But now, at that, for some reason, a revulsion of feeling took me. I sank down upon the ground away from him, and hid my face in my hands.
“No, no,” I cried—“not yet, not now. O, leave me, please!”
Perhaps he was wise to understand and temporise. Anyhow, he went, though no farther than the door.
For a moment I hated myself; for a moment I felt the basest thing on earth. What use to reflect that reason and kindness were on my side: that, since I could not cure a poor fond fool, it were no mercy, but the contrary, to submit him to the continued infection of my presence? I said so to myself, and saying it, saw his face returning—full of light and eagerness—to learn the damning truth! To be held accursed in that great heart! I could not, I could not! Poor Gogo! Had he not given up everything for me? I would not desert him. Why should he not come too? But no: I saw in the same instant that that was impossible, since he himself had no thought, no wish, to be my brother. And perhaps, if I went, I should never see him again. Well, would not that be the best for him? Let me nurse my grief eternal, so long as he found his cure in separation. It were better I should go. Freed of this incubus, he would have no longer need to crouch and starve. The world had no reason, so far as I knew, to identify him with my flight. And now every hour he remained with me was an added peril to his safety, his very existence!
Quite wild, I rose to my feet and went panting to the shadow.
“Take me away,” I said, “before he breaks my heart, returning.”
He took my hand tight in his, drew me under the starlight, and together we fled down the hill and into the woods.
XVII.
I AM CONSIGNED TO A GREEN GRAVE
To you, my dear Alcide, conscience is, I know, a disease, and virtue its relapse. I do not, then, ask your sympathy, but only your commiseration in that long struggle with my better self in which I was now to engage—a struggle which found me child, and left me woman—a struggle through whose intermittent deliriums moved ever the sorrowful figure of my poor lost Gogo.
Yet I must own that the oasis in which this destiny was to be fulfilled figured for a period the greenest in all my desert career. It was a dear time, in truth; a dear, abandoned, wonderful time, until the inevitable disenchantment came. Alas! to take profit of your own unselfishnesses is, with a stern Providence, to convert them into the plainest of worldly transactions!