CHAPTER XXX.
TWO AND A TRIUMPH.
BUT Stilson’s image of her was no longer clear and fine; and in certain lights, or, rather, shadows, it seemed to have a sinister unloveliness. He assured himself that he felt toward her as before. But—he respected her with a reservation; he loved her with a doubt; he believed in her—did he believe in her at all? He was continually regilding his idol, which persistently refused to retain the gilt.
After many days and many nights of storms he went to the Park one morning, and for two hours,—or, until there was no chance of her coming—he walked up and down near the Seventy-second street entrance. He returned the second morning and the third. As he was pacing mechanically, like a sentry, he saw her—her erect, graceful figure, her red-brown hair that grew so beautifully about her brow and her ears; then her face, small and delicate, the skin very smooth and pale—circles under her violet eyes. At sight of him there came a sudden gleam from those eyes, like, an electric spark, and then a look of intense anxiety.
“You are ill?” she said, “Or there is some trouble?”
“I’ve been very restless of late—sleeping badly,” he replied, evasively. “And you?”
They had turned into a side path to a bench where they would not be disturbed. They looked each at the other, only to look away instantly. “Oh, I’ve worked too hard and—I fancy I’ve been too much alone.” Emily spoke carelessly, as of something in the past that no longer matters.
“Alone,” he repeated. “Alone.” When his eyes met hers, neither could turn away. And on a sudden impulse he caught her in his arms. “My dear, my dear love,” he exclaimed. And he held her close against him and pressed her cheek against his.
“I thought you would never come,” she murmured. “How I have reproached you!”
He only held her the closer for answer. And there was a long pause before he said: “I can’t let you go. I can’t. Oh, Emily, my Emily—yes, mine, mine—I’ve loved you so long—you know it, do you not? You’ve been the light of the world to me—the first light I’ve seen since I was old enough to know light from darkness. And when you go, the light goes. And in the dark the doubts come.”
“Doubts?” she said, drawing away far enough to look at him. “But how can you doubt? You must know.”
“And I do know when I see you. But when I’m in the dark and breathing the poison of my own mind—Forgive me. Don’t ask me to explain, but forgive me. Even if I had the right to be here, the right to say what I’ve been saying, still I’d be unfit. How you would condemn me, if you knew.”
“I don’t wish to know, dear, if you’d rather not tell me,” she said gently. “And you have a right to be here. And no matter what you have been or are, I’d not condemn you.” Her voice sank very low. “I’d still love you.”
“You’d have had to live my life to know what those last words mean to me,” he said, “how happy they make me.”
“But I know better than you think,” she answered. “For my life has not been sheltered, as are the lives of most women. It has had temptations and defeats.”
He turned his eyes quickly away, but not so quickly that she failed to catch the look of fear in them. “What are you thinking?” she asked earnestly. “Dear, if there are doubts, may they not come again? I saw in your eyes just then—what was it?”
“Do not ask me. I must fight that alone and conquer it.”
“No—you must tell me,” she said, resolutely. “I feel that I have a right to know.”
“It was nothing—a lie that I heard. I’d not shame myself and insult you by repeating it.”
He looked at her appealingly, saw that she was trembling. “You know that I did not believe it?” he said, catching her hand. But she drew away.
“Was it about me and—Marlowe?” she asked.
“But I knew that it was false,” he protested.
She looked at him unflinchingly. “It was true,” she said. “We were—everything—each to the other.”
He sat in a stupor. At last he muttered: “Why didn’t you deceive me? Doubt was better than—than this.”
“But why should I? I don’t regret what I did. It has helped to make me what I am.”
“Don’t—don’t,” he implored. “I admit that that is true. But—you are making me suffer—horribly. You forget that I love you.”
“Love!” There was a strange sparkle in her eyes and she raised her head haughtily. “Is that what you call love?” And she decided that she would wait before telling him that she had been Marlowe’s wife.
“No,” he answered, “it is not what I call love. But it is a part of love—the lesser part, no doubt, but still a part. I love you in all the ways a man can love a woman. And I love you because you are a complete woman, capable of inspiring love in every way in which a woman appeals to a man. And it hurts me—this that you’ve told me.”
“But you, your life, what you’ve been through—I honour you for it, love you the more for it. It has made me know how strong you are. I love you best for the battles you’ve lost.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know that those who have lived and learned and profited are higher and stronger than the innocent, the ignorant. But I wish—” He hesitated, then went on doggedly, “I’d be lying to you if I did not say that I wish I did not know this.”
“Then you’d rather I had deceived you—evaded or told a falsehood.”
