“And are you thinkin’ of my misery?” she asked, so plaintively as to arrest him.
“You?”
“Yes—just me. Do you fancy for a moment that it wouldn’t be misery for me? I pity you, and I care for you so much that my heart aches for you; I would give years of my life to see you grow into a strong dependable man, but I don’t love you.... Don’t speak yet; let me speak. I will tell you something that nobody else knows. In my bedroom is a tiny closet which nobody opens but me; and when it is opened it is an altar, with candles, and a sweet, old, crooked image of Saint Francis which belonged to my mother; Saint Francis who loved the birds and the souls of all dumb things. And I fool everybody, everybody but you; for I pray before my little altar—and I have oh! such faith! But nobody else knows that; nobody but you and me now. How I fool them all with my bad tongue!... And when I pray I pray for you. I pray that the good in you shall grow and grow and grow. And my prayer is answered daily! And I pray that the good Saint Francis shall spread out his arms and take you up and shield you from all bitterness and wrong thinking. ‘Dear God,’ I say, ‘make my boy to see; reach out the hand to his stumbling feet; make my boy to see.’”
He tried to tell her something, but he could not speak. The pity in her voice, her swimming eyes, and the picture she conjured before him of the trustful suppliant bowed below her little candles—it was too much; it engulfed him.
Soon she went on. “I don’t love you and you would find it out; and then—why, Walter, in the next ten years you will be still a youth, a youth demanding youth; while I will be forty and faded out. Oh, yes, I will! I know my kind. They are either very young or very old—no middle years at all. I will grow suddenly old—and it would come all the quicker if every day I should suffer.”
He told her defiantly that she would not suffer.
“Oh, yes, I should,” she nodded her head wisely. “For you, Walter, it might mean a little happiness, but for me it would be daily and hourly pain. I know. You look at the present, but I see the years and years ahead. No, boy; you must grow strong as you have been growing. You must throw off the evil that has gripped you. And then, some day when you have become a man among men, love will come to you, and you and she will ... will go off together ... as ... as once ... I thought I was going.”
Softly she slipped into a chair and buried her face in her hands, and the quiet tears came.
After a painful moment or two Phœbe controlled her voice, but she did not look up as she spoke, nor take her hands away from her face.
“I haven’t told you all, Walter,” she said. “I have been trying not to say it ... but I must tell you. I have prayed that if it must be, I would take you and give my life to you.... And I will.”