“The sweetest pleasure in life as well as the noblest quality in man is self-denial, Burgwan; and in your case it is real prudence and wisdom as well.”
“But she bade me wait for her,” I repeated.
“Not in Poabja, Burgwan. She bade me get from you your name and the means of communicating with you if ever——”
“Then it was a mere trick of words,” I cried with angry unreason. “I shall follow her;” and without waiting for him to reply I rode off quickly. I think I was afraid to trust myself longer with him; afraid lest he should prevail with me; afraid lest the fierce consuming desire to look once more upon her face should be chilled by the appeals to my better nature which he knew how to make so shrewdly.
Already he had made me conscious of the stubborn selfishness of my purpose; and as I galloped along, I sought to stifle the feeling with specious palliation and anger. She had no right to treat me in this way. I had done nothing and said nothing to deserve it. She had run away under the cover of a mere trick and ruse. And so on.
But I could not shake off the impression of the priest’s words, “Will it ease your own pain to make her suffer?” The question haunted me. I could find no answer to it in my own thoughts, just as I had found none in speaking with him. Out of it came the chilling conviction that the part I was playing was the part of the coward.
I was forcing myself upon her in face of her remonstrance and pleading. “Her own will and wish and doing.” What was I but a coward to try and force her. The very air took up the cry of coward; and the rhythm of my horse’s hoofs seemed to echo it at every throbbing stride.
But I knitted my brows and set my teeth and held on. I must see her again. I would. It was my passion that urged me. I would see her, let the world cry shame upon me for my cowardice. And I dug my heels into my horse’s flanks in my distraction and rushed along up hill and down alike at a mad, reckless speed.
Fast as I rode, however, I could not outpace that thought of cowardice. It gained upon me, little by little; now to be flung aside in anger, only to return to chill me until I hated the thing I was doing and had to put forth every effort of my selfish desire to prevent myself checking the horse and turning back to seek some other means to my end.
If it was really to cause her suffering, after what she had gone through, how dared I go on? What would she think of me? She had trusted to me in all that time of peril with the implicit trust of a child. Thank God I had been able to stand between her and her danger, and we had come through it together to safety. And now I was so madly selfish that I could not be man enough to spare her from this pain.