He went home and, without lighting his candle, flung
himself on his bed. But he got no sleep till
morning; he lay hour after hour tossing, thinking,
wondering; his mind had never been so active.
It seemed to him his friend had laid on him in those
last moments a heavy charge and had expressed herself
almost as handsomely as if she had listened complacently
to an assurance of his love. It was neither easy
nor delightful thoroughly to understand her; but little
by little her perfect meaning sank into his mind and
soothed it with a sense of opportunity which somehow
stifled his sense of loss. For, to begin with,
she meant that she could love him in no degree or contingency,
in no imaginable future. This was absolute—he
knew he could no more alter it than he could pull
down one of the constellations he lay gazing at through
his open window. He wondered to what it was, in
the background of her life, she had so dedicated herself.
A conception of duty unquenchable to the end?
A love that no outrage could stifle? “Great
heaven!” he groaned; “is the world so rich
in the purest pearls of passion that such tenderness
as that can be wasted for ever—poured away
without a sigh into bottomless darkness?” Had
she, in spite of the detestable present, some precious
memory that still kept the door of possibility open?
Was she prepared to submit to everything and yet to
believe? Was it strength, was it weakness, was
it a vulgar fear, was it conviction, conscience, constancy?
Longmore sank back with a sigh and an oppressive feeling
that it was vain to guess at such a woman’s
motives. He only felt that those of this one
were buried deep in her soul and that they must be
of the noblest, must contain nothing base. He
had his hard impression that endless constancy was
all her law—a constancy that still found
a foothold among crumbling ruins. “She
has loved once,” he said to himself as he rose
and wandered to his window; “and that’s
for ever. Yes, yes—if she loved again
she’d be common!” He stood for a long
time looking out into the starlit silence of the town
and forest and thinking of what life would have been
if his constancy had met her own in earlier days.
But life was this now, and he must live. It was
living, really, to stand there with such a faith even
in one’s self still flung over one by such hands.
He was not to disappoint her, he was to justify a
conception it had beguiled her weariness to form.
His imagination embraced it; he threw back his head
and seemed to be looking for his friend’s conception
among the blinking mocking stars. But it came
to him rather on the mild night-wind wandering in
over the house-tops which covered the rest of so many
heavy human hearts. What she asked he seemed to
feel her ask not for her own sake—she feared
nothing, she needed nothing—but for that
of his own happiness and his own character. He
must assent to destiny. Why else was he young
Copyrights
Madame De Mauves from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
