THE FLAMES OF LIFE'S FURNACE
A large room with open windows shewing a great square of hot blue sky
and a palm branch that swayed in front of them, bright gold in the
vivid light, was before my eyes as I lay alone, stretched out on my
bed, the mosquito-curtains draped round me, and raised on the side
next the windows.
How many weary days and nights had gone slowly by since that night
which hung veiled in crimson mists in my memory! Horrible night of
anger, of struggle, of death, of blood! Would its remembrance always
cling to me like this?
Hop Lee thought I had broken my promise to him. That was the poisoned
thorn that rankled and twisted and festered within me. No wonder he
had cursed me and wanted to kill me. And Suzee--how well she had
deceived me! I remembered her as she had sat trying to weep at the
supper-table in San Francisco, telling me of the last moments of Hop
Lee, her own devotion to him, and the child in their dying sufferings!
Husband and child that she had deserted so gladly! A dull anger burnt
within me at the thought of that deception, and most fiercely at the
knowledge that she had forced me to break my word.
Yet that anger, strongly though it flamed against her, could not
wholly dry the tears that came between my lids as I thought of her.
She had loved me in her own selfish, childish way, and had risked her
own life as well as mine to come to me.
After all, was it not I who had been in the wrong from the first? I
had known she was married. Why had I ever looked at her with that
admiration which had stirred her passion for me? Morley had warned me.
Now it had ended like this and nearly cost us all our lives. But I,
the most guilty of the three, had escaped, and they were both dead.
I appeared to have broken my promise, and now, after already injuring
him so much--one who had never injured me--I had killed Hop Lee. I had
taken his wife, who, he had said, was more than his life. Not
satisfied with that, I had taken his life, too! How horrible it all
was! I felt suffocated beneath the weight of it. But surely, surely it
was Suzee who had thrown this burden on me? Yes, but I had begun the
evil far back in the sunny days at Sitka.
Truly, as I had said to Morley, "One never knows in life."
I had killed him, a poor harmless, defenceless old man who had trusted
me!
One thing after another had gradually pushed me on to this climax, all
having their origin in those careless glances exchanged in the Sitka
tea-shop.
They had thought I should die, too, all the people who had rushed into
the room and found us that night. Myself unconscious, and the others
dead.
The cold voice of a doctor had been the first I had heard as sense
came back to me with the damp night air from the window blowing on my
face:
"He's done for, I should say, you'd better take his depositions if he
can speak."
I had opened my eyes and seen some men carrying out the body of Hop
Lee and the tiny pliable form of dear little Suzee that I should never
see or clasp again.
The landlord had come up ashy-pale and shaking, with a note-book in
his hand, and had questioned and re-questioned me, and I had answered
until I fainted again.
Next, after a black gap, I came to beneath the surgeon's probe which
he was thrusting into my wound, as he would a fork into cold meat.
"He won't get through, I should think; he has too much fever," he was
saying, in the regular callous professional voice.
"But I'm going to try the effect of this new antiseptic dressing, I
want to see if it does harm or not."
I opened my eyes and looked up at his hard, thin-lipped face, and he
seemed somewhat disconcerted; but only jabbed his probe in a little
deeper and remarked jocularly:
"Ah, I see, you're tougher than I thought."
More oblivion, and when I next came to I knew that _they_ had both
been carried away from me and buried--Hop Lee, and his wife beside
him, and that that chapter in my life was, for ever and ever, closed.
Now I was in charge of a hospital nurse. A horrible creature she was,
lean and hard-faced, with a straight slit across her face for mouth,
and little grey, cruel eyes. Like a nightmare she hung round my bed,
preventing me from getting better.
All the fiendish tortures and cruelties that she had witnessed within
the hospital walls had, I suppose, made her the thing she was.
Days had passed, and very slowly a little strength had crept back into
me, enough for me to see I was not getting well as quickly as my youth
and strength would let me if there were no drawback. I drew all my
forces together to try and understand this, and then I noticed that
regularly after each dose of physic I went back a little.
