A noble cause.

Then Ernestina. I have given her my solemn promise.

It is already broken.

I will mend it.

With love? Or with guilt?

It does not matter which. A vow is sacred.

If it does not matter which, a vow cannot be sacred.

My duty is clear.

Charles, Charles, I have read that thought in the cruelest eyes. Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

She wished me to go. I could see it in her eyes—a contempt.

Shall I tell you what Contempt is doing at this moment? She is weeping her heart out.

I cannot go back.

Do you think water can wash that blood from your loins?

I cannot go back.

Did you have to meet her again in the Undercliff? Did you have to stop this night in Exeter? Did you have to go to her room? Let her hand rest on yours? Did you—

I admit these things! I have sinned. But I was fallen into her snare.

Then why are you now free of her?

There was no answer from Charles. He sat again in his pew. He locked his fingers with a white violence, as if he would break his knuckles, staring, staring into the darkness. But the other voice would not let him be.

My friend, perhaps there is one thing she loves more than you. And what you do not understand is that because she truly loves you she must give you the thing she loves more. I will tell you why she weeps: because you lack the courage to give her back her gift.

What right had she to set me on the rack?

What right had you to be born? To breathe? To be rich?

I do but render unto Caesar—

Or unto Mr. Freeman?

That is a base accusation.

And unto me? Is this your tribute? These nails you hammer through my palms?

With the greatest respect—Ernestina also has palms.

Then let us take one and read it. I see no happiness. She knows she is not truly loved. She is deceived. Not once, but again and again, each day of marriage.

Charles put his arms on the ledge in front of him and buried his head in them. He felt caught in a dilemma that was also a current of indecision: it was almost palpable, not passive but active, driving him forwards into a future it, not he, would choose.

My poor Charles, search your heart—you thought when you came to this city, did you not, to prove to yourself you were not yet in the prison of your future. But escape is not one act, my friend. It is no more achieved by that than you could reach Jerusalem from here by one small step. Each day, Charles, each hour, it has to be taken again. Each minute the nail waits to be hammered in. You know your choice. You stay in prison, what your time calls duty, honor, self-respect, and you are comfortably safe. Or you are free and crucified. Your only companions the stones, the thorns, the turning backs; the silence of cities, and their hate.

I am weak.

But ashamed of your weakness.

What good could my strength bring to the world?

No answer came. But something made Charles rise from his pew and go to the roodscreen. He looked through one of its wooden windows at the Cross above the altar; and then, after a hesitation, stepped through the central door and past the choir stalls to the steps to the altar table. The light at the other end of the church penetrated but feebly there. He could barely make out the features of the Christ, yet a mysterious empathy invaded him. He saw himself hanging there… not, to be sure, with any of the nobility and universality of Jesus, but crucified.

And yet not on the Cross—on something else. He had thought sometimes of Sarah in a way that might suggest he saw himself crucified on her; but such blasphemy, both religious and real, was not in his mind. Rather she seemed there beside him, as it were awaiting the marriage service; yet with another end in view. For a moment he could not seize it—and then it came.

To uncrucify!

In a sudden flash of illumination Charles saw the right purpose of Christianity; it was not to celebrate this barbarous image, not to maintain it on high because there was a useful profit—the redemption of sins—to be derived from so doing, but to bring about a world in which the hanging man could be descended, could be seen not with the rictus of agony on his face, but the smiling peace of a victory brought about by, and in, living men and women.

He seemed as he stood there to see all his age, its tumultuous life, its iron certainties and rigid conventions, its repressed emotion and facetious humor, its cautious science and incautious religion, its corrupt politics and immutable castes, as the great hidden enemy of all his deepest yearnings. That was what had deceived him; and it was totally without love or freedom… but also without thought, without intention, without malice, because the deception was in its very nature; and it was not human, but a machine. That was the vicious circle that haunted him; that was the failure, the weakness, the cancer, the vital flaw that had brought him to what he was: more an indecision than a reality, more a dream than a man, more a silence than a word, a bone than an action. And fossils!

He had become, while still alive, as if dead.

It was like coming to a bottomless brink.

And something else: a strange sense he had had, ever since entering that church—and not particular to it, but a presentiment he always had upon entering empty churches—that he was not alone. A whole dense congregation of others stood behind him. He turned and looked back into the nave.

Silent, empty pews.

And Charles thought: if they were truly dead, if there were no afterlife, what should I care of their view of me? They would not know, they could not judge.

Then he made the great leap: They do not know, they cannot judge.

Now what he was throwing off haunted, and profoundly damaged, his age. It is stated very clearly by Tennyson in the fiftieth poem of In Memoriam. Listen:

There must be wisdom with great Death; the dead shall look me thro’ and thro’. Charles’s whole being rose up against those two foul propositions; against this macabre desire to go backwards into the future, mesmerized eyes on one’s dead fathers instead of on one’s unborn sons. It was as if his previous belief in the ghostly presence of the past had condemned him, without his ever realizing it, to a life in the grave.

Though this may seem like a leap into atheism, it was not so; it did not diminish Christ in Charles’s eyes. Rather it made Him come alive, it uncrucified Him, if not completely, then at least partially. Charles walked slowly back into the nave, turning his back on the indifferent wooden carving. But not on Jesus. He began again to pace up and down, his eyes on the paving stones. What he saw now was like a glimpse of another world: a new reality, a new causality, a new creation. A cascade of concrete visions—if you like, another chapter from his hypothetical autobiography—poured through his mind. At a similar high-flying moment you may recall that Mrs. Poulteney had descended, in three ticks of her marble and ormolu drawing-room clock, from eternal salvation to Lady Cotton. And I would be hiding the truth if I did not reveal that at this moment Charles thought of his uncle. He would not blame on Sir Robert a broken marriage and an alliance unworthy of the family; but his uncle would blame himself. Another scene leaped unbidden into his mind: Lady Bella faced with Sarah. Miraculous to relate, he saw who would come out with more dignity; for Ernestina would fight with Lady Bella’s weapons, and Sarah… those eyes—how they would swallow snubs and insults! Comprehend them in silence! Make them dwindle into mere specks of smut in an azure sky!