A hideous question of the lastingness of human love flung itself from the darkness without in upon her brain. One could love when the face was fair, when the form was supple and straight, when the eyes were clear and the blood was young with the flush of life! One could still love when age had grayed the hair and the kindly years had bowed the back. Mutual love need not dim with time, but only mellow into the peaceful content of fruition.
But let that straight form be struck down in its prime: a misstep, a slip in the crowded street, a broken rail, an explosion in a chemist’s shop, and in an instant the beauty is scarred, the symmetrical limb is twisted, the tender face is seamed and gnarled. The loved form has gone, and in its place is left a shape of pain, of repulsion, of undelight. Ah! what of that love then?
Margaret shivered as if with cold. How could she answer that? There was a love that did not live and die in the beating of the heart, which did not fade into darkness when its outer shell perished. That was the spirit love. That was the love of the mother for the child, of the soul for the kindred soul. That was the love that endured. It was the only love which justified itself. It was this that God intended when He put man and woman in the earth to cherish one another and gave them living souls which spoke a common language. Better a million times crush from the heart any lesser habitant! Better an empty soul, swept and garnished, than a chamber of banqueting for a fleshly guest!
Woman’s heart is the Great Questioner. When Doubt waves it from natural interrogation of the world about it, it turns with fearful and inevitable questionings upon itself, until the sky which had been thronged with quiring seraphim flocks thick with sneering devils. “Do you think,” insinuates the Tempter mockingly, “that this beautiful dove-eyed love of yours can stand the ultimate test? Have you tried it? You have seen loves just as beautiful, just as young, go down into the pit. Do you dream that yours can endure? Strip from your love the subtle magnetism of the body, take from it the hand-touch, the lip-caress, the pride of the eye, and what have you left? The hand grows palsied, the lips shrivel, the eye leadens, and love’s body dies. What then? Ah, what then!
The darkness had fallen more thickly without, and Margaret saw her face reflected from the window-pane, as in a tarnished and trembling mirror. Her own eyes gazed back at her. She put up her hands and rubbed them against the glass, as though to erase the image she saw.
“Don’t look so,” she said, half aloud. “What right have you to look so good? Don’t you know that if you had staid, if you had seen him again, you would have thought as he did? You couldn’t have helped it! You couldn’t! You had to run away! You didn’t want to come! You wish you were back again now! You—you do! You want him. You want him just as you did—then! That’s the worst of it.”
The face in the glass made her no answer. It angered her that those eyes would offer no glance of self-defence, and, with a quick impulse, she reached up and drew down the shade.
The whir and click of the flying wheels jarred through her brain. She had a sense of estrangement from herself. She felt almost as though she were two persons. The one Margaret riding in her pillowed chair, with her mind a turmoil of evil doubts, and the other Margaret rushing on by her side through the outer night, calm-eyed and untroubled, and these two almost touching and yet separated by an infinite distance. They could never clasp each other again. She had a vague feeling that there was a deeper purpose of punishment in this. She herself had raised the ghost which must haunt her.