“Oh, I know it now!” he said softly to himself under the quiet sky. “I love her! What a woman she is! What a heart she has, what a heart! I want her for my wife; she’s the only one I want to have with me ’Till death us do part’--that’s a fair test. Why, I’ve been wondering why I enjoyed each minute with her and just longed to get to see her as often as possible--fool, not to recognize love when it came to me! But I know it now! I’m as sure of it as I am sure those stars, her stars, are shining up there in the sky.”
As he stood a moment silently looking into the starry heavens some portion of an old story came to him. “My love is as fair as the stars and well-nigh as remote and inaccessible.” Could he win the love of a girl like Amanda Reist? She gave him her friendship freely, would she give her love also? A woman like Amanda could never be satisfied with half-gods, she would love as she did everything else--intensely, entirely! He remembered reading that propinquity often led people into mistakes, that constant companionship was liable to awaken a feeling that might masquerade as love. Well, he’d be fair to her, he’d let separation prove his love.
“That’s just what I’ll do,” he decided. “Next week I’m to go on my vacation and I’ll be gone two weeks. I’ll not write to her and of course I won’t see her. Perhaps ’Absence will make the heart grow fonder’ with her. I hope so! It will be a long two weeks for me, but when I come back--” He flung out his arms to the night as though they could bring to him at once the form of the one he loved.
So it happened that after a very commonplace goodbye given to Amanda in the presence of the entire Reist household Martin Landis left Lancaster County a few weeks before Thanksgiving and journeyed to South Carolina to spend a quiet vacation at a mountain resort.
To Amanda Reist, pegging away in the schoolroom during the gray November days, his absence caused depression. He had said nothing about letters but she naturally expected them, friendly little notes to tell her what he was doing and how he was enjoying the glories of the famous mountains of the south. But no letters came from Martin.
“Oh,” she bit her lip after a week had gone and he was still silent. “I won’t care! He writes home; the children tell me he says the scenery is so wonderful where he is--why can’t he send me just one little note? But I’m not going to care. I’ve been a fool long enough. I should know by this time that it’s a case of ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ I’m about done with castles in Spain! All my sentimental dreams about my knight, all my rosy visions are, after all, of that substance of which all dreams are made. I suppose if I had been practical and sensible like other girls I could have made myself like Lyman Mertzheimer or some other ordinary country boy and settled down into a contented woman on a farm. Why couldn’t I long ago have put away my girlish illusions about knights and castles in Spain? I wonder if, after all, gold eagles are better and more to be desired than the golden roofs of our dream castles? If an automobile like Lyman Mertzheimer drives is not to be preferred to Sir Galahad’s pure white steed! I’ve clung to my romanticism and what has it brought me? It might have been wiser to let go my dreams, sweep the illusions from my eyes and settle down to a sordid, everyday existence as the wife of some man, like Lyman Mertzheimer, who has no eye for the beauties of nature but who has two eyes for me.”
Poor Amanda, destruction of her dream castles was perilously imminent! The golden turrets were tottering and the substance of which her dreams were made was becoming less ethereal. If Lyman Mertzheimer came to her then and renewed his suit would she give him a more encouraging answer than those she had given in former times? Amanda’s hour of weakness and despair was upon her. It was a propitious moment for the awakening of the forces of her lower nature which lay quiescent in her, as it dwells in us all--very few escape the Jekyll-Hyde combination.
When Martin Landis returned to Lancaster County he had a vagrant idea of what the South Carolina mountains are like. He would have told you that the trees there all murmur the name of Amanda, that the birds sing her name, the waterfalls cry it aloud! During his two weeks of absence from her his conviction was affirmed--he knew without a shadow of doubt that he loved her madly. All of Mrs. Browning’s tests he had applied--
“Unless you can muse in a crowd all day,
On the absent face that fixed you;
Unless you can love, as the angels may,
With the breadth of heaven betwixt you;
Unless you can dream that his faith is fast,
Through behoving and unbehoving;
Unless you can die when the dream is past--
Oh, never call it loving!”
Amanda was enthroned in his heart, he knew it at last! How blind he had been! He knew now what his mother had meant one day when she told him, “Some of you men are blinder’n bats! Bats do see at night!”