Volume Iv Part 16 (1/2)

But come! Live it down!

[With anger growing at his silence]

Live it down, man! You can't desert your post--and let these villagers do what they like with us? Do you realize that you're letting a woman, who has treated you abominably;--yes, abominably --go scot-free, to live comfortably with another man? What an example!

STRANGWAY. Will you, please, not speak of that!

MRS. BRADMERE. I must! This great Church of ours is based on the rightful condemnation of wrongdoing. There are times when forgiveness is a sin, Michael Strangway. You must keep the whip hand. You must fight!

STRANGWAY. Fight! [Touching his heart] My fight is here. Have you ever been in h.e.l.l? For months and months--burned and longed; hoped against hope; killed a man in thought day by day? Never rested, for love and hate? I--condemn! I--judge! No! It's rest I have to find--somewhere--somehow-rest! And how--how can I find rest?

MRS. BRADMERE. [Who has listened to his outburst in a soft of coma]

You are a strange man! One of these days you'll go off your head if you don't take care.

STRANGWAY. [Smiling] One of these days the flowers will grow out of me; and I shall sleep.

[MRS. BRADMERE stares at his smiling face a long moment in silence, then with a little sound, half sniff, half snort, she goes to the door. There she halts.]

MRS. BRADMERE. And you mean to let all this go on----Your wife----

STRANGWAY. Go! Please go!

MRS. BRADMERE. Men like you have been buried at cross-roads before now! Take care! G.o.d punishes!

STRANGWAY. Is there a G.o.d?

MRS. BRADMERE. Ah! [With finality] You must see a doctor.

[Seeing that the look on his face does not change, she opens the door, and hurries away into the moonlight.]

[STRANGWAY crosses the room to where his wife's picture hangs, and stands before it, his hands grasping the frame. Then he takes it from the wall, and lays it face upwards on the window seat.]

STRANGWAY. [To himself] Gone! What is there, now?

[The sound of an owl's hooting is floating in, and of voices from the green outside the inn.]

STRANGWAY. [To himself] Gone! Taken faith--hope--life!

[JIM BERE comes wandering into the open doorway.]

JIM BERE. Gude avenin', zurr.

[At his slow gait, with his feeble smile, he comes in, and standing by the window-seat beside the long dark coat that still lies there, he looks down at STRANGWAY with his lost eyes.]

JIM. Yu threw un out of winder. I cud 'ave, once, I cud.

[STRANGWAY neither moves nor speaks; and JIM BERE goes on with his unimaginably slow speech]

They'm laughin' at yu, zurr. An' so I come to tell 'ee how to du.