# Irrevocable (O'Hagan)

Extracted from Scribner's magazine, v136, 1917-18, pp. 441-449. Accompanying illustrations omitted.
Irrevocable
BY ANNE O'HAGAN
CHARLOTTE EBERLIE, her ardent eyes like blue flowers in sunshine, looked up from her footstool to her mother in the judgment-seat above her. The judgment-seat was merely a chaise-longue of silvery gray wicker, cushioned in a piled fabric of more darkly shimmering gray, but Charlotte had always called it the judgment-seat. It was there that Leila Marsh sat to listen to the children and the servants, to weigh their problems, adjust their feuds, mete out their punishments; on the little stand beside it, even now, the household account-books stood waiting in an orderly pile. Leila was not an indolent woman, despite the chair; but life had taught her to conserve the energy that, unwatched, unconfined, would long since have consumed her along with itself.
"Well, mother?" The girl kept her voice light by a rather apparent effort. Her smile was fixed. The flower-like blue of her eyes darkened and hardened to a bright jewel. "Aren't you going to say, 'Bless you, my children'?"
Mrs. Marsh accorded the quotation the recognition of a faint smile. "I like your Charlie very much," she conceded; but, obviously, something still interposed between her and the blessing of consent for which her daughter asked.
"Good!" cried that young lady with a forced vivacity, designed to cover a certain nervousness. "And you like me very much, and you highly approve the holy state of matrimony, so that—"
"Just a minute, dearest." Leila's hands, white, delicately cared for, yet withal tragic, had the trick which the hands of the resolutely self-contained often have; they sometimes revealed the intensities which her face was schooled not to obtrude upon her world. They did this now; they clasped and unclasped nervously; they fluttered as they rested along the wicker arms of the chair. "Just a minute, Charlotte. I—I have never talked to you about your father—your own father."
"No," answered Charlotte, suddenly colorless, carefully negative, expressing neither invitation nor rebuff.
"I think I must talk to you of him now. You—you are like him, very like. And he was not a man to find happiness, or to give it, in marriage."
"Mother, how immoral of you!" cried the girl, restive under earnestness. "Surely you aren't going over to the theory of 'the-family-is-doomed,' or 'the-family-be-damned,' or whatever they call it? Surely you aren't going to counsel me to—er—the sort of life in which my father, presumably, gave and found happiness?"
"No." Leila had always met even the crudest of Charlotte's flippancies without other reprimand than coldly and completely to ignore them. "I am merely trying to say this to you—you must be sure of yourself, very sure. Don't—how shall I put it inoffensively?—make any man the victim of your experimentation with love. I suffered bitterly in my youth at your father's hands. And that was not all. He suffered also. Oh yes, he suffered in a thousand ways. He was, of course, bored with the scenes I made him at first. And he had no taste for inflicting pain—he hated to hurt me. That is why he preferred to deceive me—"
Charlotte started. In all her twenty-one years she had never known that ironic edge, of which her mother's voice was capable, turned homeward, turned upon herself or any intimate association. But it was gone as Leila hurried on.
"He suffered also, even if not so sharply as I. And I have no doubt that his life would have been much happier, much more productive, if he had married a woman either capable of holding him or capable of bearing with his infidelities. Wait a minute, Charlotte—" for in the girl's lifted face interruption was imminent. "Let me finish. I have never talked to you about him before, and I shall not again. But now you are old enough to hear me out; you have a trained mind; you must listen and judge for yourself, make your own decisions. I don't expect temptation to come to you in such varied or—or such vulgar forms as it came to Thurston." Charlotte shrank a little. She had never before heard her mother call her father's name. "You are a woman, which is in itself a safeguard, at any rate from the grosser, more promiscuous dangers. And I think—I hope with all my heart—your upbringing has not made for selfishness and self-indulgence. But you are Thurston Eberlie's own daughter. You have his eyes, his mouth, his laugh. His avidity for pleasure is in you, his zest for change, and some of his hardness—and some of his charm. Now you understand why I want you to be very sure of yourself before you marry Mr. O'Halloran—"
She stopped abruptly. She was looking over her daughter's thick, wavy, chestnut hair, out through the thin net curtains of her windows toward the lake, heaving slow, lead-colored waves, save where there flashed a pool of living steel from the reflection of the afternoon sun pushing strongly through a mass of gray clouds. Her eyes were somber and stormy like the waters of the lake, and shot, too, with a shaft of brilliant light. The girl looked long at the absent, handsome face above her, marked the curious confession of suffering in the white hands outstretched upon the chair. And through her selfish shrinking from the sight of tragedy, her selfish absorption in her own plans, there pierced the thought that she, all unconscious, had been the daily reminder of the poignancies that had darkened those eyes, shaped those hands.
