“Oh, do not suffer so!” said Helen, in a faltering voice. “Do not, do not mind it—so much! It—it breaks my heart!”
These timid, womanly words recalled Bayard to himself.
“Before I break your heart,” he cried, “I ought to be sawn asunder!
“... Let us talk of this a little,” he said in a changed tone. “Just a word. You must see—you must understand my position. What another man would say, in my place, I cannot say—to any woman. What I would die for the right to ask, I may not ask.”
“I understand,” said Helen almost inaudibly.
She still stood with her back to the light, and her face to the sea.
“I love you! I love you!” he repeated. “It is because I love you—Oh, do you see? Can you see?”
Helen made no reply. Was it possible that she dared not trust herself, at that moment, to articulate? Her silence seemed to the tortured man more cruel than the bitterest word which ever fell from the lip of a proud and injured woman.
Now again the camera of his whirling brain took instantaneous negatives. He saw himself doing what other men had done before him: abandoning a doubtful experiment of the conscience to win a woman’s love. He saw himself chopping the treadmill of his unpopular, unsuccessful work to chips; a few strong blows would do it; the discouraged people would merge themselves in the respectable churches; the ripples that he had raised in the fishing-town would close over, and his submerged work would sink to the bottom and leave no sign. A few reformed drunkards would go on a spree; a few fishermen would feel neglected for awhile: the scarlet and white fires of the Church of the Love of Christ would go out on Angel Alley. In a year Windover would be what Windover was. The eye of the great Christ would gaze no more upon him through the veil of coarse gauze; while he—free—a new man—with life before him, like other men, and the right to love—like any other man—
“That,” he said solemnly, as if he had spoken aloud, “is impossible. There could be only that one way. I cannot take it.”