“What things?” asked Fessenden gently. He gathered his faculties and stood looking at her, from the other side of the narrow window, with his piercing and concentrated glance; but he took her hand and held it tenderly. “At least, if we are soon to part, let there be as little to regret as possible. You owe me your confidence—nor is there any one else to whom you would give it.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “That is true enough! To no other have I ever been as—been frank at all. No one else has ever known me, nor ever can. It has given me the most intellectual and voluptuous delight fully to reveal myself for once in my life—I suppose I do not yet realize how much. After all, why should I complain? I have had what most women never find. And I have that sense of the indestructible bond. I shall have it as long as I live. How many that flutter over this earth, do you suppose, have that sense of an everlasting indissoluble embrace? You feel it now. Will you? Will it content you—that sense of spiritual completeness—can you be faithful to that?”
“I should be very grateful for it if I could not find anything better, and I am as capable of complete fidelity as you are. But tell me what other things have worried you.”
“It is this—” Her rising excitement flashed the blood into her face, and she pushed her unsteady hand into her hair, lifting it, as if its weight oppressed her. “In these weeks that have slipped along so easily, so naturally, in which we have found so much happiness, I have—I had grown as accustomed to it all as any engaged girl. My imagination seemed to sleep, or only to give me to you in the future. Nothing in me protested, warned, except a mechanical effort of intellect. It all seemed the most natural thing in the world. I thought when I entered into that compact that I should lead a dual mental life; or rather that I should be wholly yours when with you, and wholly myself when alone, fully alive to the end. But I have been wholly yours when alone, and as wholly oblivious of the future. And that is not all. It needed only you and what you brought me to fill me with a joyous abandon of liberty such as a man might feel who saw and could walk alone for the first time. I had felt something of this before you came, for the sudden change from prison to a comparative freedom almost turned my head; but since you—who breathe liberty, who typify it, who seem to exhale the very essence of your wonderful young country—you who fear no one! who fear no one!—Am I still myself? Am I, Fessenden? That is the thought that has tortured me these last few days—am I unfaithful in some subtle way to my house, to myself, to the future, to Europe, to all that slaves born in the purple should be most steadfast to? Rudolf may have been weak, but he killed himself in a moment when he was mad with his loathing of life and the methods by which he had sought to forget it; but he was incapable of deserting his post deliberately, and if his mind could have been occupied by the duties of a ruler he would have had no time for despair. But I—I feel as if this secret revolution in me had made me capable of greater than weakness—that is common enough in my class! It has bred in me an indifference—there, I have said it!—to all that I have held most sacred. I feel as if I had slipped into another world. My rigid love of duty, even my old superstitions, they have—they had gone. But I have dragged them back. Last night as I lay awake it seemed to me that I clawed them out of their graves and shook and warmed them into life. I have escaped a deadly peril. I know that when you have gone I shall gradually become myself again—if not quite the same, if without enthusiasm, at least I shall fit into the old routine—”
“And you believe that?” asked Fessenden. “You will no more fall back into your old state of mediæval ignorance and superstition than I shall be wholly myself until I possess you. You have been remade. You have come to life, and only in me. You will return neither to separateness nor to ignorance. The imagination is quiescent while companioned—but wait!”
“Do you know, there have been moments when, if you had asked me, I believe I should have fled with you to your yacht? I don’t know myself! I almost long to have you gone that I may suffer to the utmost capacity of my nature, and then adapt myself to the future.”
He had taken out his watch. “By carriage and a good many changes of train we could reach Fiume some time to-morrow; a telegram on the way will bring my yacht there. Will you go?”
“Oh! No, I will not go! It is bad enough that I am tempted. Oh, I want to go, I want to go, more than I have ever wanted anything on this earth! Another man would make it inevitable, but you will not; and in a few days I shall be battling with regrets, and hating myself the more.”
“Yes,” he said, and with little enthusiasm. “I could compel you, and you would love me the more for it; but I should not love myself. It would not be playing a fair game. I have a Puritanic conscience as an inheritance; also I have the instinct of the American to protect women—girls, perhaps, I should say; to look upon them as his chief responsibility. That is pounded into us early. And I have lived so much within myself that it would demoralize me to fall too far below my own standard—God knows, I fall below it often enough. Moreover, if I gave way to my passions you might—were our escape interrupted—suffer so terribly that it chills my blood whenever I think of it. I believe that is the one thing—the knowledge that you were in your father’s power, unable to escape—that would send me off my head. And it is necessary that I keep my head until I am able in all ways to protect you.”