“It would have stopped their work where it was—you said so yourself.”
Cerini again bowed his head. “All part of the same mistake,” he admitted. “Had I encouraged you at that time you would not only have added much to the work itself, but you would have saved your husband from his own great error. I have been much to blame, my daughter, and you must not hold him responsible for a fault which is really mine.”
Helen tried to fathom what was in the old man’s mind. She could not question his sincerity, yet his words seemed a mockery. Jack had evidently taken him freely into his confidence, so there was no reason why she should not speak freely.
“Mr. Armstrong has apparently told you how unfortunately his experience has ended in its effect upon our personal relations. Knowing this, I am sure you would not intentionally wound me further by seeking to restore matters to a false basis; yet I can understand your words in no other way. As you said of my husband, that day in the library, this time it is your heart and not your head which finds expression.”
The librarian gasped with apprehension. “Daughter! daughter!” he cried, “have I not made myself clear! Then let me do so now before any possible misunderstanding can enter in. I am a humanist by profession—until now I believed myself a modern humanist. When I first knew your husband, he was a youth full of intelligent appreciation of those ancient marvels which I delighted to show him. Imagine my joy, twelve years later, to welcome him again, grown to man’s estate, and to find that the early seeds which I had planted within him had sent out roots and tendrils so strong as to hold him firmly in their grasp. Then he brought Miss Thayer to me—at first I took her for you, as she was the kind of woman I had expected him to marry. She entered into his work with him with the same spirit as his own, and my foolish old heart rejoiced that such splendid material had been placed in my hands for the moulding.”
“Why repeat all this?” Helen interrupted; “I know it all and accept it all, but what agony to pass through it still another time!”
“Forgive me, my daughter,” Cerini replied, quickly; “we are past the period of your sacrifice now, and have reached the point of your triumph.”
“My triumph!” cried Helen, bitterly. “Why do you hurt me so?”
“Patience, dear,” Uncle Peabody urged, quietly. “Monsignor Cerini has some purpose in mind which makes this necessary, I am sure.”
“I am unfortunate in my presentation,” the librarian apologized. “The point I wish to make is that up to the time I met Mrs. Armstrong I had known but one kind of humanism. I myself had studied the master-spirits of the past, and had assimilated the principles which they taught. Mr. Armstrong and Miss Thayer assimilated their lessons in the same way as I had done; but we all failed to recognize in this dear lady the natural expression—the personification—of all that we ourselves had labored so assiduously to acquire.”