“Oh, no! You mustn’t say that. If you wish to be kind to me—and I am sure you do wish it—don’t think bitterly of Philip.”
When I remember that the first feeling she roused in me was nothing worthier of a professing Christian than astonishment, I drop in my own estimation to the level of a savage. “Do you really mean,” I was base enough to ask, “that you have forgiven him?”
She said, gently: “How could I help forgiving him?”
The man who could have been blessed with such love as this, and who could have cast it away from him, can have been nothing but an idiot. On that ground—though I dared not confess it to Eunice—I forgave him, too.
“Do I surprise you?” she asked simply. “Perhaps love will bear any humiliation. Or perhaps I am only a poor weak creature. You don’t know what a comfort it was to me to keep the few letters that I received from Philip. When I heard that he had gone away, I gave his letters the kiss that bade him good-by. That was the time, I think, when my poor bruised heart got used to the pain; I began to feel that there was one consolation still left for me—I might end in forgiving him. Why do I tell you all this? I think you must have bewitched me. Is this really the first time I have seen you?”
She put her little trembling hand into mine; I lifted it to my lips, and kissed it. Sorely was I tempted to own that I had pitied and loved her in her infancy. It was almost on my lips to say: “I remember you an easily-pleased little creature, amusing yourself with the broken toys which were once the playthings of my own children.” I believe I should have said it, if I could have trusted myself to speak composedly to her. This was not to be done. Old as I was, versed as I was in the hard knowledge of how to keep the mask on in the hour of need, this was not to be done.
Still trying to understand that I was little better than a stranger to her, and still bent on finding the secret of the sympathy that united us, Eunice put a strange question to me.
“When you were young yourself,” she said, “did you know what it was to love, and to be loved—and then to lose it all?”
It is not given to many men to marry the woman who has been the object of their first love. My early life had been darkened by a sad story; never confided to any living creature; banished resolutely from my own thoughts. For forty years past, that part of my buried self had lain quiet in its grave—and the chance touch of an innocent hand had raised the dead, and set us face to face again! Did I know what it was to love, and to be loved, and then to lose it all? “Too well, my child; too well!”
That was all I could say to her. In the last days of my life, I shrank from speaking of it. When I had first felt that calamity, and had felt it most keenly, I might have given an answer worthier of me, and worthier of her.