“Of course.”
“She will blame me,” said Peace. “But—I shall not be troubled, and you mustn’t,” she said, and she lightly touched him. “This is just as I wish it to be. I’ve been afraid that if this ever happened, I shouldn’t have the courage to tell you what I have. But you helped me, and I am so glad you did! I was afraid you would say something that would blind me, and keep me from going on in the right way; but now—Good-night.”
“Good-night,” said Ray, vaguely. “May I—dream of you, Peace?”
“If you’ll stop at daybreak.”
“Ah, then I shall begin to think of you.”
XLV.
They had certainly come to an understanding, and for Ray at least there was release from the obscure sense of culpability which had so long harassed him. He knew that unless he was sure of his love for Peace, he was to blame for letting her trust it; but now that he had spoken, and spoken frankly, it had freed them both to go on and be friends without fear for each other. Her confession that there had been a time when she loved him flattered his vanity out of the pain of knowing that she did not love him now; it consoled him, it justified him; for the offence which he had accused himself of was of no other kind than hers. How wisely, how generously she had taken the whole matter!
The question whether she had not taken it more generously than he merited began to ask itself. She might have chosen to feign a parity with him in this. He had read of women who sacrificed their love to their love; and consented to a life-long silence, or practised a life-long deceit, that the men they loved might never know they loved them. He had never personally known of such a case, but the books were full of such cases. This might be one of them. Or it might much more simply and probably be that she had received his strange declaration as she did in order to spare his feelings. If that were true she had already told her sister, and Mrs. Denton had turned the absurd side of it to the light, and had made Peace laugh it over with her.
A cold perspiration broke out over him at the notion, which he rejected upon a moment’s reflection as unworthy of Peace. He got back to his compassionate admiration of her, as he walked down to the ferry and began his homeward journey. He looked about the boat, and fancied it the same he had crossed to New York in, when he came to the city nearly a year before. The old negro who whistled, limped silently through the long saloon; he glanced from right to left on the passengers, but he must have thought them too few, or not in the mood for his music. Ray wondered if he whistled only for the incoming passengers. He recalled every circumstance of his acquaintance with Peace, from the moment she caught his notice when Mrs. Denton made her outcry about the pocket-book. He saw how once it had seemed to deepen to love, and then had ceased to do so, but he did not see how. There had been everything in it to make them more to each other, but after a certain time they had grown less. It was not so strange to him that he had changed; he had often changed; but we suppose a constancy in others as to all passions which we cannot exact of ourselves. He tried to think what he had done to alienate the love which she confessed she once had for him, and he could not remember anything unless it was his cruelty to her when he found that she was the friend who would not look at his story a second time. She said she had forgiven him that; but perhaps she had not; perhaps she had divined a potential brutality in him, which made her afraid to trust him. But after that their lives had been united in the most intimate anxieties, and she had shown absolute trust in him. He reviewed his conduct toward her throughout, and he could find no blame in it except for that one thing. He could truly feel that he had been her faithful friend, and the friend of her whole uncomfortable family, in spite of all his prejudices and principles against people of that kind. In the recognition of this fact he enjoyed a moment’s sense of injury, which was heightened when he reflected that he had even been willing to sacrifice his pride, after his brilliant literary success, so far as to offer himself to a girl who worked for her living; it had always galled him that she held a place little better than a type-writer’s. No, he had nothing to accuse himself of, after a scrutiny of his behavior repeated in every detail, and applied in complex, again and again, with helpless iteration. Still he had a remote feeling of self-reproach, which he tried to verify, but which forever eluded him. It was mixed up with that sense of escape, which made him ashamed.