A Manifest Destiny Part 16

When the whispered misgiving would rise up in my mind I forced it down by vowing that if you did not already love me I could and would make you do so. When the blow fell, and I knew that I had lost you, I knew that my selfishness in thinking chiefly of my own happiness had been properly rewarded. At least this was the feeling that possessed my heart after the first. You were young, confiding, inexperienced. I knew better than you possibly could know that you did not love me.

Later, you knew it also."

He waited, as if for her response. From behind her close-pressed hands the answer came.

"Yes," she said, lowly, "I have long known that it was a mistake on my part. You are right. I did not love you."

Had she been looking, she would have seen a shadow cross his face--a very faint one, as the hope that it obscured had been faint also.

"Therefore," he said, "I took advantage of you, and obtained from you a promise which I should never have asked. I want you to feel that I realize the wrong I did you in that, and ask your forgiveness for it."

Slowly she lowered her hands and looked at him.

"And you can ask forgiveness of me?" she said.

"I humbly beg it--as on my knees."

"Then what should be my att.i.tude to you?"

"The proud and upright one of never having done me any conscious wrong."

"But when I left you, rejected you, threw you off--"

"That was not done to me, but to the man you supposed me to be--the man who had been proved to you a scoundrel, by such proof as any one would have deemed you mad to doubt."

She looked at him somewhat timidly.

"You are generous indeed," she said.

"I am no whit more than just. You were absolutely warranted in such a course toward me. What I long to do--what I have crossed the world in the hope of doing--is to get you to forgive yourself, to free yourself of a hallucination which is casting a needless shadow on your life."

"Oh, you are good--good!" she said. "I never knew so kind a heart.

Therefore must my unending misery be the greater that I have once wounded it."

"That consciousness should have no sting for you hereafter. You did it in utter ignorance. I cannot claim that I was half so ignorant in my wrong toward you. But surely we may remember that we have once been friends, and so we may feel that there is full and free forgiveness between us before we part."

She did not speak. That last word had pierced too deeply to her heart.

"You do forgive me--do you not?" he said, as if he misunderstood her silence.

"I thank you--I bless you--I seek _your_ forgiveness," she said.

At these last words he smiled--a smile that had a certain bitterness in it. Then suddenly his face became rigidly grave.

"If I had not given you my forgiveness, long ago," he said, "I should like to offer it to you now, at a price. I wish to G.o.d that I could."

"What do you mean?" she said, a sweet perplexity upon her face. "What price have I to pay for anything?"

"Ah, there it is! It may seem brutal of me to put a literal construction upon what you have used as a figure of speech, but let the truth come out. You are poor, unprotected, alone, and you ask me to go and leave you so! G.o.d knows it is little enough that I have it in my power to do, but the possession of money would enable you at least to live as it becomes you to live. I do not speak of your t.i.tle--it is not what you are called, but what you are, that I have in mind. If you had money, even the small income which I so desire that you shall accept, your life would be different."

But Bettina looked away from him, and shook her head in the gentle negation which he knew to be so final.

"How would my life be different?" she said.

"You could make it so."

"In what way?"

"You could travel, for one thing."

"I do not want to travel. I desired it once, and I got my wish. But with it came a wretchedness that all the travelling in the world could not carry me away from."

"Then what is to be your life?"

"What you see it now. I do not wish to change it for any other. I have tried the world and its rewards. There is nothing in them."

Her tone of absolute, unexpectant decision maddened him.

"My G.o.d, Bettina!" he exclaimed, too excited to notice that the name had escaped him. "Are you in earnest? Can you mean it? I wish I could believe that you did not. But there is a deadly reality about you now which makes me fear that you will keep your word. That you should spend your life in this isolation, that you--you--"

He broke off, as if words failed him.

"What better can I do?" she said. "You must not think of me as idle and useless. I am going to try not to be that. I have tried a little.

Ask the rector. And I am going to try more. There is but one thing that I deeply desire, and that is to be a better woman than I have been in the past. Oh, I will try hard--I will, indeed I will--to do a little good in the future, to make up for all the harm I have done!"

She ceased, her voice failing her, and as she looked at the man standing near her she saw that he was scarcely listening. Some intense preoccupation made him take in but vaguely what she was saying. She saw that he was deeply moved in some way, and the consciousness that this was so gave her a sense of alarm. She felt her own will weakening, and she knew that somehow she must get this parting over, if her strength were to suffice for it.

"Good-bye," she said, holding out her hand.

"Don't be too sorry for me. You have lightened my heart inexpressibly by what you have told me. Now that I can feel that you know all--that, wrong and wicked as I was, I was not so false as it seemed--I can bear the future with courage. I am sure of it. I want to say good-bye now, because I prefer not to see you again. You would only try to shake me in a determination that is not to be shaken.

Don't trouble about me--please don't," she added. "I have health and youth, and these will suffice me for what I have to do."

"Health and youth!" he cried, ignoring her proffered hand, and throwing his own hands up in a gesture of repudiation. "And what do these signify in a situation such as yours? They only mean that you will prolong an existence which, for such a woman as you, seems worse than death. You ask me to leave you so? To say good-bye--"

"Yes, I beg it, I implore it, I insist upon it," she interrupted him, feeling that her strength was almost gone. "You have said that you were willing to do me a service--then leave me."

She sank back in her chair exhausted.

"My G.o.d! am I a brute?" he said. "Have I made you ill with my idiotic persistency? I will go. I will rid you of the distress and annoyance of my presence. But before I go, Bettina," he said, with a sudden break in his voice, "I must and will satisfy my heart by one thing: I must, for the sake of my own soul's peace, tell you this. I have never ceased to love you, and I never shall. I gave you up when I saw the renunciation to be inevitable, but I knew then, as I know now, that I can never put any other in your place. You were the love of my youth, and you will be the love of my old age, if my lonely life goes on till then. Don't turn from me. Don't hide your face like that. I ask nothing but this sacred right to speak. I know you never loved me. I know it is not in me--if, indeed, it be in any mortal man--to enter into the heaven of being loved by you. But, at least, you have been the vision in my life--the sacred manifestation of what girl and sweetheart and woman and wife might be--and for that I thank you. In the shadow of that beatific vision I shall walk henceforth, and believe me when I say that I shall walk there alone."

Bettina, with her face buried in her hands, remained profoundly still. When he had waited a moment he began to fear that he had overtaxed her strength too far, and that she might have fainted.

Kneeling in front of her, he took her two wrists gently in his hands and tried to draw them away from her eyes. The strong resistance that she made to this gave evidence enough that she was conscious in every sentient nerve.

"Forgive me," he said; "I am going--I have been wrong to force all this upon you--but it is the last time that we shall meet. Let me, I pray you, see your face once more before I turn away from it forever."

The tense hands relaxed within his grasp, but he caught no more than a second's glimpse of the beautiful face before it was hid against his shoulder.

At the same instant a low voice whispered in his ear: