Then harshly, rudely, the change; the voice which had seemed to caress each word was now like a lash.
"Suppose you didn't have the luxury of giving yourself up to your own heart? Suppose that every day and night of your life, you had to fight memory, knowing it held nothing for you but jeers and mockery and things too damnable for words! Suppose you had to fairly forbid yourself to think of the beautiful things of life! Suppose that what had been the most beautiful moments of your life were made, by memory, the most hideous! Suppose the memory of his kiss always brought with it the consciousness of his falseness; that his words of love never came back to you without the knowledge that he had been laughing at you in his heart all the time! Suppose you could never get away from the damning truth that what you gave from the depth of your heart was tossed aside with a laugh! Suppose you had given the great passion of your life, the best that was in you, to a liar and a hypocrite! Suppose you had been made a fool of!—easy game! Then what of life?—your belief in love?—thoughts of fate? Great God, woman, can't you see what you have got?"
After the throbbing moment which followed that there came a great quiet; slowly passion settled to sadness. He seemed to have forgotten her, to be speaking instead to his own heart, as he said, very low, his voice touched with the tenderness of unrelinquished dreams: "To have had one hour—just one perfect hour, and then the memory of that untarnished forever—it would be enough."
Her heart rushed passionately to its own defence; she wanted to tell him no! She wanted to tell him it was cruel to be permitted to live for a time in a beautiful country, only to be turned out into the dark. She wanted to tell him that to know love was to need it forever. But his head had fallen to his hand; he seemed entirely lost to her, and even now she knew his answer to what she would say. "But you had it," he would reply. "The cruel thing would be to awaken and find no such country had ever existed." They would get no closer than that, and with new passionateness her heart went out to Karl. Karl would understand it as it was to her!
He too felt that they could come no closer than this. They sat there in the gathering twilight with their separate thoughts as souls sit together almost in the dark, seeing one another in shadow, across dim spaces.
The tearing open of his heart had left him weakened with pain. Perhaps that was why he was so very tired, and perhaps it was because he was so tired that this thought of growing old came back to him. It seemed to him now, leaning back in his chair and filled with the things of which he had spoken, that almost as great as a living presence with which to share the years, would be that thing of growing old with a beautiful memory. It would be a supreme thing to have a hand in your hand, a face against your face, a heart against your heart as you stepped on into the years; but if that could not be, and perfection is not given freely in this life, surely it would keep the note of cheer in one's voice, the kindly gleam in one's eye, to bring with one into old age the memory of a perfect love. It would be lonely then when one sat in the twilight and dreamed—but what another loneliness! If instead of holding one's self away from one's own heart, one could turn to it with: "She loved me like that. Her arms have been about my neck in true affection; her whole being radiated love for me; she had no words to tell it and could tell it only with her eyes and with the richness and the lavishness of her kisses. She would have given up the world for me; she inspired me to my best deeds; she comforted me in my times of discouragement and rejoiced with me in my hours of cheer. She is not here now, and it is lonely, but she has left me, in spirit, the warmth of her presence, the consciousness that she loved me with a love in which there was no selfishness nor faltering, and the things she has left me I can carry through life and into eternity."
And all of that was Ernestine's could she but see her way to take it!
He knew that it was growing late. "I must go," he said, but still he sat there, knowing he had not finished what he had come to say. But need he say it? Would it avail anything? Must not all human souls work their own way through the darkness? And when the right word came, must it not come from Karl himself, through some memory, some strange breath of the spirit? He knew, but she would have to see it for herself. That each one's seeing it for one's self was what made life hard. Would there not surely come a day, somewhere in the upward scale, where souls could reach one another better than this?
But he had stirred her; he knew that by the way she was looking at him now. Finally she asked, tremblingly, a little resentfully: "Dr. Parkman, what is it you would have me do?"
"Do something with your life," was his prompt reply. "Help make it right for Karl."