Helen stooped down upon her knees and put her arms about him, gazing up pleadingly into his face. “Dearest David,” she whispered, “is it right to refuse to tell me about that sorrow?”
There was a long silence, after which the man replied slowly, “I have not ever refused to tell you, sweetheart; it would be very fearful to tell, but I have not any secrets from you; and if you wished it, you should know. But, dear, it was long, long ago, and nothing can ever change it now. It would only make us sad to know it, so why should we talk of it?”
He stopped, and Helen gazed long and earnestly into his face. “David,” she said, “it is not possible for me to imagine you ever doing anything wrong, you are so good.”
“Perhaps,” said David, “it is because you are so good yourself.” But Helen interrupted him at that with a quick rejoinder: “Do you forget that I too have a sorrow upon my conscience?” Afterwards, as she saw that the eager remark caused the other to smile in spite of himself, she checked him gravely with the words, “Have you really forgotten so soon? Do you suppose I do not ever think now of how I treated poor Arthur, and how I drove away from me the best friend of my girlhood? He wrote me that he would think of me no more, but, David, sometimes I wonder if it were not just an angry boast, and if he might not yet be lonely and wretched, somewhere in this great cold world where I cannot ever find him or help him.”
The girl paused; David was regarding her earnestly, and for a long time neither of them spoke. Then suddenly the man bent down, and pressed a kiss upon her forehead. “Let us only love each other, dear,” he whispered, “and try to keep as right as we can while the time is given us.”
There was a long silence after that while the two sat gazing out across the blue lake; when Helen spoke again it was to say, “Some day you must tell me all about it, David, because I can help you; but let us not talk about these dreadful things now.” She stopped again, and afterwards went on thoughtfully, “I was thinking still of what you said about immortality, and how very strange it is to think of ceasing to be. Might it not be, David, that heaven is a place not of reward, but of the same ceaseless effort as you spoke of?”
“Ah, yes,” said the other, “that is the thought of 'the wages of going on.' And of course, dear, we would all like those wages; there is no thought that tempts me so much as the possibility of being able to continue the great race forever; but I don't see how we have the least right to demand it, or that the facts give us the least reason to suppose that we will get it. It seems to me simply a fantastic and arbitrary fancy; the re-creating of a worn-out life in that way. I do not think, dearest, that I am in the least justified in claiming an eternity of vision because God gives me an hour; and when I ask Him the question in my own heart I learn simply that I am a wretched, sodden creature that I do not crowd that hour with all infinity and go quite mad at the sight of the beauty that He flings wide before me.”
Helen did not reply for a while, and then she asked: “And you think, David, that our life justifies itself no matter how much suffering may be in it?”
“I think, dearest,” was his reply, “that the soul's life is struggle, and that the soul's life is sacred; and that to be right, to struggle to be right, is not only life's purpose, but also life's reward; and that each instant of such righteousness is its own warrant, tho the man be swept out of existence in the next.” Then David stopped, and when he went on it was in a lower voice. “Dear Helen,” he said, “after I have told you what I feel I deserve in life, you can understand my not wishing to talk lightly about such things as suffering. Just now, as I sit here at my ease, and in fact all through my poor life, I have felt about such sacred words as duty and righteousness that it would be just as well if they did not ever pass my lips. But there have come to me one or two times, dear, when I dared a little of the labor of things, and drank a drop or two of the wine of the spirit; and those times have lived to haunt me and make me at least not a happy man in my unearned ease. There come to me still just once in a while hours when I get sight of the gleam, hours that make me loathe all that in my hours of comfort I loved; and there comes over me then a kind of Titanic rage, that I should go down a beaten soul because I have not the iron strength of will to lash my own self to life, and tear out of my own heart a little of what power is in it. At such times, Helen, I find just this one wish in my mind,—that God would send to me, cost what it might, some of the fearful experience that rouses a man's soul within him, and makes him live his life in spite of all his dullness and his fear.”
David had not finished, but he halted, because he saw a strange look upon the girl's face. She did not answer him at once, but sat gazing at him; and then she said in a very grave voice, “David, I do not like to hear such words as that from you.”