As Adam went about his morning's work he was filled with a sense of
gladness, an exaltation of life he had never known before. He
stretched out his arms, as if to let all the glory of the earth meet
the profounder splendor of his soul. As he walked down the garden path
he looked with affection at the flowers they had planted together. But
for the absurdity of it, he could have woven a chaplet of them and
worn it. But the world had reached that height of civilization where
the symbol of the glad and living thing was too emotional; always and
everywhere we preferred the dead thing, the skin of the seal, the
shroud of the silkworm, the straw that was left after the flowers were
gone; and Adam was still civilized.
He accepted his happiness without a question. It was too real, too
keen, too great a revelation for him to stop to analyze it. He knew it
in every pulsation of his heart, in every imagination of his mind, and
with the quickened senses of the lover he perceived that Robin's
feelings differed from his own. For a year he had been lost in
introspection; now they seemed to have changed places, and she grew
silent and almost reserved.
"What is it, dear?" he said. "No, don't try to evade an answer. We
must not stop being frank with each other now."
She did not reply at once, and when she did her voice was so low that
he had to stoop to catch the words. "Do you think you do love me as
fully as you might have loved some one else, younger and happier than
I, better fitted to you? It doesn't seem as if you could; you never
did in the old days, you never even thought of it."
Adam laughed lightly. "I beg of you spare me, for this isn't 'so
sudden' at all." Then seeing that her mood forbade jest, he went on
seriously: "Really, I mean it. It's true I never made you pretty
speeches in the old days, nor stopped to consider whether I might have
done so had things been different; but then I never made pretty
speeches to any one. From the very beginning I have taken you as a
matter of course. It always seemed as if we had known each other from
the very first. You entered into my plans as if you had known them as
you might if we had gone to the same little red schoolhouse. I wish we
had! I'm jealous of the years when I didn't know you."
"But a whole year," she said doubtfully. "Are you sure it isn't just
loneliness and propinquity?"
Adam kissed her fingers one at a time. "You are going to beg my pardon
for that some day," he said. "You are not very vain, my sweetheart;
how could I help loving you?"
"That's just what I am finding fault with," she said with a sudden
twinkle of fun in her eyes. "You have managed to keep from it so long.
But seriously, I am not the kind of a woman I should have fancied you
would care for. I am, at least I was, very weary of life; I knew too
much about it. And I am older than you."
He looked at her critically. "You were, a year ago," he answered; "I
don't know how much, two or three years--"
"Five," she said.
"Well, five; but this last year you have been growing young. The very
fact that you were tired of the old life made it less of a strain for
you to give it up. The tired look is all gone, even from your eyes,
whereas lots of gray has come into my hair. You had learned to live in
yourself and your music. My whole scheme of life was wrapped up in the
social existence of our time. In a way I lost more than you did. I
have learned a good deal this past year. Five years ago, if I had
loved you, there would have been many inequalities between us that do
not exist to-day. Now it seems to me we are as absolutely mated, as
much parts of one whole as the two halves of the brain, or the right
and left ventricles of our hearts. It is no disparagement of you or of
myself to say that no boy could appreciate you. The measure of a man's
manhood is his ability to understand the highest type of womanhood. As
to your being worldly, that's all nonsense." He stroked her hair a few
minutes in silence, and then said, half quizzically, "You might
question me, if I said it, but this is what Balzac said of women like
you: 'A woman who has received a man's education possesses a faculty
which is the most fertile in happiness for herself and her husband;
but that woman is as rare as happiness itself.'"
She looked pleased, but she did not reply, and he went on.
"Do you still doubt me? Well, then, know that I have loved you from
the very beginning, for love, when it comes, is a retroactive law of
our being. If I had loved you less, if you had seemed less a part of
me, I might have realized it sooner."
She shook her head. "I have known that I loved you for a long time,
months," she said.
"Then you ought to have known I loved you," he answered quickly.
"Don't you think it is possible to love with our souls, our
subconsciousness, and realize with our slow brains, after months and
years, what our hearts knew at once? Even love has become more or less
of a mental process. We reason about things instead of feeling them,
and yet when we come to our last analyses we don't _know_ anything; we
simply feel. When the scientist says, 'The amoeba moves out of the
shade into the sunlight because it wants the sunlight,' he bases his
postulate upon what he feels, and believes that the atom feels. This
is all that he knows. We do not seek warmth because we have calculated
its effects upon us, but because we feel cold. Oh, we have starved our
feelings to feed our brains, until the mind believes it is the
immortal part of us, instead of realizing that what we know, we are
merely re-discovering, while what we feel is our apperception of the
infinite. If we had the courage to be true to our feelings, instead of
our thoughts, I believe it would be a better, as it would certainly be
a truer, world."
"Do you really think more people are guided by thought than by
feeling?" she asked with a good deal of surprise.
"Perhaps not in one sense," he answered. "A great many people are
carried along by their impulses, their transitory emotions, which are
not, properly speaking, feelings at all. They make what some one calls
the 'fatal error of mistaking the eddy for the current.' But among
educated people it seems to me that we think too much, especially of
our own thoughts, and feel too little. All this year I have not said
that I loved you; I don't know that I have thought it, but I have felt
and lived it. Sometimes I have not been thoughtful--"
"You have always been too thoughtful," she interrupted.
"No, but when I have been inconsiderate it was because you were
myself, the best self that we overlook sometimes, but return to with
unfailing loyalty. You were not bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh;
that is a very low and material view of what you have been and are to
me, heart of my heart and soul of my soul. I cannot think of a life
apart from you, for you are my life. Marriage is not a matter of a
license and a ceremony and Mendelssohn and gaping crowds and a tour.
We do not need any one to tell us that what God has joined cannot be
sundered by man. All this year has been a long wedding of every
thought and feeling and desire, until I have looked into your eyes to
see my own wish. We have thought and thought, but that way madness
lies. Now I feel that all the world we have lost, lives for us in
every glorious possibility in each other. For I know that you love
me."
"Yes," she said, "I think I have loved you all along, but it never
entered my dreams that you could love me. Even now, when you tell me,
it does not seem as if it could be so, either by the mental process,
or by that of feeling."
He caught her in his arms and kissed her, a kiss so long and tender
that it left her clinging to him, breathless and half awakened.
"Don't think," he said, "feel,--feel my heart and know that every beat
is for you, that every atom of me calls for you, and every drop of
blood obeys, as it would command you. I have tried to reach the ideal
of the love that says, not 'thou must be mine,' but 'I must be thine,'
but I have failed if you can doubt me."
She flung her arms around his neck with sudden passion.
"This is the greatest, the most perfect dream of all," she said; "I
think it must be heaven."
"A new heaven and a new earth," he answered gently.