The Builders

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"You are unhappy!" With these three words, into which he seemed to put infinity, he had broken down the walls of reticence that divide human souls from each other. She was unhappy! Before this one torrential discovery all the restraints of habit and tradition, of conscience and honour, vanished like the imperfect structures of man in the rage of the hurricane.

She shivered, and looked at him with a long frightened gaze. There was no rebellion, there was only a passive sadness in her face. She was too weak, her eyes said, to contend with unhappiness. Some stronger hands than hers must snatch her from her doom if she were to be rescued.

"How can I be happy?" The words were wrung slowly from her lips. "You see how it is?"

"Yes, I see." He honestly imagined that he did. "I see it all, and it makes me desperate. It is unbelievable that any one should make you suffer."

She shook her head and answered in a whisper, "It is partly my fault. Whatever happens, I always try to remember that, and be just. The first mistake may have been mine."

"Yours?" he exclaimed passionately, and then dropping his face into his hands, "If only I were not powerless to protect you!"

For a moment, after his smothered cry, she said nothing. Then, with an exquisite gesture of renunciation, she put the world and its temptations away from her. "We are both powerless," she responded firmly, "and now you must read me the rest of your play, or I shall be obliged to send you home."

Blackburn, meanwhile, had stopped outside on his way to the stable, and stood looking across the garden for some faint prospect of a clearer to-morrow. Overhead the winter sky was dull and leaden; but in the west a thin silver line edged the horizon, and his gaze hung on this thread of light, as if it were prophetic not only of sunshine, but of happiness. Already he was blaming himself for the scene with Angelica; already he was resolving to make a stronger effort at reconciliation and understanding, to win her back in spite of herself, to be patient, sympathetic, and generous, rather than just, in his judgment of her. In his more philosophical moments he beheld her less as the vehicle of personal disenchantment, than as the unfortunate victim of a false system, of a ruinous upbringing. She had been taught to grasp until grasping had become not so much a habit of gesture, as a reflex movement of soul—an involuntary reaction to the nerve stimulus of her surroundings.

Though he had learned that the sight of any object she did not own immediately awoke in her the instinct of possession, he still told himself, in hours of tolerance, that this weakness of nature was the result of early poverty and lack of mental discipline, and that disappointment with material things would develop her character as inevitably as it would destroy her physical charm. So far, he was obliged to admit, she had risen superior to any disillusionment from possession, with the ironic exception of that brief moment when she had possessed his adoration; yet, in spite of innumerable failures, it was characteristic of the man that he should cling stubbornly to his belief in some secret inherent virtue in her nature, as he had clung, when love failed him, to the frail sentiments of habit and association. The richness of her beauty had blinded him for so long to the poverty of her heart, that, even to-day, bruised and humiliated as he was, he found himself suddenly hoping that she might some day change miraculously into the woman he had believed her to be. The old half-forgotten yearning for her swept over him while he thought of her, the yearning to kneel at her feet, to kiss her hands, to lift his eyes and see her bending like an angel above him. And in his thoughts she came back to him, not as she was in reality, but as he longed for her to be. With one of those delusive impersonations of memory, which torment the heart after the mind has rejected them, she came back to him with her hands outstretched to bless, not to grasp, and a look of goodness and love in her face.

He remembered his first meeting with her—the close, over-heated rooms, the empty faces, the loud, triumphant music; and then suddenly she had bloomed there, like a white flower, in the midst of all that was ineffectual and meaningless. One minute he had been lonely, tired, depressed, and the next he was rested and happy and full of wild, startled dreams of the future. She had been girlish and shy and just a little aloof—all the feminine graces adorned her—and he had surrendered in the traditional masculine way. Afterwards he discovered that she had intended from the first instant to marry him; but on that evening he had seen only her faint, reluctant flight from his rising emotion. She had played the game so well; she had used the ancient decoy so cleverly, that it had taken years to tear the veil of illusion from the bare structure of method. For he knew now that she had been methodical, that she had been utterly unemotional; and that her angelic virtue had been mere thinness of temperament. Never for a moment had she been real, never had she been natural; and he admitted, in the passing mood of confession, that if she had once been natural—as natural as the woman upstairs—the chances were that she would never have won him. Manlike, he would have turned from the blade-straight nature to pursue the beckoning angel of the faint reluctance. If she had stooped but for an instant, if she had given him so much as the touch of her fingers, she might have lost him. Life, not instinct, had taught him the beauty of sincerity in woman, the grace of generosity. In his youth, it was woman as mystery, woman as destroyer, to whom he had surrendered.