More fever, more pain in my shoulder, more delusions before the brain.
Each morning when the vitality within me had struggled through the
evil effects of my medicine I was better, then came the harpy-faced
nurse to the pillow--my dose--then pain and illness again.
The look on the face of the woman as I drank it was extraordinary. A
sly, pleased look, as one sees on the face of a schoolboy dismembering
a living fly.
One day I took the glass as usual from her, but instead of raising it
to my lips, turned it upside down through the window.
The woman turned red, and then livid.
"What does that mean, sir, may I ask?"
"Simply that I am not going to take any more medicine, thank you," I
replied quietly, "as I now wish to get well."
"My orders from the doctor are that you shall take it," she said
grimly; "and I'll make you."
She poured out another glass of the medicine and approached the bed,
with the intention, it seemed, of opening my mouth and pouring it
down. But I had had no weakening, sense-destroying drug that morning,
and nature was rapidly curing me.
She forgot that. As she came up, I sprang from the bed, put my hand on
her shoulder, and forced her to the door. She shrieked and protested,
but she could not resist. I put her outside and locked the door.
Then I sank down trembling with exhaustion, for I was very weak. But I
rejoiced to know my strength had come back even that much. I crossed
to the window after a moment and looked out. In the distance
glimmered the sea, blue and joyous and beautiful. How I longed to be
out near it, in its warm salt breeze! Beside my window grew the
companion of my weary hours, the waving palm; beneath there was a
little flagged court, shut in by small buildings belonging to the
hotel. There was a well there and a banana-tree, and a man sitting
down plucking alive a struggling fowl. I called to him in Spanish:
"Send the administrador to me." And he looked up.
A frightened look came into his face as he saw who it was that called
him. Then he nodded, and carrying the unhappy bird by its feet, head
downwards, disappeared into the hotel.
People and things move slowly with the Spaniards. I waited an hour,
gazing out into the amethystine distance, wondering if Suzee's glad,
careless, irresponsible little spirit was dancing there in the
sunbeams; and then a knock came at the door.
I walked to it and said: "Who is there?"
I recognised the voice of the administrador in his answer, and
unlocked the door and bid him come in.
He did so, with an alarmed aspect.
"Have you seen the nurse?" I asked.
"Yes," he replied; "she told me you were again delirious and had
refused to take your medicine, and that she must refuse all
responsibility for you."
"I am not at all delirious, as you see," I answered; "I simply want to
get well, and each time I take their stuff I get worse; so I am going
to cease taking it. Now what I ask you to do is to keep that woman and
the doctor and the surgeon out of my room. All I want is to be left
alone, to be quiet. The surgeon took all the stitches out yesterday.
There is no need for _him_ to see me again, and the others I won't
have in here."
"But the responsibility, really, Señor," the man muttered looking all
ways at once, "and the good doctor--such an amiable man. What object
could he have in not curing the Señor quickly?"
"The object of prolonging his fees," I answered smiling, "I should
think. When I get well, his fees stop." Then it occurred to me this
man had also an object in keeping me here, since my hotel bill would
certainly stop, like the doctors' fees, when I got well; so I added:
"What day of the month is it? The twentieth? Well, listen to this. If
I am well, perfectly well by the end of the month, I will give you a
cheque for fifty pounds in addition to my bills, just to show my
good-will."
Now £50 is much to a Mexican, and over this man's face spread a look
as of one who has a glimpse of Paradise. He looked down immediately,
however, and said deprecatingly:
"How can I influence the Señor's getting well? These things are as
the good God wills. I can hire a Sister to pray for the Señor. That I
can do."
"Thank you," I said. "But if you will keep the doctor and nurse out of
my room and send me good food and water I shall get well and the fifty
pounds is yours. Do you understand, if they come into this room again
you lose it. I only wish to be alone."
The man bowed and bowed.
"As the Señor wishes, but the good amiable doctor, what should I say
to him?"
"What you please, only don't let him come near me."
"And when the Señor is well there are many little matters to settle.
The Consul and the Magistrate...."
