"And not a sorrow"—
She could recall no more. The lines had an echo of Keats. She looked across the room toward the low shelves where Jack's books were crammed in dusty banishment. It was not likely that Keats would be in that company; yet Jack, by fits and starts, had been a passionate reader of everybody, even of the poets.
She was too utterly comfortable to be willing to move merely to lay the ghost of a vanished song. And now another verse awoke to haunt her:—
"But wilt thou cure thine heart
Of love, and all its smart—
Then die, dear, die!"
"'T is deeper, sweeter"—
Than what? She could not remember. She had read the verses long ago, as a girl of twenty measures time, when the sentiment had had for her the palest meaning. Now she thought it not extravagant, but simply true.
"Then die, dear, die!"
She repeated, pillowing her head in the satin lining of her cloak. A tear of self-forgiving pity stole down her cheek. Love,—of her own fair, sensitive self; love of the one who could best express her to herself, and magnify her day by day, on the highest key of modern poetic sympathy and primal passion and mediæval romance,—this was the whole of life to her. She desired no other revelation concerning the mission of woman. In no other sense would she have held it worth while to be a woman. Yet she, of Beauty's daughters, had been chosen for that stupidest of all the dull old world's experiments in what it calls success—a loveless marriage!
When at length the fire went down, and the air of the draughty room grew cool, Esmée languidly bestirred herself. The confusion that Jack had left behind him in his belated departure began to afflict her—the unwashed dishes on the table, the crumbs on the floor, the half-emptied pipe and ashes on the mantel, the dust everywhere. She pitied herself that she had no one at her command to set things right. At length she rose, reluctantly dispensing with her cloak, but keeping the fur boots on her feet, and began to pile up the breakfast dishes, and carry them by separate journeys to the kitchen.
The fire had long been out in the cook-stove; the bare little place was distressingly cold; neither was it particularly clean, and the nature of its disorder was even more objectionable than that of the sitting-room. Poor Jack! Esmée had profoundly admired and pitied his struggles with the kitchen. What man of Jack's type and breeding had ever stood such a test of devotion? Even young Sir Gareth, who had done the same sort of thing, had done it for knighthood's sake, and had taken pride in the ordeal. With Jack such service counted for nothing except as a preposterous proof of his love for her.