“Glad! I shall be glad, shall I? At the present moment, in any case, I am the most miserable man on earth. Have you no pity, Cornelia? Will nothing move you? Think how happy we have been together! If we loved each other, surely we could outlive the differences? Can you bear to go away like this and leave me for ever? Is it nothing to you how I suffer? Don’t you care, Cornelia?”
“Yes, I care,” she answered simply. “It hurts, but it’s going to hurt a lot more if I stay behind. If we lived together it would be like trying to piece together the bits of two different puzzles. We don’t fit!”
The simple words expressed the truth with paralysing force. Even at that bitter moment Guest recognised their truth, and was dumb before it. He turned aside, his strong jaw working with emotion, powerless to fight any longer against the rock of Cornelia’s will.
Behind him lay the grey city wrapped in its veil of smoke, the tall spire of the old church rising in picturesque isolation above the line of the surrounding buildings. It seemed at that moment to stand as a symbol of the life of the Mother Country, a life fenced in by convention, by forms and ceremonies sanctified to every Englishman by centuries of association; forms at which he may at times smile or scoff, but which he would no sooner demolish than he would tear away the clustering ivy which clothes his walls. Before him lay the broad river, its mouth widening to the sea: to that free, untrammelled waste of waters, which were a fit symbol of that land of the West, whose daughter could place her liberty even before her love!
There came a sudden stir and movement. A second time the bell clanged its warning, and the visitors began to stream towards the gangway. Guest heard the sound of a strangled sob, and felt his own heart beat with suffocating quickness.
“I—I can’t face it,” he cried desperately, “I won’t take this as an answer. If I had time I could make you listen to me. I could make you agree. I shall come after you to New York.”
She turned aside, but not so quickly that he did not catch the sudden light in her eyes, the same involuntary gleam of joy which had greeted his coming a few minutes before. The sight of that tell-tale signal made his heart leap, but Cornelia shook her head, and her voice broke in a low-breathed “Ho! It would be a mistake. Wait here. Wait quietly! At first it will hurt, but after a while you’ll be glad. You’ll find that other things come first. You think now that you will come after me, but I know you better! You will never come. You’ll not want me any more.”
Guest laughed a strained little laugh of excitement and exultation. Cornelia might preach prudence, and hold fast to her own ideas, but at least she had not forbidden his coming; had not said in so many words, “I will not see you!” For the moment, at least, he had triumphed; he was confident that the future also would be his own.
“We will discuss that question on our next meeting,” he cried breathlessly. “I will wait as long as you like; undergo any test you like to decree, but I will come! Au revoir, Cornelia!”
“Good-bye!” breathed Cornelia, low. She raised her eyes to his, but now there was no light in the golden depths, but only a deep and immeasurable sadness.