"Mother," she whispered, "how you must have hated me!"
Leila Marsh brought her gaze back from the lake. With a sudden melting of her glance, she seemed to caress the young face uplifted to her in fascination and fear.
"Ah, my dear!" she said. "How I have loved you!" Then she sprang to her feet. She avoided intensities—she had had her fill of them long, long ago; she wanted no more of them now.
"That's all, Charlotte, dear. I wanted to help you to understand yourself before you made irrevocable vows to that nice boy. For vows are irrevocable, however we seem to smash them—"
"I'm sure of myself," stated Charlotte, briefly, following her mother's example and getting to her feet. "And I do understand myself better—a little. And you better—a lot."
"That," replied Leila, smiling, "is unnecessary, even undesirable. Run along now, dear. I'm going to ring for Miss Kenney to come and go over the books—"
"And I'm engaged? And you'll break it to Dad? And to the dear public? And Charlie may come down from Quentin for the parental benediction?"
"Yes. Run along, now." With an impulsiveness rare in her relations with her children, she leaned forward and kissed the girl.
Yet, when the straight, pliant, young figure had disappeared, her hand, outstretched toward the bell in the panel beside the door, fell back. She turned, and, walking to the window, looked out across the broad, leafless boulevard to the lake. It was all in sullen shadow again, the sun withdrawn from the leaden welter of waters. With nervous, white hands that gave the lie to the smooth tranquillity of her brow, she caught at the curtain-cord. A shudder shook her.
It was eighteen years since Thurston Eberlie had passed out of her life; eighteen years since she had first known loneliness, anguish, the humiliation of a nature weakly clamoring for a love withdrawn, and that fierce purpose which is the human spirit's expression or its instinct to live. In them, too, she had known gratitude, affection, companionship, the warm revival of the capacity for happiness. In them she had dared marriage again, had borne children, had experienced life, full, sweet, orderly—even noble, as lives go. Yet, with all that lay between her and that day, how its memory, once admitted, still had power to tear at her heart!
It had been in her dressing-room, that final scene in the long list of scenes that had punctuated the five years of her happiness and torment with the husband of her youth. He had been away for a fortnight; he had gone to inspect a tunnel which his firm was building in the Shasta range. He was to have been gone five days. Accident, utter and wanton but entirely conclusive, had supplied her with the proof of his companionship. And, learning that once again he had deceived her, derided and disgraced her with a trivial amour, she had told herself that she had reached the limit of her endurance.
Life had been strong, insistent, in her, and she had perceived, as by a revelation, that with Thurston Eberlie it was doomed. To remain with him, to endure the anger and anguish of his infidelities; to receive him back into her heart, her arms, humble, grateful, trembling with the rapture of reconciliation and of hope—only, by and by, to feel again the chill and numbness of creeping doubt, then the violent fury of certainty, then the stoic stiffening of her forces to bear a seemly presence in the world— Oh, to pass through these terrible alternations of feeling was to kill her, heart and soul. The body will not long survive the recurrent rages and shiverings of its fevers; she knew that her spirit could not survive the ravages of emotion which existence with Thurston implied. And there was in her—no more a matter of her choice than was the thick, blue-blackness of her hair, the vigor of her strong, graceful body, the shadowed darkness of her gray eyes; no more her choice than these—an insistence upon life.