I stopped him.
"Not now. I am to have ten days in peace, and alone, or you don't get
the money."
The man stood bowing and shuffling and muttering for some minutes.
Then the thought of the £50 came before him too dazzling to resist,
and with a final: "It shall be exactly as the Señor wishes," he
withdrew.
And so now I lay alone. Ah, what a comfort solitude is!
Freedom and solitude! Are these not two sweet Sisters of Mercy?
How few of all worldly ills and sorrows can they not either cure or
assuage? Or, rather, perhaps, ought one not to call them mates, from
which the child, Content, is born?
I lay there, weak and suffering still, but a balm seemed poured all
over me, for now I was alone.
I fell asleep after a time and did not wake till it was dark. I felt
stronger, better. Sleep had nursed me in her own way through all the
afternoon.
A lamp had been lighted on the table beside me and only needed turning
up. There was a tray of food there and a carafe of water. I took a
little of both and felt life stirring in all my veins, now that the
paralysing grip of the deadly drugs they had been giving me was lifted
off.
I lay still, gazing about the large, shadowy room and into the violet
dusk of the square beyond the window, and then gradually sleep came
over me again.
In less than an hour I started up from my bed, wide-awake. I thought I
had been with Hop Lee. I looked round the room. All was just as I had
seen it last. I sank back on my pillow. "It was only a vivid dream," I
said to myself, and then fell to wondering what the dream had been. I
could not remember. It seemed some communication had been made to my
brain while I slept, that it had received very clearly, but now that I
was awake it could not retain nor understand it, but it could, and did
remember that I had dreamed of Hop Lee, and that it was a pleasant
dream.
Yes, the man I had murdered had been with me, had spoken to me, and
the impression was that of rest, of calm, of some aching self-reproach
being appeased.
"Just a dream, of course," I said to myself; "but how odd that I
cannot remember at all what he said." An hour perhaps passed by while
I lay quiet, strangely comforted by the dream I had forgotten; and
then I lapsed back into sleep and again Hop Lee was with me, speaking,
telling me something earnestly, exhorting me gently, and again I woke
with a feeling of gratitude, of peace; but I could recall nothing of
what had been said to me.
The light burned steadily beside me, and I sat up and thought.
The feeling of tranquillity that spread through me, so different from
the feverish self-reproach that had gripped me ever since I had killed
Hop Lee was so marked, so wonderful in its effect on me that I could
not feel it was the result of a dream. No, the spirit of the old man
had been there, absolving me of my broken word, absolving me of his
murder. The fact that I could not remember, could not recall or
understand when awake my dream or his words, seemed to shew that in
sleep a mysterious message from a hidden source had been conveyed to
me, which, from its nature and the nature of my ordinary material
brain, could not be received by the latter. From that hour I began to
get well rapidly. Often and often in the long nights or the lonely
quiet days, I tried to call up a dream to me, a vision of either of
them again; often I longed to speak to Suzee once more. But never
again did any shade come to my pillow. He had come that once, of that
I was convinced. To others it would always seem as if I had dreamed
that night. I knew, by some inner sense, I had been spoken to by the
soul of the old dead Chinaman, and forgiven.
The time passed evenly in that calm solitude. Sometimes still I was
burnt with fever and racked with pain and got but poor food, and often
longed for a hand to give me water in the dark nights. And I
longed--ah, how I desired, infinitely, to send to Viola, tell her, and
ask her to come to me!
I felt she would come then, that she would fly to me once she heard I
was ill, in actual need of her.
But my pride refused to let me do this.
I had begged her to come in the name of our love, appealed to her
through our passion. I would never appeal to her pity.
Besides, I could not bear that she should see me now, wrecked in
strength, a shadow, a skeleton of myself.
Fever had reduced me to the last thin edge of existence. As I
stretched out my arms before me, they looked like some grim ghastly
stranger's, I did not recognise them. No, she should come back to me
when I had regained the full glory of my health and strength that I
knew she delighted in.
So I waited with all the patience I could command, and sleep and
Nature nursed me between them till I was quite well.
