“And he doesn’t frighten you?”
She armed herself to smile over Gavan’s old question. “Why should he?”
Grainger left her for some moments of aimless, silent wandering. He came back and paused again before her. He did not answer her.
“I throw in my lot with life, too, Eppie,” he said, “and I ask no more of it than the here and the now of our human affair. But that I do ask with all my might, and if might can give it to me, I’ll get it.”
She looked up at him gravely, without challenge, with a sympathy too deep for pity.
“At all events,” he added slowly, “at all events, in so far, our lots are cast together.”
“Yes,” she assented.
His eyes studied hers; his keen mind questioned itself: Could a woman look so steadily, with such a clear, untroubled sympathy, upon such a love as his, were there no great emotion within her, controlling her, absorbing her, making her indifferent to all lesser appeals? Had this negative, this aimless, this ambiguous man, captured, without any fight for it, her strong, her reckless heart? So he questioned, while Eppie still answered his gaze with eyes that showed him nothing but their grave, deep friendship.
“So it’s a contest between life and death?” he said at last.
“Between me and Gavan you mean?”
The shield of their personal question had dropped from her again, and the quick flush was in her cheek.
“Oh, I come into it, too,” he ventured.
“You don’t, in any way, depend on it, Jim.”
“So you say.” His eyes still mercilessly perused her. “That remains to be seen. If you lose, perhaps I shall come into it.”
Eppie found no answer.
IT was night, and Eppie, Gavan, and Jim Grainger were on the lawn before the house waiting for a display of fireworks.
Grainger was feeling sore for his own shutting-out from the happy child-world of games and confidences that the other two inhabited, for it had been to Gavan that she had spoken of her love for fireworks and he who had at once sent for them.
Grainger was sore and his heart heavy, and not only it seemed to him, on his own account. Since the encounter in the library there had been a veil between him and Eppie, and through it he seemed to see her face as waiting the oncoming of some unknown fate. Grainger could not feel that fate, whatever the form it took, as a happy one.
She stood between them now, in her white dress, wrapped around with a long, white Chinese shawl, and the light from the open window behind them fell upon her hair, her neck, her shoulders, and the shawl’s soft, thick embroideries that were like frozen milk.
Gavan and Grainger leaned against the deep creepers of the old walls, Gavan’s cigarette a steadylittle point of light, the glow of Grainger’s pipe, as he puffed, coming and going in sharp pulses of color.
Aunt Barbara sat within at the open window, and beyond the gates, at the edge of the moor, the general and the gardener, dark figures fitfully revealed by the light of lanterns, superintended the preparations.
The moment was like that in which one watches a poised orchestra, in which one waits, tense and expectant, for the fall of the conductor’s bâton and for the first, sweeping note.
It seemed to break upon the stillness, sound made visible, when the herald rocket soared up from the dark earth, up to the sky of stars.
Bizarre, exquisite, glorious, it caught one’s breath with the swiftness, the strength, the shining, of its long, exultant flight; its languor of attainment; its curve and droop; the soft shock of its blossoming into an unearthly metamorphosis of splendor far and high on the zenith.
The note was struck and after it the symphony followed.
Like a ravished Ganymede, the sense of sight soared amazed among dazzling ecstasies of light and movement.
Thin ribbons of fire streaked the sky; radiant sheaves showered drops of multitudinous gold; fierce constellations of color whirled themselves to stillness on the night’s solemn permanence; a rain of stars drifted wonderfully, with the softness of falling snow, down gulfs of space. And then again therockets, strong, suave, swift, and their blossoming lassitude.
Eppie gazed, silent and motionless, her uplifted profile like a child’s in its astonished joy. Once or twice she looked round at Gavan and at Grainger,—always first at Gavan,—smiling, and speechless with delight. Her folded arms had dropped to her sides and the shawl fell straightly from her shoulders. She made one think of some young knight, transfixed before a heavenly vision, a benediction of revealed beauty. The trivial occasion lent itself to splendid analogies. The strange light from above bathed her from head to foot in soft, intermittent, heavenly color.
Suddenly, in darkness, Grainger seized her hand. She had hardly felt the pressure, short, sharp with all the exasperation of his worship, before it was gone.
She did not turn to look at him. More than the unjustifiableness of the action, its unexpectedness, she felt a pain, a perplexity, as for something mocking, incongruous. And as if in instinctive seeking she turned her eyes on Gavan and found that he was looking at her.
Was it, then, her eyes, seeking and perplexed, that compelled him; was it his own enfranchised impulse; was it only a continuation of fairy-land fitness, the child instinct of sharing in a unison of touch a mutual wonder? In the fringes of her shawl his hand sought and found her hand. Another rose of joy had expanded on the sky; and they stood so, hand in hand, looking up.
Eppie looked up steadily; but now the outer vision was but a dim symbol, a reflection, vaguely seen, of the inner vision that, in a miracle of accomplished growth, broke upon her. She did not think or know. Her heart seemed to dilate, to breathe itself away in long throbs, that worshiped, that trembled, that prayed. Her strength was turned to weakness and her weakness rose to strength, and, as she looked up at the sky, the stars, the dream-like constellations that bloomed and drifted away, universes made and unmade on the void, her mind, her heart, her spirit were all one prayer and its strength and its humility were one.
She had known that she loved him, but not till now that she loved him with a depth that passed beyond knowledge; she had known that he loved her, but not till now had she felt that all that lived in him was hers forever. His voice, his eyes, might hide, might deny, but the seeking, instinctive hand confessed, dumbly, to all.
She had drawn him to her by her will; she had held him back from death by her love. His beloved hand clasped hers; she would never let him go.
Looking up at the night, the stars, holding his hand, she gave herself to the new life, to all that it might mean of woe and tragedy. Let it lead her where it would, she was beside him forever.
Yet, though her spirit held the sky, the stars, her heart, suffocated and appalled with love, seemed to lie at his feet, and the inarticulate prayer, running through all, said only, over and over, “O God, God.”
Meanwhile Grainger leaned against the wall, puffingdoggedly at his pipe, unrepentant and unsatisfied.
“There, that is the end,” Miss Barbara sighed. “How very, very pretty. But they have made me quite sleepy.”
A few fumes still smoldered at the edge of the moor, and the night, like an obscure ocean, was engulfing the lights, the movements; after the radiance the darkness was thick, oppressive.
Eppie knew, as Gavan released her hand, that his eyes again sought hers, but she would not look at him. What could they say, here and now?
He went on into the house, and Grainger, lingering outside, detained her on the steps. “You forgive me?” he said.
She had almost forgotten for what, but fixing her eyes and thoughts upon him, she said, “Yes, Jim, of course.”
