Part 12 (1/2)
She did not move nor speak, but stood straight and silent, her hands hanging at her sides with the palms loosely open, the very abandonment of pathetic helplessness.
Such a little woman, to withstand a storm of pa.s.sion!
As he wondered at her curiously blended strength and weakness, a sun-shaft blazed through the crimson gla.s.s of the upper window. The reddened light, falling on her up-springing almost coppery locks, seemed to the man's excited fancy a crown, of thorns, crimsoned with blood, and there was, oddly enough, a cross in the window.
The thought of another vicarious sacrifice awed him. Must this be one, too?
”Mistakes, dear, are not crimes. Can you not understand? I have been mistaken, have suffered, have atoned for my error. Is that enough?”
”But,” she said, and her voice seemed to have suddenly grown old and thin, ”you have no right to talk of mistakes. She is your wife.”
”The biretta, that ends all, again! No, not so. It is as insane and inhuman to force two people to remain in wedlock after it has become odious to them, as it would be to force them into that marriage at first. Oh, my tender-hearted little one, can you not see that the bondage is more humiliating, more craven than is the idea of the veriest chattel mortgage? Yet you refuse to let the injured one go free, as you would not refuse the poorest prodigal whose one chance for home and happiness was pa.s.sing from his sight.”
”I cannot answer you when you discuss learnedly on such questions,” she said, with a weary dignity, ”for I have never thought about them. Why should I? It has always seemed to me that a man with more than one wife was a--a--Mormon. It is all so dreadful. Surely, if a marriage is anything, it is a vow before G.o.d.”
”It is you that make the mistake now,” he said, ”for the mere form of marriage is nothing but the outward evidence of a union that has already taken place. The first is the vow before G.o.d--not the latter.
I understand why you think all this; clergymen have so long been called upon to officiate at marriage rites that, with the fatherly a.s.sumption notable in the order all the world over, they have grown to regard themselves as the especial and heaven-appointed guardians of the inst.i.tution. It is all so grotesque when one remembers how ready they are to 'solemnize'--save the mark!--marriage, no matter what the conditions. Have the candidates to be known as right and fitting persons? Is there even the simplest formula of preparatory examination? None! Two wholly unsuited people may rush into marriage--and misery--any day by simply presenting themselves before a sleek-faced person who mumbles drowsily over their clasped hands, and calls it a vow before G.o.d!--as he hurries back to his dinner!”
Still she was silent.
An errand boy trudging by whistled a few bars of the wedding march, doubtless heard that day at some open church door.
”Dear, there is a higher, holier law of the great Power, who made us what we are, than this one of slavish obedience to a tradition. Why must our feet go in the burning ruts?”
”It is not the well-worn ruts that burn, but the by-paths,” she answered, ”and oh! _how_ they burn!”
”Let me lift you in my arms and carry you over them, then, that your feet may not touch. Do not be unjust to yourself. Cannot you see how right, how good it is? It is not as if I came to you from another woman----”
The girl faced around on him almost fiercely.
”No, you could not be so bad as that! To have felt the morning kiss of another woman, to have watched her good-night smile, and then to have come to me--that would have been too base, too degrading--I should have hated you because I despised you. I should have loathed you instead----”
”Of loving me! Be honest and true, little Jean--you do care.”
”Yes, I have cared.”
”And do still?”
”Yes.”
Her tone was as cold and as clear as the sound of an icicle striking the frozen earth in the fall. It angered him, and his voice shook roughly.
”A man who binds up his life in the love of a woman is a fool! Because she is all the world to him, all he works to receive praise from, all he fears in the blaming, he thinks her capable of as much love as himself. And even as he watches, he sees her pa.s.s from fervor into apathy. Her affection is but the dry husks of what he hoped to find.
You never cared!”
”Grant,” she said, earnestly, ”you have told me to be honest. I will be. I think”--with a little laugh--”that if I had been a man I should not have been a coward. I shall not be now. You wrong me and yourself when you say that I never cared. It is because my caring has been so much a part of myself that I have never been able to stand aloof and look and comment upon it. It was just me. When I lived, it lived; when I die----”
”My love!”