Then came long-drawn-out procedure in the Mexican courts. I had
documents to write and sign, affidavits to make out, interrogations to
answer; but finally the Law was satisfied. I was acquitted. I heard
the decision with a curious feeling. How little it seemed to matter
beside the inner knowledge of my heart, that Hop Lee himself had been
with me, and knew and understood.
One afternoon then, after the satisfying of nearly endless claims upon
me, I looked at the long, flat, rolling sea with its reefs of palms
for the last time, and took the train northwards away from Tampico.
The year was not yet over, but I was going back to be in London, or
very near it. For would she not write first to my club? and here it
took at least three weeks for my letters sent on from the club to
reach me.
I did not wish to live actually in town yet till Viola joined me, to
advertise our separation, unnecessarily, to our friends, but I thought
I would live practically hidden somewhere near, so that letters could
reach me from London the same day.
Within a month I was back in London and went first of all to call for
letters. Amongst them I recognised instantly there was not one from
Viola. And, depressed and disappointed, I went down into the country,
to work.
Work, the dear mistress of an artist's life, the one that never leaves
him but is there always waiting to receive him back to her, to console
him in her arms for all the wounds that love has made.
Month after month went by and I worked at the painting, turning into
finished pictures the many sketches life with Suzee had given me.
As I worked on some of these a wave of sad reflection would sweep over
me, of memory of her, but the recollection of the deceit and lies in
which her love for me had been always cloaked came with that memory
and blunted the poignant edge of it.
Then suddenly one morning came a letter from Viola, and my heart
seemed at the sight of it to fly upwards and forwards to the future as
a swallow let out of a darkened room flies upwards and outwards with a
swift rush to the open light.
"Bletchner's Hotel, Paris." "If you wish, you may come to me."
That was all, but it was enough. Within a few moments I was ready for
departure. For weeks a little case had stood ready packed against the
wall of my room. All else was left standing.
I went to town, caught the morning train to Dover, and crossed to
Calais.
I reached Paris finally about six and drove to a hotel. I dined in my
travelling clothes in the restaurant, and then went up to my room to
dress. What keen life I felt in all my veins! How strongly all the
power of living had come back to me! Ordinarily, when we are well we
get so accustomed to our health and strength we are hardly aware of
either, but there are times when we become supremely conscious of
both, as I was now. As I walked about my small apartment I felt a
pride and joy in my strength such as a woman feels, I suppose, in her
beauty when she surveys it in the mirror--a wild elation, a sense of
triumph, as she realises in it her power. The thought of the
approaching meeting with Viola danced before my mind, filling it with
superb delight. All my veins seemed filled with fire instead of blood.
My limbs and muscles flew to do the bidding of the eager, impatient
brain.
I drove to Bletchner's Hotel and enquired for Madame Lonsdale, and was
immediately shewn up to her suite of apartments. The salon I entered
was empty. A door faced me at the other end. It was closed. My heart
leapt up as I saw it. Was she there--just on the other side? The salon
was lighted with shaded electric lamps and furnished and hung entirely
in white, so that there was that dazzling effect of light I knew she
always loved. I walked up and down in short quick turns, longing to go
up to that tantalising door and knock, but holding myself back.
After a moment it opened and she came through it towards me. For one
second before I rushed forward to clasp her in my arms, I stood to
gaze at her, and the sweetness, the enchanting glamour of the vision
was borne in upon me and locked itself into my memory for ever. She
was in white, some soft white tissue that fell round her closely,
edged with silver that seemed like moonlight on white clouds, and
there was a little silver on her shoulders and round the breast that
seemed like moonlight upon snow. Her fair hair shone in the blaze of
light, her face raised to mine was pale and smiling, with a wonderful
lustre in the azure eyes.
She seemed, as ever, the dream, the vision, the ideal, the
unattainable divinity man's soul continually strives after.
A moment more and she was in my arms. Her physical semblance was mine,
in which her spirit walked and moved, and I was the owner and
conqueror of that at least.