“I couldn’t stand it,—you were so lovely,” said Grainger; “I didn’t know that I was such a sentimental brute. But I had no business not to stand it. It’s my business in life to stand it.”
“I am so sorry, Jim,” Eppie murmured. “You know, I can do nothing—except forgive you.”
“I am not ungrateful. I know how good it is of you to put up with me. Do I bother you too much, Eppie?”
“No, Jim dear; you don’t.”
He stood aside for her to enter the house. He saw that, with all her effort to be kind, her thought passed from him. Pausing to knock the ashes of his pipeagainst the wall, he softly murmured, “Damn,” before following her into the house.
Eppie, in her own room, put out her candle and went to the window.
Leaning out, she could see the soft maze of tree-tops emerge from the dim abyss beneath. The boughs of the pine-tree made the starlit sky pale with their blackness.
This was the window where she and Gavan had stood on the morning of Robbie’s death. Here Gavan had shuddered, sobbing, in her arms. He had suffered, he had been able to love and suffer then.
The long past went before her, this purpose in it all, her purpose; in all the young, unconscious beginnings, in the reunion, in her growing consciousness of something to oppose, to conquer, to save. And to-night had consecrated her to that sacred trust. What lived in him was hers. But could she keep him in life? The memory, a dark shadow, of the deep indifference that she had seen in his contemplative eyes went with a chill over her.
Leaning out, she conquered her own deep fear, looking up at the stars and still praying, “O God, God.”
SHE could not read his face next day. It showed a change, but the significance of the change was hidden from her. He knew that she knew; was that it? or did he think that they could still pretend at the unchanged fairy-tale where one clasped hands simply, like children? Or did he trust her to spare them both, now that she knew?
When they were alone, this, more than all, the pale, jaded face seemed to tell her, it would be able to hide nothing; but its strength was in evasion; he would not be alone with her.
All the morning he spent with the general and in the afternoon he went away, a book under his arm, down to the burn.
From the library window Eppie watched him go. She could see for a long time the flicker of his white figure among the distant birches.
She sat in a low chair in the deep embrasure of the window-seat, silent and motionless. She felt, after the night’s revelation, an apathy, mental and physical; a willing pause; a lull of the spirit, that rested in its accepted fate, should it be joyful ortragic. The very fact of such acceptance partook of both tragedy and joy.
Grainger was with her, walking, as usual, up and down the room, glancing at her as he passed and repassed.
He felt, all about him, within and without, the pressure of some crisis; and his ignorance, his intuitions, struggling within him, made a consciousness, oddly mingled, of sharp pain, deep dread, and, superficially, a suffocating irritation, continually rising and continually repressed.
Eppie’s aspect intensified the mingled consciousness. Her figure, in its thin dress of black and white, showed lassitude. With her head thrown back against the chair, her hands, long, white, inert, lying along the chair-arms, she looked out from the cool shadow of the room at the day, fierce in its blue and gold, its sunlight and its wind.
He had seen Gavan pass, so strangely alone; he had watched her watching of him. She was languid; but she was patient, she was strong. That was part of the suffocation, that such strength, such patience, should be devoted to ends so undeserving. More than by mere jealousy, though that seethed in him, he was oppressed by the bitter sense of waste, of the futile spending of noble capacity; for, more than all, she was piteous; there came the part of pain and dread, the presage of doom that weighed on his heart.
In her still figure, her steady look out at the empty, splendid vault of blue, the monotonous purple stretches of the moor, his unesthetic, accurate mind felt, with the sharp intuition that carried him somuch further than any conscious appreciation, a symbol of the human soul contemplating the ominous enigma of its destiny. She made him dimly think of some old picture he had seen, a saint, courageous, calm, enraptured, in the luminous pause before a dark, accepted martyrdom. He did violence to the simile, shaking it off vehemently, with a clutch at the sane impatience of silly fancies.
Stopping abruptly before her, though hardly knowing for what end, he found himself saying, and the decisive words, as he heard, rather than thought them, had indeed the effect of shattering foolish visions, “I shall go to-day, Eppie.”
In seeing her startled, pained, expostulatory, he saw her again, very sanely, as an unfortunate woman bent on doing for herself and unable to hide her situation from his keen-sightedness. For really he didn’t know whether a hopeless love-affair or a hopeless marriage would the more completely “do” for her.
“My dear Jim, why to-day?” Eppie asked in a tone of kindest protest.
He was glad to have drawn her down to the solid ground of his own grievances. She hurt him less there.
“Why not to-day?” he retorted.
She replied that, if for no better reason, the weather was too lovely not to be enjoyed by them all together.
“Thanks, but I don’t care about the weather. Nor do I care,” Grainger went on, taking the sorry comfort that his own mere ill-temper afforded him, “towatch other people’s enjoyment—of more than weather. I’m not made of such selfless stuff as that.”
She understood, of course; perhaps she had all along understood what he was feeling more clearly than clumsy he had, and she met all that was beneath the mannerless words with her air of sad kindliness.
“You can share it, Jim.”
“No, I can’t share it. I share nothing—except the weather.”
She murmured, as she had the night before, that she was sorry, adding that she must have failed; but he interrupted her with: “It’s not that. You are all right. You give me all you can. It’s merely that you can’t give me anything I want. I came to see if there was any chance for me, and all I do see is that I may as well be off. I do myself no good by staying on,—harm, rather; you may begin to resent my sulkiness and my boorish relapses from even rudimentary good manners.”
“I have resented nothing, Jim. I can’t imagine ever resenting anything—from you.”
“Ah, that’s just the worst of it,” Grainger muttered.
“For your own sake,” Eppie went on, “you are perhaps wise to go. I own that I can’t see what happiness you can find in being with me, while you feel as you do.”
“While I feel as I do,” he repeated, not ironically, but as if weighing the words in a sort of wonder. “That ‘while’ is funny, Eppie. You are right. I don’t find happiness, and I came to seek it.” The“while” had cut deep. He paused, then added, eying her, “So I’ll go, and leave Palairet to find the happiness.”
Eppie was silent. Paler than before, her eyes dropped, she seemed to accept with a helpless magnanimity whatever he might choose to say. “You find me impertinent,”—Grainger, standing before her, clutched his arms across his chest and put his own thought of himself into the words,—“brutal.”
Without looking up at him she answered: “I am so fond of you, so near you, that I suppose I give you the right.”
The patient words, so unlike Eppie in their patience, the downcast eyes, were a torch to his exasperation.
“I can take it, then—the right?” he said. “I am near enough to say the truth and to ask it, Eppie?”
She rose and walked away from him.
