The thought filled the man’s soul and surrounded it as water fills and surrounds a ring fallen into the sea. Barbara had loved him. There was nothing in the world outside that thought.
At first, it caught him up to heaven, and then just as he saw the light, it flung him down to hell.
Fool that he had been, never to see the truth under her reserve, while seeing would have meant standing by her, keeping her forever! But he had let her go, and it was too late now, even for explanations. He had shut an iron door between them; and standing with her on the other side of that door was a man who called her his wife. There was the situation; and he, by his silence, had created it. He was condemned to perpetual silence; for it was the wildest, most hopeless mockery of all which brought to John Sanbourne a knowledge of Barbara’s love for John Denin.
Fate had been laughing at him while he wrote his book with a message of peace for her, laughing wicked and cruel laughter, because through the message he was to come into touch with Barbara and learn the tragic failure of his sacrifice. That seemed to Denin a vile trick for life to play upon a man, and whipped by the seven devils of thwarted love which had entered into him he cursed it; cursed life and fate, himself and Trevor d’Arcy, and was ready to deny Justice, even Justice blindfolded.
His heaven lasted for a moment at best. For many hours Cain and Abel in him fought each other in hell. But he had been down in depths well nigh as black, and had struggled out to the light. Remembering this, he struggled out once more, at last, and perceived that, somehow, to his own wondering surprise, he had stumbled up to a higher level and a stronger footing than before. Within distant sight he visioned those serene mountain tops where light is, the light that never shines on sea or land for those who have not suffered.
Only a short time ago he had begun daily to realize and tell himself that strength and steadfastness alone really mattered; that suffering was but a flame which passed. This was still true, as true as it had ever been. A man could choose whether the flame should consume or purify him in its passing; and here and now the immediate hour of his choice was on the stroke. At the end of that day of turmoil, Denin seemed still to be looking down at himself, as a crouching prisoner in a dark underground cell. Yet he knew that he was his own prisoner, not really a helpless captive of the Fate he had cursed. Fate had no power after all to make men prisoners. It was their business to find this out, and to prove that they had only to release themselves, in order to be free. He felt this to be an abstract fact of life; and if he meant to live he must make it concrete.
The underground hole where he so miserably crouched was but the cellar of his darkest self. If he but thought so, he had strength enough in him to fight his way up into the high, bright tower which was also himself, a tower with a wide view on every side, over the sunlit mountains from whose peaks he could already catch some glimmering vision.
Even the thought of the mountain tops—that they were there, shining, and always had been and always would be—made Denin lift his head and draw deep breaths into his lungs. That part of him which had yearned to write the book for Barbara and had conquered difficulties to write it, came like a strong brother to the rescue of a weak brother and pulled him up by main force out of the dark. He tried to reassure himself, over and over, that he need never again crawl back into the darkness. He had seen the view from the tower, and the tower was his to reach.
Denin had not worked out for his own guidance any clear-cut philosophy of life. He had just stumbled along with strength for his goal mark, trying now and then to recall some whisper or note of music he had caught from the other side before he came back. He had written down in his book, for Barbara, all that had been tangible under his pen. But now, knowing she had loved him, he saw how much more help she needed than he had given, and how much more—how very much more—he owed her.