Every man writes his own page. What had he written? And he was getting out of middle age. There was not so much more time left to write. Not so much space.
He would go home to her whom he should never have left; to her whose page opened facing his; to her, the mother of his children, whom he had left to teach them, unaided by him, how to write on the clean, white page.
Together they would work out something better than themselves. What is written, lives on. What they wrote would stand as a record, for better or worse, after they were through inscribing it. The thing was—it must be done together.
He wandered about Edinburgh for a week and then shipped for New York from Liverpool. This was in early winter.
XI
Before Richard Hand said good-bye to Mary Vanton that September he told her frankly of his love for her.
“I am not doing a dishonourable thing,” he insisted. “If I tell you this, now, it is my right to speak and your right to hear.”
Mary Vanton sat looking directly at him, the brilliance gone from her blue eyes, the depths in them showing, the depths in her showing, too, in the way she listened, and the words she uttered. Her wonderful hair, darkly red, lay framed against the white linen of a chair covering, a chair with a tall back that seemed to shield and protect her and bring out in relief the milky whiteness of her fine skin, unchanged by the sun and salt air, like a pure and unspotted marble.
“No,” she said, slowly, “it is not dishonourable. For it is not myself, Mary Vanton, that you love, but the girl Mermaid. I am not she. I am much altered.”
“You are Mermaid,” he said, simply, and in his voice there was reverence.