With the sense of hot pursuit that sprang up in him he felt himself as ruthless as a boy, pushing through the thickets of reticence, through the very supplications of generosity, to the nest of her secret. It was not joy he sought, but his own pain, and to see it clearly, finally. He must see it. And when Eppie, her back to him, leaning her arm on the mantel and looking down into the empty cavern of the great chimney-place, answered, accepting all his implications, “Gavan hasn’t found any happiness,” he said, “He finds all that he asks for.”
It was as if he had wrenched away the last bough from the nest, and the words gave him, with theirbreathless determination, an ugly feeling of cruel, breaking malignity.
Eppie’s face was still turned from him so that he could not see how she bore the rifling, but in the same dulled and gentle voice she answered, “He doesn’t ask what you do.”
At that Grainger’s deepest resentment broke out.
“Doesn’t ask your love? No, I suppose not. The man’s a mollusk,—a wretched, diseased creature.”
He had struck at last a flash from her persistent gentleness. She faced him, and he saw that she tried to smile over deep anger.
“You say that because Gavan is not in love with me? It is a sick fancy that sees every man not in love with me as sick too.”
She had taken up a weapon at last, she really challenged him; and he felt, full on that quivering nerve of dread, that she defended at once herself and the man she loved from her own and from his unveiling.
It made a sort of rage rise in him.
“A man who cares for you,—a man who depends on you,—as he does,—a man whom you care for,—so much,—is a bloodless vampire if he doesn’t—respond.”
When he had driven the knife in like that, straight up to the hilt, he hardly knew whether his anger or his adoration were the greater; for, as if over a disabling wound, she bent her head in utter surrender, quite still for a moment, and then saying only, while she looked at him as if more sorry for him than for herself, “You hurt me, Jim.”
Tears of fury stood in his eyes. “You hurt, too. My love for you—a disease.Mylove, Eppie!”
“Forgive me.”
“Forgive you! I worship everything you say or do!”
“It was that it hurt too much to see—what you did, with your eyes.”
“Then—then—you don’t deny it,—if I have eyes to see, he too must see—how much you care?”
“I don’t deny it.”
“And if I have courage enough to ask it, you have courage enough to answer me? You love him, Eppie?”
He had come to her, his eyes threatening her, beseeching her, adoring her, all at once. She saw it all—all that he felt, and the furious pity that was deeper than his own deep pain. She could resent nothing, deny nothing. As she had said, he was so near.
She put her hand on his shoulder, keeping him from her, yet accepting him as near, and then all that she found to say—but it was in a voice that brought a rapt pallor to his face—was, “Dear Jim.”
He understood her—all that she accepted, all that she avowed. Her hand was that of a comrade in misfortune. She forgave brutality from a heart as stricken as his. She forgave even his cruelly clear seeing of her own desperate case—a seeing that had revealed to her that it was indeed very desperate. But if she too was stricken, she too was resolute, and she could do no more for him than look withhim at the truth. Their eyes recognized so many likenesses in each other.
He took the hand at last in both his own, looking down at it, pressing it hard.
“Poor darling,” he said.
“No, Jim.”
“Yes; even if he loves you.”
“Even if he doesn’t love me—and he does love me in a strange, unwilling way; but even if he doesn’t love me,—as you and I mean love,—I am not piteous.”
“Even if he loves you, you are piteous.” All his savagery had fallen from him. His quiet was like the slow dropping of tears.
“No, Jim. There is the joy of loving. You know that.”
“You are more piteous than I, Eppie. You,you, to sue to such a man. He is the negation of everything you mean. To live with him would be like fighting for breath. If you marry him,—if you bring him to it,—he’ll suffocate you.”
“No, Jim,” she repeated,—and now, looking up, he saw in those beloved eyes the deep wells of solemn joy,—“I am the stronger.”
“In fighting, yes, perhaps. Not in every-day, passive life. He’ll kill you.”
“Even if he kills me he’ll not conquer me.”
He shook away the transcendentalism with a gentle impatience, “Much good that would do to me, who would only know that you were gone. Oh, Eppie!—“
He pressed and let fall her hand.
The words of the crisis were over. Anything else would be only, as it were, the filling in of the grave.
He had walked away from her to the window, and said presently, while he looked out: “And I thought that you were ambitious. I loved you for it, too. I didn’t want a wife who would acquiesce in the common lot or make a virtue of incapacity. I wanted a woman who would rather fail, open-eyed, in a big venture than rest in security. You would have buckled the sword on a man and told him that he must conquer high places for you. You would have told him that he must crown you and make you shine in the world’s eyes, as well as in his own. And I could do it. You are so worthy of all the biggest opportunities and so unfit for little places. It’s so stupid, you know,” he finished, “that you aren’t in love with me.”
“It is stupid, I own it,” Eppie acquiesced.
He found a certain relief in following these bitterly comic aspects of their case and presently took it up again with: “I am so utterly the man for you and he is so utterly not the man. I don’t mean that I’m big enough or enough worth your while, but at least I could give you something, and I could fight for you. He won’t fight, for you, or for anything.”
“I shall have to do all the fighting if I get him.”
“You want him so that you don’t mind anything else. I see that.”
“Exactly. For a long time I didn’t know how I loved him just because I had always taken all that you are saying for granted, in the funniest, most naïvely conceited way; I took it for granted that Iwas a very big person and that the man I married must stand for big opportunities. Now, you see,” she finished, “he is my big opportunity.”
He was accepting it all now with no protest. “Next to no money, I suppose?” he questioned simply.
“Next to none, Jim.”
“It means obscurity, unless a man has ambition.”
“It means all the things I’ve always hated.” She smiled a little over these strange old hatreds.
Again a silence fell, and it was again Grainger who broke it.
“You may as well let me have the last drop of gall,” he said. “Own that if it hadn’t been for him you might have come to care for me.”
Still he did not look at her, and it was easier, so, to let him have the last gulp.
“I probably should.”
He meditated the mixed flavor for some moments; pure gall would have been easier to swallow. And he took refuge at last in school-boy phraseology. “I should like to break all the furniture in the room.”
“I should like to break some, too,” she rejoined, but she laughed out suddenly at this anticlimax, and, even before the unbroken heaviness of the gaze now turned on her, that comic aspect of their talk, the dearly, sanely comic, carried her laugh into a peal as boyish as his words.
Grainger still gazed at her. “I love that in you,” he said—“your laugh. You could laugh at death.”
“Ah, Jim,” she said, smiling on, though with the laughter tears had come to her eyes, “it’s a gooddeal more difficult to laugh at life, sometimes. And we both have to do a lot of living before we can laugh at death.”
