articulate expressions of affection and fear of an agony of regret for a possible severance. And through it all there beamed like a star, steadfast and un.o.bscured in tempest, the loyal heart, the uncountable soul which, in whatsoever error, knows love and fealty as its only guides.

CHAPTER XXVII

By far the greater part of the theoretical wisdom of the world comes to us in the shape of legacies bequeathed by fools. A fool is not a person without knowledge or understanding--that is an ignoramus. The true fool--the only fool worthy of a wise man's contemplation--is the man who knows and understands, and habitually refrains from acting according to knowledge and understanding. It is the record of the follies of such people which has built up the world's wisdom. From that record we have learned amongst many other things that the fool of understanding has one eternal refuge from himself which he seeks with a full knowledge of the fact that the shelter it affords is illusory, and that the path by which it leads him can only conduct him to greater dangers than those from which he is striving to escape. It is too late to go back now, quoth the fool; the business must be gone through to the end. Thus if this brief diagnosis be of any value, the root of folly is to be found in the decay of will. Few men had reason to hold this belief more firmly than Paul Armstrong, and yet even now, when whatever was best in his own nature was more seriously engaged than it had ever been before, he went on to the consummation of a most undoubted and most cruel wrong, on the poor pretence that every stage he pa.s.sed towards it made the pa.s.sage of the next stage inevitable.

If ever it had seemed clear to him that it was too late to retire it seemed clearer now, and indeed he had so involved himself that it became to him alike and equally criminal to retreat or to advance. But by-and-by a solace for his miseries brought a solution of perplexity.

Since he had taken so tremendous a responsibility upon himself, since there was now no escape from it without an act of brutality at the mere thought of which his heart revolted, there grew up within him such a resolve and such a sense of protective tenderness as had been hitherto impossible for him. Poor little Madge was to be victimized, but the _via dolorosa_ which she would tread unendingly should at least be strewn with flowers, and the victim herself should be beautifully garlanded.

His life should be one act of worship in return for her self-sacrifice.

His devotion should offer such a challenge to the censure of the world that all reproach should shrink away ashamed. There never had been so complete an atonement as he would offer.

The nauseous pill of self-reproach was so thickly sugared and gilded by this inspiration that in a while he was not only able to take it without making wry faces, but with an actual sense of relish and self-approval.

This was naturally a good deal dashed by the coming interview with Madge's mother, about whose unknown personality there began to cl.u.s.ter some self-contradictory ideas. That lady would be a most unnatural mother if she rejected the proposal he had to lay before her, and a most unnatural mother if she accepted it. In his reflections, according to his mood, he saw either horn of this dilemma so clearly that the other vanished from his mind, but it always a.s.sumed its proper reality again, and made its companion altogether visionary.

When at last the fatal hour for the interview arrived, he went to the rendezvous in a pitiable state of hope and fear. He had always his whole life through carried all his eggs in one basket, and had been incapable of undertaking more than one emotional enterprise at a time. To lose Madge now would be to lose everything, and his former experiences of the healing powers of time--which were possibly numerous and striking enough--were of no value to him. Obeying the directions he had received, he chartered a cab, and after a half-hour's tumultuous journey found himself alighting before a pretty villa in Prahran, with a well-ordered garden in front of it full of English shrubs and flowers, amidst which were interspersed a number of sub-tropic plants and trees. He was shown with no delay into a shaded room, where he had some difficulty in making out the figure of a gray-haired lady who sat in an arm-chair to receive him, and who did not rise at his entrance. Madge was standing near her, and as the dazzling effect of the bright sunshine of the streets pa.s.sed from his eyes he saw the sign of many tears in the two faces before him.

There was an embarra.s.sing silence, which lasted for a full half-minute, and Paul stood there conscious of the mother's scrutiny, and feeling like a criminal in the dock. The girl herself was the first who found courage and self-control to speak.

'Mother dear,' she said in an uncertain voice, 'this is Mr. Armstrong.'

The elder lady nodded, and with a slight gesture of the hand motioned the visitor to a chair. Paul obeyed the gesture, and waited in silence.