“It is that that enrages me,—your mystic sickness. I am awake, but you aren’t even dreaming. You are drugged—drugged with thought not strong enough to find its real end. You have paralyzed yourself. No argument could cure you. No thought could cure you. Only life could cure you. You must get life, and to get it you must want it.”
“I don’t want it. I can’t want it. I only want you,” said Gavan, with such a different echo.
She understood, more fully than he, perhaps, the helpless words.
Above his bowed head, her face set, she looked out into the night. Her mind measured, coldly it seemed to her, the strength of her own faith and of his negation.
Her love, including but so far transcending all natural cravings, had its proud recoil from the abasement—oh, she saw it all!—that his limitation would bring to it. Yet, like the mother again, adapting truth to the child’s dim apprehension, leading it on by symbols, she brooded over her deep thoughts of redemption and looked clearly at all dangers and all hopes. Faith must face even his unspiritual seeing. Faith must endure his worse than pagan love. Bound to her by every natural tie, her strength must lift him, through them, to their spiritual aspect, to their reality. Life was her ally. She must put her trust in life. She consecrated herself to it anew. Let it lead her where it would.
The long moment of steady forecast had, after its agony of shame and fear, its triumph over both.
He felt the deep sigh that lifted her breast—it was almost a sob; but now her arms took him closely, gently, to her and her voice had the steadfastness, no longer of rejection, but of acceptance.
“Gavan, dream with me, then; that’s better than being drugged. Perhaps you will wake some day. There, I kiss you.”
She said it, and with the words his lips were on hers.
In the long moment of their embrace he had a strange intuition. Something was accomplished; some destiny that had led them to this hour was satisfied and would have no more to do with them. He seemed almost to hear this thought of finality, like the far, distant throbbing of a funeral bell, though the tolling only shut them the more closely into the silence of the wonderful moment.