“A lot of living,” he repeated. His stern, firm face had a queer grimace of pain at the prospect of it, and again she put out her hand to him.
“Let me count for as much as I can, always,” she said. “You will always count for so much with me.”
He had taken the hand, and he looked at her in a long silence that promised, accepted, everything.
But an appeal, a demand, wistful yet insistent, came into his silence as he looked—looked at the odd, pale, dear face, the tawny, russet hair, the dear, deep eyes.
“I’m going now,” he said, holding to his breast the hand she had given him. “And I will ask one thing of you—a thing I’ve never had and never shall, I suppose, again.”
“What is it, Jim?” But before his look she almost guessed and the guessing made her blanch.
“Let me take you in my arms and kiss you,” said Grainger.
“Ah, Jim!” Seeing herself as cruel, ungenerous, she yet, in a recoil of her whole nature, seemed to snatch from him a treasure, unclaimed, but no longer hers to give.
Grainger eyed her. “You could. You would—if it weren’t for him.”
“You understand that, too, Jim. I could and would.”
“He robs me of even that, then—your gift of courageous pity.”
His comprehension had arrested the recoil. And now the magnanimity she felt in him, the tragic force of the love he had seen barred from her forever, set free in her something greater than compassion and deeper than little loyalties, deeper than the lesser aspects of her own deep love. It was that love itself that seemed, with an expansion of power, to encircle all life, all need, all sorrow, and to find joy in sacrificing what was less to what was greater.
He saw the change that, in its illumined tenderness, shut away his craving heart yet drew him near for the benison that it could grant, and as she said to him, “No, Jim, he shall not rob you,” his arms went round her.
She shut her eyes to the pain there must be in enduring his passion of gratitude; but, though he held her close, kissing her cheeks, her brow, her hair, it was with a surprising, an exquisite tenderness.
The pain that came for her was when,—pausing to gaze long into her face, printing forever upon his mind the wonderful memory of what she could look like, for him—he kissed her lips; it came in a pang of personal longing; in a yearning, that rose and stifled her, for other arms, other kisses; and, opening her eyes, she saw, an ironic answer to the inner cry, Gavan’s face outside, turned upon her in an instant of swift passing.
Grainger had not seen. He did not speak another word to her. The kiss upon her lips had been in farewell. He had had his supreme moment. He let her go and left her.
GAVAN came up from the burn, restless and dissatisfied.
He had wanted solitude, escape; but when he was alone, and walking beside the sun-dappled water, the loneliness weighed on him and he had seemed to himself walking with his own ghost, looking into eyes familiar yet alien, with curiosity and with fear. Was it he or that phantom of the solitude who smiled the long, still smile of mockery?
How he wanted something and how he wanted not to want; to be freed from the intolerable stirring and striving within him, as of a maimed thing, with half-atrophied wings, that could never rise and fly to its goal. It was last night that had wakened this turmoil, and as he walked his thought turned and turned about those moments under the dazzling sky when he had found her hand in the fringes of her shawl.
He knew that there had been a difference in the yielding of her hand, as he had known, in his own helpless stretching out for it in the darkness, another impulse than that of childlike tenderness. It had been as if some deep, primeval will beneath his own had stretched his hand out, searching in the dark;and with the strange blissfulness of so standing with her beneath the stars, there came a strange, new fear, as though he no longer knew himself and were become an automaton held by some incalculable force.
Wandering through the woods in the hope of reëntering nature’s beneficent impersonality, he felt no anodynes—only that striving and stirring within him of maimed limbs and helpless wings.
There was no refuge in nature, and there was none in himself. The thought of Eppie as refuge did not form itself, but it was again in seeking, as if through darkness for he knew not what, that he turned to the house. And then, on all his tangled mood, fell the vibrating shock of that vision at the window.
With his quick looking away he did not know whether Eppie had seen him see. He went on, knowing nothing definite, until, suddenly, as if some fierce beast had seized him, he found himself struggling, choking, torn by a hideous, elemental jealousy.
He stood still in the afternoon sunlight as he became aware of this phenomenon in himself, his hands involuntarily clenched, staring as if at a palpable enemy.
The savage, rudimentary man had sprung up in him. He hated Grainger. He longed to beat him into the earth, to crush the breath out of him; and for a moment, most horrible of all,—a moment that seemed to set fangs in his throat,—he could not tell whether he more hated Eppie or more desired to tear her from the rival, to seize her and bear her away, with a passion untouched by any glamour.
And Gavan was conscious, through it all, that onlyinhuman heights made possible such crumbling, crashing falls into savagedom; conscious that Grainger could not have known such thoughts. They were as ugly as those of a Saint Anthony. Wholesome manhood would recoil from their debasement. He, too, recoiled, but the debasement was within him, he could not flee from it. The moment of realization, helpless realization, was long. Ultra-civilization stood and watched barbarian hordes swarm over its devastated ruins. Then, with a feeling of horrible shame, a shame that was almost a nausea, he went on into the house.
In his own room he sat down near the window, took his head in his hands, the gesture adding poignancy to his humiliation, and gazed at the truth. He had stripped himself of all illusion only to make himself the more helpless before its lowest forms. More than the realized love was the realized jealousy; more than the anguish at the thought of having lost her was the rage of the dispossessed, unsatisfied brute. Such love insulted the loved woman. He could not escape from it, but he could not feel the added grace and piety that, alone, could make it tolerable. From the fixed contemplation of his own sensations his mind dropped presently to the relief of more endurable thoughts. To feel the mere agony of loss was a dignifying and cleansing process. For, apparently, he had lost her. It was strange, almost unthinkable, that it should be so, and stranger the more he thought. He, who had never claimed, had no right to feel a loss. But he had not known till now how deep was his consciousness of their union.
She had long ago guessed the secret of the voiceless, ambiguous love that could flutter only as far as pain, that could never rise to rapture. She had guessed that behind its half-tortured, momentary smile was the impersonal Buddha-gaze; and because she so understood its inevitable doom she had guarded herself from its avowal—guarded herself and him. He had trusted her not to forget the doom, and not to let him forget it, for a moment. But all the time he had known that in her eyes he was captive to some uncanny fate, and that could she release him from his chains her love would answer his. He had been sure of it. Hence his present perplexity.
Perplexity began to resolve itself into a theory of commonplace expediency, and, feeling the irony of such resentment, he resented this tame sequel to their mute relationship.
Unconsciously, he had assumed that had he been able to ask her to be his wife she would have been able to consent. Her courage, in a sense, would have been the reward of his weakness, for what he would see in himself as weakness she would see as strength. Courage on her part it certainly would have needed, for what a dubious offering would his have been: glamour, at its best,—a helpless, drugged glamour,—and, at its worst, the mere brute instinct that, blessedly, this winding path of thought led him away from.
