And while he sat in his private room considering the case, all the racial passions of his rough ancestry burning within him, Basil Stanhope called to see him. He permitted him to come into his presence, but he rose as he entered, and walked hastily a few steps to meet him.
"What do you want here, sir?" he asked.
"My wife."
"My daughter. You shall not see her. I have taken her back to my own care."
"She is my wife. No one can take her from me.""I will teach you a different lesson."
"The law of God."
"The law of the land goes here. You'll find it more than you can defy.""Sir, I entreat you to let me speak to Dora.""I will not."
"I will stay here until I see her."
"I will give you five minutes. I do not wish to offer your profession an insult; if you have any respect for it you will obey me."Answer me one question--what have I done wrong?"
"A man can be so intolerably right, that he becomes unbearably wrong. You have no business with a wife and a home. You are a d---- sight too good for a good little girl that wants a bit of innocent amusement. Sermons and Christmas trees! Great Scott, what sensible woman would not be sick of it all? Sir, I don't want another minute of your company. Little wonder that my Dora is ill with it. Oblige me by leaving my house as quietly as possible." And he walked to the door, flung it open, and stood glaring at the distracted husband. "Go," he said. "Go at once. My lawyer will see you in the future.
I have nothing further to say to you."
Basil went, but not to his desolate home.
He had a private key to the vestry in his church, and in its darkness and solitude he faced the first shock of his ruined life, for he knew well all was over. All had been. He sank to the floor at the foot of the large cross which hung on its bare white walls. Grief's illimitable wave went over him, and like a drowning man he uttered an inarticulate cry of agony --the cry of a soul that had wronged its destiny.
Love had betrayed him to ruin. All he had done must be abandoned. All he had won must be given up. Sin and shame indeed it would be if in his person a sacrament of the Church should be dragged through a divorce court. All other considerations paled before this disgrace. He must resign his curacy, strip himself of the honorable livery of heaven, obliterate his person and his name. It was a kind of death.
After awhile he rose, drank some water, lifted the shade and let the moonlight in.
Then about that little room he walked with God through the long night, telling Him his sorrow and perplexity. And there is a depth in our own nature where the divine and human are one. That night Basil Stanhope found it, and henceforward knew that the bitterness of death was behind him, not before.
"I made my nest too dear on earth," he sighed, "and it has been swept bare--that is, that I may build in heaven.
Now, the revelation of sorrow is the clearest of all revelations. Stanhope understood that hour what he must do. No doubts weakened his course. He went back to the house Dora called "hers," took away what he valued, and while the servants were eating their breakfast and talking over his marital troubles, he passed across its threshold for the last time. He told no one where he was going; he dropped as silently and dumbly out of the life that had known him as a stone dropped into mid-ocean.
Ethel considered herself fortunate in being from home at the time this disastrous culmination of Basil Stanhope's married life was reached. On that same morning the Judge, accompanied by Ruth and herself, had gone to Lenox to spend the holidays with some old friends, and she was quite ignorant of the matter when she returned after the New Year. Bryce was her first informant.
He called specially to give her the news. He said his sister had been too ill and too busy to write. He had no word of sympathy for the unhappy pair. He spoke only of the anxiety it had caused him. "He was now engaged,"he said, "to Miss Caldwell, and she was such an extremely proper, innocent lady, and a member of St. Jude's, it had really been a trying time for her." Bryce also reminded Ethel that he had been against Basil Stanhope from the first. "He had always known how that marriage would end," and so on.
Ethel declined to give any opinion. "She must hear both sides," she said. "Dora had been so reasonable lately, she had appeared happy.""Oh, Dora is a little fox," he replied; "she doubles on herself always."Ruth was properly regretful. She wondered "if any married woman was really happy." She did not apparently concern herself about Basil. The Judge rather leaned to Basil's consideration. He understood that Dora's overt act had shattered his professional career as well as his personal happiness.
