“Why hadn’t this happened a week ago!”
[XXI: THE WIDOW TO THE RESCUE]
Who shall interpret the feelings of a high-minded maid who is bent on wrecking her own and two other lives through a mistaken sense of honor?
Broadly, one might hint at rebellions sternly repressed, at doubts and misgivings, secret tears, agonizings of spirit that affected Lee’s flesh during the next week till her roses paled, eyes grew dark and heavy.
Not that she was altogether unhappy. A woman’s life is her feelings, and if they be sufficiently intense she obtains from their exercise a certain mournful satisfaction—akin, no doubt, if a little paler, to the ecstasies of a martyr. But into these innermost recesses, innocent springs of the woman soul whence flow endless capacities for devotion and self-sacrifice, into these it is not given to the eternally masculine to enter. Accordingly, during the following week Gordon perceived only a surface resignation that manifested itself toward him in a quiet, sisterly manner.
A blunt male, his psychology was much more simple, fluctuating between desperation, depression, determination, and despair, the composite of which showed on the surface as a decided case of the sulks. Yes, it has to be set down that he followed the customary and unheroic masculine precedent, returning for Lee’s sisterly solicitude more than the average brotherly brusqueness.
Nature having neglected to insert a compensating balance in the feelings of the eternally masculine, the poor fellow was utterly miserable. Despite the fact that, up to a week ago, he had regarded Lee with neutral friendliness, he now desired more desperately than ever to place her in a certain Java forest adorned with the regalia of a honeymoon. What is more to the point, under his sulks he was determined to do it.
Summing them, he sulked and she grieved up to the moment that a mozo rode in, one day, with a package from Ramon.
Though it held only a single flower, she easily read the message, “May I come?” and though she returned a single line, “I’m coming to see Isabel next week,” the flower had done its work.
The concrete fact behind its bloom emerged from mists of procrastination and stared her boldly in the face. Its reflection set such misery in her eyes that, without understanding, Gordon’s sulks gave place to pity. Bull, who knew even less, was moved to send a mozo with a note to the widow.