Told in a French Garden Part 13

"I came back here. I met her on this very spot. I said to her, 'You are alone in the world--your mother has married--she has other children. I have saddened your life with my love. Let me at least help to cheer it again. You need affection. Here it is--in my arms!'

"And, while I waited for her answer, I prayed with all my soul that she might deny me.

"G.o.d bless her! She did! I turned away from her with a glad heart, and in that heart I enshrined this woman, who, loving me, had denied me.

There I set up her image, pure and inviolate. Two long years I stayed away from her, and as I worked, I wors.h.i.+pped her, and out of that wors.h.i.+p I wrought a great thing.

"With time, however, her real image grew faint within me. Other emotions, other experiences seemed to blur and dim it. In spite of myself, I returned here. Once more I stood on this spot, within the gaze of her deep eyes. I began to believe that a love everlasting, all enduring, had been given me! But still it was pa.s.sion that pleaded for possession, and still it was self-knowledge that looked on in fear.

"Pa.s.sion bade me plead: 'You love me! You need me! Come to me!' And fear kept my heart still, in dread of her consent.

"But she looked up into my face with eyes that seemed to widen under mine, and simply whispered, 'My mother.' The heart that knew and understood now all that sad history seemed to feel that her act might re-open the mother's old wound; that the verdict 'like mother, like daughter' would turn virtue back to sin again.

"Once more I went out into the world with a light heart! Her virtue, her strength, seemed to be mine. I went back to my work with renewed spirit, back to my life with no new self-reproach.

"But once more I swung round the circle. With a perversity that, dreading success, and conscious of fear, yet longs to strive for what it dreads to win, I returned to her again. The death of her mother was my new excuse.

"She came to me--here, as usual. But this time she came leading by the hand her little sister, and I felt her armored against me even before I spoke.

"You, who used to believe in a merciful G.o.d, can you explain to me why he has left in the nature of man, created--so you believe--in His own image--that impulse to destroy that which he loves? I loved her for exactly what she was. I loved her because she had the courage to resist me. Yet from each denial so ardently desired, so thankfully received, my soul sprang up strengthened in desire. Safe above me I wors.h.i.+pped her. Once in my arms, I knew, only too well, that even that love would pa.s.s as all other emotions had done. I knew I should put her aside, gently if I could, urgently, if I must, and pa.s.s on. That is my Fate! Everything that enters my life leaves something I need--and departs! For what I have not, I hunger. What I win soon wearies me. It is the price life exacts for what it gives me.

"So, when August of this year came round, I found myself once more standing here.

"Ten years had pa.s.sed since we stood here with her between us--ten years that had laid their richest gifts on her beauty. This time she was indeed alone. As I looked into her face, I somehow thought of Agamemnon's fair daughter doomed to die a virgin. You can see my 'Iphigenia' in the spring, if you chance to be in Paris.

"This time, self-knowledge deserted me. The past was forgotten. The future was undreaded. The pa.s.sion in my heart spoke without reserve or caution! I no longer said: 'You need me! You love me!' I cried out: 'I can no longer live without you!' I no longer said, 'Come to me!' I pleaded, 'Take me to your heart. There, where my image is, let me rest at last. I have waited long, be kind to me.'

"I saw her sway toward me as once before she had done. It was too late to look backward or forward. I had conquered. In my weakness I believed it was thus ordained--that I deserved some credit for waiting so long.

"Yet, when she left me here alone, having promised, with downcast eyes that avoided mine, to place her hand in mine, and walk boldly beside me down the forbidden path of the world, I fell down on the spot her feet had pressed, and wept bitterly, as I had never done before in all my life. Wept over the shattered ideal, the faith I had so wilfully torn down, the miserable victory of my meanest self.

"I thought the end was come. Fate was merciful to me, however!

"I had myself fixed the following Thursday as the day for our departure. As I dated a letter to her that night my mind involuntarily reckoned the days, and I was startled to find that Thursday fell on that fatal tenth of August.

"I had not thought I could be so tortured in my mind as I was by the dread that she should notice the dire coincidence.

"She did!

"The hour that should have brought her to me, brought a note instead.

It was dated boldly 'August tenth.' It was without beginning or signature. It said--I can repeat every word--'Of the two roads to self-destruction open to me, I have chosen the one that will, in the end, give the least pain to you. I love you. I have always loved you since I was a child. I do not regret anything yet! Thank G.o.d for me that I depart without ever having seen a look of weariness in the eyes that gazed so lovingly into mine when we parted, and thank Him for yourself that you will never see a look of reproach in mine. I know no time so fitting to say a long farewell for both of us as this--Farewell, then.'

