THE LOVER
They left her alone with Peter in the drawing room in the interval
before the coffee, seeing that he had barely spoken to her though his
eyes had not left her face since the moment of her spectacular
appearance between the portières.
"I'm not going to marry you, Peter," Beulah whispered, as she slipped
by him to the door, "don't think of me. Think of her."
But Peter was almost past coherent thought or speech as they stood
facing each other on the hearth-rug,--Eleanor's little head up and her
breath coming lightly between her sweet, parted lips.
"Where did you go?" Peter groaned. "How could you, dear--how could
you,--how could you?"
"I'm back all safe, now, Uncle Peter. I took up nursing in a
hospital."
"I didn't even find you. I swore that I would. I've searched for you
everywhere."
"I'm sorry I made you all that trouble," Eleanor said, "but I thought
it would be the best thing to do."
"Tell me why," Peter said, "tell me why, I've suffered so
much--wondering--wondering."
"You've suffered?" Eleanor cried. "I thought it was only I who did the
suffering."
She moved a step nearer to him, and Peter gripped her hard by the
shoulders.
"It wasn't that you cared?" he said. Then his lips met hers dumbly,
beseechingly.
* * * * *
"It was all a mistake,--my going away," she wrote some days after. "I
ought to have stayed at the school, and graduated, and then come down
to New York, and faced things. I have my lesson now about facing
things. If any other crisis comes into my life, I hope I shall be as
strong as Dante was, when he 'showed himself more furnished with
breath than he was,' and said, 'Go on, for I am strong and resolute.'
I think we always have more strength than we understand ourselves to
have.
"I am so wonderfully happy about Uncle David and Aunt Margaret, and I
know Uncle Jimmie needs Aunt Gertrude and has always needed her. Did
my going away help those things to their fruition? I hope so.
"I can not bear to think of Aunt Beulah, but I know that I must bear
to think of her, and face the pain of having hurt her as I must face
every other thing that comes into my life from this hour. I would give
her back Peter, if I could,--but I can not. He is mine, and I am his,
and we have been that way from the beginning. I have thought of him
always as stronger and wiser than any one in the world, but I don't
think he is. He has suffered and stumbled along, trying blindly to do
right, hurting Aunt Beulah and mixing up his life like any man, just
the way Uncle Jimmie and Uncle David did.
"Don't men know who it is they love? They seem so often to be
struggling hungrily after the wrong thing, trying to get, or to make
themselves take, some woman that they do not really want. When women
love it is not like that with them.
"When women love! I think I have loved Peter from the first minute I
saw him, so beautiful and dear and sweet, with that _anxious_ look in
his eyes,--that look of consideration for the other person that is
always so much a part of him. He had it the first night I saw him,
when Uncle David brought me to show me to my foster parents for the
first time. It was the thing I grew up by, and measured men and their
attitude to women by--just that look in his eyes, that tender warm
look of consideration.
"It means a good many things, I think,--a gentle generous nature, and
a tender chivalrous heart. It means selflessness. It means being a
good man, and one who _protects_ by sheer unselfish instinct. I don't
know how I shall ever heal him of the hurt he has done Aunt Beulah.
Aunt Margaret tells me that Aunt Beulah's experience with him has been
the thing that has made her whole, that she needed to live through the
human cycle of emotion--of love and possession and renunciation before
she could be quite real and sound. This may be true, but it is not the
kind of reasoning for Peter and me to comfort ourselves with. If a
surgeon makes a mistake in cutting that afterwards does more good than
harm, he must not let that result absolve him from his mistake.
Nothing can efface the mistake itself, and Peter and I must go on
feeling that way about it.
"I want to write something down about my love before I close this book
to-night. Something that I can turn to some day and read, or show to
my children when love comes to them. 'This is the way I felt,' I want
to say to them, 'the first week of my love--this is what it meant to
me.'
"It means being a greater, graver, and more beautiful person than you
ever thought you could be. It means knowing what you are, and what you
were meant to be all at once, and I think it means your chance to be
purified for the life you are to live, and the things you are to do in
it. Experience teaches, but I think love forecasts and points the way,
and shows you what you can be. Even if the light it sheds should grow
dim after a while, the path it has shown you should be clear to your
inner eye forever and ever. Having been in a great temple is a thing
to be better for all your life.
"It means that the soul and the things of the soul are
everlasting,--that they have got to be everlasting if love is like
this. Love between two people is more than the simple fact of their
being drawn together and standing hand in hand. It is the holy truth
about the universe. It is the rainbow of God's promise set over the
land. There comes with it the soul's certainty of living on and on
through time and space.
"Just my loving Peter and Peter's loving me isn't the important
thing,--the important thing is the way it has started the truth going;
my knowing and understanding mysterious laws that were sealed to me
before; Peter taking my life in his hands and making it consecrated
and true,--so true that I will not falter or suffer from any
misunderstandings or mistaken pain.
"It means warmth and light and tenderness, our love does, and all the
poetry in the world, and all the motherliness, (I feel so much like
his mother). Peter is my lover. When I say that he is not stronger or
wiser than any one in the world I mean--in living. I mean in the way
he behaves like a little bewildered boy sometimes. In loving he is
stronger and wiser than any living being. He takes my two hands in his
and gives me all the strength and all the wisdom and virtue there is
in the world.
"I haven't written down anything, after all, that any one could read.
My children can't look over my shoulder on to this page, for they
would not understand it. It means nothing to any one in the world but
me. I shall have to translate for them or I shall have to say to them,
'Children, on looking into this book, I find I can't tell you what
love meant to me, because the words I have put down would mean nothing
to you. They were only meant to inform me, whenever I should turn back
to them, of the great glory and holiness that fell upon me like a
garment when love came.'
"And if there should be any doubt in my heart as to the reality of the
feeling that has come to them in their turn, I should only have to
turn their faces up to the light, and look into their eyes and
_know_.
"I shall not die as my own mother did. I know that. I know that Peter
will be by my side until we both are old. These facts are established
in my consciousness I hardly know how, and I know that they are
there,--but if such a thing could be that I should die and leave my
little children, I would not be afraid to leave them alone in a world
that has been so good to me, under the protection of a Power that
provided me with the best and kindest guardians that a little orphan
ever had. God bless and keep them all, and make them happy."
THE END