He was answering her look, seeing her as life’s wounded champion, standing, shot through, on the ramparts of her beleaguered city. She would shake her banner high in the air as she fell. The pity, the fury, the love of his eyes dwelt on her.
And suddenly, under that look, her eyes closed. She shrank together in her chair; she bowed down her head upon her knees, covering her face.
“Oh, Jim,” she said, “my heart is broken.”
He knew that he had brought her to this, that never before an onlooker had she so fallen into her own misery. He had forced her to show the final truth that, though she held the banner, she was shot through and through. And he could do nothing but stand on above her, his face set to a flintier, sharper endurance, as he heard the great sobs shake her.
He left her presently and walked up and down the room while she wept, crouched over upon her knees. It was not for long. The tempest passed, and, when she sat in quiet, her head in her hands, her face still hidden, he said, “You must set about mending now, Eppie.”
“I can’t mend. I’ll live; but I can’t mend.”
“Don’t say it, Eppie. This may pass as—well—other things in your life have passed.”
“Do you, too, talk Spinoza to me, Jim?”
“Damn Spinoza! I’m talking life to you—the life we both believe in. I’m not telling you to turn your back on it because it has crippled you. You won’t, I know it. I know that you are brave. Eppie, Eppie,”—before her, now, he bent to her, then knelt beside her chair,—“let me be the crutch. Let me have the fragments. Let’s try, together, to mend them. I ask nothing of you but that trying, with my help, to mend. He isn’t for you. He’s never for you. I’ll say no more brutalities of him. I’ll use your own words and say that he can’t,—that his saintship can’t. So won’t you, simply, let me take you? Even if you’re broken for life, let me have the broken Eppie.”
She had never, except in the moment of the kiss, seen this deepest thing in him, this gentleness, this reverent tenderness that, under the bullying, threatening, angry aspects of his love, now supplicated with a beauty that revealed all the angel in humanity. Strange—she could think it in all her sorrow—that the thing that held him to her was the thing that held her to Gavan, the deep, the mysterious, the unchangeable affinity. For him, as for her, there could be but one, and for that one alone could these depths and heights of the heart open themselves.