She would have been glad enough to die, in spite of Charlotte, cooing to the birds from her basket on the piazza outside. Yes, she could have rejoiced in death! But her strong body rejected it; it was only her spirit that would die, and she would walk the earth a horrible thing—a charnel for her own dead being—unless she escaped from Thurston, unless she parted from him forever. She recalled the tradition of one of her pioneer ancestors who, horribly mutilated by Indians, left by them for dead, had managed, stricken as he was, to crawl back to the settlement out of which he had strayed; had managed to mend himself into some semblance of a man again, and had died, finally, full of years, the sire of a strong race. They were tenacious of life, her people. Her body could not die, and her will could not let her spirit die. Twisted, tortured, as it had been, she must save it. She must escape from the cruel, joyful, crucifying domination of her love for Thurston Eberlie.
That time she had known her decision real, no mere hysteric threat designed to bring him to his knees. That time it was earnest—she must save her life.
She remembered the room, all rosy cretonne and white muslin. Heliotrope—not the ground-hugging plant of the East, but an aspiring, strong tree—hung against her window. The years and years it had taken her to bear its languorous musk without a stricture of the throat, a weakness of the wrists!
He had come into the pretty, bright room—glad, gay, compelling. Where had she, who had loved him so, found strength to withstand the mere sight of him? Ah, she had to live, to live! And so she had told him, quite calmly, though with shortened breath, that she was going to leave him. She had taken, she remembered, his light, home-coming, customary kiss without emotion. Without emotion she had watched him go out to the baby on the little side-piazza. The child had crowed with joy, and had burst into a spray of pretty, silvery, half-intelligible words—the words of a two-year-old making wonderful experimental splashes into the pool of language. And, by and by, he had come back into the room, and she had interrupted his opening sentence of explanation about his delayed return from the mountains.
"Don't, Thurston. It isn't necessary. I know where you have been." She herself had been astonished at the almost casual tone of her voice. He had glanced at her quickly—alert, defensive, silent. He had many of the instinctive ways of animals—something of their suppleness of motion, something of their quickness of eyes, of swift apprehensiveness. He had been silent then, waiting—watching.
"I am going to get a divorce, Thurston," she had told him. And again she had sounded matter-of-fact. There had been no hysteric note, even when she had gone on: "I can't live this way, and I have to live. That is the queer thing—I have to live."
"You can't live without me, Leila," he had told her, "any more than I can live without you." And, miracle! she had not melted at the triumphant, tender security of his voice. More miraculous still, she had not even sneered then at his claim to need of her. And nothing that he had said had altered the calm finality of her decision. She remembered how he arose at last, his tanned face curiously whitened, his blue eyes black, as they had the trick of being when he was profoundly stirred. She remembered the grace of his figure, the strength, the resiliency, the charm.
"This is nonsense, you know, Leila," he had repeated. "I don't mean that I am blameless, but that you and I belong to each other. Other women—" He had brushed them all off, as though he knocked the ash from an idle moment's cigarette. "You and I belong to each other."
"No, you mean only that I belong to you," she had interrupted him, suddenly stung into feeling. "But I shall not, any longer. Thurston, I'm not angry. You cannot help it, perhaps, any more than you can help the color of your hair. But I have to save my own life. I cannot be stretched on this rack of torment and live."
He began to promise her amendment, with tender words of pity for her suffering. He blamed his ancestry, his upbringing, his associations, for that streak of irrepressible amorousness in him. But he would overcome it, he would—
"Thurston!" she had cried. "We can't go over this again. You were flirting before we were five months married, you were untrue to me before the year was past. And all those weeks before Charlotte was born— Oh, you wanted to be kind and thoughtful, and you quite adored me for bringing you a child—but all the time—all the time— Oh, can you not see it yourself? You can't resist the impulse to follow the woman who lures you, who intrigues you. Perhaps it is as you say. Perhaps it is your reckless great-grandfather, your dreadful old scandal of a grandmother. Perhaps it is that you were never taught self-denial, and that you went with a—a rotten crowd, you called them—at school and college. I don't accuse you of originating disloyalty and irresponsibility, Thurston. I only say that they are in you, bone and fiber, and that they are killing me, and that I am going to leave you—"
And she had never seen him since that day!
