PART TWO: ROBBERY.
I.
No plummet ever sank so deep as Jamie sank the thoughts of those few months. No oblivion more vast than where he buried it. No human will so strong as that he bent upon it, bound it down with. No sin absolved was ever so forgotten. One wonders if Jamie, at the day of judgment even, will remember it. Perhaps 'twill then be no more the sin he thought it. For Jamie's nature, like that of spiny plants, was sensitive, delicate within, as his outer side was bent and rough; and he fancied it, first, a selfishness; then, as his lonely fancy got to brooding on it, an actual sin. James Bowdoin's unlucky laugh had taught him how it seemed to others; and was not inordinate affection, to the manifest injury of the object loved, a sin? Jamie felt it so; and he had the Prayer Book's authority therefor. "Inordinate and sinful affections,"—that is the phrase; both are condemned.
But he kept it all the closer from Mercedes. It did not grow less; he had no heart to cease loving. Manlike, he was willing to face his God with the sin, but not her. He sought to change the nature of his love; perhaps, in time, succeeded. But all love has a mystic triple root; you cannot unravel the web, on earth at least. Religious, sexual, spiritual,—all are intertwined.
Jamie and Mercedes lived on in the little brick house, as he had promised. Only one thing the Bowdoins noticed: he now dressed and talked and acted like a man grown very old. His coats were different again; his manner was more eccentric than ever. His hair helped him a little, for it really grew quite white. He asked Mercedes now to call him father.
"Jamie is posing as a patriarch," said Mr. Bowdoin; he smiled, and then he sighed.
Old Mr. Bowdoin did not forget his promise to have his granddaughters call upon Mercedes. Now and then they sent her tickets for church fairs. But it takes more love than most women have for each other to give the tact, the self-abnegation, that such unequal relations, to be permanent, require. The momentary gush of sympathy that the Bowdoin girls felt, upon their grandfather's account of Sadie's loneliness, was chilled at the first haughty word Mercedes gave them. It takes an older nature, more humbled by living than is an American young lady's, to meet the poor in money without patronizing, and the proud at heart without seeming rude. So this attempted intimacy faded.