LOVE'S SACRAMENT
A full week had elapsed since the night of that eventful journey in
pursuit of Molly, and from the moment when Garth had given Sara into the
safe keeping of Jane Crab till the moment when he came upon her by the
pergola at Rose Cottage, perched on the top of a ladder, engaged in
tying back the exuberance of a Crimson Rambler, they had not met.
And now, as he halted at the foot of the ladder, Sara was conscious that
her spirits had suddenly bounded up to impossible heights at the sight
of the lean, dark face upturned to her.
“The Lavender Lady and Miles are pottering about in the greenhouse,” she
announced explanatorily, waving her hand in the direction of a
distant glimmer of glass beyond the high box hedge which flanked the
rose-garden.
“Are they?” Trent, thus arrested in the progress of his search for his
host and hostess, seemed entirely indifferent as to whether it were ever
completed or not. He leaned against one of the rose-wreathed pillars of
the pergola and gazed negligently in the direction Sara indicated.
“How is Miss Molly?” he asked.
Sara twinkled.
“She is just beginning to discard sackcloth and ashes for something more
becoming,” she informed him gravely.
“That's good. Are you--are you all right after your tumble? I'm making
these kind inquiries because, since it was my car out of which you
elected to fall, I feel a sense of responsibility.”
Sara descended from the ladder before she replied. Then she remarked
composedly--
“It has taken precisely seven days, apparently, for that sense of
responsibility to develop.”
“On the contrary, for seven days my thirst for knowledge has been only
restrained by the pointings of conscience.”
“Then”--she spoke rather low--“was it conscience pointing you--away from
Sunnyside?”
His hazel eyes flashed over her face.
“Perhaps it was--discretion,” he suggested. “Looking in at shop
windows when one has an empty purse is a poor occupation--and one to be
avoided.”
“Did you want to come?” she persisted gently.
Half absently he had cut off a piece of dead wood from the rose-bush
next him and was twisting it idly to and fro between his fingers. At her
words, the dead wood stem snapped suddenly in his clenched hand. For
an instant he seemed about to make some passionate rejoinder. Then he
slowly unclenched his hand and the broken twig fell to the ground.
“Haven't I made it clear to you--yet,” he said slowly, “that what I want
doesn't enter into the scheme of things at all?”
The brief speech held a sense of impending finality, and, in the silence
which followed, the eyes of the man and woman met, questioned each other
desperately, and answered.
There are moments when modesty is a false quantity, and when the big
happinesses of life depend on a woman's capacity to realize this and her
courage to act upon it. To Sara, it seemed that such a moment had come
to her, and the absolute sincerity of her nature met it unafraid.
“No,” she said quietly. “You have only made clear to me--what you want,
Garth. Need we--pretend to each other any longer?”
“I don't understand,” he muttered.
“Don't you?” She drew a littler nearer him, and the face she lifted to
his was very white. But her eyes were shining. “That night--when I fell
from the car--I--I wasn't unconscious.”
For an instant he stared at her, incredulous. Then he swung aside a
little, his hand gripping the pillar against which he had been leaning
till his knuckles showed white beneath the straining skin.
“You--weren't unconscious?” he repeated blankly.
“No--not all the time. I--heard--what you said.”
He seemed to pull himself together.
“Oh, Heaven only knows what I may have said at a moment like that,” he
answered carelessly, but his voice was rough and hoarse. “A man talks
wild when the woman he's with only misses death by a hair's breath.”
Sara's lips upturned at the corners in a slow smile--a smile that was
neither mocking, nor tender, nor chiding, but an exquisite blending
of all three. She caught her breath quickly--Trent could hear its soft
sibilance. Then she spoke.
“Will you marry me, please, Garth?”
He drew back from her, violently, his underlip hard bitten. At last,
after a long silence--
“No!” he burst out harshly. “No! I can't!”
For an instant she was shaken. Then, buoyed up by the memory of that
night when she had lain in his arms and when the agony of the moment had
stripped him of all power to hide his love, she challenged his denial.
“Why not?” Her voice was vibrant. “You love me!”
“Yes . . . I love you.” The words seemed torn from him.
“Then why won't you marry me?”
It did not seem to her that she was doing anything unusual or unwomanly.
The man she loved had carried his burden single-handed long enough. The
time had come when for his own sake as well as for hers, she must wring
the truth from him, make him break through the silence which had long
been torturing them both. Whatever might be the outcome, whether pain or
happiness, they must share it.