"I knew what I should find when I went up the hill.

"The doctors said 'heart disease.' She had been troubled with some such weakness. I alone knew the truth! As I had known myself, she had known me!

"You think you suffer--you, who might, but for me, have made her happy, as such women should be, in a world of simple natural joys! My friend, loss without guilt is pain--but it is not without the balm of virtuous compensation. You have at least a right to grieve.

"But I! I am forced to know myself. To feel myself borne along in spite of myself; and to realize that she who should have worn a crown of happy womanhood, lies there a sacrifice, to be bewailed like Jepthah's one fair daughter; and to sit here in full dread of the ebbing of even this great emotion, knowing too well that it will pa.s.s out of my life when it shall have achieved its purpose, leaving only as evidence _this_--another great work, crystalized into immortality in everlasting stone. I know that I cannot long hold it here in my heart. The day will come--perhaps soon--when I shall stand outside that door, and recognize this as my work, and be proud of it, without the power to grieve, as I do now; when I shall approve my own handiwork, and be unable to mourn for her who was sacrificed to achieve it. What is your pain to mine?"

And I saw the hot tears drop from his eyes. I saw them fall on the marble floor, and they watered the very spot where his name was so soon to spring up in pride to confess his handiwork.

I looked on her calm face. I knew she did not regret her part! I rose, and, without a word, I pa.s.sed out at the wide door, and, without looking back, I pa.s.sed down the slope in the dusk, and left them together--the woman I had loved, and the friend I had lost!

As his voice died away, he sat upright quickly, threw a glance about the circle, and, with another fine gesture said: "_Et voila_!"

The Doctor was the only one to really laugh, though a broad grin ran round the circle.

"Well," remarked the Doctor, who had been leaning against a tree, and indulging in shrugs and an occasional groan, which had not even disconcerted the story teller, "I suppose that is how that very great man, your governor, did the trick. I can see him in every word."

"That is all you know about it," laughed the Sculptor. "That is not a bit how the governor did it. That is how I should have done it, had I been the governor, and had the old man's chances. I call that an ideal thing to happen to a man."

"Not even founded on fact--which might have been some excuse for telling it," groaned the Critic. "I'd love to write a review of that story. I'd polish it off."

"Of course you would," sneered the Sculptor. "That's all a critic is for--to polish off the tales he can't write. I call that a nice romantic, ideal tale for a sculptor to conceive, and as the Doctor said the other night, it is a possible story, since I conceived it, and what the mind of mortal can conceive, can happen."

"The trouble," said the Journalist, "with chaps like you, and the Critic, is that your people are all framework. They're not a bit of flesh and blood."

"I'd like to know," said the Sculptor, throwing himself back in his chair, "who has a right to decide that?"

"What I'd like to know," said the Youngster, "is, what did she do between times? Of course he sculpted, and earned slathers of money.

But she--?"

"Oh, ouch--help!" cried the Sculptor. "Do I know?"

"Exactly!" answered the Critic, "and that you don't sticks out in every line of your story."

"Goodness me, you might ask the same thing about Leda, or Helen of Troy."

"Ha! Ha!" laughed the Doctor. "But we know what they did!"

"A lot you do. It is because they are old cla.s.sics, and you accept them, whereas my story is quite new and original--and you were unprepared for it, and so you can't appreciate it. Anyway, it's my first-born story, and I'll defend it with my life."

Only a laugh replied to the challenge, and the att.i.tude of defense he struck, as he leaped to his feet, though the Journalist said, under his breath, "It takes a carver in stone to think of a tale like that!"

"But think," replied the Doctor, "how much trouble some women would escape if they kept on saying A B C like that--for the A B C is usually lovely--and when it was time to X Y Z--often terrible, they just slipped out through the 'open door.'"

"On the other hand, they _risk_ losing heaps of fun," said the Journalist.

"What I like about that story," said the Lawyer, "is that it is so aristocratic. Every one seems to have plenty of money. They all three do just what they like, have no duties but to a.n.a.lyze themselves, and evidently everything goes like clockwork. The husband enjoys being morbid, and has the means to be gloriously so. The sculptor likes to carve Edgar Allan Poe all over the place, and the fair lady is able to gratify the tastes of both men."

"You can laugh as much as you please," sighed the Sculptor, "I wish it had happened to me."

"Well," said the Doctor, "you have the privilege of going to bed and dreaming that it did."

"Thank you," answered the Sculptor. "That is just what I am going to do."