“I suppose people pity me and think how hard it was that Lydia’s accident couldn’t have happened before we were married instead of afterward. Fools! Fools! As though that would make it different! If it must have been, I wouldn’t have it otherwise. Not to possess wholly the woman one loves is the cruelty of Love; the pain of knowing that no other love can possess you is the mercy of Love. Such misery is dearer than all other joys. She is mine, and with every breath that I curse Fate with I thank God for her!”
“Isn’t that happiness?”
He laughed, a short, jarring, mirthless laugh that hurt her. “Do you think,” he said, “that that is all a man craves? Can a man—a living, breathing man—live on soul alone? Can you feed a starving human being on philosophy? His stomach cries for bread! You can quench his spiritual thirst while his heart dries up with physical drought. He wants both sides. With one unsatisfied, he goes halting, crippled. I live in my past and feed on the husks of it. Do you think they fill me? I tell you, I go always hungry—always famishing for what other men have!”
Margaret felt as if she were being wafted through some intangible inferno of suffering. She felt smothered, as by the dust of some dead thing into whose open grave she had unwittingly stumbled. The real Melwin that she had waked terrified her. The glimpse through the torn mask, into the distorted face, with its marks of branding, shook the depths of her nature. She had always thought of Melwin abstractly, as of a beautiful personality, crowned with spiritual stars and haloed with pain; now she saw him as he was—a half-man, decrepit, moribund, his passion no living glow, but a flitting and unreal fox-fire, which he must follow, follow, grasping at, but never gaining. The dreadful unfulfilment of his life’s promise sat upon his brow and cried to her from every word and gesture. She felt as if she was gazing at some mysterious and but half-indicated problem to which there could be no answer.
That was a meal which Margaret never afterward remembered without a recoil. A chilling self-consciousness had fallen upon her and clogged her tongue. Melwin ate hastily and almost fiercely, saying nothing, and once half rising, it seemed in utter forgetfulness of her presence, and then sitting down again. She excused herself before the coffee and slipped away, running hastily up the stair to her room, her feet catching in the unaccustomed tightness of the old-fashioned skirt.
As she turned the key in the lock, she fancied she heard a moan through the thick walls of Lydia’s room, and she tore off the garments with feverish haste, shutting them from her sight in the carved Dutch chest which filled one corner, releasing, as she did so, a pungent odor of cedar; not the fresh, resinous smell of sappy forest-growth, but the dead-faint aroma of the past—the perfume that belonged to Lydia’s gown, to Melwin, and to that gloomy house and all it contained.
She pushed open the heavy blinds and leaned across the window ledge, questioning. Melwin was a man—but Lydia? Had she also this inner buried side, which in him had been shocked into betrayal? Were men and women alike? Were their longings and cravings the same? Was there something in the one which felt and answered the every need of the other? Was spiritual attraction forever dependent for its completion upon physical love? The thought came to her that in the long years Melwin had become less himself; that his brooding mind had perhaps lost its balance; that what to a healthier mind would be but a shadow had grown for him a threatening phantom. Her heart was full of a vague protest against the suggestion which had thrust itself upon her.
Her spiritual side reached out groping hands for comfort and sustenance.
Drawing down the window, she turned into the room. A ponderous Bible in huge blocked leathern covers lay on the low table, its antiquated silver clasps winking in the light from the pronged candlestick. With a sudden impulse, she threw it open, leaning forward, her fingers nervously ruffling its edges. This was the soul-comforter of the ages. It must help her.