“I told you—no, darling, I won’t say it,” answered Ralston. “Give me a kiss, and I won’t say it.”
CHAPTER XXIII.
Love, Mrs. Lauderdale had said in her absent-minded way, was not at all like other passions. The words remained in Katharine’s memory and pleased her and comforted her in a manner which would have surprised the elder woman, had she guessed that she had unintentionally drawn music from a human soul with one of those dull and stereotyped phrases which people fall back upon when they cannot or will not explain themselves.
But that was precisely what Katharine wished to believe—that love was not at all like other passions, that it bore not the slightest resemblance in its nature to those which she had seen asserting themselves so strongly around her, and of which she was beginning to understand something by proxy, as it were. For though she had said that her love for John Ralston was like her father’s love of money, she did not in the least wish to believe it. She attached to love the highest interpretation of which it is capable; she attributed to it the purest and most disinterested motives; she gave it in her thoughts the strongest and best qualities which anything can have.
She had a right to do so, and though she sought an explanation of her right, she was not disturbed because she found none. She dreamed of theories vague, but as beautiful as they were untenable, as men of ancient times imagined impossible, but deeply poetic, interpretations of nature and her doings. Her soul, and the soul of the man she loved had elected one another of old from amongst myriads; neither could give light without the other, nor could either live without the other’s life. Together they were one immortal; separate they must perish. The good of each was the triumphant enemy of evil in the other, and the evil in both was gradually to be driven out and forgotten in the perfection of the whole.
All that was contemplative in her nature was entranced before the exquisite beauty of her imagined deity. Little by little, as other attachments were rudely shaken, broken, and destroyed, the one of all others which she most valued grew stronger and fairer in the wreck of the rest; the one passion which she saw was good towered in her soul’s field as an archangel among devils, spotless, severe, and invincible. The angel was not John Ralston, nor were the devils those persons with whom her life had to do. They all had other features, immortal natures, and transcendent reasoning. At that time there was in her the foundation of a great mythology of ideals, good and bad, personified and almost named, among which love was king over all the rest, endowed with divine attributes, with knowledge of the human soul, and power to move the human heart, knowing all motives and divining all impulses,—a being to whom a prayer might be said in trouble, and whose beneficent hand would be swift and strong to help. Love, in her theory of the world, was the prime cause, the intelligent director, and at the same time the ultimate end. She and her husband were under his immediate and especial protection. If they were faithful to him, he would shield them from harm, and make them immortal with himself beyond the stars. If they denied him—that is, if they ceased to love one another—his face would grow dark, his right hand would be full of semi-biblical terrors, and he would abandon them to the wicked will of the devils,—which were the bad passions the girl saw in others,—to be tormented until they themselves should be extinguished in eternal night.
Practically, Katharine had constructed a religion for herself out of the most human thing in her nature, since she had lost the bearings of anything higher in the storms through which she had passed. It was by no means an unassailable religion, nor a very logical one, being derived altogether from the exaltation of the most human of all passions, and having its details deduced from the one-sided experience of an innocent child. But that very innocence, that very impossibility of conceiving that there should be anything not good in love that was true, gave it an enormous force against the powers which were evidently evil. There was an appearance of inexorably sound reason, too, in the conclusion that all human motive was passion of one kind or another, and that all passions but love were bad and self-destructive in the end, having their foundation in selfishness, and not in the other self that fills love-dreams.
Since passion and motive were one and the same, thought Katharine, there could be no question as to which of them all was the best, since true love such as hers was the only passion that had no one of the seven capital sins attached to it. Such an argument was manifestly unanswerable when it came from her, and she rejoiced in the security of knowing herself to be right in the midst of many wrongs, which is one of the highest satisfactions of human vanity for the young or the old. Day by day, through the changing events of the past year, the conviction had grown, until it was now the dominant cause and mover of her being, and was assuming superhuman proportions in her estimated values of things transcendent.
Paul Griggs, with his vaguely expressed explanations of things which meant much, and meant it clearly, to himself, had unconsciously helped Katharine to deify love at the expense, and to the ruin, of any form of religious belief to which she might have been inclined. He was assuredly not one of those men who seem to make it their business to destroy the convictions of others, and to give them nothing in exchange for what was consolation, if not salvation. He was, at least, a man who believed in belief, so to say, and who, perhaps, believed many things which must have seemed utterly incredible to ordinary beings of ordinary experience. But he was fond of stating the results he had reached, in a careless way, which seemed less than half-serious, without giving the smallest hint as to the means by which he had obtained them. The statements themselves were fragmentary: here a hand, there a head, now a foot, and next a bit of the shoulders. He was not conscious of his fault. To him the image was always present and complete. It seemed to him that he was but calling attention to one point or another of the visible whole, when it seemed to others as though he were offering them broken bits, often unrecognizable as belonging to any possible image whatsoever. Others sometimes put the bits together in their own way.