“Yes, my child lives; does it not live? But oh, my wife! You cannot know or guess how a man loves.”
“Ah, yes, I do—I do indeed.”
“Then look at me. She was my life, my first real love.”
“Oh, restrain your tears.”
“You have never loved. She was all the better part of me, or bore the burden of the worse. She took me in growing manhood, she, only a tender girl. She leaned to my first embrace, she overlooked my failings and shared my first struggles. After some years we married. She said I was patient to wait. And then we grew in life together, the weak strengthening the weak. I used to dream of our growing old together, dying together, and our loves living on after us together, after having drawn us nearer and making us dearer to God and each other. Ah, me! that short life soon ended; and now it is dead, dying in the dream of another life in our child. And I saw the soft look in the eyes of the mother harden under the cold shadow of death. Do not weep for me!”
“I, too, have loved. You do not know how a woman loves. The base of eternity was the love I builded on. I loved unspeaking, silently, as a woman must; but I loved, and I would have shared hell with the man I loved. I resisted, fought against it and he never knew. Yet I think he loved me once—is it impossible? I felt myself mastered by the generous and godly mind of a man; my weaknesses vanished in the potency of his strength. And he may have loved me—he may have loved me.
“But I saw another woman’s love for this man. I knew the frail flower of her life was dying in the want of sustenance for her love.... No, I did not love her; a woman does not love so. Perhaps it was for pity of her, perhaps it was for love of him, that I was impelled to offer myself a sacrifice. His was a man’s love. Oh, yes, I know a man’s love rises to that height at times where only a woman’s love constantly abides. His was a man’s love, and soon he loved her. Ah, I envied her, almost bitterly. I sewed her bridal linen; it was a work of love which she dreamed not of. I made the garments for their first born; it was a holy duty of my love. I laid her in her shroud. I envy her, even now.”
He was as a man waking from a dream. He took a step toward her, but she turned away. He looked at the waxen face of the corpse.
“Ah, it is terrible to die; but what is it to live?”