“I have done nothing for her. Everything has failed.” Still, with closed eyes, she leaned her head against the chair, and slow tears fell down her cheeks.
“You have fulfilled yourself toward her; that is not failure. You have fought your fight. Surely it is the fighting, and not its result, that makes success. And can you say that everything has failed—when you still have me to live for? Claire has gone out of your life. She has shut the door on you. She has left you, and—oh, dearest, dearest, she has left you to me!”
He stood before her, looking at her with faithful eyes. His love for her made no menace to her grief; it did not jar upon her sorrow; rather it was with her in it all, it could not: be separated from it—as he could not be separated from any part of her life.
“You are alone now,” he said, “and I am alone.”
“No,”—she put her hand out to him,—“no; we are not alone.”
“Then—“ The air was golden, and in the open window, white flowers, set there, dazzled against the sky. This day of sunlight and disaster must symbolize the past and the future, as her eyes, with their silent, solemn assent, her face, so sweet and so sorrowful. She rose; he drew her toward him. But then, as though another consecration than embrace and kiss were needed for this strange betrothal, she walked with him, holding his hand, to the window, where the white flowers dazzled in the sun. She looked at the flowers, at the trees, at the splendid serenity of the morning sky, softly breathing the clear, radiant air—as though in “a peace out of pain.”
“We will go away,” said Damier, who looked at her; and, despite his sorrowing for her, the day seemed to him full of wings and music. “I do not want to see Paris again, do you? And this will be our last memory of it—these flowers, this garden, this sky, that we look at together. We will think of it so, without pain almost, in a new, new life.”
“A new life,” she repeated gently and vaguely. Lifting his hand, she kissed it. “You have rescued me from the old one. You are my angel of resurrection,” she said.
Yet that the future was dim to her, except through his faith in it,—that, indeed, it could never become an unshadowed brightness,—he knew, as, leaning against him, needing protection from her bitter thoughts, she murmured in the anguish of her desolate and bereaved motherhood: “Oh—but my child!”