“I suppose if I had got her and if—if they were my children...?”
The adviser looked at him gravely.
“I think there is no doubt about it,” he answered.
They sat there in the gathering twilight for some time in a silence fraught with the pain of a deep revelation. Richard Hand struggled with the thing that stood revealed to him and within him. After a while he said, in words that seemed to choke him: “But what shall I do? What—what can I do—about it—now?”
“Look the thing full in the face, as you are doing now, and conquer it,” the other counselled.
After a pause he went on to explain: “You love her, you have always loved her. And because you love her you will love her children, as a part of her. As long as you suppressed your love for her, as long as you refused to acknowledge it even to yourself, so long it continued to punish you in other ways. It did not so act upon you as to prevent you doing good work and profiting by it; but when you had done great work and had profited by it this suppressed longing stepped in and robbed you of the reward you had earned by destroying all the beauty and meaning of life for you, by turning your victories to ashes in your mouth, by making everything you were doing or had done or might do, pointless and futile. For you the final satisfaction would have lain exclusively in doing all these things for her.
“Why haven’t you done them for her? Why don’t you? You can. You can make her yours and her children your own. I’m not, of course, suggesting anything disgraceful or dishonourable. I am suggesting that you look the truth in the face like an honest man—though you haven’t been intentionally dishonest with yourself. Outward conventions are responsible for most of the ingrowing minds. Look the truth in the face like an honest man and fight the good fight like a brave man.
“Say to yourself—you won’t have to say it to her—just this: ‘I love her; I have always loved her. I always shall. I have done everything I have done for her, always, though I didn’t perhaps know it, and certainly did not admit it. It isn’t wrong to recognize it and it’s not wrong to admit it to myself; it’s merely a piece of honesty, and it’s an outlet for what would otherwise be suppressed and denied until it fouled and poisoned my whole life. At the same time this thing must be kept under control, just as any outlet must be controlled. I mustn’t let it, in its flow, do damage as great as it would in its stagnation—and a worse. I must be as honest as the day about it and as strong as I am honest.’”
It was quite dark. The two sat there motionless for a while. Then Richard Hand got up and came toward the other man, offering him his hand.
“Thank you,” he said, and his voice was boyish and alive. “I think you have shown me a way out—if I am strong enough to take it and hold to it. I—I think I shall go and visit her—and find out.”