Then, lighting his pipe--cigars being now on the expensive and forbidden
list--he drew a chair to his table and sat down, resting his worn face
between both hands. Truly the world was not going very well with him in
these days.
For some time, now, it had been his custom to face his difficulties here
in the silence of his little bedroom, seated alone at his table, pipe
gripped between his firm teeth, his strong hands framing his face. Here
he would sit for hours, the long day ended, staring steadily at the
blank wall, the gas-jet flickering overhead; and here, slowly,
painfully, with doubt and hesitation, out of the moral confusion in his
weary mind he evolved the theory of personal responsibility.
With narrowing eyes, from which slowly doubt faded, he gazed at duty
with all the calm courage of his race, not at first recognising it as
duty in its new and dreadful guise.
But night after night, patiently perplexed, he retraced his errant
pathway through life, back to the source of doubt and pain; and, once
arrived there, he remained, gazing with impartial eyes upon the ruin two
young souls had wrought of their twin lives; and always, always somehow,
confronting him among the debris, rose the spectre of their deathless
responsibility to one another; and the inexorable life-sentence sounded
ceaselessly in his ears: "For better or for worse--for better or for
worse--till death do us part--till death--till death!"
Dreadful his duty--for man already had dared to sunder them, and he had
acquiesced to save her in the eyes of the world! Dreadful,
indeed--because he knew that he had never loved her, never could love
her! Dreadful--doubly dreadful--for he now knew what love might be; and
it was not what he had believed it when he executed the contract which
must bind him while life endured.
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