If she had known then what the next five years were to be, could she have let him go out of the room, out of the house? Those five terrible, aching, lonely years, when sometimes she would have crawled to him on hands and knees, to place her neck beneath his foot, to implore him to take her back on what terms he would! Those five dogged years when she had said to herself: "I will live, I will! I will live, a whole woman; not a poor, broken thing!" Those five frightened years, when she was forever fleeing from his figure descried in the distances, though she knew him seas and continents away; when she was forever waking, panic-stricken, from dreams of chance meetings with him! Those five determined years that drained, as she had thought, the last drop of her youth!
She would live, whole, sane. So she had studied, she had worked; she taught, she took loathed exercise, she sent herself tired to bed each night that she might sleep in spite of memory. In the libraries where she read and studied, she forbade her twitching fingers to touch the engineering journals that might, perhaps, have his name at the foot of an article, or might mention what he was doing, where he was building his railroads, his bridges—
Those bridges of his! She remembered how, in the rapturous six months of their engagement, when once she had bemoaned some separation, had declaimed against dividing space and time, he had laughed at her.
"Not dividing," he had said, "uniting! What's all the world but a road from your heart to mine? What's a sunbeam, a star ray, but a bridge between us—swinging so much truer than any I shall ever build? Ah, what is the whole universe but a series of delicately adjusted vibrations between us two?"
Five years of remembering that, and of stamping upon the memory, only to have it spring up again like fire beaten out in the brush. Five years of believing, in mad moments, that the world was indeed but the path between them he had named it, and that he, over there in Russia, or Persia, or wherever it was, must feel the beating of her heart, back there in New York.
Space and time! Ah, he had been wrong, she had been right. They did their sundering work at last. Space and time, and that unquenchable instinct of hers for life. When the fifth year had passed, she had met Camden Marsh. When the sixth was over, she was his wife—dear Camden!
Always, on those rare occasions when she permitted herself a reverie, she had a pang of remorse toward Camden. Yet she knew, with that clear vision of hers, that she had made him happy, as he, indeed, had made her happy. She drew a deep breath of gratitude for him, for their finely attuned congeniality, for their full-hearted contentment in each other, for the vigorous grace of their life. She had given him what he most wanted, comradeship of mind and heart, home, children. He had given her back her life. There was no true reason why she should ever feel that wave of remorse when she thought of what she had given Camden.
Turning from the window, she shook her shoulders with a characteristically decisive movement, as though with it she shook off the weight of the past. Not for months before had she indulged herself thus in the lacerating futility of recollection. It would be the last time, she promised herself rigorously; to-day, perhaps, she had been forced to unlock the door of that old room in her heart in order to do her duty to Charlotte. But that duty was done now, and she could lock the door again and throw away the key. She could live henceforth in the ample, serenely ordered rooms of her love for Camden, of his love for her. Dear Camden! Her breast swelled with the surge of her gratitude to him, of her renewed purpose to be to him all that a devoted woman could be to a man.
Not—again she insisted upon it, almost vehemently—that there had been in their relation any lack with which she could reproach herself. She loved him; she had loved him before she married him; not with rhapsody, not with the ignorant palpitations of a girl, but fully, honestly, thankfully—oh, how thankfully! She remembered how, when they had first met, his interest had injected, as it were, the cleansing medicament of self-respect into her ever-reopening wound. That he, so plainly and so greatly serviceable to his world, should find her talk stimulating, her thought helpful! That he, already a figure of meaning in the nation, should seek her out! The restoring pride that had come to her with that knowledge! The humility with which she had striven to be worthy of that friendship which he gave her! And then—the day when, looking into his clear-seeing eyes, she had surprised there the light of a man's desire for his mate, and had felt in her own veins the rush of response!
