All the night before, all this morning, he had fought a fierce battle with his past--with a raging thirst. The old appetite had swept over him fiercely. All day he had moved in a fevered conflict, which had lifted him away from the small movements of everyday life into a region where only were himself and one strong foe, who tirelessly strove with him. In his old life he had never had a struggle of any sort. His emotions had been cloaked, his soul masked, there had been a film before his eyes, he had worn an armour of selfishness on a life which had no deep problems, because it had no deep feelings--a life never rising to the intellectual prowess for which it was fitted, save when under the stimulus of liquor.
From the moment he had waked from a long seven months’ sleep in the hut on Vadrome Mountain, new deep feelings had come to him as he faced problems of life. Fighting had begun from that hour--a fighting which was putting his nature through bitter mortal exercises, yet, too, giving him a sense of being he had never known. He had now the sweetness of earning daily bread by the work of his hands; of giving to the poor, the needy, and the afflicted; of knowing for the first time in his life that he was not alone in the world. Out of the grey dawn of life a woman’s voice had called to him; the look of her face had said to him: “Viens ici! Viens ici!”--“Come to me! Come to me!”
But with that call there was the answer of his soul, the desolating cry of the dispossessed Lear--“--never--never--never--never!”
He had not questioned himself concerning Rosalie--had dared not to do so. But now, as he stood under the great tree, within hand-touch of the old life, in imminent danger of being thrust back into it, the question of Rosalie came upon him with all the force of months of feeling behind it. Thus did he argue with himself:
“Do I love her? And if I love her, what is to be done? Marry her, with a wife living? Marry her while charged with a wretched crime? Would that be love? But suppose I never were discovered, and we might live here for ever, I as ‘Monsieur Mallard,’ in peace and quiet all the days of our life? Would that be love?... Could there be love with a vital secret, like, a cloud between, out of which, at any hour, might spring discovery? Could I build our life upon a silence which must be a lie? Would I not have to face the question, Does any one know cause or just impediment why this woman should not be married to this man? Tell Rosalie all, and let the law separate myself and Kathleen? That would mean Billy’s ruin and imprisonment, and Kathleen’s shame, and it might not bring Rosalir. She is a Catholic, and her Church would not listen to it. Would I have the right to bring trouble into her life? To wrong one woman should seem enough for one lifetime!”