But she had probably come to despair of releasing him from chains, had come to see clearly that at the end of every avenue she walked with him the Buddha statue would be waiting in a serenity appalling andpermanent; and, finding last night the child friendship dangerously threatened, discovering that the impossible love was dangerously real and menaced both their lives, she had swiftly drawn back, she had retreated to the obvious safeguards of an advantageous marriage. He couldn’t but own that she was wise and right; more wise, more right,—there was the odd part of it, the unadjusted bit where perplexity stung him,—than he could have expected her to be. Ambition and the common-sense that is the very staff of life counted for much, of course; but he hadn’t expected them to count so soon, so punctually, as it were.
Perhaps,—and his mind, disentangled from the personal clutch where such an interpretation might have hurt or horrified, safe once more on its Stylites pillar, dwelt quite calmly on this final aspect,—perhaps, with her, too, sudden glamour and instinct had counted, answering the appeal of Grainger’s passion. He suspected the whole fabric of the love between men and women to be woven of these blind, helpless impulses,—impulses that created their own objects. Her mind, with its recognition of danger, had chosen Grainger as a fitting mate, and, in his arms, she had felt that justification by the senses that people so funnily took for the final sanctification of choice.
This monkish understanding of the snares of life was quite untouched by monkish reprobation; even the sense of resentment had faded. And it spoke much for the long training of his thought in the dissecting and destroying of transitory desires that hewas presently able to contemplate his loss—as he still must absurdly term it—with an icy tranquillity.
A breathlessness, as from some drastic surgical operation, was beneath it, but that was of the nature of a mere physical symptom, destined to readjust itself to lopped conditions; and with the full turning of his mind from himself came the fuller realization of how well it was with Eppie and a cold, acquiescent peace that, in his nature, was the equivalent for an upwelling of religious gratitude, for her salvation.
But the stress of the whole strange seizure, wrench and renouncement had told on him mentally and physically. Every atom of his being, as if from some violent concussion, seemed altered, shifted.
The change was in his face when, in the closing dusk of the day, he went down to the library. It was not steeled to the hearing of the news that must await him: such tension of endurance had passed swiftly into his habitual ease; but a look of death had crossed and marked it. It looked like a still, drowned face, sinking under deep waters, and Eppie, in her low chair near the window, where she had sat for many hours, saw in his eyes the awful, passionless detachment from life.
After his pause at the unexpected sight of her, sitting there alone, a pause in which she did not speak, although he saw that her eyes were on him, he went on softly down the room, glancing out at each window as he passed it; and he looked, as he went, like an evening moth, drifting, aimless, uncanny.
Outside, the moor stretched like a heavily sighingocean, desolate and dark, to the horizon where, from behind the huge rim of the world, the sun’s dim glow, a gloomy, ominous red, mounted far into the sky.
Within the room, a soft, magical color pervaded the dusk, touching Eppie’s hair, her hands, the vague folds and fallings of her dress.
He waited for her to speak, though it seemed perfectly fitting that neither should. In the silence, the sadness of this radiant gloom, they needed no words to make more clear the accepted separation, and the silence, the sadness, were like a bleeding to quiet, desired death.
The day was dying, and the instable, impossible love was dying, too.
She had let go, and he quietly sank.
But when she spoke her words were like sharp air cutting into drowned lungs.
“I saw you pass this afternoon, Gavan.”
From the farthest window, where he had paused, he turned to her.
“Did you, Eppie?”
“Didn’t you see that I did?”
“I wasn’t sure.” He heard the flavor of helplessness in his own voice and felt in her a hard hostility, pleased to play with his helplessness.
“Why did you not speak of what you saw?” Her anger against him was almost like a palpable presence between them in the dark, glowing room. He began to feel that through some ugly blunder he was very much at her mercy, and that, for the first time, he should find little mercy in her; and, for the firsttime, too, a quick hostility rose in him to answer hers. It was as if he had tasted too deeply of release; all his strength was with him to fight off the threat of the returning grasp.
“Why should I?” he asked, letting her see in his gaze at her that just such a hard placidity would meet any interpretation she chose to give.
“Didn’t you care to understand?”
“I thought that I did understand.”
“What did you think, then?” Eppie asked.
He had to give her the helpless answer. “That you had accepted him.”
He knew, now, that she hadn’t, and that for him to have thought so was to have cruelly wronged her; and she took it in a long silence, as though she must give herself time to see it clearly, to adjust herself to it and to all that it meant—in him, for her.
What it meant, in her and for him, was filling his thoughts with a dizzy enough whirl of readjustment, and there mingled with it a strange after-flavor of the jealousy, and of the resentment against her; for, after all, though he had probably now an added reason for considering himself a warped wretch, there had been some reason for his mistake: if she hadn’t accepted him, why had he seen her so?
“Jim is gone,” she said at last.
“Because—It was unwillingly, then?”
The full flame of her scorn blazed out at that, but he felt, like an echo of tears in himself, that she would have burst into tears of wretchedness if she had not been able so to scorn him.
“Unwillingly! Why should you think him insolentand me helpless? Can you conceive of nothing noble?” she said.
“I am sorry, Eppie. I have been stupid.”
“You have—more than stupid. He was going and he asked me for that. And I gave it—proudly.”
“I am sorry,” Gavan repeated. “I see, of course. Of course it was noble.”
“You should be more than sorry. You knew that I did not love him.”
“I am more than sorry. I am ashamed,” he answered gravely.
He had the dignity of full contrition; but under it, unshaken after all, was the repudiation of the nearness that her explanation revealed. His heart throbbed heavily, for he saw, as never before, how near it was; yet he had never feared her less. He had learned too much that afternoon to fear her. He was sure of his power to save her from what he had so fully learned.
He looked away from her and for long out at the ebbing red, and it was the unshaken resolve that spoke at last. “But all the same I am sorry that it was only that. He would have made you happy.”
“You knew that I did not love him,” Eppie repeated.
“With time, as his wife, you might love him.” Facing her, now, folding his arms, he leaned back against the mantel at his far end of the room. “I know that I’ve seemed odiously to belittle and misunderstand you, and I am ashamed, Eppie—more ashamed than you can guess; but, in another way, it wasn’t so belittling, either. I thought you verywise and courageous. I thought that you had determined to take the real thing that life offered you and to turn your back, for once and for all, on—on unreal things.” He stopped at that, as though to let it have its full drop, and Eppie, her eyes still fixed on him from her distant chair, made no answer and no sign of dissent.
