It was not long until he heard of Esther’s illness. It gave him a stab of remorse and distressed him sorely. Had he, who had nurtured her soul so carefully, injured it more deeply than the careless world? He who had enthralled her childhood, steadfastly guided her girlhood—in whose woman’s destiny he had played so fatal a part. Here the pathos and the irony were strangely interwoven. Would it have been better had she never known the broader, fuller world? Had she now been living away her life contentedly in the dark? These questions came between him and his work. As he gazed dreamily out, the leaves were swaying carelessly. A vision of the dependent, lovely girl overwhelmed him. In the wind he seemed to hear Esther’s voice—all the youth and laughter gone out of it. It was not like that day when he held her face between his hands and gave her the kiss of love. He sighed for the virginal softness of her tremulous lips. The wind went wandering along the wood’s green edge, like a miserable thing, offering no consolation. From his meditation came like an accusing ghost the realization that there is but one true aim in life—to seek and find the soul’s complement. He had sought. He had found, but he had sacrificed. The spiritual need of his soul had been set aside. For what? An agony of yearning welled up in his heart—a yearning for the sense of her sweet presence which thrilled him with a joy of pain. The best of love they had missed—the supreme surrender.
CHAPTER VI.
Esther’s health was returning, and with it her strength. Her pride and her spirit, both, were fired. There was one thing left to her in her grief—concealment. She bound this thought to her heart, and held it close—so close. She was a soldier’s daughter, and came of a stock whose fortitude in defeat had been even more splendid than their valor in war. To her the secret of love had been harshly told, but she would hear it with courage. In the swiftest current of destiny, she would show her womanly strength.
CHAPTER VII.
“You will wonder at seeing this letter from me,” Glenn wrote to Esther, “for it will not be a usual one—not at all the sort of letter you have been accustomed to receiving from me. Perhaps it is that I have changed—greatly changed from that old self you knew—most of all changed from what I used to be to you. I can see you now as you looked to me that afternoon at Indian Well, when I first spoke to you. You touched me so closely then—so nearly—and you were such a child.
“All through that first year I think you could never have guessed how much the blossoming of that little wild heart of yours meant to me. I watched it from day to day, from month to month, so closely. Maybe I watered it some, and pulled some of the weeds that might have crowded its roots. I hope so. You were a child then and I a man, yet I had been a man without a passion. I thought much in those days, and dreamed that I knew myself. Achievement was my god. I told myself that my interest in you was the interest of the philosopher—the master—and I watched your mind unfold with a curious delight. I know now, dear, that it was a far different feeling from that—one that went far deeper and meant much more to me, even when I would not admit it to myself. It is to his own heart last of all that a man admits his own error. And yet, as I look back at it now, I think that I meant to be honest with myself. When you came to the city and I saw the wondrous woman that had grown—when I saw your flower heart—still the heart of the child in all that was sweet and innocent—turning more and more towards me for its sun—it waked something new within me. I saw the problem. I felt your dependence grow each day stronger. You leaned upon me so that I thought sometimes I could feel every throb of your heart. You were achieving. Your art was growing. Your genius was lifting. You were coming nearer and nearer to the ideal that I had imagined for you. When such a development has become the great and absorbing passion of a man’s life, I cannot express to you how haunting becomes the fear of disappointment, how terrible the jealousy of circumstance that may step between him and its fulfillment. You had beautiful ideals—such as I have had—and they had grown a part of you. To lose them would have ashed the ember; it would have deadened the quick sensibilities and wounded that soul-instinct of yours in which your music lived. And when I saw these ideals dependent upon me—upon my presence—upon the sympathy of mine, which I could not have denied if I had tried—I stood by them and you. Dear, the soul of a woman is a wonderful thing. It will not bear experiment. Yours was like a sensitive plant that cannot bear the light, and sheds its loveliest perfume in the dark. So I tried to give it the darkness—to cloud the glare of hollowness that was in our world—to let the light in slowly and only when the leaves were strong enough to bear it. All this time I could not help but see that when I went from you the shock would be great. My philosophy taught me the penalty of emotion, and I thought I had much to do in the world. I dreamed of work that would absorb me utterly—that would take the best that was in me, of feeling and of effort. All my life I had denied myself the passion that my eyes told me was growing in you. I had grown to consider myself apart from others—a mental solitary who had locked the door of his heart because he had work to do. It had not occurred to me that the Juggernaut whose rumbling wheels I would not hear might crush you. It was the concert at the Metropolitan that opened my eyes. I knew then that your art and your heart had twined together so intimately that if one were cut, the other would bleed. I knew then that I must either go or stay, that if I became a stronger part of you my going would be fatal to your own achievement and to mine. Dear, it was not all selfishness—this resolve of mine. You will never know what it meant to me to tear up the roots that had grown in spite of me: it was like tearing the flesh and leaving it quivering. But that I could have borne if it left you better able to go on. I did not know then what I know now. I blame myself that I did not read truer. The news of your breakdown and the giving up of your music came to me like a blow in the dark. In showing me yours, it has shown me my own heart. The depths of my self-condemnation have taught me myself. It has taught me that achievement is a pitiful thing compared with a woman’s love—that your happiness means more to me—a thousand times more—than success: that I love you—I love you—utterly and wholly—and that I want you to be my wife. The future is impossible to me without you. Each day since I saw you, your step has been in every sound. Each night your face has been my vision. Here from my window I can see a little knoll on which is a cross, where the peasants go to pray to the patron saint of the village. It is ugly, and battered, and old, but it has come to be beautiful to me, for I know now what they are praying for. The hills are gold with the grain, and a little winding path runs down toward my eyrie. I can almost imagine you coming down it now to meet me, with your dear face raised to my window—”
As Glenn finished the page, the boy tapped at the little door with the daily mail, and he reached out an indifferent hand to take it. A familiar flourish caught his eye, and, recognizing Richmond Briarley’s penmanship, he opened a bulky envelope. A card, closely written, and a small book met his gaze.
CHAPTER VIII.
“My young Idealist, I send you a clever story, one which shows remarkable talent, and which you really must read. There is, or was, once upon a time in this town, another consummate young Idealist like yourself, but of the female persuasion; a protegé of yours who fiddled. She, I remember, believed in a few things; among others, that there was a little to be considered besides art, and that she had a lump somewhere which she called a heart. You have always been troubled with the same feature, I believe.
“The lady has just issued a story, which I send you to-day. Just take a look at it and find me that lump, will you? Cold as an icicle! By the way, I understand that the lady in question was quite a social success here in our city, and very much sought after in drawing rooms, in which she earned about her own price. She has come to the philosophical conclusion that you used to uphold: which is, that as long as a person does, it don’t much matter what a person feels. Anyway, she is doing it; and I take it from this novel that she is not feeling much either.