Part 20 (1/2)
”It will never become my duty. But if it should, I would never marry without being true to the woman; and to be true is to tell the truth.”
”You mean that you would tell her?”
”I mean that I would tell her.”
After a little silence she stirred in her seat and spoke, all her anger gone:
”I am going to ask you, if you ever do, not to tell her as you have told me--after it is too late. If you cannot find some way of letting her know the truth before she loves you, then do not tell her afterward, when you have won her life away from her. If there is deception at all, then it is not worse to go on deceiving her than it was to begin to deceive her. Tell her, if you must, while she is indifferent and will not care, not after she has given herself to you and will then have to give you up. But what can you, a man, know what it means to a woman to tell her this! How can you know, how can you ever, ever know!”
She covered her face with her hands and her voice broke with tears.
”Isabel--”
”You have no right to call me by my name, and I have no right to hear it, as though nothing were changed between us.”
”I have not changed.”
”How could you tell me! Why did you ever tell me!” she cried abruptly, grief breaking her down.
”There was a time when I did not expect to tell you. I expected to do as other men do.”
”Ah, you would have deceived me!” she exclaimed, turning upon him with fresh suffering. ”You would have taken advantage of my ignorance and have married me and never have let me know! And you would have called that deception love and you would have called yourself a true man!”
”But I did not do this! It was yourself who helped me to see that the beginning of morality is to stop lying and deception.”
”But if you had this on your conscience already, what right had you ever to come near me?”
”I had come to love you!”
”Did your love of me give you the right to win mine?”
”It gave me the temptation.”
”And what did you expect when you determined to tell me this? What did you suppose such a confession would mean to me? Did you imagine that while it was still fresh on your lips, I would smile in your face and tell you it made no difference? Was I to hear you speak of one whose youth and innocence you took away through her frailties, and then step joyously into her place? Was this the unfeeling, the degraded soul you thought to be mine? Would I have been worthy even of the poor love you could give me, if I had done that?”
”I expected you to marry me! I expected you to forgive. I have this at least to remember: I lost you honestly when I could have won you falsely.”
”Ah, you have no right to seek any happiness in what is all sadness to me! And all the sadness, the ruin of everything, comes from your wrong-doing.”
”Remember that my wrong-doing did not begin with me. I bear my share: it is enough: I will bear no more.”
A long silence followed. She spoke at last, checking her tears:
”And so this is the end of my dream! This is what life has brought me to! And what have I done to deserve it? To leave home, to shun friends, to dread scandal, to be misjudged, to bear the burden of your secret and share with you its shame, to see my years stretch out before me with no love in them, no ambitions, no ties--this is what life has brought me, and what have I done to deserve it?”
As her tears ceased, her eyes seemed to be looking into a future that lacked the relief of tears. As though she were already pa.s.sed far on into it and were looking back to this moment, she went on, speaking very slowly and sadly:
”We shall not see each other again in a long time, and whenever we do, we shall be nothing to each other and we shall never speak of this. There is one thing I wish to tell you. Some day you may have false thoughts of me. You may think that I had no deep feeling, no constancy, no mercy, no forgiveness; that it was easy to give you up, because I never loved you. I shall have enough to bear and I cannot bear that. So I want to tell you that you will never know what my love for you was. A woman cannot speak till she has the right; and before you gave me the right, you took it away.
For some little happiness it may bring me hereafter let me tell you that you were everything to me, everything! If I had taught myself to make allowances for you, if I had seen things to forgive in you, what you told me would have been only one thing more and I might have forgiven. But all that I saw in you I loved. Rowan, and I believed that I saw everything. Remember this, if false thoughts of me ever come to you! I expect to live a long time: the memory of my love of you will be the sorrow that will keep me alive.”