"Trevor dear, be gentle!" she murmured in laughing remonstrance, but
her white arms did not unlock from my neck nor her soft lips move far
from mine.
"How happy I am now," she said, sinking into my embrace, "and how well
you look, Trevor, how splendid! So strong and gloriously full of
life!"
"I wonder I do," I answered, "after this cruel year you gave me. How
could you leave me as you did while I was asleep beside you, and what
was your reason? You will have to tell me now."
"I believe you would be happier if I did not, if you just trusted me
and never asked to know," she answered, smiling back at me. "Are we
not perfectly happy now? You have me again; look at me, am I just the
same as when we parted?"
I looked at her intently, eagerly, my eyes drinking in all the perfect
vision before me, each slim outline of the body, lying back now on the
couch where we both were sitting, all the delicacy of the transparent
skin, the smooth white forehead with its fine, straight-drawn
eyebrows, the lovely eyes searching mine. Yes, I had lost nothing of
my possession, and there seemed rather something added to that inner
light and that wonderful look of intellect and power that shone
through the face.
"I think you are the same," I said slowly, seeking vainly to express
that indefinable extra light that seemed upon her face.
"Only perhaps more lovely. But tell me what your reason was. I cannot
bear to think there is a dark gap between us."
"You are so happy at this moment it seems a pity," she murmured
softly. "You will not feel so happy when you know, and it's all over
and past and forgotten. It's a thunderstorm that has rolled by and
left us again in the sunlight. We are in Paradise now, are we not?"
I looked at her, and the triumph of delighted joy I had in her rose up
to my brain, filling it, making all else seem obscure and of no
account. Yet something in her words stirred my brain anxiously. Why
should I mind hearing what she had to say? Was it possible that she
had acted on her first letter to me, after all, and, while forcing
freedom on me, taken it also for herself? Was it possible she had lent
my possession, herself, to another? That blind, insensate jealousy of
the male in physical matters instantly flamed up through me. In that
moment of extreme passion for her, of expected triumph and delight, it
burnt at its most furious pitch. I felt I must _know_, must drag the
secret out of her, and if it was what I thought in that unreasoning
moment, I would kill us both.
I threw myself forward on her so that she could not move. "Now tell
me," I said. "You shall tell me, you promised you would."
Viola looked up at me with a regretful gaze but without any shrinking
from my savage look and grasp.
"Certainly I will," she said gently; "but you will regret forcing me
to tell you. Well, I left you, Trevor, because I found I was going to
be the mother of your child."
"Viola!"
Had she stabbed me in the breast as I leant over her, the shock could
not have been more great. To me the words seemed to go straight to my
heart and stop it. I could not speak beyond that one word. For the
moment I was absolutely stunned, paralysed. I took my hands from her
arms which I had been holding, rose from the couch mechanically, and
walked away from her, trying to realise, to understand what she had
said and its meaning.
This was the fact that stood out most clearly before my disordered
mental vision: knowing she was going to be in danger, to suffer, she
had fled from me to bear the burden of it alone. And, next, that I had
brought that burden and suffering on her. That spirit, so far above
earthly things, as I always thought her, I had dragged down to know
the common trials, share the common lot of earthly womanhood. The pain
of these two ideas, the agony they brought with them to me in those
moments was something almost unendurable. I felt crushed, absolutely
ground into the dust before it. I sat down by the table and put both
hands across my eyes, shutting out her exquisite vision, trying to
shut out my thoughts. I felt as a religious enthusiast might feel who
in a moment of drunken madness had outraged a sacred shrine.
Viola was to me, had always been, far more than a wife or a mistress
is to a man; she was also the Idea to my brain, and what his Idea is
to an artist an artist alone can know. But it is something he will
live and die for, and count his heart's blood as nothing beside it.
