‘Then you are deceiving yourself,’ I said, shrugging and turning impatiently on my heel. ‘She loves you. I have seen it in her eyes, felt it to the inmost fibres of consciousness in her voice.’
‘And if it were so!’ Trueberry cried, in a soft, fond tone of interjection, that brought my fierce look back to his face. He called himself miserable, but bliss sparkled out of the depths of his frank eyes. He fronted daylight, the proud and conscious lover, and the shadow upon his radiance was, after all, but a becoming tone to temper fatuity to my amazed and acrid scrutiny. Without it, I might have longed to strike him, in my state of moral degradation.
‘How much nearer am I to her for that?’ he went on, in reply to my hateful look. ‘My dear friend, there is nothing for us both but to take up our staff and knapsack, and trudge wearily out of this enchanted valley into the busy garish world, carrying with us the remembrance of an unstable and beautiful dream. We are equals in fortune, Gontran.’
‘Equals,’ I roared, goaded by the fiery bar of his speech. ‘What equality exists between success and unsuccess? between the chosen and the neglected? between heat and cold, sun and ice, glory and shame, tears and laughter? The barrier to your happiness may be levelled by fate at any moment. You have but to wait and watch the newspapers. While I——’
‘Don’t be rough, old man. You would be sorrier than I if you hurt me now, when I can ill bear more pain. For I am dismissed, sent away. Oh!’
He sat down and covered his face with both hands, and I, in awakened wickedness of spirit, gloated over his convulsive wretchedness. Suffering had blunted conscience, and the finer feelings, and left me abjectly enslaved to all the baser sensations that assail weakened humanity. In such moments, happily brief, the savage is uppermost, whatever the training of the gentleman. The soul sleeps, and the body, with all its frenzied needs and desires, stands naked, primitive, elemental, the mere animal living through the senses. The handsome sobbing creature had all, and I had nothing. Yet he dared to speak of equality in misery between us.
‘Good-bye,’ I said, and moved to the door.
Trueberry sprang up, and clutched my arm. His dear, simple nature could understand nothing of the vileness that the finer and more complex order of being may contain. To him I was not an embittered rival, but a cherished friend to whom he boyishly clung in his unbearable sorrow.
‘Must we separate, Gontran?’ he entreated. ‘Why, since we both go to-day?’
The inalterable sweetness of his temper shook me on a crest of remorse, and conquered assaulting vindictiveness. I felt so mean beside him that I could have begged his pardon for unuttered insult. His superiority more than justified Brases’ choice, though the dear fellow lacked my brains, and my name commanded considerable stir.