The Glory of the Conquered Part 41

CHAPTER XLIII

"AND THERE WAS LIGHT"

He spent the intervening hours restlessly; the hands of his watch moved slowly; his duties occupied only a small portion of his mind.

He was at the Inst.i.tute at just three, and they directed him where to go.

His heart was beating fast as he walked down the corridor. The hand which he laid upon the door-k.n.o.b shook a little.

He opened the door, and a woman came toward him with outstretched hand.

It was Ernestine--but the three years had done much.

Older--greater--a more steady flame--a more conscious power--grief trans.m.u.ted to understanding--despair risen to resolution--she had gone a long way. He looked at her in silence--reading, understanding. It was all written there--the story of deep thinking and deeper loving, of battles and victories, and other battles yet to fight, the poise which attends the victor--yes, she had gone a long way. And as she spoke his name, and smiled a little, and then could not repress the tears which his presence, all that it meant, brought, he saw, s.h.i.+ning through her tears, that light of love's own days.

She turned and walked to the other side of the room, and he knew that she was taking him to the picture.

She watched his face as he took it in, and she knew then that she had done her work.

For a long time he said nothing, and when at last he turned to her, eyes dim, voice husky, it was only to say: "I can say--nothing. There are--no words."

He turned back to the picture, she standing silent beside him, reading in his face that with each moment he was coming into more perfect understanding.

For she had painted Karl's face as it was just before he went into the silence. She had caught the look which illumined his face that day on his death bed when she told him what she had done. She had painted Karl as he was in that moment of perfect understanding--the joy which was uplift, the knowledge which was glory. She had perpetuated in her picture the things which Karl took with him from life. It was Karl in the supreme moment of his life--the moment of revelation, transfiguration, the moment which lighted all the years.

It was triumph which she had perpetuated in the picture. She was saying to the world--He did not achieve what he set out to achieve, but can you say he failed when he left the world with a soul like this?

He saw that it was what she had done with light which made the picture, from the standpoint of her art, supreme. The critics said that no one had ever done just that thing with light before--painted light in just that spirit of loving and understanding it; less light, indeed, than light's significance. They said that no one before had painted the kind of light which could make a blind man see. For he was blind--the picture told that, but it seemed no one had ever had light quite as understandingly as he had it there.

"You feel it, doctor?" she asked at last, timidly. "You see it all?"

He nodded. It seemed so far beyond any word of his.

But she wanted to talk to him about it. "You see what it has meant to me?

Why I loved it and lived for it? Oh doctor--I wanted to show that he was greater than all the great things he sought to do! The night this picture came to me it set my blood on fire, and at no moment since, no matter how tired or lonely or discouraged--have I lost my love for it--belief in it.

It seems so right. It seems to stand for so many things. They call it a masterpiece of light--and isn't it fine--great--right, that Karl's portrait should be a masterpiece of light?"

For a long time he was lost to it. It was as she said--right. To the blind man had come the light; to the man of science the light of truth, and to the human soul, about to set out on another journey, had come the perfect understanding of what had lighted the way for him here.

When he turned to her at last she was looking at the picture with such love in her eyes as he had never seen. Her lips were parted--tremulous; there were tears upon her cheeks; her whole face quivered with love and longing. He saw then, in that one glance before he turned away, that time and death held no sway over such a love as this.

"I did not mean to," she faltered. "But I have not seen the picture myself for a long time, and your being here--"

She broke down there, and he summoned no word with which to answer her sobs.

"Dr. Parkman,"--raising a pa.s.sionate face--"I want you to know that if this were the greatest picture the world had ever seen--if it were a thousand times greater than anything the world had ever known--I would throw it away--obliterate it--gladly--joyously--for just one touch of Karl's hand!"

"Yes," he murmured, more to himself than to her, "and if you were not like that you never could have done it."

"What it cost!"--he heard her whisper. "What it _cost_!"

He told her that it had ever been so. That the great things were paid for like that. That so many of the things which had lived longest and gone deepest had come from broken hearts and souls tried almost beyond their power for suffering. He told her that the future would accept this, as it had the others, without knowing of its cost, that a myriad of broken hearts had gone into the sum of the world's achievement.

In the half hour which followed, as they sat there, speaking sometimes of Karl, more often silent, some things seemed to pa.s.s from the man's heart, other things to come. And as at the last he rose to go, for he felt she would like a little time alone, he said, and his face and his voice gave much which the words missed: "Ernestine, you have done more than you know. For me too--you have made it right."

She sat a long time before her picture, dreaming of Karl. She whispered his name, and he seemed to answer with, "Liebchen--brave liebchen--you have been good to me."

To her too the hour brought new light. It came to her now that she had won a victory for them, not because she had painted a great picture, but because she had brought them back to that world harmony from which they seemed for a time to have gone. She had won, not through the greatness of her achievement, but through having made it right with her own soul. The picture itself was a thing of canvas and paint; it was the spirit out of which it grew--his spirit and hers--was the thing everlasting. She was sure that Karl too knew now that it was having the spirit right which counted. The "perhaps" of his letter was surely answered for him now.

And out of this closeness to the past there opened to her a little of her own future--things she would do. For she must work,--theirs a love which made for work. There was much more to paint, much to show how she and Karl loved the world, what they held it worth,--and all of it to speak for their love, glorify, immortalise it.

She dreamed deeply and tenderly--the past so real to her, Karl, their love, so great.

Now she must go. To-morrow many others would come. Artists would come to p.r.o.nounce her work good, wonder how she had done this or that. Doctors and the university men would come, proud to speak of Karl, claim him as their own. But ah--who would understand the tears and heart's blood out of which it had come? Who would know? Who could?

"Karl," she murmured at the last--eyes dim with loving tears--"dear Karl,"--dwelling with a long tenderness upon the name--"did I indeed bring you the light?"