Only a tress of sunny hair; but Olivia received the gift as if it were a very precious one, thanking him, not only with wet eyes, but friendly words.
“Dear Felix, for her sake let me help you, if I can. Do not go away so lonely, purposeless, and poor. The world is hard; you will be disheartened, and turn desperate, with no one to love and hope and work for.”
“I must help myself. I am poor; but not purposeless, nor alone. Disheartened I may be: never desperate again; for I have some one to love and hope and work for. She is waiting for me somewhere: I must make myself worthy to follow and find her. I have promised; and, God helping me, I will keep that promise.”
Very humble, yet hopeful, was the voice; and full of a sad courage was the young man’s altered face,—for out of it the gladness and the bloom of youth had gone for ever, leaving the strength of a noble purpose to confront a life which hereafter should be honest, if not happy.
Helwyze had not the infinite patience to work in marble; the power to chisel even his own divided nature into harmony, like the sculptor, who, in the likeness of a suffering saint, hewed his own features out of granite. He could only work in clay, as caprice inspired or circumstance suggested; forgetting that life’s stream of mixed and molten metals would flow over his faulty models, fixing unalterably both beauty and blemish. He had found the youth plastic as clay, had shaped him as he would; till, tiring of the task, he had been ready to destroy his work. But the hand of a greater Master had dropped into the furnace the gold of an enduring love, to brighten the bronze in which suffering and time were to cast the statue of the man. Helwyze saw this now, and a pang of something sharper than remorse wrung from him the reluctant words,—
“Take, as my last gift, the fame which has cost you so much. I will never claim it: to me it is an added affliction, to you it may be a help. Keep it, I implore you, and give me the pardon she asked of you.”
But Canaris turned on him with the air of one who cries, “Get thee behind me!” and answered with enough of the old vehemence to prove that grief had not yet subdued the passionate spirit which had been his undoing,—
“It is no longer in your power to tempt me, or in mine to be tempted, by my bosom sin. Forsythe knows the truth, and the world already wonders. I will earn a better fame for myself: keep this, and enjoy it, if you can. Pardon I cannot promise yet; but I give you my pity, ‘for her sake.’”
With that—the bitterest word he could have uttered—Canaris was gone, leaving Helwyze to writhe under the double burden imposed by one more just than generous. Olivia durst not speak; and, in the silence, both listened to the hasty footsteps that passed from room to room, till a door closed loudly, and they knew that Canaris had set forth upon that long pilgrimage which was in time to lead him up to Gladys.
Helwyze spoke first, exclaiming, with a dreary laugh,—