“Was I heartless with poor Mamie? I suppose I was, because I made her believe for a while that I loved her. Let us be honest. I felt something, I made myself believe that I felt something which was like love. It was of the baser kind. It was the temptation of the eye, the fascination of a magnetic vitality, the flattery of my vanity in seeing myself so loved. I lived for months in an enchanted palace in an enchanted garden, where she was the enchantress. Everything contributed to awaken in me the joy of mere life, the belief that reality was better than romance, and that, in love, it was better to receive than to give. I was like a man in a badly conceived novel, with whom everything rests on a false basis, in which the scenery is false, the passion is false, and the belief in the future is most false of all. And how commonplace it all seems, as I look back upon it. I do not remember to have once felt a pain like a knife just under the heart, in all that time, though my blood ran fast enough sometimes. And it all went on so smoothly as Lachesis let the thread spin through her pretty fingers. Who would have believed that a man could be at once so fooled and so loved? I was sorry that I could not love her, even after we knew all that her mother had done. I remember that I began a book on that very day. Heartless of me, was it not? If she had been Grace I should never have written again. But she was only Lachesis; the thread turned under her hand, and spun on in spite of her, and in spite of itself—to its end.
“Grace is the end. There can be no loving after this. My father tells me that I am working too hard and that I am growing prematurely old. It is not the work that does it. It is something that wears out the life from the core. And yet I would not be without it. There is that thrust again, that says I am not deceiving myself. Grace holds the thread and will neither cut it, nor let it run on through her fingers. Heaven knows, I am not a sentimental man! But for the physical pain I feel when I think of losing her, I should laugh at myself and let her slip down to the middle distance of other memories, not quite out of sight, nor yet quite out of mind, but wholly out of my heart. I have tried it many a time, but the trouble grows instead of wearing out. I have tried wandering about the earth in most known and unknown directions. It never did me any good. I wonder whether she knows! After all it will be four years next summer since poor John Bond was drowned, and everybody says she has forgotten him. But she is not a woman who forgets, any more than she is one to waste her life in a perpetual mourning. To speak may be to cut the thread. That would be the end, indeed! I should see her after that, of course, but it would never be the same again. She would know my secret then and all would be over, the hours together, the talks, the touch of hands that means so much to me and so little to her. And yet, to know—to know at last the end of it all—and the great ‘perhaps’ the great ‘if’—if she should! But there is no ‘perhaps,’ and there can be no ‘if.’ She is my fate, and it is my fate that there should be no end to this, but the end of life itself. Better so. Better to have loved ever so unhappily, than to have been married to any of the Constances or the Mamies of this world! Heigho—I suppose people think that there is nothing I cannot have for my money! Nothing? There is all that could make life worth living, and which millions cannot buy!”
The curtain fell before the little stage, and the eyes of the lonely man closed with an expression of intense pain, as he let his forehead rest in the palm of his hand.
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