“When I say that my own life since my marriage has been a hell, I am not using too strong words, and if I have been able to stand it in a way it is because I think the love Rebecca has for me partly exonerates her. I know that her feelings of mean pleasure at having the power to torment and humiliate me with her jealousy and rage are a caricature of betrayed love, and it is a kind of satisfaction to my sense of justice that there is a reason for my unhappiness. I betrayed her when I took her love without giving her mine—intending secretly to give her only crumbs—the small coin of love—in payment for the best of herself she offered me. If life punishes every sin against the sacredness of love so ruthlessly, it proves to me that there is nothing holier in life, and that he who is true to his ideal of love will reap his recompense in the greatest and purest bliss.
“I told you once that I learnt to know and to love a woman when it was too late. She had loved me from the time we were children without my knowing, or caring to know it. When she heard of my marriage she accepted a man who vowed that she could save and raise him if she married him. I know you would scorn any such means of saving, but you don’t know, child, how you would act yourself, if you knew the being you loved with your whole soul was in the arms of another, and found your life not worth living, and if you heard an erring human being ask you to give him the life you did not value and save him thereby.
“Helene was unhappy, and so was I. Later we met, understood one another, and it came to an explanation which, however, did not result in what people call happiness. We were both bound by ties we dared not break, and I must admit that my love for her changed as the hope of making her my wife slowly died, but the memory of her is the greatest treasure of my life. She is now living in another part of the world, devoting her life to her children and trying to lessen for them the misery of having to live with a father who is a drunkard and a moral wreck. For her sake I have held on to my faith in the purity of the human soul, in its beauty and its strength—and in love, and I know, too, that the remembrance of me inspires Helene with the strength to struggle on and to suffer because she loves me today as she did in our childhood, and believes in me, in my talent, my love, and that I was worthy of a better fate. I am still something to her, don’t you think?”
Jenny did not answer.
“The happiness in life is not only to be loved, Jenny; the greatest happiness is to love.”
“H’m. A very poor sort of happiness, I should say, to love when your love is not returned.”
He sat quiet for a while, looking down; then said almost in a whisper:
“Great or small, it is happiness to know somebody of whom one thinks only good, about whom one can say: God give her happiness, for she deserves it—give her all that I never had. She is pure and beautiful, warm-hearted and sweet, talented and kind. It means happiness to me, dear Jenny, to be able to pray like this for you. No; it is nothing to be afraid of, little one.”
He had risen, and she rose too, making a movement as if she were afraid he would come nearer. Gram stopped and smiled: