It seemed that he was going to be a very splendid lover!
XXVIII
The summer was nearly at an end—a summer that had brought rehabilitation to the Typometer Company, yet rehabilitation under strict rule, strict economy, endless work. Nominally the same thing, the typometer was now but one factor of trade among a dozen other patented inventions under the control of Rondell Brothers.
If there was not quite the same personal flavor as yet in Justin's relation to the business which had seemed so inspiringly his own, there was a larger relation to greater interests, a wider field, a greater sense of security, and a sense of justice in the change; he felt that he had much to learn. There was something in him that could not profit where other men profited—that could not take advantage when that advantage meant loss to another. He was not great enough alone to reconcile the narrowing factors of trade with that warring law within him. The stumbling of Cater would have been another stumbling-block if it had not been that one. That for which Leverich, with Martin always behind him, had chosen Justin first, had been the very thing that had fought against them.
The summer was far spent. Justin had been working hard. It was long after midnight. Lois slept, but Justin could not; he rose and went into the adjoining room, and sat down by her open window. The night had been very close, but now a faint breath stirred from somewhere out of the darkness. It was just before the dawn. Justin looked out into a gloom in which the darkness of trees wavered uncertainly and brought with it a vague remembrance. He had done all this before. When? Suddenly he recollected the night he had sat at this same window, at the beginning of this terrible journey; and his thoughts and feelings then, his deep loneliness of soul, the prevision of the pain even of fulfilment—an endless, endless arid waste, with the welling forth of that black spirit of evil in his own nature, as the only vital thing to bear him secret company—a moment that was wolfish to his better nature. Almost with the remembrance came the same mood, but only as reflected in the surface of his saner nature, not arising from it.
As he gazed, wrapped in self-communing, on the vague formlessness of the night, it began gradually to dissolve mysteriously, and the outlines of the trees and the surrounding objects melted into view. A bird sang from somewhere near by, a heavenly, clear, full-throated call that brought a shaft of light from across the world, broadening, as the eye leaped to it, into a great and spreading glory of flame.
It had rained just before; the drops still hung on bush and tree; and as the dazzling radiance of the sun touched them, every drop also radiated light, prismatic, and scintillating an almost audibly tinkling joy. So indescribably wonderful and beautiful, yet so tender, seemed this scene—as of a mighty light informing the least atom of this tearful human existence—that the profoundest depths of Justin's nature opened to the illumination.
In that moment, with calm eyes, and lips firmly pressed together, his thoughts reached upward, far, far upward. For the first time, he felt in accordance with something divine and beyond—an accordance that seemed to solve the meaning of life, what had gone and what was to come. All the hopes, the planning, the seeking and slaving, whatever they accomplished or did not accomplish, they fashioned us ourselves. As it had been, so it still would be. But for what had gone before, he had not had this hour.
It was the journey itself that counted—the dear joys by the way, that come even through suffering and through pain: the joy of the red dawn, of the summer breeze, of the winter sun; the joy of children; the joy of companionship.
He held out his arm unconsciously as Lois stole into the room.