“Why won't you marry me, Garth?”
The little question, almost voiceless in its intensity, clamoured loudly
at his heart.
“Don't tempt me!” he cried out hoarsely. “My God! I wonder if you know
how you are tempting me?”
She came a little closer to him, laying her hand on his arm, while her
great, sombre eyes silently entreated him.
As though the touch of her were more than he could bear, his hard-held
passion crashed suddenly through the bars his will had set about it.
He caught her in his arms, lifting her sheer off her feet against his
breast, whilst his lips crushed down upon her mouth and throat, burned
against her white, closed lids, and the hard clasp of his arms about
her was a physical pain--an exquisite agony that it was a fierce joy to
suffer.
“Then--then you do love me?” She leaned against him, breathless, her
voice unsteady, her whole slender body shaken with an answering passion.
“Love you?” The grip of his arms about her made response. “Love you?
I love you with my soul and my body, here and through whatever comes
Hereafter. You are my earth and heaven--the whole meaning of things--”
He broke off abruptly, and she felt his arms slacken their hold and
slowly unclasp as though impelled to it by some invisible force.
“What was I saying?” The heat of passion had gone out of his voice,
leaving it suddenly flat and toneless. “'The whole meaning of things?'”
He gave a curious little laugh. It had a strangled sound, almost like
the cry of some tortured thing. “Then things _have_ no meaning----”
Sara stood staring at him, bewildered and a little frightened.
“Garth, what is it?” she whispered. “What has happened?”
He turned, and, walking away from her a few paces, stood very still with
his head bent and one hand covering his eyes.
Overhead, the sunshine, filtering in through the green trellis of leafy
twigs, flaunted gay little dancing patches of gold on the path below,
as the leaves moved flickeringly in the breeze, and where the twisted
growth of a branch had left a leafless aperture, it flung a single shaft
of quivering light athwart the pergola. It gleamed like a shining sword
between the man and woman, as though dividing them one from the other
and thrusting each into the shadows that lay on either hand.
“Garth----”
At the sound of her voice he dropped his hand to his side and came
slowly back and stood beside her. His face was almost grey, and the
tortured expression of his eyes seemed to hurt her like the stab of a
knife.
“You must try to forgive me,” he said, speaking very low and rapidly. “I
had no earthly right to tell you that I cared, because--because I can't
ask you to marry me. I told you once that I had forfeited my claim to
the good things in life. That was true. And, having that knowledge, I
ought to have kept away from you--for I knew how it was going to be
with me from the first moment I saw you. I fought against it in the
beginning--tried not to love you. Afterwards, I gave in, but I never
dreamed that--you--would come to care, too. That seemed something quite
beyond the bounds of human possibility.”
“Did it? I can't see why it should?”
“Can't you?” He smiled a little. “If you were a man who has lived under
a cloud for over twenty years, who has nothing in the world to recommend
him, and only a tarnished reputation as his life-work, you, too, would
have thought it inconceivable. Anyway, I did, and, thinking that, I
dared to give myself the pleasure of seeing you--of being sometimes in
your company. Perhaps”--grimly--“it was as much a torture as a joy on
occasion. . . . But still, I was near you. . . . I could see you--touch
your hand--serve you, perhaps, in any little way that offered. That was
all something--something very wonderful to come into a life that, to
all intents and purposes, was over. And I thought I could keep myself in
hand--never let you know that I cared--”
“You certainly tried hard enough to convince me that you didn't,” she
interrupted ruefully.
“Yes, I tried. And I failed. And now, all that remains is for me to go
away. I shall never forgive myself for having brought pain into your
life--I, who would so gladly have brought only happiness. . . . God
in Heaven!”--he whispered to himself as though the thought were almost
blinding in the promise of ecstasy it held--“To have been the one to
bring you happiness! . . .” He fell silent, his mouth wrung and twisted
with pain.
Presently her voice came to him again, softly supplicating. “I shall
never forgive you--if you go away and leave me,” she added. “I can't do
without you now--now that I know you care.”
“But I _must_ go! I can't marry you--you haven't understood--”
“Haven't I?” She smiled--a small, wise, wonderful smile that began
somewhere deep in her heart and touched her lips and lingered in her
eyes.
“Tell me,” she said. “Are you married, Garth?”
He started.
“Married! God forbid!”
“And if you married me, would you be wronging any one?”
“Only you yourself,” he answered grimly.
“Then nothing else matters. You are free--and I'm free. And I love you!”
