“For this once you may believe in me,” he said. “Look at me!” His gaze, burning with an inner scorn, rested on hers. “You are the dearest, the loveliest—” His voice broke once more, he had to wait before he could regain it. “If I were to let you sink your life with mine, I’d deserve to be hung. I’ve let you talk as if you could help me. Well, you can’t, and I’ll tell you why—I’ll clear your conscience of me forever. Down at the bottom of it all, I don’t want to be helped. I don’t want to be made better. I don’t want to live a different life! There are moments when I’ve deceived myself as well as you, but it was all rot. It’s not that I’m not fit for you,—no man’s that!—but I’m made so that I’d rather go to the devil than be fit for you. The more you cared for me, the more I’d drag you down. That’s the whole brutal truth. The one saving grace I own is that I tell it to you now.”
“Ah, no, no!” said Dosia, with a cry. “It can’t be so.” She turned her head from side to side, as one looking for succor; her composure was failing her, after so many cruel knife-thrusts in her already bleeding heart—she yearned over him with a compassion and longing too great to bear.
“Dosia,” said Lawson, standing up; his altered voice sounded far away in her ears.
“Yes,” she answered, rising also, she knew not why.
“This is good-by.”
She did not speak, but looked at him. His face seemed to lose the marks of dissipation and bitterness, and become strangely boyish, strangely sweet, in its expression.
“See!” he said, “I could clasp my arms around you, as I’m longing to, and kiss your darling mouth. You’d let me, wouldn’t you, blessed one? For all that I’ve done or all that I’ve been, you’d let me?”
“Yes,” whispered Dosia, trembling.
“Then remember it of me, for one poor thing of good, that I did not—that I was man enough to keep you free of me at the last. I’ll never touch you again—no, not so much as the hem of your gown. And, so help me God, I’ll never look upon your face again.”
“Lawson, Lawson!”