The reproduction of a wonderful painting of the meeting of Beatrice and Dante held her eye for a long time.... The blight was upon her as she tried a last time to write. It spread over her hand and the table, the room, the day. There was a hurt for him in everything she wanted to say. She was hot and ill—her back, her brain, her eyes, from trying. She could not hurt him any more. He had done nothing but give her healing and visions. His Guardian had done nothing but tell the truth, which she had seen at the time. This agony of hers had existed. It was like everything else in the world.
She wrote at last of their service in the world. They needed, she said, the strong air of solitude to think out the perfect way. It was very hard for her, who had fared so long on dreams and denials and loneliness. He must remember that. “Great things come to those who love at a distance,” she wrote bravely. Tears started when she saw the sentence standing so dauntlessly upon the page of her torture.... It would make them kinder, make their ideals live—and how young they were!... She said that she was afraid to be so happy as he had made her in certain moments. Often she found herself staring at the picture of Beatrice and Dante.
The thought that broke in upon this brave writing was that she was denied the thrill of great doing, as it had come to her while Fallows had spoken.... It would have lived on, had she gone that night, without seeing Morning again. Moreover, her way was different from that which she had pictured, as his Guardian talked. She did not see then that her action made a kind of lie of all her giving up to that hour; and that there could be no united sacrifice. It was pure, voiceless sacrifice for her—and blind murdering for him....
From the choke of this, her mind would turn to the song of triumph her spirit had sung as his Guardian told the story.... She had seemed to live in a vast eternal life, as she listened; and this which she was asked to do—was just to attend a temporary flesh sickness. She had the strange blessedness that comes with the conviction that immortality is here and now, as those few men and women of the world have known in their highest moments.
She could get back nothing of that exaltation. It would never come again. The spirit it had played upon was broken.... She had been rushing away on her thoughts. It was afternoon, the letter unfinished, the ’cello staring at her from the corner. It had stood by her in all her sorrows of the years, but was empty as a fugue now—endless variations upon the one theme of misery.... Happiness does not come back to the little things—after one has once known the breath of life.... She closed the narrow way of the letter, which she had filled with words—no past nor future, only the darkness that had come in to mingle with the dark hangings of the room of her friend.... She kissed the pages and sent them back the way she had come in the night.
The qualities that had brought her the friend, Helen Quiston, and which had made the friendship so real, were the qualities of Betty Berry. She had come to the last woman to be told of her madness, or to find admonition toward breaking down the thing she had begun.... They had talked for hours that night.
“I know it is lovely, dear Betty. Why, you look lovelier this instant than I ever dreamed you could be. Loving a man seems to do that to a woman—but the privilege of the greater thing! Oh, you are privileged. That’s the way of the great love. I should like sometime to know that Guardian. How did mere man grasp the beauty and mystery of service like that?... Stay with me. I will serve you, hands and feet. It is enough for me to touch the garment’s hem.... You are already gone from us, dearest. You have loved a man. You do love a man. He is worthy. You have not found him wanting. What matters getting him—when you have found your faith? Think of us—think of the gray sisterhood you once belonged to—nuns of the world—who go about their work helping, and who say softly to each other as they pass, ‘No, I have not been able to find him yet.’”
17
Morning awoke in the gray of the winter morning. The place was cold and impure. He had fallen asleep without the accustomed blasts of hill-sweeping wind from window to window. He had not started the fire the night before; had merely dropped upon his cot, dazed with suffering and not knowing his weariness. He was reminded of places he had awakened in other times when he could not remember how he got to bed. Beyond the chairs and table lay the open fire-place, the ashes hooded in white.