She leaned towards him, her hands outheld, her mouth still touched with
that little, mystic smile. “Please--tell me all over again now much you
love me.”
But no answering hands met hers. Instead, he drew away from her and
faced her, stern-lipped.
“I must make you understand,” he said. “You don't know what it is that
you are asking. I've made shipwreck of my life, and I must pay the
penalty. But, by God, I'm not going to let you pay it, too! And if you
married me, you would have to pay. You would be joining your life to
that of an outcast. I can never go out into the world as other men
may. If I did”--slowly--“if I did, sooner or later I should be driven
away--thrust back into my solitude. I have nothing to offer--nothing
to give--only a life that has been cursed from the outset. Don't
misunderstand me,” he went on quickly. “I'm not complaining, bidding
for your sympathy. If a man's a fool, he must be prepared to pay for his
folly--even though it means a life penalty for a moment's madness. And
I shall have to pay--to the uttermost farthing. Mine's the kind of debt
which destiny never remits.” He paused; then added defiantly: “The woman
who married me would have to share in that payment--to go out with me
into the desert in which I lie, and she would have to do this without
knowing what she was paying for, or why the door of the world is locked
against me. My lips are sealed, nor shall I ever be able to break the
seal. _Now_ do you understand why I can never ask you, or any other
woman to be my wife?”
Sara looked at him curiously; he could not read the expression of her
face.
“Have you finished?” she asked. “Is that all?”
“All? Isn't it enough?”--with a grim laugh.
“And you are letting this--this folly of your youth stand between us?”
“The world applies a harder word than folly to it!”
“I don't care anything at all about the world. What do _you_ call it?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I call it folly to ask the criminal in the dock whether he approves the
judge's verdict. He's hardly likely to!”
For a moment she was silent. Then she seemed to gather herself together.
“Garth, do you love me?”
The words fell clearly on the still, summer air.
“Yes”--doggedly--“I love you. What then?”
“What then? Why--this! I don't care what you've done. It doesn't matter
to me whether you are an outcast or not. If you are, then I'm willing
to be an outcast with you. Oh, Garth--My Garth! I've been begging you to
marry me all afternoon, and--and----” with a broken little laugh--“you
can't _keep on_ refusing me!”
Before her passionate faith and trust the barriers he had raised between
them came crashing down. His arms went round her, and for a few moments
they clung together and love wiped out all bitter memories of the past
and all the menace of the future.
But presently he came back to his senses. Very gently he put her from
him.
“It's not right,” he stammered unsteadily. “I can't accept this from
you. Dear, you must let me go away. . . . I can't spoil your beautiful
life by joining it to mine!”
She drew his arm about her shoulders again.
“You will spoil it if you go away. Oh! Garth, you dear, foolish man!
When will you understand that love is the only thing that matters?
If you had committed all the sins in the Decalogue, I shouldn't care!
You're mine now”--jealously--“my lover. And I'm not going to be thrust
out of your life for some stupid scruple. Let the past take care of
itself. The present is ours. And--and I love you, Garth!”
It was difficult to reason coolly with her arms about him, her lips so
near his own, and his great love for her pulling at his heart. But he
made one further effort.
“If you should ever regret it, Sara?” he whispered. “I don't think I
could bear that.”
She looked at him with steady eyes.
“You will not have it to bear,” she said. “I shall never regret it.”
Still he hesitated. But the dawn of a great hope grew and deepened in
his face.
“If you could be content to live here--at Far End . . . It is just
possible!” He spoke reflectively, as though debating the matter with
himself. “The curse has not followed me to this quiet little corner of
the earth. Perhaps--after all . . . Sara, could you stand such a life?
Or would you always be longing to get out into the great world? As I've
told you, the world is shut to me. There's that in my past which blocks
the way to any future. Have you the faith--the _courage_--to face that?”
Her eyes, steadfast and serene, met his.
“I have courage to face anything--with you, Garth. But I haven't courage
to face living without you.”
He bent his head and kissed her on the mouth--a slow, lingering kiss
that held something far deeper and more enduring than mere passion. And
Sara, as she kissed him back, her soul upon her lips, felt as though
together they had partaken of love's holy sacrament.
“Beloved”--Garth's voice, unspeakably tender, came to her through the
exquisite silence of the moment--“Beloved, it shall be as you wish.
Whether I am right or wrong in taking this great gift you offer me--God
knows! If I am wrong--then, please Heaven, whatever punishment there be
may fall on me alone.”