“But I’m glad, Al!” she told him. “It’s life!”
EPILOGUE
§ i
IT struck Claudine with the force of a blow. She put down the book and the night wind at once fluttered over the pages, as if by command of nature trying to divert her. But she turned back to the place again, all her heart fixed on the words like the eyes of a frightened child fixed upon an approaching light; she did not all at once grasp the meaning, but the significance was coming to her, illuminating and dispelling a familiar dusk, revealing to her what had always been there, but what she had not seen.
She had been turning over the pages of an old copy of Browning’s poems, given her by Lance years ago, because he had fancied that so small and delicate and pretty a creature must necessarily feed on poetry. As a matter of fact, she had never been poetic, not even very romantic; she had always had a love for indigestible ideas, which had, in the main, done her very little harm. She might read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer; she remained none the less the Claudine who could wander gay and happy in a garden.
And now suddenly stood up this robust dead poet to look into her soul and accuse her, to judge and condemn her. The thing had all the solemn horror of what her ancestors would have called the voice of an awakened conscience; it was the handwriting on the wall.
The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is—the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.
That was for her! That was an arrow for her heart.
She was quite alone in the house; Rose had gone out to a lodge meeting of the Lady Pioneers. Claudine was always glad to let her go; she was never so happy as when alone with her ghosts. When the stairs creaked, that was the stout figure of her mother in dull black silk, going about her benevolent household affairs; there was a rustle of paper; that was the boy Lance studying in his room upstairs; a faint tapping; that was her father emptying his pipe. The wind blowing across the garden brought back to her unblemished the old emotions, the sheltered security, that careless and formless hope that had filled her girlhood; she would forget, alone in her room, the reality she had found so bitter.
But to be a ghost among these other ghosts! That frightened her. She looked about the quiet lamp-lit room; in the bookcase her old books, on the walls her old pictures, on the bureau the photographs of her father and mother, and a pitiful little bottle of that Cherry Blossom perfume; only the old things; it was as if twenty years had been a dream. She was aware that she had tried to make them so, that she had tried with desperation not to live. Blasphemous effort, rewarded now by this numb anguish!