As he spoke a queer, effervescent blitheness had come to him, a light indifference to his own cruelty; and the hateful callousness of his state gave him a pause of wonder and interest. However, he couldn’t help it; it was the reaction, no doubt, from the deep disgust of his abasement, and it helped him, as nothing else would have done, thoroughly to accomplish his task.
“He can give you all the things you need,” he went on, echoing poor Grainger’snaïfsumming up of his own advantages. “He has any amount of money, and a very big future before him; and then, really above all, you do care for him so much. You see the same things in life. You believe in the same things; want the same things. If you would take him he would never fail you in anything.”
Still her heavy silence was unbroken. He waited in vain for a sign from her, and in the silence the vibration of her dumb agony seemed to reach him, so that, with all the callousness, he had to conquer an impulse to go to her and see if she wept. But when he said, “I wish you would take him, Eppie,” and she at last answered him, there were no tears in her voice.
“I will never take him.”
“Don’t say that,” he replied. “One changes.”
“Is that a taunt?”
“Not a taunt—a reminder.”
She rose and came to him, walking down the long room, past the somber illuminations of the windows, straight to him. They stood face to face, bathed in the unearthly light. All their deep antagonism was there between them, almost a hatred, and the love that swords clashed over.
“You do not believe that of me,” she said.
He was ready and unfaltering, and was able to smile at her, a bright, odd smile. “I believe it of any one.”
It was love that eyed him—love more stern, more relentless in its silence than if she had spoken it, and never had she been so near as when, sending her clarion of open warfare across the abyss, she said, “I will never change—to you.”
The words, the look,—a look of solemn defiance,—shattered forever the palace of pretence that they had dwelt in for so long. Till now, it might have stood for them. In its rainbow chambers they might still have smiled and sorrowed and eluded each other, only glanced through the glittering casements at the dark realities outside; but when the word of truth was spoken, casements, chambers, turrets, fell together and reality rushed in. She had spoken the word. After that it was impossible to pretend anything.
Gavan, among the wreck, had grown pale; but he kept his smile fixed, even while he, too, spoke the new language of reality.
“I am afraid of you, then.”
“Of course you are afraid of me.”
Still he smiled. “I am afraidforyou.”
“Of course you are. You have your moments of humanity.”
“I have. And so I shall go to-morrow,” said Gavan.
She looked at him in silence, her face taking on its haggard, unbeautiful aspect of strange, rocky endurance. And never had his mind been more alert, more mocking, more aloof from any entanglement of feeling than while he saw her love and his; saw her sorrow and his sorrow—his strange, strange sorrow that, like a sick, helpless child, longed, in its darkness, its loneliness, to hide its head on her breast and to feel her arms go round it. Love and sorrow were far, far away—so far that it was as if they had no part at all in himself, as if it were not he that felt them.
“Are you so afraid as that?” Eppie asked.
“After last night?” he answered. “After what I felt when I saw you here, with him? After this? Of course I am as afraid as that. I must flee—for your life, Eppie. I am its shadow—its fatal shadow.”
“No, I am yours. Life is the shadow to you.”
“Well, on both sides, then, we must be afraid,” he assented.
She made no gesture, no appeal. Her face was like a rock. It was only that deep endurance and, under it, that deep threat. Never, never would she allure; never draw him to her; never build in hercathedral a Venusberg for him. He must come to her. He must kneel, with her, before her altar. He must worship, with her, her God of suffering and triumph. And, the dying light making her face waver before his eyes with a visionary strangeness, stern and angelic, he seemed to see, deep in her eyes, the burning of high, sacramental candles.
That was the last he saw. In silence she turned and went. And what she left with him was the sad, awed sense of beauty that he knew when watching kneeling multitudes bowed before the great myth of the Church,—in silence, beneath dim, soaring heights. He was near humanity in such moments of self-losing, when the cruder myth of the great world, built up by desire, slipped from it. And Eppie, in this symbolic seeing of her, was nearer than when he desired or feared her. Beauty, supreme and disenfranchising, he saw. He did not know what he felt.
Far away, on the horizon, in the gloomy waste of embers, the sun’s deep core still burned, and in his heart was a deep fatigue, like the sky’s slow smoldering to gray.
GRAINGER had gone, and Gavan announced his departure for the next morning. The situation was simplified, he felt, by Eppie’s somber preoccupation. He was very willing that she should be seen as a gloomy taker of scalps and that his own should be supposed to be hanging at her girdle. The resultant muteness and melancholy in the general and Miss Barbara were really a comfort. The dear old figures in the tapestry seemed fading to-night into mere plaintive shadows, fixing eyes of sad but unquestioning contemplation upon the latent tragedies of the foreground figures.
It was a comfort to have the tapestry so reticent and so submissive, but, all the same, it made the foreground tragedy, for his eyes, painfully distinct. He could look at nothing else. Eppie seemed to stand, with her broken and bleeding heart, in the very center of the design. For the first time he saw what the design was—saw all of it, from the dim reaches of the past, as working to this end.
The weaving of fate was accomplished. There she stood, suffering, speechless, and he, looking at her, fatal shuttle of her doom that he was, felt under all the ashes a dull throbbing.
After dinner he smoked a cigar with the general, who, tactfully, as to one obviously maimed, spoke only of distant and impersonal matters. Gavan left him over some papers in the quiet light of the smoking-room and went to the library. Eppie, with her broken heart, was not there. The night was very hot. By an open window Miss Barbara sat dozing, her hands upturned with an appealing laxity on her knees, sad even in her sleep.
Eppie was not there and she had not spoken one word to him since those last words of the afternoon. Perhaps she intended to speak no more, to see him no more. Pausing on the threshold, he was now conscious of a slow, rising misery.
If he was to be spared the final wrench, he was also to be robbed of something. He hadn’t known, till then, of how much. He hadn’t known, while she stood there before him, this fully revealed Eppie, this Eppie who loved far beyond his imagining, far beyond prudence, ambition, even happiness, what it would be not to see her again, to part from her speechlessly, and with a sort of enmity unresolved between them.
The cathedral simile was still with him, not in her interpretation of it, as the consecration of human love, but in his own, as a place of peace, where together they might still kneel in farewell.
But she barred him out from that; she wouldn’t accept such peace. He could only submit and own that she was perhaps altogether right in risking no more battles and in proudly denying to him the opportunity of any reconciling. She was right tohave it end there; but the core among the embers ached.
He wandered out into the dark, vague night, sorrowfully restless.
It was not a radiant night. The trees and the long undulations of the moorland melted into the sky, making all about a sea of enveloping obscurity. The moor might have been the sky but for its starlessness; and there were few stars to-night, and these, large and soft, seemed to float like helpless expanded flowers on a still ocean.
