Bigamy -- Fiction; Domestic fiction; England -- Fiction; Married women -- Fiction
He sat, with his elbows on his knees, smoking and thinking. Before long
the restlessness that had got possession of him forced him to his feet
again. He rose, and paced round and round the strip of greensward under
the walnut-tree, like a wild beast in a cage.
What was the meaning of this disturbance in the inner man? Now that he
had committed himself to the betrayal of the friend who had trusted and
served him, was he torn by remorse?
He was no more torn by remorse than you are while your eye is passing
over this sentence. He was simply in a raging fever of impatience to see
himself safely la nded at the end which he had in view.
Why should he feel remorse? All remorse springs, more or less directly,
from the action of two sentiments, which are neither of them inbred in
the natural man. The first of these sentiments is the product of the
respect which we learn to feel for ourselves. The second is the product
of the respect which we learn to feel for others. In their highest
manifestations, these two feelings exalt themselves, until the first he
comes the love of God, and the second the love of Man. I have injured
you, and I repent of it when it is done. Why should I repent of it if
I have gained something by it for my own self and if you can’t make me
feel it by injuring Me? I repent of it because there has been a sense
put into me which tells me that I have sinned against Myself, and sinned
against You. No such sense as that exists among the instincts of the
natural man. And no such feelings as these troubled Geoffrey Delamayn;
for Geoffrey Delamayn was the natural man.
When the idea of his scheme had sprung to life in his mind, the
novelty of it had startled him--the enormous daring of it, suddenly
self-revealed, had daunted him. The signs of emotion which he had
betrayed at the writing-table in the library were the signs of mere
mental perturbation, and of nothing more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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