The day had come when Gordon was well enough to go home. As he sat
giving directions to Ezra, who was awkwardly packing his valise, he
looked over the books, papers, and letters that lay on the table near
the bed.
"There is one letter missing," he said, with a troubled expression, as
he finished his search. Then he added quickly, in a tone of helpless
entreaty--
"You couldn't have taken it to the station and mailed it with the
others, could you, Ezra? It was not to go to the station. It was to
have gone to the convent."
The last sentence he uttered rather to his own thought than for the ear
of his listener.
"I _took_ it to the convent," said Ezra, stoutly raising himself from
over the valise in the middle of the floor. "I didn't _take_ it to the
station!"
Gordon wheeled on him, giving a wrench to his wound which may have
caused the groan that burst from him, and left him white and trembling.
"You took it _to the convent_! Great God, Ezra! When?"
"The day you _told_ me to take it," replied Ezra simply. "The day the
Sister came to see you."
"O _Ezra_!" he cried piteously, looking into the rugged, faithful
countenance of the old man, and feeling that he had not the right to
censure him.
Now for the first time he comprehended the whole significance of what
had happened. He had never certainly known what motive had brought her
to him that day. He had never been able to understand why, having come,
she had gone away with such abruptness. Scarcely had he begun to speak
to her when she had strangely shrunk from him; and scarcely had he
ceased speaking when she had left the room without a word, and without
his having so much as seen her face.
Slowly now the sad truth forced itself upon his mind that she had come
in answer to his entreaty. She must have thought his letter just
written, himself just wounded and dying. It was as if he had betrayed
her into the utmost expression of her love for him and in that moment
had coldly admonished her of her duty. For him she had broken what was
the most sacred obligation of her life, and in return he had given her
an exhortation to be faithful to her vows.
He went home to one of the older secluded country-places of the
Blue-grass Region not far from Lexington. His illness served to account
for a strange gravity and sadness of nature in him. When the winter had
passed and spring had come, bringing perfect health again, this sadness
only deepened. For health had brought back the ardour of life. The
glowing colours of the world returned; and with these there flowed back
into his heart, as waters flow back into a well that has gone dry, the
perfect love of youth and strength with which he had loved her and tried
to win her at first. And with this love of her came back the first
complete realisation that he had lost her; and with this pain, that
keenest pain of having been most unkind to her when he had striven to be
kindest.
He now looked back upon his illness, as one who has gained some clear
headland looks down upon a valley so dark and overhung with mist that he
cannot trace his own course across it. He was no longer in sympathy with
that mood of self-renunciation which had influenced him in their last
interview. He charged himself with having given up too easily; for might
he not, after all, have won her? Might he not, little by little, have
changed her conscience, as little by little he had gained her love?
Would it have been possible, he asked himself again and again, for her
ever to have come to him as she had done that day, had not her
conscience approved? Of all his torturing thoughts, none cost him
greater suffering than living over in imagination what must have
happened to her since then--the humiliation, perhaps public exposure;
followed by penalties and sorrows of which he durst not think, and
certainly a life more unrelieved in gloom and desolation.
In the summer his father's health began to fail and in the autumn he
died. The winter was passed in settling the business of the estate, and
before the spring passed again Gordon found himself at the head of
affairs, and stretching out before him, calm and clear, the complete
independence of his new-found manhood. His life was his own to make it
what he would. As fortunes go in Kentucky he was wealthy, his farm being
among the most beautiful of the beautiful ones which make up that land,
and his homestead being dear through family ties and those intimations
of fireside peace which lay closest the heart of his ideal life. But
amid all his happiness, that one lack which made the rest appear
lacking--that vacancy within which nothing would fill! The beauty of the
rich land henceforth brought him the dream-like recollection of a rough,
poor country a hundred miles away. Its quiet homesteads, with the
impression they create of sweet and simple lives, reminded him only of a
convent standing lonely and forbidding on its wide landscape. The calm
liberty of woods and fields, the bounding liberty of life, the
enlightened liberty of conscience and religion, which were to him the
best gifts of his State, his country, and his time, forced on him
perpetual contrast with the ancient confinement in which she languished.
Still he threw himself resolutely into his duties. In all that he did or
planned he felt a certain sacred, uplifting force added to his life by
that high bond through which he had sought to link their sundered
pathways. But, on the other hand, the haunting thought of what might
have befallen her since became a corrosive care, and began to eat out
the heart of his resolute purposes.
So that when the long, calm summer had passed and autumn had come,
bringing him lonelier days in the brown fields, lonelier rides on
horseback through the gorgeous woods, and lonelier evenings beside his
rekindled hearth-stones, he could bear the suspense no longer, and made
up his mind to go back, if but to hear tidings whether she yet were
living in the convent. He realised, of course, that under no
circumstances could he ever again speak to her of his love. He had put
himself on the side of her conscience against his own cause; but he felt
that he owed it to himself to dissipate uncertainty regarding her fate.
This done, he could return, however sadly, and take up the duties of his
life with better heart.