A night for wandering griefs to hide in, to feel at one with, and, with an instinct that knew that it sorrowed but hardly knew that it sought, Gavan went on around the house, through the low door in the garden wall, and into the garden.
Here all the warmth and perfume of the summer day seemed still to exhale itself in a long sigh like that of a peaceful sleeper. Earth, trees, fruit, and flowers gave out their drowsy balms. Veiled beauty, dreaming life, were beneath, above, about him, and the high walls inclosed a place of magic, a shadow paradise.
He walked on, past white phlox, white pansies, and white foxglove, through the little trellis where white jasmine starred its festoons of frail, melancholy foliage, and under the low boughs of the small, gnarled fruit-trees. Near the summer-house he paused, looking in at the darkness and seeing there the figures of the past—two children at play. His heart ached on dully, the smoldering sorrow rising neither to passionate regret nor to passionate longing,acquiescing in its own sorrow that was part of the vision. Moved by that retrospect, he stepped inside.
The sweet old odor, so well remembered, half musty, half fresh, of cobwebbed wood, lichened along the lintels and doorway beams, assailed him while he groped lightly around the walls, automatically reaching out his hand to the doll’s locker, the little row of shelves, the low, rustic bench and the table that, he remembered as it rocked slightly under his touch, had always been unsteady. All were in their old, accustomed places, and among them he saw himself a ghost, some sightless, soundless creature hovering in the darkness.
The darkness and the familiar forms he evoked from it grew oppressive, and he stepped out again into the night, where, by contrast with the uncanny blindness, he found a new distinctness of form, almost of color, and where a memory, old and deep, seemed to seize him with gentle, compelling hands, in the fragrance of the white roses growing near the summer-house. Wine-like and intoxicating, it filled the air with magic; and he had gone but a few steps farther when, like a picture called up by the enchantment, he saw the present, the future too, it seemed, and, with a shock that for all its quiet violence was not unexpected, stood still to gaze, to feel in the one moment of memory and forecast all his life gathered into his contemplation.
Eppie sat on a low garden bench in the garden’s most hidden corner. With the fresh keenness of sight he could see the clustering white roses on thewall behind her, see against them the darkness of her hair, the whiter whiteness of her dress, as she sat there with head a little bent, looking down, the long white shawl folded about her.
It was no longer the Eppie of the past, not even the Eppie of the present: the present was only that long pause. It was the future that waited there, silent, motionless, almost as if asleep; waited for the word and touch that would reveal it.
She had not heard his light step, and it seemed to be in the very stillness of his pause that the sense of his presence came to her. Raising her head she looked round at him.
He could only see the narrow oval of her face, but he felt her look; it seized him, compelling as the fragrance had been—compelling but not gentle. He felt it like firm hands upon him while he walked on slowly toward her, and not until he was near her, not until he had sat down beside her, did he see as well as feel her fixed and hostile gaze.
All swathed and infolded as she was, impalpable and unsubstantial in the darkness, her warm and breathing loveliness was like the aroma of a midnight flower. She was so beautiful sitting there, a blossoming of the darkness, that her beauty seemed aware of itself and of its appeal; and it was as if her soul, gazing at him, dominated the appeal; menaced him should he yield to it; yet loved, ah, loved him with a love the greater for the courage, the will, that could discipline it into this set, stern stillness.
Yes, here was the future, and what was he to dowith it? or, rather, what was it to do with him? He was at her mercy.
He had leaned near her, his hand on the bench, to look into her eyes, and in a shaken, supplicating voice he said, “Eppie, Eppie, what do you want?”
Without change, looking deeply at him, she answered, “You.”
That crashed through him. He was lost, drowned, in the mere sense of beauty—the beauty of the courage that could so speak and so hold him at the point of a sword heroically drawn. And with the word the future seized him. He hid his face upon her shoulder and his arms went round her. Her breast heaved. For a moment she sat as if stricken with astonishment. Then, but with sternness, as of a just and angry mother, she clasped him, holding him closely but untenderly.
“I did not mean this,” she said.
“No; but youareit,” Gavan murmured.
She held him in the stern, untender clasp, her head drawn back from him, while, slowly, seeking her words over the tumult she subdued, she said: “It’syouI want—not your unwilling longing, not your unwilling love. I want you so that I can be really myself; I want you so that you can be really yourself.”
He strained her to him, hiding his face on her breast.
“Can’t you live? Can’t you be—if I help you?” she asked him.
For a long time he was silent, only pressing closelyto her as though to hide himself from her questions—from his own thoughts.
He said at last: “I can’t think, Eppie. Your words go like birds over my head. Your suffering, my longing, hurt me; but it’s like the memory of a hurt. I am apart from it, even while I feel it. Even while I love you—oh, Eppie! Eppie!—I don’t care. But when we are like this—at last like this—I am caught back into it all, all that I thought I’d got over forever, this afternoon,—all the dreadful dream—the beautiful dream. It’s for this I’ve longed—you have known it: to hold you, to feel your breath on me, to dream with you. How beautiful you are, how sweet! Kiss me, Eppie,—darling, darling Eppie!”
“I will not kiss you. It would be real to me.”
He had raised his head and was seeing now the suffering of her shadowy eyes, the shadowy lips she refused him tragically compressed lest they should tremble. Behind her pale head and its heavy cloud of hair were the white roses giving out—how his mind reeled with the memory of it—the old, sweet, wine-like fragrance.
He closed his eyes to the vision, bending his lips to her hand, saying: “Yes, that’s why I wanted to spare you—wanted to run away.”
In the little distance now of his drawing from her, even while he still held her, his cheek on her hand, she could speak more easily.
“It is that that enrages me,—your mystic sickness. I am awake, but you aren’t even dreaming.You are drugged—drugged with thought not strong enough to find its real end. You have paralyzed yourself. No argument could cure you. No thought could cure you. Only life could cure you. You must get life, and to get it you must want it.”
“I don’t want it. I can’t want it. I only want you,” said Gavan, with such a different echo.
She understood, more fully than he, perhaps, the helpless words.
Above his bowed head, her face set, she looked out into the night. Her mind measured, coldly it seemed to her, the strength of her own faith and of his negation.
Her love, including but so far transcending all natural cravings, had its proud recoil from the abasement—oh, she saw it all!—that his limitation would bring to it. Yet, like the mother again, adapting truth to the child’s dim apprehension, leading it on by symbols, she brooded over her deep thoughts of redemption and looked clearly at all dangers and all hopes. Faith must face even his unspiritual seeing. Faith must endure his worse than pagan love. Bound to her by every natural tie, her strength must lift him, through them, to their spiritual aspect, to their reality. Life was her ally. She must put her trust in life. She consecrated herself to it anew. Let it lead her where it would.
