Part 56 (1/2)
”Obey your heart!” Forbes broke in, at last. She shook her head.
”But my brain says, 'Think of the long, long future!' A woman spends so little of her married life with her husband. It's the long days that count, the days she spends with other women, with rivalries, jealousies, with economy, economy, economy. That's what I'm afraid of. Economy would play the devil with me, Harvey. Two thousand a year and forage! I'm afraid of it.”
”So you will marry this rich man. And then?”
”Then I shall probably learn to hate him.”
”And to love somebody else?”
”I shall never love anybody but you, Harvey. I've never told anybody else my real mind as I have you, for I am trained to conceal--always to conceal.”
”But don't conceal from yourself the failure you are going to make of your life. No woman can play false to her heart and prosper. I beg you not to despise my love.”
”Despise your love!” she cried. ”It's myself I despise. Ah, Harvey, try to understand me.”
”I can't! I can only warn you.”
”Oh, don't warn me! Don't lecture me! Just love me! Let's not think of the future--it's always full of tragedy. If we married in all our love, we should meet so much unhappiness! The most loving love matches I've known have burned out--ended in divorces and open scandal, or scandal concealed like ostriches for everybody to see and laugh at. Two people fall in love and meet opposition and run away together to a preacher.
Then they have n.o.body to oppose them, so they oppose each other. And by and by they run away from each other and don't meet till they get to a divorce court in some small town to avoid the notoriety.”
”And you think that you will escape that by marrying without love?”
”Yes. Because I don't expect love. I sha'n't expect Willie to be a romantic saint, and then hate him for not living up to my specifications.”
”But yourself--your body--you will give that to him?”
She closed her eyes and turned ghastly white as she whispered: ”I suppose so. That's the usual price a woman pays, isn't it?”
He flung her from him as something unclean, common, cheap.
From the huddle she was in she whispered:
”I understand. I--I don't blame you.”
There was a sort of burlesque saintliness about her meekness that nauseated him. He did not realize that she forgave him because his rage seemed a proof of his love. She would have forgiven him with bruised lips if he had struck her in the face.
He loathed himself for his vicious wrath, but he almost loathed her more for compelling it. Yet when she got to her feet and stood clinging to the velvet curtain, and mumbled:
”It was better that this happened before we were married, wasn't it? And now that you are cured of loving me I may go, mayn't I?”
He stared at her; his lips parted to utter words he could not find; he put out his hands, and she went back to his arms. And she cried a little, not forgetting even in her grief to sob stealthily lest some one hear. And he understood that, too, and hated her for her eternal vigilance. Even while he kissed the brackish tears from her cheeks and eyes he hated her for being so beautiful and so wise, so full of pa.s.sion and so discreet.
She wept but a little while, and then she was quiet, reclining against him in silence and meditating.
And he pondered the mystery of his own behavior. A sense of duty and a sense of honor had always guided his acts. .h.i.therto. This woman acted upon him like the drug that doctors use for controlling violent patients and the criminal insane; it leaves the senses all alive but annuls the power of motion.
Here he was, convinced to the very depths of his soul that it was abominable to embrace the betrothed of another, yet he did not take his arms from about her, he did not put her away from him. Instead, he held her fast even when she made to go. And yet he blamed her.
This much at least he accomplished in the long silence: he ceased to blame Persis and accused himself, tried himself before the tribunal of his own soul, and denounced himself as guilty of treason to himself and her and the laws of the world. But he did not put her from him.