"Yes," he said, gravely and calculatingly, "I do forgive you. The ruin has been almost complete; but I am strong enough to build again!"
"Oh," she exclaimed eagerly, starting up, "do you think you can?"
"Yes," he assured her stoutly, "I know it." He was beginning to feel sorrier for her than for himself. "You, too," he suggested gently, "must begin to build again."
Again her features whitened, and she fell back, pressing her brow with a gesture of pain and bewilderment, a suggestion of one who wakes to find one's self in chaos. It seemed a very long time that she was silent, but with lines of thought upon her brow and the signs of strengthening purpose gradually again appearing about her mouth and chin. When she spoke it was to say with determination:
"Yes; and I, too, am strong enough to build again. In these silent minutes I have been thinking worlds and worlds of things. I have lost everything—yet everything remains—and more. My art shall be my husband; and I will be a greater actress than ever. I shall play with a greater power, inspired and informed by the love which I have lost. I was never tender enough before. The critics charged me with hardness; I hated them for it. I could not understand them. Now I know. I could never play but half a woman's heart. I was too selfish, too proud, too imperious. I regarded love too lightly. That mistake will be impossible now. I know that love is all and all. There is no ecstasy of love's delight of which my imagination cannot conceive; there is no despair which the loss of love may produce that my experience will not have fathomed before this poignant ache in my heart is done."
At first John recoiled a little at this talk of a utilitarian extraction from her bitter experience and his; yet he reflected that it was like the woman. It was but the outcrop of the dominant passion. Since girlhood she had seen herself solely in terms of relation to her art; therefore this attitude now indicated, not a lack of fineness, but her almost noble capacity for converting everything to the ultimate object of the artist. Without such capacity for abandon, there was, he reflected, no supreme artist; and, he reasoned further, no supreme minister—or man, even. To this extent and in this moment, Marien's bearing in defeat was a lesson and a spur to him.
"I shall go widowed to my work," she went on to say, "but it will be a greater work than I could have done before. Then I had an ambition. Now I have a mission! To show women—and men too—the worth and weight and height and depth and paramount value of love."
Hampstead was again deeply impressed with her enormous resiliency of spirit. The woman's heart had been torn to pieces; yet while each nerve and fiber of it was a pulse of pain, she was purposing to bind the thing together and let its every throb be a word of warning to womankind.
"I learned it from you," she explained, almost as if she had read his thoughts. "I understand now the exalted mood in which you spoke a few minutes ago. I am sorry that I have lost you; but I am not sorry that I have hurled you down, since it leaves revealed a nobler figure of a man than I had thought existed."
Hampstead shuddered, in part at his own pain, in part at the ease with which she uttered the sentiment, because this woman could really never know how much his fall had cost him.