That she was a sacred thing, to be protected and guarded from the
sordid incidents of daily life that she hated, had always been my
thought. She was an artist, and as such had Art's own penalties to
pay--the excessive nervous strain it puts upon the body, the long
weakening tension, the extreme mental and bodily fatigue that
sometimes accompanies or follows an artist's flight into the Elysian
fields, from which he brings back those deathless flowers of music,
verse, song, or colour to plant in the world. It is not fair that such
a one should have to bear the common ills of life as well as pay those
penalties.
That had always been my view. Viola was apart from the world, a
daughter of the gods, not suited for, nor designed for the common
sufferings of the clay. Love she might know, or rather must know, for
love is always the handmaiden to Art, but motherhood, no. For those
thousands and thousands of women who inhabit this world and have no
divine gifts to bestow maternity is a pleasing and natural
occupation; for the one amongst those thousands who has heard the
Divine whisper and walked and conversed with the gods, and who can
repeat those whispers to mortals, it is a waste of divine energy--a
sacrilege. For genius is not handed down. It is given to one alone. It
is not hereditary. For genius accumulated through heredity would at
last produce a god. And that the jealous gods will not allow.
Therefore the child of a genius is rarely a genius itself. It is born
with a veil across its eyes that it may not see divinity and so return
to the common type.
Knowing all this and feeling it keenly to my heart's core, I had given
my promise to Viola. A promise, which indeed was part of a religion to
me, and this was how I had kept it!
The intense humiliation of it all rolled through me, stunning me like
a physical agony.
I heard her voice speaking gently to me, but I could not understand
what she said, could not respond.
In memory, I was listening again to her voice when she had come that
first night to the studio:
"You will not let our love drag us down to earth, will you? Let it
only inspire us more. We will go to the Elysian fields together to
gather the amaranth flowers. You will not try to turn me into the
ordinary married woman. I could not accept those duties and that
life. I want to live in my music, in the heaven of Ideas, as I do now.
And to you I want always to be the vision, the dream, the spirit of
your thoughts: never the wife, the mother, the keeper of the
household, occupied with worldly matters."
And I had promised with all the rapture and the fervour of one who
understood and thought her thoughts, and who had always longed to
escape from the commonplace, the trivial matters of the world, to
whom, as to her, the deathless amaranth flowers of beauty, of art, of
Idea, of inspiration were all.
But the promise had been broken. Through me she had known pain,
suffering, danger, inability to work, anxiety, daily care for months
and months alone. The exquisite, perfect form I had counted so sacred,
had suffered the common earthly lot. And through me. My thoughts
seemed crushing me, grinding me beneath them, but at last her voice
penetrated to my brain, through its anguish of self-reproach.
"I knew you would feel it so much, dear Trevor, that was why I kept it
secret from you and went away, but now it is all over and past, you
must not dwell on it. It is irrevocable. Don't reproach yourself about
it. Let us be glad we are in Heaven now."
I rose and went over to her and knelt by the couch, raising one of her
hands to my lips and holding it against me.
"Dear! Dearest one! You went away to endure all that misery alone, so
that it should not distress me? How wonderfully unselfish you have
always been to me!"
"Oh, no," she answered quickly, a light colour rising all over her
face.
"You must not think that. I went away for myself, too. I could not
bear that you should see me disfigured, spoiled, as you would think. I
had always been the ideal to you. I could not bear to let you see me
as an ordinary woman. I was afraid I should lose your passion for me,
which I value more than anything else in the world. I felt I could
face everything but that. Terrifying and horrible as it all was to
meet quite alone, still it was better than feeling I was losing your
love and desire."
"But you would not have done," I said vehemently; "nothing could make
any difference to my love for you."
"Not to your love, perhaps, but our passions are not in our own
control. They rise under certain influences, sink and decline under
others, and we can do nothing. We must look these things in the face.
See now, if I were suddenly turned to an old, old woman, withered
before your eyes, would you feel as you feel now?"
"No," I answered slowly, "I admit old age...."
"Or hopelessly disfigured--my face rendered hideous by burns or
loathsome with disease? You could not desire me then, I should not
expect it. Love is unchangeable, but passion is a flame that shivers
in every transient breeze. We can't help it. It _is_ so. As I look at
you now I love you for your strength and grace, above all for your
beautiful form. If you hobbled into the room, bent and lame, I should
love you still but not as I do now, quite, quite otherwise. And I was
disfigured, temporarily, I know, but it went on for months and months.
