She must feel in his silence now the quality of some extreme emotion, and that she believed it to be pity was evident to him as she went on, seeking to comfort him; and troubled by his trouble: “You mustn’t be sorry. I am not unhappy. I am a happy person. Do you remember that Sunday morning at Coldbrooks, long ago? How I said to Mother—to Mrs. Chadwick—that I had no doubts? You thought me fatuous. I dimly saw that you thought me fatuous. But it’s still true of me. I must tell you, so that you shan’t think I’m unhappy. I’ve been, it seems to me, through everything since then. I’ve had doubts—every doubt: of myself; of life; of all the things I trusted. Doubt at last, when the dreadful darknesses came—Barney’s hatred, Palgrave’s death—of God. We’ve never spoken of Palgrave, have we? I was with him, you had heard, and at the very end it was he who helped me rather than I him. He held me up. When he was dying he held me up. He made me promise him that I would not kill myself—for he guessed what I was thinking; he made me promise to go on. And he saved me. The light began to come back to me while I sat beside him after he had died.”
She had not looked at him while she spoke, but down at her hands that, trembling, turned and returned the little pocket-book. And controlling her voice as she sought to control the trembling of her hands, she said: “Perhaps it is always like that. When one confesses one’s sin and hates it in oneself, even if it is still there, tempting one, the light begins to come back. After that it came more and more. What you call my gift is part of it. Isn’t it strange that I should have had that gift when I was so blind? But what you said was true. I had a sort of wholeness then, because I was blind. And now that I see, it’s a better wholeness and a safer gift. That is what I wanted to say, really. To explain, so that you shan’t be sorry. No one who can find that light can be unhappy. It comes to me now, always, when I need it. I can make it shine in other people—as Palgrave made it shine in me. Love does it. Isn’t it wonderful that it should be so? Nothing else is real beside it. Nothing is real without it. And when it happens, when one feels it come through and shine further, it is more, far more, than happiness.”
All the while that she had spoken, pale, and with her trembling hands, he had lain looking at her in silence, a silence that was dividing him, as if by a vast chasm, from all his former life.
He and Adrienne stood on one side of this chasm, and, while it seemed to widen with a dizzying rapidity, he saw that on the other stood Barney, Nancy, Coldbrooks, and Lydia—poor Lydia—and that they were being borne away from him for ever. He saw nothing before him but Adrienne; and for how long was he to keep her? That was his supreme risk; but he could not allay it or step back to the further brink. It was his very life that had fallen in two while she had spoken and without the sense of choice; though he dimly saw that, in the restlessness and urgency of the hours since he had seen her last, the choice had been preparing.
He was taking the only step possible for him to take on the narrow foothold of the present when he said, in a voice so quiet that she might even be unaware of his seeming gross irrelevance, “Do you know, about your plan—for Barney and Nancy—I’ve been thinking it over and I’ve decided that it must be I, not Hamilton.”
CHAPTER VI
HER eyes met his for a long time before he realized that she might find not only irrelevance but even irreverence. She had shown him her very soul and he had answered with this announcement. Of course it had been because of what she told him that he had seen at last his own necessity; but he could not tell her that.
“I’m not sorry for you,” he said. “I envy you. You are one of the few really happy people in the world.”
“But I’d quite given that idea up, Mr. Oldmeadow,” she said. “What has made you change?”
He saw the trouble in her face, the suspicion of her power and its compulsion over the lives of others. He took the bull by the horns.