“No,” he said with emphasis, and he looked at her steadily and proudly. “I can’t imagine you telling me a falsehood or making any pretense whatever. At least I can honestly say that after the first purely physical impulse of anger, I didn’t for an instant suspect you of any baseness. And whenever an ugly thought about you has shown itself in my mind, it has been—choked to death before it had a chance to speak.”
“I know that,” she said, “I know it, dear.” And she put her hand on his.
“And—I wouldn’t have you different from what you are. You are a certain kind of human being—my kind—the kind I admire through and through—yes, through and through. And—you are the only one of the kind in all this world, so far as I have seen. I don’t care by what processes you became what you are. You say you love me for the battles I’ve lost. Honestly, would you like to hear, even like to have me tell you, in detail, all that I’ve been through? Aren’t you better satisfied just to know the results?”
“Yes,” she admitted, and she remembered how she had hated Marguerite Feronia that day at the Astor House, how she never saw a lithograph of her staring from a dead wall or a bill board or a shop window that she did not have a pang.
“Then how can you blame me?” he urged.
“I—I guess—I don’t,” she said with a little smile.
“But I blame myself,” he went on. “I—yes, I, the immaculate, arraigned you at the bar for trial and——”
“Found me guilty and recommended me to the mercy of the court?”
“No—not quite so bad as that,” he replied. “But don’t think I’m not conscious of the colossal impudence of the performance—one human being sitting in judgment on another!”
“It’s done every minute,” she said cheerfully. “And we make good judges of each other. All we have to do is to look inside ourselves, and we don’t need to listen to the evidence before saying ‘Guilty.’ But what was the verdict at my trial?”
“It hadn’t gone very far before we changed places—you became the accuser and I went into the prisoner’s pen. And I could only plead guilty to the basest form of that base passion, jealousy. I couldn’t deny that you were noble and good, that it was unthinkable that you could be guilty of anything low. I was compelled to admit that if you had been—married—”
“Was any evidence admitted on that point?” she asked with a sly smile at the corners of her mouth.
“No,” he said, then gave her a quick, eager glance. At sight of the quizzical expression in her eyes, he blushed furiously but did not look away.
“You know,” he said, and he put his arm about her shoulders, “that I love you in the way you wish to be loved. I don’t deny that I’m not very consistent. My theory is sound, but—I’m only a human man, and I’d rather my theory were not put to the test in your case.”
“But it has been put to the test,” she replied, “and it has stood the test.” And then she told him the whole story.
He called her brave. “No one but you, only you, would have had the courage to end it when you did—away off there, alone.”
“I thought it was brave myself at the time,” she said. “Then afterwards I noticed that it would have taken more courage to keep on. Any woman would have freed herself if she had been independent as I was, and with no conventionalities to violate.”
Stilson said thoughtfully after a pause: “It did not enter my head that you had been married. And even now, the fact only makes the whole thing more vague and unreal.”
“It took two minutes to be married,” replied Emily, “and less to be divorced—my lawyer wrote proudly that it was a record-breaking case for that court, though I believe they’ve done better elsewhere in Dakota.”
“What a mockery!”
“Oh, I don’t think so. The marriage isn’t made by the contract and the divorce isn’t made by the court. The mere formalities that recognise the facts may be necessary, but they can’t be too brief.”
“But it sets a bad example, encourages people to take flippant views of serious matters.”
“I wonder,” said Emily doubtingly, “do the divorced people set so bad an example as those who live together hating each the other, degrading themselves, and teaching their children to quarrel. And haven’t flippant people always been flippant, and won’t they always continue to be?”
“It may be so, but men and women ought to know what they are about before they—” Stilson paused and suddenly remembered. “I shan’t finish that sentence,” he said, with a short laugh. “I don’t know what you know about me, and I don’t want to. I can’t talk of my affairs where they concern other people. But I feel that I must——”
“You need not, dear,” said Emily. “I think I understand how you are situated. And—I—I—Well, if the time ever comes when things are different, then—” She dropped her serious tone—“Meanwhile, I’m ‘by the grace of God, free and independent’ and——”
“I love you,” he said, the hot tears standing in his eyes as he kissed her hand. “Ever since the day you came back from the mines, I’ve known that I loved you. And ever since then, it’s been you, always you. The first thought in the morning, the last thought at night, and all day long whenever I looked up—you, shining up there where I never hope to reach you. Not shining for me, but, thank God, shining on me, my Emily.”
“And now—I’ve come down.” She was laughing at him in a loving way. “I’m no longer your star but—only a woman.”
“Only a woman!” He drew a long breath and his look made her blood leap and filled her with a sudden longing both to laugh and to cry.