I was no longer your gay, glad spirit with the radiant wings. I was
broken, distorted, hideous."
"Don't tell me," I muttered; "I can't bear it." She put one arm round
my neck and her soft lips on my hair.
"It is over," she whispered. "Do not be sorry, do not reproach
yourself. It was so much better for you not to know, not to see it. It
would all have preyed upon you so from day to day. _I_ felt the long
waiting. It seemed the time would never pass, and each day and night I
felt so glad to know you were not there, to suffer with me, but away,
quite out of reach of it all."
"But suppose you had died ... without me."
"The chances were against that. And if I had, it would have still been
better that you should be away ... for you. I would have come to you
after death, really a spirit then, and lived ever after in your soul."
I put my arms round her, living, warm, beautiful, in the flesh.
"What a lonely, terrible year for you!" I said. "It never occurred to
me ... I never dreamed ... and I can't understand now...."
"You remember the night I came back from Lawton's place to you? ...
You were mad with jealous rage, and I am so little accustomed to
resist you.... Well, it was my punishment for even thinking I could
leave you.... At least, I have always accepted it as such."
"I can never, never forgive myself."
"I knew you would take it like that, and now you see I can make you
soon forget it. If you had felt like this for weeks and months it
would almost have killed you."
She played with my hair and her lips touched my eyebrows.
"Yes," she answered, looking back at me sadly and closely. "Are you
sorry?"
"No, I am not sorry," I answered savagely.
"I thought you would not be."
"Are you?"
She sighed.
"I hardly know. It was so like you, Trevor, such a very, very
beautiful boy, exactly like you in miniature. I loved it, of course; I
could not help it, but it is better as it is, better that it should
die. We could not foresee how it would grow up, and so many men, the
majority, are such monsters, such cruel fiends, it is really a crime
to bring one into the world."
I was silent, thinking over that wonderful devotion and courage she
had shewn me. Of all the solutions to the problem of her flight from
me, this had never presented itself to my mind. We are taught both by
tradition and experience how most women cling to their lover at such a
time. Though indifferent, even faithless to him in their beauty and
health, they come to him then for protection, for assistance. For
their name's sake, to save their conventional honour, they will even
accept marriage with one they no longer love, or force themselves on
one they know has no longer love for them.
But how different this one, as always, had been! To preserve inviolate
the spirit of our love, she had gone forward to meet what must to a
sensitive nature like hers have been a time of horror and terror,
absolutely alone, unsupported except by the thought that I was away,
free, unable to share her misery!
With gifts in both hands she had come to me and laid them all in mine.
Then, when I had broken my trust and brought distress upon her, when
she was in need and I could have been the one to give, she had fled
away from love, from consolation, from any return or reparation.
Proud, courageous, independent, untamable, as she had always been, she
was in comparison with other women as a lioness is to a gazelle.
I folded my arms round her tighter at these thoughts, for the lioness
was mine and I owned her.
Perhaps, after all, it was worth while to suffer that agony of
self-reproach I had just now, and was suffering still, to see put in
such shining light before me her courage and her worth.
This was a white night, surely, as the others had been coloured, for
as white is the blending of all the colours into one, so in this night
all the emotions of those previous nights were blended. Passion,
jealousy, triumph, and an agony like death had all swept over me in
these few short hours, and now from them all, blent together and
burning as metals in a smelter, rose up the extreme white vivid flame
of love for her like the white silken tongue of fire, the last degree
of fiercest heat that the smelter can produce.
I bent over her, looking down into her eyes, deep down into those
living depths where I seemed to see the rays of an eternal heaven,
clasping the smooth breast to me, closely, that its passionate
heart-beats might answer my own, and in our veins burnt that intense
white flame that melts into itself the glory of the immortal Spirit,
the wonder of the hereafter, and all the joys of the world.