The Golden House

by Charles Dudley Warner

On the morrow Father Damon went back to his solitary rooms, to his chapel, to the round of visitations, to his work with the poor, the sinful, the hopeless. He did not seek her; he tried not to seem to avoid her, or to seem to shun the streets where he was most likely to meet her, and the neighborhoods she frequented. Perhaps he did avoid them a little, and he despised himself for doing it. Almost involuntarily he looked to the bench by the chapel door which she occasionally occupied at vespers. She was never there, and he condemned himself for thinking that she might be; but yet wherever he walked there was always the expectation that he might encounter her. As the days went by and she did not appear, his expectation became a kind of torture. Was she ill, perhaps? It could not be that she had deserted her work.

And then he began to examine himself with a morbid introspection. Had the hope that he should see her occasionally influenced him at all in his obedience to Father Monies? Had he, in fact, a longing to be in the streets where she had walked, among the scenes that had witnessed her beautiful devotion? Had his willingness to take up this work again been because it brought him nearer to her in spirit?

No, she could not be ill. He heard her spoken of, here and there, in his calls and ministrations to the sick and dying. Evidently she was going about her work as usual. Perhaps she was avoiding him. Or perhaps she did not care, after all, and had lost her respect for him when he discovered to her his weakness. And he had put himself on a plane so high above her.

There was no conscious wavering in his purpose. But from much dwelling upon the thought, from much effort rather to put it away, his desire only to see her grew stronger day by day. He had no fear. He longed to test himself. He was sure that he would be impassive, and be all the stronger for the test. He was more devoted than ever in his Work. He was more severe with himself, more charitable to others, and he could not doubt that he was gaining a hold-yes, a real hold-upon the lives of many about him. The attendance was better at the chapel; more of the penitent and forlorn came to him for help. And how alone he was! My God, never even to see her!

In fact, Ruth Leigh was avoiding him. It was partly from a womanly reserve—called into expression in this form for the first time—and partly from a wish to spare him pain. She had been under no illusion from the first about the hopelessness of the attachment. She comprehended his character so thoroughly that she knew that for him any fall from his ideal would mean his ruin. He was one of the rare spirits of faith astray in a skeptical age. For a time she had studied curiously his efforts to adapt himself to his surroundings. One of these was joining a Knights of Labor lodge. Another was his approach to the ethical-culture movement of some of the leaders in the Neighborhood Guild. Another was his interest in the philanthropic work of agnostics like herself. She could see that he, burning with zeal to save the souls of men, and believing that there was no hope for the world except in the renunciation of the world, instinctively shrank from these contacts, which, nevertheless, he sought in the spirit of a Jesuit missionary to a barbarous tribe.

It was possible for such a man to be for a time overmastered by human passion; it was possible even that he might reason himself temporarily into conduct that this natural passion seemed to justify; yet she never doubted that there would follow an awakening from that state of mind as from a horrible delusion. It was simply because Ruth Leigh was guided by the exercise of reason, and had built up her scheme of life upon facts that she believed she could demonstrate, that she saw so clearly their relations, and felt that the faith, which was to her only a vagary of the material brain, was to him an integral part of his life.

Love, to be sure, was as unexpected in her scheme of life as it was in his; but there was on her part no reason why she should not yield to it. There was every reason in her nature and in her theory why she should, for, bounded as her vision of life was by this existence, love was the highest conceivable good in life. It had been with a great shout of joy that the consciousness had come to her that she loved and was loved. Though she might never see him again, this supreme experience for man or woman, this unsealing of the sacred fountain of life, would be for her an enduring sweetness in her lonely and laborious pilgrimage. How strong love is they best know to whom it is offered and denied.

And why, so far as she was concerned, should she deny it? An ordinary woman probably would not. Love is reason enough. Why should artificial conventions defeat it? Why should she sacrifice herself, if he were willing to brave the opinion of the world for her sake? Was it any new thing for good men to do this? But Ruth Leigh was not an ordinary woman. Perhaps if her intellect had not been so long dominant over her heart it would have been different. But the habit of being guided by reason was second nature. She knew that not only his vow, but the habit of life engendered by the vow, was an insuperable barrier. And besides, and this was the touchstone of her conception of life and duty, she felt that if he were to break his vow, though she might love him, her respect for him would be impaired.

It was a singular phenomenon—very much remarked at the time—that the women who did not in the least share Father Damon's spiritual faith, and would have called themselves in contradistinction materialists, were those who admired him most, were in a way his followers, loved to attend his services, were inspired by his personality, and drawn to him in a loving loyalty. The attraction to these very women was his unworldliness, his separateness, his devotion to an ideal which in their reason seemed a delusion. And no women would have been more sensitive than they to his fall from his spiritual pinnacle.

It was easy with a little contrivance to avoid meeting him. She did not go to the chapel or in its neighborhood when he was likely to be going to or from service. She let others send for him when in her calls his ministration was required, and she was careful not to linger where he was likely to come. A little change in the time of her rounds was made without neglecting her work, for that she would not do, and she trusted that if accident threw him in her way, circumstances would make it natural and not embarrassing. And yet his image was never long absent from her thoughts; she wondered if he were dejected, if he were ill, if he were lonely, and mostly there was for him a great pity in her heart, a pity born, alas! of her own sense of loneliness.