Part 24 (1/2)

There have been times when your impositions, so carelessly thrust upon me, because you were selfish, because you knew I must accept them from you, were almost unbearable. The touch of your thief-trained hands to steal from everything its beauty and self-respect has galled me beyond all endurance. My body has received its last vile grasp from you.”

She stopped, appalled at his expression. She did not know, neither of them knew, that love, the ever-changing impulse of creation within men and women, speaks its desire through bitter scorn and abuse, when softer words are too slow in finding their way.

He was sitting there, white, anguished, cowering under her tongue, his whole life shaken. Her words made him feel that the thing she said was true. He had always feared it, realizing that in a measure it was inevitable, and his great strength was now turned against himself, against his bitter handicap, and he was in that tremendous upheaval that requires a rebuilding of one's faith. His belief in himself was broken.

His belief in his power was gone. Coming after weeks of thought and fear about blindness, Claire's words tore him asunder and made him feel that there was nothing for him but abject misery and dependence upon charity.

Instinctively, his hand went up as if to s.h.i.+eld him from a blow, and he murmured, ”For G.o.d's sake, Claire!”

There was to come a time, later, when experience would have taught him that there is a wild strain in the nature of human hearts which abuses out of a desire to be conquered. He did not yet realize that he had spoken truly when he said that this woman had hidden in her the savage warring s.e.xed tumult of all the struggling ages.

She saw him there, his hand up, and suddenly her emotion changed. It was love, still love crying out for expression, but now she was all compa.s.sion, tenderness, and fear. She read in his face what she had done, and her heart was gray with the pain at her own failure.

Now all love for her was buried, perhaps dead, under his shattered selfhood, slain in the wrecking earthquake that she had brought to pa.s.s with the ardor of her pa.s.sion. She had meant to sting him into taking her in his arms and forcing her to love him, and instead--”Oh, G.o.d!” she whispered, and slipped behind the curtain to throw herself on her bed and weep with heart wrung by self-condemnation and loving pity for the man whom she had clubbed with his own dread weakness. She had shattered into chaos the strong soul of the man she loved, with the only weapon he would have felt, and she realized now that it was her love, her desire to be his, to be his utterly, that had led her to do it.

Lawrence was too hurt to move. His mind repeated again and again the words she had spoken. He kept saying to himself: ”Blindness has made me that, an egotist beggar.” He did not reproach Claire. She had swept him too far from his habitual moorings for that. There was no rebellion against her, none, indeed, against life. Over him rolled wave after wave of self-contempt, distrust, and anguish that shook him with an agony that only the a.s.sured man knows when the one he loves most of all on earth strikes dead his faith in himself. He thought of a mult.i.tude of things that stabbed anew, but not once did he move in the interminable period that pa.s.sed before Philip returned.

When he did come, the Spaniard was amazed at the crouching, white-faced man whom he found before a dying fire. There was something so sad in the blind face that Philip felt no suspicion and no anger. He looked for Claire, but she was not visible. He stirred the fire and set about preparing supper while his mind began digging at the problem which he saw in the att.i.tude of the man there in the chair. Claire did not come out to help. She was too exhausted from the storm that had swept over her. In her bed she could hardly smother the scream that kept rising to her lips. She wanted to spring up and cry aloud to Lawrence for forgiveness. She was scarcely aware of Philip as he moved about.

She could have thrown herself at Lawrence's feet and pleaded with him.

She was discovering that her whole wild outbreak was a strange expression of her physical desire for this man whom she loved, and the discovery made her as self-detesting as she had been violent in her outbreak. It seemed to her that there was nothing, nothing she would not do to make amends to Lawrence for what she had said. She wanted to tell him what it had been that prompted her, but she dared not lest in revulsion at her viciousness he turn on her and kill her.

”G.o.d, G.o.d,” she muttered, ”what have I done!”

Philip was calling her to supper. She steadied her voice, and said humbly: ”I can't come out. I'm not feeling very well. Go on without me, please.”

She heard him speak to Lawrence, and she strained her ears to catch the answering movement toward the table, but there was none. At last Philip spoke again in a voice that was full of anxiety: ”Lawrence, what in G.o.d's name has happened?”

Lawrence was moving now, and she waited with bated breath for his answer. He walked to the table and sat down. His voice was heavy. ”I've found myself out, Philip. That's all. I know what I am.”

There was a moment of silence. Claire covered her mouth with her hand to suppress a cry. She wanted to shout: ”No, no, no, not that, but what I am, my beloved, my adored one.”

”What do you mean?” Philip's voice seemed stern.

”I mean that I am indebted to you and Claire for the truth I needed.”

Behind the curtain Claire turned on her face and burst into sobs.

Philip arose abruptly. ”Lawrence,” he said quietly, ”I do not know what has happened to you this afternoon; I do not know what you mean; but this I do know: I am deeply sorry if anything I have done or said has made you feel that you are an unwelcome guest in my home.”

Lawrence stood up and gathered his scattered senses.

”Philip, I beg your pardon, old man. It isn't that at all. The truth is”--and his voice broke--”I have lied to myself and to the world these many years. Much of it hasn't been my fault, but I must pay the price just the same. I am blind. That has led me to a sort of clamorous egoism which carried me on and on until I came to feel that I was really doing something. At last, I know that I am a narrow human parasite, worthless, utterly worthless. A blind, clinging, grasping, vagrant beast, fed upon the mercy of too kind-hearted humanity. I am sorry. It isn't my fault, but it is so.”

Philip stood for a few minutes in silence. ”You're ill, Lawrence,” he said finally. ”Get back to yourself if you can. Things do not stay at this point in human abas.e.m.e.nt. I know of what I speak. I have been through that myself. I cannot say anything comforting. No one can.”

They went to bed with but a few commonplace remarks, and the cabin became silent. Lawrence lay awake through that night. Claire, unknown to him, spent her vigil in a great readjustment of her life.

CHAPTER XIV.

PHILIP TO THE RESCUE.