"It makes little difference, the right and the wrong, after to-night," he replied grimly, "in all the days to come…. We have lived and we have loved, that is enough."
"No, no,—we are not weak, blind fools!" she spoke on swiftly. "I will not have it so! I will not have you leave me to-night with the thought that some day you will feel that of me. You must understand—you must always remember through all the years of life—that I—the woman you love—am sinless, am pure…. I can go with your kisses upon my lips to my children, to little Ned, and hold them tight, and know that I am pure in the sight of God! …
"I give them my life, my all,—I am giving them this, too. A woman's heart is not filled with the love of children. A woman's life is not closed at thirty-two! … I have a soul—a life to be satisfied,—ah, dearest, a soul of my own to be filled, in order to give. Most men don't know that a woman has a life of her own—apart from her children, from her husband, from all. It's hers, hers, her very own!" she cried with a sob of joy and anguish.
In these words escaped the essence of that creed which had taken the place of the Bishop's teaching,—the creed that is breathed insensibly in the atmosphere of the age,—'I, the woman, have a soul that is mine which has its rights, and what it bids me take, that I will take and hold!'
The man listened to the solemn rhythm of the sea pounding upon the rocky coast, and it spoke to him of fatality, of the surge of life striking blindly, carrying in its mighty grip the little human atoms. It had borne him up to the stars, and in a few hours it would roll him back, down into the gulf, from which no effort of his will could take him. With this hunger, which was his human birthright, he must labor on, unappeased. It was given him merely to know what would recreate living for him, what would make of the days joy instead of pain, and it was not to be his, except for this moment of time.
"I think," he said, "there is enough to suffer and endure. We will not quibble about the law. In the face of the gulf, why argue?" and he took her once more in his arms, where she rested content….
Lawlor's Point was a little neck of shingle, curving inwards from the open sea, making a small harbor. On the landward side the still, salty marsh was fringed by evergreens that rose dark in the night. Once it had been a farm, its few acres swept by the full Atlantic winds, its shore pounded by the rock drift of the coast. Within the shingle the waves had washed a sandy beach…. Margaret knew the place years before, and they had found it to-night in the dark. The abandoned farm-house, windowless, loomed above them, desolate, forlorn, emitting an odor of the past from its damp rooms. About the old walnut tree where they had been sitting there grew in the long grass fleur-de-lys and myrtle.
"Let us go nearer to the water!" Margaret exclaimed. "I want to hear its voice close to my ears. This place is musty with dead lives. Dead lives!" She laughed softly. "I was like them once, only I walked and spoke, instead of lying still in a grave. And then you found me, dearest, and touched me. I shall never be dead like that again."
And when they had picked their way over the rough shingle to the water, she said in another passionate outburst, as if nature dammed for a long time were pouring itself forth in torrent:—
"Pain! Don't say the word. Do you think that we can count the pain—ever?
Now that we have lived? What is Pain against Being!"