Part 30 (1/2)

He felt a something high and implacable in the gentle girl; something he had never found in her before. He looked at her with despairing eyes. Her white grace, her stately little ways, her delicate beauty, had never seemed so desirable.

”Good G.o.d, Vivian. You can't mean it. Give me time. Wait for me. I'll be straight all the rest of my life--I mean it. I'll be true to you, absolutely. I'll do anything you say--only don't give me up!”

She felt old, hundreds of years old, and as remote as far mountains.

”It isn't anything you can do--in the rest of your life, my poor boy!

It is what you have done--in the first of it!... Oh, Morton! It isn't right to let us grow up without knowing! You never would have done it _if_ you'd known--would you? Can't you--can't we--do something to--stop this awfulness?”

Her tender heart suffered in the pain she was inflicting, suffered too in her own loss; for as she faced the thought of final separation she found that her grief ran back into the far-off years of childhood. But she had made up her mind with a finality only the more absolute because it hurt her. Even what he said of possible recovery did not move her--the very thought of marriage had become impossible.

”I shall never marry,” she added, with a s.h.i.+ver; thinking that he might derive some comfort from the thought; but he replied with a bitter derisive little laugh. He did not rise to her appeal to ”help the others.” So far in life the happiness of Morton Elder had been his one engrossing care; and now the unhappiness of Morton Elder a.s.sumed even larger proportions.

That bright and hallowed future to which he had been looking forward so earnestly had been suddenly withdrawn from him; his good resolutions, his ”living straight” for the present, were wasted.

”You women that are so superior,” he said, ”that'll turn a man down for things that are over and done with--that he's sorry for and ashamed of--do you know what you drive a man to! What do you think's going to become of me if you throw me over!”

He reached out his hands to her in real agony. ”Vivian! I love you! I can't live without you! I can't be good without you! And you love me a little--don't you?”

She did. She could not deny it. She loved to shut her eyes to the future, to forgive the past, to come to those outstretched arms and bury everything beneath that one overwhelming phrase--”I love you!”

But she heard again Dr. Bellair's clear low accusing voice--”Will you tell that to your crippled children?”

She rose to her feet. ”I cannot help it, Morton. I am sorry--you will not believe how sorry I am! But I will never marry you.”

A look of swift despair swept over his face. It seemed to darken visibly as she watched. An expression of bitter hatred came upon him; of utter recklessness.

All that the last few months had seemed to bring of higher better feeling fell from him; and even as she pitied him she thought with a flicker of fear of how this might have happened--after marriage.

”Oh, well!” he said, rising to his feet. ”I wish you could have made up your mind sooner, that's all. I'll take myself off now.”

She reached out her hands to him.

”Morton! Please!--don't go away feeling so hardly! I am--fond of you--I always was.--Won't you let me help you--to bear it--! Can't we be--friends?”

Again he laughed that bitter little laugh. ”No, Miss Lane,” he said. ”We distinctly cannot. This is good-bye--You won't change your mind--again?”

She shook her head in silence, and he left her.

CHAPTER XI.

THEREAFTER.

If I do right, though heavens fall, And end all light and laughter; Though black the night and ages long, Bitter the cold--the tempest strong-- If I do right, and brave it all-- The sun shall rise thereafter!

The inaccessibility of Dr. Hale gave him, in the eye of Mrs. St.

Cloud, all the attractiveness of an unscaled peak to the true mountain climber. Here was a man, an unattached man, living next door to her, whom she had not even seen. Her pursuance of what Mr. Skee announced to his friends to be ”one of these Platonic Friends.h.i.+ps,” did not falter; neither did her interest in other relations less philosophic.

Mr. d.y.k.eman's precipitate descent from the cla.s.s of eligibles was more of a disappointment to her than she would admit even to herself; his firm, kind friendliness had given a sense of comfort, of achieved content that her restless spirit missed.