Chapter II

Alone to her room, Mary brought her letter. That room had become the chapel of her most sacred thoughts. There, in that house, she was alone. There, as though it were the very script of her faith, she brought her letter and, locking the door, took it across to her chair by the window and sat down.

There was something she needed in this message from him. Courage had not failed her. No pricks of conscience fretted her peace of mind. More it was that in the conventional outlook of that house, in the atmosphere indeed of all Bridnorth, she felt set aside. Nor did she fear to be thus separated. Only it was at moments that it was chill. At times she shivered as though the cold edge of a draught through unsuspected chinks had found her out and for the moment set back the temperature of her courage.

Merely momentary were these misgivings. With a shaking of her shoulders, she could dispel them. The touch of his hand across that distance which separated them, the sound of his voice, all to be contained in her letter, these would drive them utterly away.

Alone there in that house, she needed her letter and her fingers were warm and her heart was beating with a quiet assurance as she tore open the envelope.

"Mary--" it began. She liked that. Her heart answered to it. It was not the passionate embrace she sought; rather it was the firm touch of a hand in her own. This simple use of her name fully gave it her.

"Mary--I have been wanting to write to you, my dear, ever since I came home. I even tried in the train coming back when, not only my hand on the paper, but it seemed my mind as well, were so jolted about that I gave it up as a bad job.

"I want you to believe, my dear, that I know my own weakness, but only for your sake do I honestly regret it. For myself, I have no real regrets at all. Knowing you, as I have done, has made a greater fullness in my life. Knowing me, as you have done, can only have brought bitterness and, I am ashamed to think of it, perhaps shame to yours."

Mary laid the letter down in her lap. Fingers of ice were touching on her heart. He thought he had brought her shame. Shame? What shame? If with his wife it were greater fullness to him, what fullness must it not be to her with none other than him beside her? She picked up the letter and the pupils of her eyes as she read on were sharpened to the finest pinpoints.

"I blame myself utterly and I blame myself alone. Life was all new to you. It was not new to me. I should have had the courage of my experience. If my character had been worth anything at all, I ought to have had the will of restraint even to the last. I wonder will you ever forgive me, for believe me, my dear, it is a great wish in my heart, always to be thought well of by you. I suppose thoughts are prayers and if they are, then you do not know how often I pray that nothing may happen to you. But if my thoughts are not answered and you have to suffer, for my weakness, you may know I will do all I can. None need ever know. With care that could be achieved, but we will not talk of that yet, or will I think of it if I can help it until you let me know for certain. Not once did you mention it, even after the first time we were alone in the wonderful still night on those cliffs. So many another woman would. So many another would have reckoned the cost before she knew the full account. You said nothing. You are wonderful, Mary, and if any woman deserves to escape the consequences of passion, it is you."

Again she laid the letter down. For a while she could read no more. The consequences of passion! Reckoned the cost! The full account! God! Was that the little mind her own had met with?

None need ever know! With care that could be achieved! She started to her feet in sudden impulse of feeling that her body held a hateful thing. Instinctively she turned to the mirror on her dressing table, standing there some moments and looking at her reflection, as though in her face she might find truly whether it were hateful or not.

Seemingly she found her answer, for as she stood there, without the effort of speech or conscious motion of the muscles of her throat, the words came between her lips--"Fear not, Mary--" Scarcely did she know she had said them, yet, nevertheless, they were the voice of something more deep and less approachable than the mere thoughts of her mind.

It was not hateful. There was all of wonder and something more beautiful about it than she could express.

Had she been told she was to receive such a letter, she would have feared to open it lest it should destroy courage and make hideous the very sight of life. But in trust and confidence having opened it, and in gradual realization having read, its effect upon her had been utterly different from what she might have anticipated.

Such an effect as this upon any other woman it might have had. But this Mary Throgmorton was of imperishable stone, set, not in sheltered places, or protected from the winds of ill-repute, but apart and open for all the storms of heaven to beat upon with failing purpose to destroy.

It may have alienated her that letter. Indeed it cut off and put her consciously alone. She knew in that moment she no longer loved. She knew how in the deepest recesses of her soul there did not live a father to her child. It was hers. It was hers alone. If this was a man, then men were nothing to women. Two nights of burning passion he had been with her and for those moments they had been inseparably one. But now he had gone as though the whole world divided them. The future was hers, not his. With that letter he had cancelled all existence in the meaning of life. There was no meaning in him. A mere shell of empty substance had fallen from her. To herself she seemed as though she were looking from a great height down which that hollow thing fluttered into the nothingness of space, leaving her in a radiant ether that none could enter or disturb.

Then of a sudden and in all consciousness now, there came with rushing memory into her mind, the thought of that sermon at Christmas time.

"Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God."

She repeated the words aloud; hearing them now as she spoke them in her throat and knowing, with all the fullness of its meaning to her, the realization it gave expression to when she voiced the thought which that day in church had followed it.

"Who was the father of the Son of Man?"

Might there not indeed, as here with her, have been no father at all? The mere servant of Nature, whipped with passion to her purpose, then feared by the laws he and his like had made to construct a world; feared by them, disemboweled by them and by Nature herself driven out and cast aside.

It was not that these ideas had any definite substance of thought in her mind. Those few words she repeated aloud. The rest had merely stirred in her like some nebulous form of life, having neither shape nor power of volition.

She did not know to what plane of thought she had raised herself. She did not appreciate any distinct purpose that it brought. All she knew and in a form of vision, was that she was alone; that it was not a hateful thing her body held; that she was possessed of something no power but tragic Fate could despoil her of; that it was something over which she had direct power of perfecting in creation; that in the essence of her womanhood, she was greater than he who at the hands of Nature had been driven to her arms and left them, clasping that air which, in her ears, was full of the voices of life, full of the greatest meaning of existence.