Langbourne could not have told just why he had withdrawn his acceptance
of Miss Bingham's invitation. If at the moment it was the effect of a
quite reasonless panic, he decided later that it was because he wished
to think. It could not be said, however, that he did think, unless
thinking consists of a series of dramatic representations which the mind
makes to itself from a given impulse, and which it is quite powerless to
end. All the afternoon, which Langbourne spent in his room, his mind was
the theatre of scenes with Miss Simpson, in which he perpetually evolved
the motives governing him from the beginning, and triumphed out of his
difficulties and embarrassments. Her voice, as it acquiesced in all, no
longer related itself to that imaginary personality which had inhabited
his fancy. That was gone irrevocably; and the voice belonged to the
likeness of Barbara, and no other; from her similitude, little, quaint,
with her hair of cloudy red and her large, dim-sighted eyes, it played
upon the spiritual sense within him with the coaxing, drolling, mocking
charm which he had felt from the first. It blessed him with intelligent
and joyous forgiveness. But as he stood at her gate that evening this
unmerited felicity fell from him. He now really heard her voice, through
the open doorway, but perhaps because it was mixed with other
voices--the treble of Miss Bingham, and the bass of a man who must be
the Mr. Dickery he had seen at the saw mills--he turned and hurried back
to his hotel, where he wrote a short letter saying that he had decided
to take the express for New York that night. With an instinctive
recognition of her authority in the affair, or with a cowardly shrinking
from direct dealing with Barbara, he wrote to Juliet Bingham, and he
addressed to her the packet of letters which he sent for Barbara.
Superficially, he had done what he had no choice but to do. He had been
asked to return her letters, and he had returned them, and brought the
affair to an end.
In his long ride to the city he assured himself in vain that he was
doing right if he was not sure of his feelings towards the girl. It was
quite because he was not sure of his feeling that he could not be sure
he was not acting falsely and cruelly.
The fear grew upon him through the summer, which he spent in the heat
and stress of the town. In his work he could forget a little the despair
in which he lived; but in a double consciousness like that of the
hypochondriac, the girl whom it seemed to him he had deserted was
visibly and audibly present with him. Her voice was always in his inner
ear, and it visualized her looks and movements to his inner eye.
Now he saw and understood at last that what his heart had more than once
misgiven him might be the truth, and that though she had sent back his
letters, and asked her own in return, it was not necessarily her wish
that he should obey her request. It might very well have been an
experiment of his feeling towards her, a mute quest of the impression
she had made upon him, a test of his will and purpose, an overture to a
clearer and truer understanding between them. This misgiving became a
conviction from which he could not escape.
He believed too late that he had made a mistake, that he had thrown away
the supreme chance of his life. But was it too late? When he could bear
it no longer, he began to deny that it was too late. He denied it even
to the pathetic presence which haunted him, and in which the magic of
her voice itself was merged at last, so that he saw her more than he
heard her. He overbore her weak will with his stronger will, and set
himself strenuously to protest to her real presence what he now always
said to her phantom. When his partner came back from his vacation,
Langbourne told him that he was going to take a day or two off.