Adam found a note beside his plate in the morning. "I will be back
before five o'clock," it said; "I must think." He did not sit down to
the table she had spread for him, but called the dogs; Prince was
missing, and this was a relief to him. Nothing could happen to her
when Prince was with her. His first impulse was to follow her, but he
repelled it, and he too sat down to think. Lassie whined uneasily, and
he stroked her head absent-mindedly, and finally went out and tried to
work. The hours dragged away, and by four o'clock he could stand it no
longer. He went to the gateway. As he unfastened it, he saw her coming
toward him, but she stopped and he joined her, and together they
turned back to the boulder. He noticed that she was very white, and
that her eyes looked as if she had not slept, but he only said, "Have
you thought?"
"Yes," she answered, "I have thought."
"And decided?"
"No," she said wearily; "we must decide together. We are not children,
Adam, nor are we in any way the prototypes of those first parents of
ours. I think sometimes that ever since their day their children have
been walking in a blind circle, eating not the fruit of knowledge, but
of the knowledge of good and evil. And what do we know, you and I,
after all these years? Are you sure what we ought to do? It is as if
God had taken us into a conspiracy to renew the old, or create a new,
scheme of existence. Possibly we are being tried, tested, to prove
whether or not we have learned our lesson. We must be brave enough to
think, not what is our will, but what is our duty. Think of the awful
responsibility, whichever way we choose."
"I can't," said Adam. "I can't think of anything but you."
"Nor I of aught but you," she said, moving away, "when you hold me so.
But we _must_ think."
"I have," answered Adam, gravely. "All my life I have thought. I have
wanted the perfect companionship of the one woman in all the world who
could give it; I have always known she would come. I have wanted a
home; I have wanted to see my sons and daughters grow up about me. I
wanted to be a power for good in this world of which we are a part,
and where we live for some good purpose, if there be any purpose in
life. I have so conducted myself that I can look a good woman in the
face, and offer her my life, for whatever it is worth, without damning
recollections to come between us. My children will have a clean
heritage of blood and name. The family tree was scoffed at in America,
but, thank God, mine was an oak that had weathered many a gale. Not
very great folk, but honest, upright, fearless men and women, true to
their king or their country and their faiths; true to their ideals,
too, when their fellows were content with realities only. Any man who
gives his children such a heritage as that can say with more truth
than Napoleon said to his soldiers, 'Fifty centuries look down upon
you.' I wanted to make the world a little better for my life, and I
wanted my children brought up to feel that their lives belonged first
to their country, to live or die for her."
"I know," said Robin, softly; "I used to think I would drape the flag
over my baby's cradle, and embroider it on his pinning blanket."
"We are probably a pair of sentimental fools," he went on, "but I
believe in sentiment. A man could not say this out loud because
sentiment was supposed to be essentially womanish. How those old
distinctions weary one, with their scientific data to prove that men
surpass women in the senses of feeling and taste, while women have
better sight and hearing, and so on through every conceivable
maundering of the human brain, forever harping on differences and
accentuating them, forever dwelling on sex distinctions and never on a
common humanity."
"It was a dreadfully scientific age," she assented, "a generation
fearfully and wonderfully given over to statistics; and yet how many
dreamers there were!"
"Yes, but in the twentieth century a young man dreamed dreams and saw
visions at his own risk. While he dreamed of the brotherhood of man,
his classmate with the corporation practice distanced him in the
pursuit of position. While he led himself through the valley of the
shadow of temptation, and feared no evil because of the Madonna vision
in his soul, even the Madonnas preferred Lancelot and Tristram to
Galahad. It wasn't an easy world for a man who wanted to keep faith
with himself. It was a pinchbeck world, of pretence and pull,--that
world that lies drowned out there. And yet I believe it was infinitely
better than the lost Atlantis, better than the deluged planet of Noah,
nobler and finer than the best civilization of which we have any
trace. I never despaired of it, and yet as I grew older I wondered if
I was not foolish and mistaken in daring to hope and to dream."
"I know," she said again. "I think I did despair, for it seemed to me
a dreadful, a terrible world. I used to wonder how conscientious men
and women could bring other human beings into it, to be and to suffer
and to faint in the frantic struggle for the unrealities that made us
miserable or happy. Consider how paltry they were. If we built a new
house, we were infinitely more concerned to see that the contractor
used pressed brick than we were to see that the construction of our
own characters was true. When we grew wealthy we moved into houses of
more stories; but how often did we say: 'Build thee more stately
mansions, O my soul'? I had as clean and strong a heritage as you, but
a different one. It is no use to comfort oneself with nice little
aphorisms about the needle's eye, and saws about filthy lucre, and
telling God's estimate of money from the kind of people He gives it
to; I tell you biting poverty is a terrible thing, an unspeakable
thing. It is a misfortune for a child to grow up under a sense of
injustice. I used to have times of revolt against it all, when I hated
with the blind, ferocious hate of a child, and I saw what David never
saw,--the righteous forsaken, and his seed begging, not bread, but a
chance to earn his bread, and begging for it without being able to
make just terms. I saw my home sold under the sheriff's hammer, and my
parents struggle all their lives because of the lack of money, when
they had everything else, nobility, character, truth, and education.
My girlhood was a long series of going-withouts. Finally I married a
man who promised me everything. Ah, well, when has the Apple of Sodom
failed to deceive the eye and undeceive the tongue? At least he did
care for my voice, and through that I learned that all those years I
had carried in my own throat the golden notes to have altered
everything, and I sang a little gladness into my parents' lives before
they ended, thank God."
"How did you come to sing in opera? Do not tell me if the recollection
is unpleasant. I wondered then."
"Because after--after things went wrong, I could not take his money. I
knew how to sing, and I loved it; but even there it was the same story
of suspicion and jealousy, till it seemed to me that hate and fear
ruled the world. I went to so many, many cities, but there was no city
beautiful, and in all the country I found no Arcady. I had money then,
it is true; but the jingle of the guinea doesn't help the artist who
sings, or paints, or writes, or plays, because God has put it into his
soul to do this thing; at least not after the very first, when it
stands as a tangible assurance of success. The cities were 'cities of
dreadful night,' and awful days; there were places that were not
hives, but styes of human beings, fighting for what they called life,
to die, never having lived. Sometimes I went into those jungles of
civilization and sang to them. It was the only thing I could give them
all. It was there I got my lesson. I had been singing 'All Tears,'
when an old woman said in her feeble, trembling voice, 'Ye mun loe us,
young leddy, to come to sic a place an' sing o' Him wha sa loed the
warld that He sent His only begotten Son ta it, for it's only great
loe that casts out fear, and this is a fearsome spot.' Since then I
haven't hated anything, except wanton cruelty, and I know love rules
when it is fearless, but that is very seldom. We were afraid to say, I
love you, to anything more sensitive than a stray kitten, though the
world has hungered and thirsted after the love we have feared to give
even to our own children. And yet just the love a man and woman may
bear each other, unconsciously, is enough to transform the earth. We
have not been cross to each other; I do not believe we have spoken
unkindly to anything this year."