He looked at her silently for a moment, his cheeks pale, his breast heaving. Before he came to Beryngford, he had fought his battle between religion and human passion, and passion had won. He had cast under his feet every principle and tradition in which he had been reared, and resolved to live alone henceforth for the love and companionship of one human being, could he obtain her consent to go with him.
Yet for the moment, he hesitated to speak the words he had resolved to utter, under the roof of a house of God, so strong were the influences of his early training and his habits of thought. But as his eyes feasted upon the face before him, his hesitation vanished, and he leaned toward her and spoke. “Joy,” he said, “three years ago I went away and left you in sorrow, alone, because I was afraid to brave public opinion, afraid to displease my mother and ask you to be my wife. The story your mother told me of your birth, a story she left in manuscript for you to read, made a social coward of me. I was afraid to take a girl born out of wedlock to be my life companion, the mother of my children. Well, I married a girl born in wedlock; and where is my companion?” He paused and laughed recklessly. Then he went on hurriedly: “She is in an asylum for the insane. I am chained to a corpse for life. I had not enough moral courage three-years ago to make you my wife. But I have moral courage enough now to come here and ask you to go with me to Australia, and begin a new life together. My mother died a year ago. I donned the surplice at her bidding. I will abandon it at the bidding of Love. I sinned against heaven in marrying a woman I did not love. I am willing to sin against the laws of man by living with the woman I do love; will you go with me, Joy?” There was silence save for the beating of the rain against the stained window, and the wailing of the wind.
Joy was in a peculiarly overwrought condition of mind and body. Her hours of extravagant weeping the previous night, followed by a day of fasting, left her nervous system in a state to be easily excited by the music she had been playing. She was virtually intoxicated with sorrow and harmony. She was incapable of reasoning, and conscious only of two things—that she must leave Beryngford, and that the man whom she had loved with her whole heart for five years, was asking her to go with him; to be no more homeless, unloved, and alone, but his companion while life should last.
“Answer me, Joy,” he was pleading. “Answer me.”
She moved toward the stairway that led down to the street door; and as she flitted by him, she said, looking him full in the eyes with a slow, grave smile, “Yes, Arthur, I will go with you.”
He sprang toward her with a wild cry of joy, but she was already flying down the stairs and out upon the street.
When he joined her, they walked in silence through the rain to her door, neither speaking a word, until he would have followed her within. Then she laid her hand upon his shoulder and said gently but firmly: “Not now, Arthur; we must not see each other again until we go away. Write me where to meet you, and I will join you within twenty-four hours. Do not urge me—you must obey me this once—afterward I will obey you. Good-night.”
As she closed the door upon him, he said, “Oh, Joy, I have so much to tell you. I promised your father when he was dying that I would find you; I swore to myself that when I found you I would never leave you, save at your own command. I go now, only because you bid me go. When we meet again, there must be no more parting; and you shall hear a story stranger than the wildest fiction—the story of your father’s life. Despite your mother’s secretiveness regarding this portion of her history, the knowledge has come to me in the most unexpected manner, from the lips of the man himself.”
Joy listened dreamily to the words he was saying. Her father—she was to know who her father was? Well, it did not matter much to her now—father, mother, what were they, what was anything save the fact that he had come back to her and that he loved her?
She smiled silently into his eyes. Glance became entangled with glance, and would not be separated.