"I've been an awful ass," he muttered. "I can't see just now where it is exactly that I failed. But it's evident that somewhere along the line I've acted like one of the early Christian martyrs."
He picked up a little volume that was lying at his elbow. It was a dainty thing bound in gold and ivory. He remembered that Roger Kenwick had given it to his sister on that last night when he had come to bid her good-by. He had never looked into it before. Now he turned the pages idly. It was modern verse, and he read intermittently here and there. Among the leaves he came at last upon a folded bit of paper. It was in Marcreta's handwriting; evidently something that she had copied. He tilted it under the light and read the trio of stanzas.
I cannot drive thee from my memory;
I cannot live and tear thee from my heart.
Is there no corner of oblivion's realm
Whence thy uneasy spirit may depart?
If love were dead, if love could only die,
And leave me desolation and despair;
The emptiness of day, the aching night,
All these at last my soul could learn to bear.
But ever when I think thy fire is spent
And seek the peace of death's all-sacred pain,
Behold, comes Memory with her torch a-light—
And all my altar flames to life again.
Clinton Morgan folded the bit of paper with reverent fingers. For he knew, all at once, that this was not a copy of anything, but that he had unwittingly torn aside the veil of his sister's secret soul. He felt all of the honorable man's repugnance against outraged decency. The scrap of paper seemed to scorch his fingers. With a punctilious regard for detail, which he knew to be absurd, he tried to find the exact page where it had been concealed. Then he put the volume back upon the table and went over to the window. His conjectures concerning this romance had come to an end. Now he knew, and knowing felt suddenly weighted with guilt.
He could imagine now how she must have felt as she had sat, a few hours before, listening to the paragraphs of Kenwick's masterpiece as they fell from the glib tongue of Richard Glover. There was an expression almost of awe upon his face. She could write all that, feel all that for one man, and then deliberately plan to marry another, to set him free! The thing seemed preposterous, and yet he knew it to be true.
And then his thoughts reverted to Kenwick, and the days that now seemed almost like the unreal days of a dream, when he had first known him over at the fraternity-house in Berkeley. He recalled the night when he had brought him home to dinner and introduced him to Marcreta and tried to make him show off for her like a trained puppy. Perhaps it would have been better if he had never brought him. But these things were in the hands of fate and fate has an infinite number of tools. Standing there at the window, gazing at the reflection of the gas logs mirrored against the black pane, he found himself growing suddenly resentful of the casual emergencies of life. Mere cobweb threads they were but upon them hung the destinies of human souls. You turned the first corner instead of the second in an hour of aimless wandering, and the circulation of your life current was completely changed. It was folly to believe that all the corners were posted with signs to be read and heeded by that secret autocrat, the subconscious mind. The intricacies of such a universe made the brain reel. It was better to believe that we played the game blind, and that the stakes were to the courageous.
He went back to the table and turned out the reading-lamp, blotting out the sight of the white and gold book.
"Lord! What a pity!" he murmured. "She would have been such an inspiration to him. It was the devil's own luck. Poor Kenwick! Poor little Crete!"