The Love Affairs of an Old Maid Part 11

"Anything _human_," I repeated gladly.

Louise looked down.

"He was not omnipotent," she said huskily. "He ruled my heart only, not my soul."

"I suppose you have tried to love your husband?" I said.

"Tried? Oh, Ruth, I have tried so hard! He is so good to me. He knows everything. Of course I told him. That was why we were married so suddenly. He wished it and urged such excellent reasons, and I had so much respect for him and his wisdom in what is best, that I married him. I thought I could love him. I always thought that if I didn't love--the other one--I should love Norris; but I can't. I believe my power of love is gone forever. I feel sometimes as if the best part of me had been killed--not died of its own accord, but as if it had been murdered."

"Poor child!" I said. "Why don't you talk this over with your husband?"

"Oh, Ruth, how could I?"

"Well, may I talk to you? Will it hurt you?"

"Nothing that you would say can hurt me, dear."

"Then let me say just this. You have been trying to do in weeks what nature would take years to do. In real life you cannot lose your love and heal your worse than widowed heart and love anew as you would in private theatricals. You have outraged your own delicate sensibilities, but not with your husband's consent. He does not want you to try to love him. No good man does. He wants you to love him because you can't help yourself--because it seems to your heart to be the only natural thing to do. 'When the song's gone out of your life, you can't start another while it's a-ringing in your ears. It's best to have a bit o' silence, and out of that maybe a psalm'll come by and by.'"

"Oh, Ruth, dear Ruth, say that again," she cried, turning towards me with tears in her lovely eyes. I repeated it.

"How restful to dare to take 'a bit o' silence'!"

"No one can prevent you doing so but yourself. Mr. Whitehouse married you to give you just that, confident that he loved you so much that the psalm would come by and by."

"I believe he did," said Louise gently, with color rising in her cheeks.

"Another thing. Don't try not to grieve. Don't repress yourself. It is right that you should mourn over your lost ideals. Nothing on earth brings more poignant grief than that. You will never get them back. Do not expect what is impossible. They were false ideals, none the less beautiful and dear to you for being that, but truly they were distorted. You will see this some time. You have begun to see it now. You realize that this man was in no way what you thought him. You had idealized him, had almost crowned him. Now you can't help trying to invest Mr. Whitehouse with the same unnamable, invisible qualities. But no man has them. Your husband is a thousand times more worthy than the other, yet even he does not deserve wors.h.i.+p. Let the man do the crowning if you can, although a woman of your temperament would find even that difficult--that which the most inane of women could accept with calmness and a smile. You have the magnificent humility of the truly great. Still it is not appreciated in this world.

Try resting for a while and let your husband love you."

I knew that I was saying, though perhaps in a different way, things which Norris Whitehouse had urged upon her. Not that she said so. She would have regarded that as sacrilege. But it was a look, a little trembling smile, which betrayed the ingenuous young creature to me. I felt that I was in the presence of a nature very fair and exquisitely pure. It was a sacred feeling. I almost felt as if I ought not to read the signs in her face, because she had no idea that they were there.

"I have such horrible doubts," she said suddenly with suppressed bitterness. "I do not belittle my love. I know that I loved him with all my heart and soul, and that I gave him more than most women would have done, because love means infinitely more to me than it does to them. I knew all the time that I loved him more than he loved me, but I did not care, for I believed, blind as I was, that we loved each other all we were capable of doing, and if I had more love to give it was only because I was richer than he, and I meant to make him the greater by my treasure. Now I feel that both I and my love have been wasted. Oh, it was a cruel thing, Ruth. I feel so poor, so poor."

"Louise, you think, but you do not think rightly. _Are_ you poorer for having loved him? What is his unworth compared with your worth? Isn't your love sweeter and truer for having grown and expanded? No love was ever wasted. It enriches the giver involuntarily. You are a sweeter, better woman than before you loved, unless you made the mistake of small natures and let it embitter you. You have no right to feel that it has been wasted."

"Do you think so?" she said doubtfully. "That is an uplifting thought."

