“She has not given him up, Mrs. Hawthorne,” said Gerald. “Believe me, she has not. She has some plan, some dream, for bringing about the good end in time without aid from her parents. I am sure of it. No, she has not given him up.” He had before him, vivid in memory, the image of Brenda in the little church, and was looking at that, though his eyes were on Mrs. Hawthorne’s friendly and attentive face. “She is at the wonderful hour of her love,” he said, “when the world is transfigured and life lifted above the every-day into regions of poetry; when the simple fact of his existence justifies the plan of creation, when to wait a hundred years for him would seem no more difficult than to wait a day, and to perform the labors of Hercules no more than breaking off so many roses. She is sure of him, the immortality of his passion, 116as she is sure of herself. So they are above circumstances, and nothing that friend or foe can do should trouble their essential serenity.”
“How wonderful!” breathed Mrs. Hawthorne, after a little silence in which Gerald had been thinking with a very sickness of sympathy of Brenda and the sinister propensity of the Fates for bringing to nothing the most valiant dreams and hopes; and Mrs. Hawthorne had been thinking entirely of Gerald, whose own heart was so much more certainly revealed by what he said than could be anybody else’s.
“Unfortunately,”–he turned abruptly to another part of his subject,–“he is not of the same temperament. She has some project, I imagine, for earning the money for her dowry, poor child, by music, singing, painting. But he does not know her vows of fidelity, because her parents did use their authority so far as gently to request her not to write to him or see him; and she promised, and a promise with Brenda is binding. And he has felt his honor involved in not writing or meeting her. But, though separated, they have been in the same city; they could hope to catch a glimpse of each other now and then. Heaven only knows how often he has stood to see her pass, or watched her window, and lived on such things as unhappy lovers find to live on. After all, the faith that when he dreamed of her she dreamed of him, that as he kissed a glove she kissed a silver button, was a life, something to go on with. I dare say, too, he cherished the hope of some miracle,–it is so natural to hope!... But now they are sending her away, and it seems to him the black end of everything.”
“I see. And what you want is–”
117“To be driven half a world apart for indefinite periods, more than probably forever, without one look, one word of leave-taking, is truly too much. Granted that they are not to have each other, they ought not to be torn in two like a bleeding body. Let them have to remember a few last beautiful moments!”
Mrs. Hawthorne had become pensive. He watched her sidewise, trying to divine what turn her thoughts were taking. Her prolonged silence made him uneasy.
“It wouldn’t be wrong, you think?” she asked finally. “Mrs. Foss wouldn’t be cross with us?”
“If it is wrong, my dear Mrs. Hawthorne, let it be wrong!” he cried impetuously. “If any one is cross, we will bow our heads meekly–after having done what we regarded as merciful. Let us not permit a cruelty it was in our power to prevent!”
But Mrs. Hawthorne continued to disquiet him by hesitating, while her face suggested the travels of her thought all around and in and out of the question under consideration.
“You don’t think it would perhaps be cruel to Brenda?” she laid before him another difficulty in the way of making up her mind. “Mightn’t it just ruin the evening for her, with the painfulness of good-bys? Or, if she doesn’t in the least expect him, the shock of the surprise?”