The long moment of steady forecast had, after its agony of shame and fear, its triumph over both.
He felt the deep sigh that lifted her breast—it was almost a sob; but now her arms took him closely,gently, to her and her voice had the steadfastness, no longer of rejection, but of acceptance.
“Gavan, dream with me, then; that’s better than being drugged. Perhaps you will wake some day. There, I kiss you.”
She said it, and with the words his lips were on hers.
In the long moment of their embrace he had a strange intuition. Something was accomplished; some destiny that had led them to this hour was satisfied and would have no more to do with them. He seemed almost to hear this thought of finality, like the far, distant throbbing of a funeral bell, though the tolling only shut them the more closely into the silence of the wonderful moment.
Drugged? No, he was not drugged. But was she really dragging him down again, poor child, into her own place of dreams?
After the ecstasy, in the darkness of her breast and arms, he knew again the horrible surge of suffering that life had always meant to him. He saw, as though through deep waters, the love, the strife, the clinging to all that went; he saw the withering of dreams, and death, and the implacable, devouring thought that underlay all life and found its joy in the rending sorrow of the tragedy it triumphed over.
It was like a wave catching him, sucking him down into a gulf of blackness. The dizziness of the whirlpool reeled its descending spiral through his brain. Eppie was the sweet, the magical, the sinister mermaid; she held him, triumphing, and he clung to her, helpless; while, like the music of rushing waters,the horror and enchantment of life rang in his ears. But the horror grew and grew. The music rang on to a multitudinous world-cry of despair,—the cry of all the torments of the world turning on their rack of consciousness,—and, in a crash of unendurable anguish, came the thought of what it all would mean; what it all might mean now—now—unless he could save her; for he guessed that her faith, put to the test, might accept any risk, might pay any price, to keep him. And the anguish was for her.
He started from her, putting away her arms, yet pinioning her, holding her from him with a fierceness of final challenge and looking in the darkness into her darker eyes.
“Suppose I do,” he said. “Suppose I marry you,”—for he must show her that some tests she should not be put to. “Suppose I take you and reënter the dream. Look at it, Eppie. Look at your life with me. It won’t stay like this, you know. Look far, far ahead.”
“I do,” she said.
“No, no. You don’t. You can’t. It would, for a year, perhaps, perhaps only for a day, be dream and ecstasy,—ah, Eppie, don’t imagine that I don’t know what it would be,—the beauty, the joy, the forgetfulness, a radiant mist hanging over an abyss. Your will could keep me in it—for a year, perhaps. But then, the inevitable fading. See what comes. Eppie, don’t you know, don’t you feel, that I’m dead—dead?”
“No; not while you suffer. You are suffering now—for me.”
“The shadow of a shadow. It will pass. No, don’t speak; wait; as you said, we can’t argue, we can’t, now, go into the reasons of it. As you said, thought can’t cure me; it’s probably something far deeper than our little thought: it’s probably the aspect we are fated to be by that one reality that makes and unmakes our dreams. And I’m not of the robust Western stuff that can work in its dream,—create more dream, and find it worth while. I’ve not enough life in me to create the illusion of realities to strive for. Action, to me, brings no proof of life’s reality; it’s merely a symptom of life, its result, not its cause or its sanction. And the power of action is dead in me because the desire of life is dead,—unless you are there to infect me with it.”
“I am here, Gavan.”
“Yes, you are,—can I forget it? And I’m yours—while you want me. But, Eppie, look at it; look at it straight. See the death that I will bring into the very heart of your life. See the children we may have; see what they would mean to you, and what they would mean to me: Transient appearances; creatures lovely and pathetic, perhaps, but empty of all the significance that you would find in them. I would have no love for our children, Eppie, as you understand love. We will grow old, and all the glamour will go—all the passion that holds us together now. I will be kind—and sorry; but you will know that, beside you, I watch you fading into listlessness, indifference, death, and know that even if I am to weep over you, dead, I will feel only that you have escaped forever, from me, from consciousness,from life. Eppie, don’t delude yourself with one ray of hope. To me your faith is a mirage. And it all comes to that. Have you faith enough to foresee all the horror of emptiness that you’ll find in me for the sake of one year of ecstasy?”
She had not moved while he spoke—spoke with a passion, a vehemence, that was like a sudden rushing into flame of a forest fire. There was something lurid and terrible in such passion, such vehemence, from him. It shook him as the forest is shaken and was like the ruinous force of the flames. She sat, while he held her, looking at it, as he had told her, “straight.” She knew that she looked at everything. Her eyes went back to his eyes as she gave him her answer.
“Not for the sake of the year of ecstasy; in spite of it.”
“For what, then?” he asked, stammering suddenly.
Her eyes, with their look of dedication, held him fast.
“For the sake of life—the long life—together; the life without the glamour, when my faith may altogether infect you.”
“You believe, Eppie, that you are so much stronger than I?”
“It’s not that I’m strong; but life is stronger than anything; life is the only reality. I am on the winning side.”
“So you will hope?”
“Hope! Of course I hope. You could never make me stop hoping—not even if you broke my heart. You may call it a mirage if you like—that’s only a word. I’ll fill your trance with my mirage, I’ll flood your whiteness with my color, and, God grant, you will feel life and know that you are at last awake. You are right—lifeisendless contest, endless pain; it’s only at that price that we can have it; but you will know that it’s worth the price. I see it all, Gavan, and I accept. I accept not only the certainty of my own suffering, but the certainty of yours.”
Through the night they gazed at each other, his infinite sadness, her infinite valor. Their faces were like strange, beautiful dreams—dreams holding in their dimness such deep, such vivid significance. They more saw the significance—that sadness, that valor—than its embodiment in eyes and lips.
It was finally with a sense of realization so keen that it trembled on the border of oblivion, of the fainting from over-consciousness, that Gavan once more laid his head upon her breast. He, too, accepting, held her close,—held her and all that she signified, while, leaning above him, her cheek against his hair, she said in a voice that over its depth upon depth of steadiness trembled at last a little: “I see it all. Imagine what a faith it is that is willing to make the thing it loves most in the whole world suffer—suffer horribly—so that it may live.”
He gave a long sigh. At its height emotion dissolved into a rapt contemplation. “How beautiful,” he said.
“Beautiful?” she repeated, with almost a gentle mockery for the word. “Well, begin with beauty if you will. You will find that—and more besides—as an end of it all.”