The summer slid, Bayard knew not how. They separated as so many confused lovers do in the complicated situations of our later life; wherein we love no longer in the old, outright, downright way, when men and women took each other for better, for worse, and dared to run the risk of loving, without feeling responsible for the consequences. We are past all that; and whether it is the worse or the better for us, who shall say?
At least, these two had the healthy ring to their love; in that great and simple feeling was no delinquency or default. Bayard did not hesitate or quibble—one day a lover, the next a prudential committee, after the fashion of such feeble mathematicians as go by the name of men, to-day. He was incapable of calculating his high passion; there was no room in his soul or body for a doubt to take on lease of life. He loved her; as the greatest of women might be proud and humble to be loved; as the smallest would be vain to be.
He loved her too much to make her miserable; and he knew, with that dreary, practical perception of the truth sometimes but rarely granted to men of the seer’s temperament, that he could not make her happy. Between love and joy a dead wall shut down; it seemed to him to reach from the highest heavens to the waters under the earth. What elemental chaos could rend it? What miracle was foreordained to shatter it? Would the busy finger of God stretch out to touch it?
“God knows,” he wrote her. “And He purposes, I am fain to believe, if He purposes anything we do or suffer. The hour may come, and the way might clear. More incredible things have happened to men and women loving less than we. If I can, I claim you when I can. Oh, wait for me, and trust me! Life is so short; it is not easy. Sometimes madness enters into me, to fling all these cold, these cruel considerations, these things we call honor, unselfishness, chivalry, to the gales.... Then I come to myself. I will not wrong you. Help me to bear to live without you till I see your face again.”
Helen wrote him noble letters; brave, womanly, and as trustful as the swing of the earth in its orbit. It is not too much to say that few women in her place would have shown the strong composure of this ardent girl. The relation between acknowledged lovers unbetrothed is one whose difficulty only an inspired delicacy can control. Helen’s clear eyes held no shadows. The dark wing of regret for a moment’s weakness never brushed between her heart and this Sir Galahad who loved her like man and spirit too. Few women reared as she had been would have trusted the man as she did; we may add that fewer men would have deserved it.
Emanuel Bayard did. Her heart knew him for one of the sons of light, who will not, because he cannot, cause the woman whom he loves an hour’s regret that she has believed in him utterly and told him so. Now, the value of a woman’s intuition in most of the problems or relations of life cannot be overestimated; when she loves, it is the least reliable of her attributes or qualities. Helen in her composed way recognized this fact perfectly, but it gave her no uneasiness.
“My own perception might fail me,” she wrote. “You could not. It is not my own sense of what is best to do that I am trusting, in this: it is you.”
When he read these words, he put the paper to his lips, and laid his face upon it, and covered it from the sight even of his own eyes.
The date of Professor Carruth’s return was set for early October. In September Bayard received from Helen the news that her mother had met with an accident—a fall; an arm was broken, and, at the age of the patient, the surgeon forbade the voyage. The Professor would get back to his lecture-room, as he must. The two ladies were indefinitely delayed in Berlin.