It was Arthur's work to teach others how dark and mysterious are the
ways of Providence, but he had not himself half learned that lesson in
all its strange reality; but the lesson was coming on apace; each
stride of his swift-footed beast brought him nearer to the great shock
waiting for him upon the study table, where Thomas, his man, had put
it.
He saw it the first thing on entering the room, but he did not take
it up until the snow was brushed from his garments and he had warmed
himself by the cheerful fire blazing on the hearth. Then, sitting in
his easy-chair, and moving the lamp nearer to him, he took Mrs.
Meredith's letter and broke the seal, starting as if a serpent had
stung him when, in the note inclosed, he recognized his own
handwriting, the same he had sent to Anna when his heart was so full
of hope as the brown stalks now beating against his windows with a
dismal sound were full of fragrant blossoms. Both had died since
then--the roses and his hopes--And Arthur almost wished that he, too,
were dead when he read Mrs. Meredith's letter and saw the gulf his
feet were treading. Like the waves of the sea, his love for Anna came
rolling back upon him, augmented and intensified by all that he had
suffered, and by the terrible conviction that it could not be,
although, alas! "it might have been."
He repeated the words over and over again, as stupified with pain, he
sat gazing at vacancy, thinking how true was the couplet-"Of all sad words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are these, it might have been."
He could not even pray at once, his brain was so confused, but when,
at last, the white, quivering lips could move, and the poor aching
heart could pray, he only whispered, "God help me to do right," and by
that prayer he knew that for a single instant there had crept across
his mind the possibility of sacrificing Lucy, who loved and trusted
him so much. But only for an instant. He could not cast her from him,
though to take her now, knowing what he did, were almost death itself.
"But God can help me to bear it," he cried; then, falling upon his
knees, with his face bowed to the floor, the Rector of St. Mark's
prayed as he had never prayed before--first for himself, whose need
was greatest, and then for Lucy, that she might never know what making
her happy had cost him, and then for Anna, whose name he could not
speak. "That other one," he called her, and his heart kept swelling in
his throat and preventing his utterance, so that the words he would
say never reached his lips.