The Hidden Places

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

"Don't mistake me, Robin," she said with a self-conscious little laugh. "I'm no lovesick flapper. Neither am I simply a voluptuous creature seeking a new sensation. I don't feel as if I couldn't live without you. But I do feel as if I could come back to you again and it would be a little like coming home after a long, disappointing journey. When I see you suffering, I want to comfort you. If she makes you suffer, I shall be unhappy unless I can make you feel that life still holds something good. If I could do that, I should perhaps find life good myself. And it doesn't seem much good to me, any more. I'm still selfish. I want to be happy. And I can't find happiness anywhere. I look back to our old life and I envy myself. If the war marred your face and made you suffer, remember what it has done to me. Those months and months that dragged into years in London. Oh, I know I was weak. But I was used to love. I craved it. I used to lie awake thinking about you, in a fever of protest because you could not be there with me, in a perfect passion of resentment at the circumstances that kept you away; until it seemed to me that I had never had you, that there was no such man, that all our life together was only a dream. Think what the war did to us. How it has left us—you scarred and hopeless; I, scarred by my passions and emotions. That is all the war did for any one—scarred them, those it didn't kill. Oh, Robin, Robin, life seems a ghastly mockery, sometimes. It promises so much and gives so little."

She bent her head. Her shoulders shook with sobs she tried to strangle. Hollister put his hand on the thick coils of honey-colored hair. He was sorry for her—and for himself. And he was disturbed to find that the touch of her hair, the warm pressure of her hands on his knee, made his blood run faster.

The curious outbreak spent itself. She drew herself away from him, and rising to her feet without a word she walked rapidly away along the path by the river.

Hollister looked after her. He was troubled afresh, and he thought to himself that he must avoid scenes like that. He was not, it appeared, wholly immune from the old virus.

And he was clearly conscious of the cold voice of reason warning him against Myra. Sitting there in the shadow of his silent house, he puzzled over these new complexities of feeling. He was a little bewildered. To him Doris meant everything that Myra had once been. He wanted only to retain what he had. He did not want to salvage anything from the wreckage of the past. He was too deeply concerned with the dreadful test that fully restored eyesight would impose on Doris. He knew that Doris Cleveland's feeling for him had been profound and vital. She had given too many proofs for him to doubt that. But would it survive? He did not know. He hoped a little and feared much.

Above this fear he found himself now bewildered by this fresh swirl of emotion. He knew that if Myra had flung herself into his arms he would have found some strange comfort in that embrace, that he could not possibly have repulsed her. It was a prop to his soul—or was it, he asked himself, merely his vanity?—that Myra could look behind the grimness of his features and dwell fondly on the essential man, on the reality behind that dreadful mask.

Still, Hollister knew that to be only a mood, that unexpected tenderness for a woman whom he had hated for betraying him. It was Doris he wanted. The thought of her passing out of his life rested upon him like an intolerable burden. To be in doubt of her afflicted him with anguish. That the fires of her affection might dwindle and die before daily sight of him loomed before Hollister as the consummation of disaster,—and he seemed to feel that hovering near, closely impending.

That they had lived together sixteen months did not count. That she had borne him a child,—neither did that count. That she had pillowed her brown head nightly in the crook of his arm—that he had bestowed a thousand kisses on her lips, her hair, her neck—that she had lain beside him hour after hour through the long nights, drowsily content—none of these intimacies counted beside vision. He was a stranger in the dark. She did not know him. She heard his voice, knew his tenderness, felt the touch of him,—the unseen lover. But there remained for her the revelation of sight. He was still the mysterious, the unknown, about which her fancies played.

How could he know what image of him, what ideal, resided tenaciously in her mind, and whether it would survive the shock of reality? That was the root of Hollister's fear, a definite well-grounded fear. He found himself hoping that promise of sight would never be fulfilled, that the veil would not be lifted, that they would go on as they were. And he would feel ashamed of such a thought. Sight was precious. Who was he to deny her that mercy,—she who loved the sun and the hills and the sea; all the sights of earth and sky which had been shut away so long; she who had crept into his arms many a time, weeping passionate tears because all the things she loved were forever wrapped in darkness?