Then she added in a low voice, "There is one thing more. It is very unworthy, I am afraid, but it is a canker that is eating my heart out. And that is the mortification of it. Can you picture the thing to yourself?

Can you form any idea of how I felt? It grows worse the more I think of it."

"I know, I know. But, dear child, there is where I am powerless to help you. If I were in your place I think I should feel just as you do. It was a cruel thing. I wonder that you bore it as well as you did."

"What! Should _you_ feel that way? Then you do not blame me?"

"Why mention blame in connection with yourself? You are singularly free from it. But did you ever consider what an honor the love of such a man as your husband is? Do you know how he is admired by great men? Do you realize how he must love you, and what magnificent faith he must have to wish to marry a young girl like you who admits that she does not love him?

If you never do anything else in this world except to deserve the faith he has in you, you will live a worthy life."

We were standing still now, and Louise was looking at her husband at a distance with a look in her eyes which was good to see.

"You never can love him as you loved the other one. A first love never comes again. Would you want it to? When you love your husband, as he and I both know that you will do some time--perhaps not soon, but he is very patient--still, I say, when you love him you will love him in a gentler, truer way."

"Can you tell me why such a bitter experience should have been sent to me so early in life?"

"To save you pain later and to make of you what you were planned to be."

Tears rolled down her cheeks and she bent to kiss me, for the last mail had been put aboard and we had only a moment more.

What she whispered in my ear I shall never tell to any one, but it will sweeten my whole life.

As we went towards Mr. Whitehouse Louise involuntarily quickened her pace a little and held out her hand to him with a smile. It was good to see his face change color and to view the quiet delight with which he received her.

Then there were good-byes and hurried steps and a great deal of shouting and hauling of ropes, and there were waving of hands and a tossing of roses from the decks above and a few furtive tears and many heart-aches, and then--the great steamer had sailed.

XII

IN WHICH I WILLINGLY TURN MY FACE WESTWARD

"Grow old along with me.

The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made.

Our times are in His hand Who saith, 'A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust G.o.d, see all, nor be afraid.'"

The years cannot go on without destroying the old landmarks, and I am so old-fas.h.i.+oned that change of any kind saddens me. People move away, strangers take their houses, the girls marry, children grow up, and everything is so mutable that sometimes my cheerfulness has a haze to it.

I am in a mood of retrospection to-night. I am living over the past and knitting up the ravelled ends.

Dear Rachel! I am thankful that she and Percival continue so happy. It is wonderful how every one recognizes and speaks of the completeness of these two. They do not parade their affection. They seem rather to try to hide it even from me, as if it were almost too sacred for even my kindly eyes. It is in the atmosphere, and, though they go their separate ways, they are more thoroughly together than any other married people I know.

Both Percival and Rachel are becoming very generally recognized now.

People are discovering how wonderfully clever their work is, and they share themselves with the public, although it is a sacrifice every time they do so. Rachel's rather turbulent cleverness has softened down. She says it is because it is "billowed in another greater and gentler sort."

She looks at me rather wistfully sometimes. I know what she thinks, but she does not bore me with questions. I wonder if she thinks I regret anything. Unless I consider that the Percivals have redeemed the record I am keeping, there is nothing especially tempting in the marriages I am watching. I cannot think that they are any happier than I am.

Sallie c.o.x seems contented most of the time. She has a magnificent establishment, handsomer than all the rest of the girls' put together. Her husband "doesn't bother" her, she says, and the Osbornes are very popular.

"I'm glad I'm shallow," she said to me once. "Shallow hearts do not ache long. If I had a deep nature I should go mad or turn into a saint. As it is, I wear the scars."

Once, when I went with her to Rachel's, she sat and looked around the simple, inexpensive house, with the walls all lined with books and no room too good to live in every day, and she said,

"This is the prettiest home I ever was in in my life, and there is not a lace curtain in the house!"

We laughed--everybody laughs at Sallie--and Rachel said gently,

"We don't need them."

Sallie looked up quickly and took in the full significance of the words, as she answered in the same tone,