We had dinner on the terrace of the Tamerlane Inn, overlooking the
Sound.
"But, Hilda," I was arguing, toward coffee, "we might have gone on
caring forever--if we hadn't been separated. Propinquity feeds love;
absence starves it."
"Love? Indeed it doesn't. Fancy? Yes."
She looked straight in my eyes.
"Hilda," I said, "you--you don't still--that way--about me?"
"Don't I?" she said slowly. "Why else would I lie awake to hear Mr.
Fulton go swimming? Why else would I be wanting to go with the Red
Cross to the front where the bullets are?"
"But you told me in Aiken that you--that you despised me."
"It would be a poor love," she said, "that couldn't live down a little
contempt that had jealousy for its father and mother."
We continued to look at each other while the waiter brought and served
the coffee. Then I said: "Hilda, I know one thing. What you've got to
give ought not to go begging."
Her eyes part-way filled, but she gave her shoulders a valiant little
shrug. Then, with a sudden strong emotion, and a thrill in her voice:
"That's for you to say," she said.
"Do you mean that?"
"You had only to ask," she said; "ever."
I was deeply moved, and a conviction that for me there might still be
something true and fine raced into my mind. And was followed by a
whole host of gentle and unselfish and pitying thoughts, as to a tree
at evening flocks of starlings come to roost.
"Hilda," I said, "if there is no power of loving in me, but only of
fancying, still you have said that fancy feeds on propinquity. I have
no right to say that I love you; no right to promise that I ever will.
It's not your sweet pretty face that's moving me now. It's your power
of loving--your power of loving me--your constancy--your trust--your
courage in saying that these things shall not go begging--if I say they
shall not. What I thought another had, what I thought I had, only you
have. I dare not make promises. I dare not boast. But caring the way
you care, if you think you can make anything out of me--say so."
She thought for a while, her eyes lowered, her lips parted in a
peaceful sort of smile. Then she said; "It'll be good to have heard
all that."
"It'll be better to have tried," I said.
"Not if you don't want me _at all_."
"But I do."
"Well," she said, looking up now, and a valiant ring in her sweet
English voice: "If I wanted to say no, I couldn't. If I thought I
ought to say no, I wouldn't. But I don't think I ought to. I think
when the Lord God put what's in my heart in it, he meant for there to
be _something_ for me at the end of torment. So I say yes. For I've
knelt on cold floors and hot floors to pray God that some day I could
give myself to the man I love."
"And that shall be when you are married to him. . . . Don't look so
frightened . . . it's got to be like that. Give a man a chance to make
good. Do you think I'm such a fool as to throw away the love you've
got for me? . . . We'll try this nursing game together, but not at the
front, where the bullets are. I want us to live and to have our
chance, you yours and I mine--taken together. Don't you see that I am
speaking with every ounce of sincerity there is in me? I _couldn't_
take such love as yours and not make good. That's in my heart. I
couldn't, I couldn't. Isn't it in my face, too--isn't it?"
She did not answer at first, only looked in my face, her eyes flooding.