Chapter VIII

And then, while that dreadful house stood listening about us in the early hours of this chill morning upon the edge of winter, she told me, with laconic brevity, things about Mabel that I heard as from a distance.  There was nothing so unusual or tremendous in the short recital, nothing indeed I might not have already guessed for myself.  It was the time and scene, the inference, too, that made it so afflicting:  the idea that Mabel believed herself so utterly and hopelessly lost—­ beyond recovery damned.

That she had loved him with so passionate a devotion that she had given her soul into his keeping, this certainly I had not divined—­probably because I had never thought about it one way or the other.  He had “converted” her, I knew, but that she had subscribed whole-heartedly to that most cruel and ugly of his dogmas—­this was new to me, and came with a certain shock as I heard it.  In love, of course, the weaker nature is receptive to all manner of suggestion.  This man had “suggested” his pet brimstone lake so vividly that she had listened and believed.  He had frightened her into heaven; and his heaven, a definite locality in the skies, had its foretaste here on earth in miniature—­The Towers, house, and garden.  Into his dolorous scheme of a handful saved and millions damned, his enclosure, as it were, of sheep and goats, he had swept her before she was aware of it.  Her mind no longer was her own.  And it was Mrs. Marsh who kept the thought-stream open, though tempered, as she deemed, with that touch of craven, superstitious mercy.

But what I found it difficult to understand, and still more difficult to accept, was that, during her year abroad, she had been so haunted with a secret dread of that hideous after-death that she had finally revolted and tried to recover that clearer state of mind she had enjoyed before the religious bully had stunned her—­yet had tried in vain.  She had returned to The Towers to find her soul again, only to realize that it was lost eternally.  The cleaner state of mind lay then beyond recovery.  In the reaction that followed the removal of his terrible “suggestion,” she felt the crumbling of all that he had taught her, but searched in vain for the peace and beauty his teachings had destroyed.  Nothing came to replace these.  She was empty, desolate, hopeless; craving her former joy and carelessness, she found only hate and diabolical calculation.  This man, whom she had loved to the point of losing her soul for him, had bequeathed to her one black and fiery thing—­the terror of the damned.  His thinking wrapped her in this iron garment that held her fast.

All this Frances told me, far more briefly than I have here repeated it.  In her eyes and gestures and laconic sentences lay the conviction of great beating issues and of menacing drama my own description fails to recapture.  It was all so incongruous and remote from the world I lived in that more than once a smile, though a smile of pity, fluttered to my lips; but a glimpse of my face in the mirror showed rather the leer of a grimace.  There was no real laughter anywhere that night.