At first, astonished, outraged, she had denied the authenticity of that message of her blood. And Camden had not stormed her, but had waited the outcome of the battle in her with that touch of humorous philosophy which tempered his vigor, gave charm and color to his earnestness. The battle had been ended soon. She had not been swept off her feet either by him or by the resurgent capacity for passion in herself. But her startled anger at its first manifestation had died away. There spoke to her clear, balancing mind the purpose which had controlled her from the day when, out in the sunny, scented room with the heliotrope tapping the windows, she had told Thurston Eberlie that she must live. That purpose scorned, as sentimental, missish, her first revulsion from a new life of normal womanhood, it bade her be glad that nothing in her had been killed; bade her be honest to admit that, for her, there had been infinite possibilities of healing in life. She had thought again of that ancient of her race, and had felt close akin to him. She had yielded, married, lived the opulent life of love and service. In nothing—nothing!—she insisted upon it to herself, had she cheated Camden! Not in word, not in act, not even in those moments when bitter memory overwhelmed her like a salt tide. Why should there, then, ever and anon, have strayed out of that locked, dusty, dismantled room of her past something that went sighing, "Poor Camden!" through the rich house of life that she and he had made?
Again she shook her shoulders, and now she stepped determinedly toward the door. A tap sounded upon it.
"Come in," she called.
The footman, in the unostentatious livery which was her compromise between a sense of the fitness of things and her theoretically radical democracy, came in with a package.
"It is marked 'important,' madam, and just delivered by messenger."
"Ah, yes!" murmured Leila, half to herself as she looked at the superscription. "The book on internationalism Mrs. Mather promised to send me. Is that the afternoon paper, Jeliff?"
"Yes, ma'am. I thought you might like to see it. Terrible days in France, ma'am." Jeliff was English, and the professional immobility of his features was overlaid with human trouble.
"Thank you, Jeliff."
Leila laid the book upon the table and ran her glance over the headlines stretched across the page. Jeliff departed, leaving behind his bent, noiseless exit the faint atmosphere of his worriment. She read on about the battle, raging with vast slaughter and extravagant inconclusiveness on the western front of the war. And then, turning the page to go on with the tale of horror, she saw in black letters, there where the minor but still important events of the world were chronicled: "Thurston Eberlie Dead—Distinguished Engineer." Below was the smudged cut of a youthful photograph.
For a second she continued to stand, staring at the words, her body rigid. Her graceful arms were still wide outstretched; she had not folded the paper back to its single-page width. There was no sound at all in the room, no motion. Then the sheet began to rattle in the woman's hands. The tension of her arms relaxed. She felt herself swaying. She took a tight hold upon the paper and seemed to feel her way to a chair. She crumpled into it, then straightened and sat rigid for a moment, fighting the wave rising before her, threatening her with obliteration. She brushed the veil of on-creeping blindness from before her eyes. By and by, with great labor, she folded back the paper and read the column printed below the sinister collocation of black letters.
"Thurston Eberlie dead; forty-six years old." ("Yes, he was four years older than she.") "Headquarters in London for the past ten years—" ("Ah, so that was where he had been!") "Died, suddenly, in Algeria, pushing a French railroad." ("Algeria—he would have liked that—the heat, the color, the savagery that absolved a civilized man from his dull code of responsibility.") "Important work for the French government—" ("He had liked the French always, had always enjoyed the challenge of great jobs.") "Famous in the engineering world and well known to the bon-vivants of all the capitals in Europe—" ("Oh yes, he had been a bon-vivant in the making eighteen years before, when she had left—when he had left—when the end had come.") "Had married, in 1892, Miss Leila Magruder, of San Francisco, by whom he had been-divorced in 1897—" ("Yes, that, too, was true. She had divorced him.") "Had not married again—" ("Ah!") The syllable came in an uneven diminuendo from her lips. "Cremation—" ("Of course, of course! How he had always hated churchyards—and churches!") "Anecdotes—" ("Yes, there would be many of those ") "resourceful, generous, witty—"
What trivialities were these which she was reading? Trivialities, inanities!
Thurston was dead.
That was all the paper said; that was all that the universe thundered, pressing upon her ears, her eyes, with the monstrous message.
Thurston was dead!
"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Marsh, but—" It was Miss Kenney, her competent secretary.
"Go away! Go away!"
The girl, unable to believe her ears, frightened by the dull voice, came farther into the room, startled concern on her face.
"Go away, I tell you," cried Leila Marsh, terrifyingly distinct.
Rose Kenney retreated, hesitated at the threshold, looked back and met the full, furious command of her employer's eyes. She closed the door behind her. Leila, with a spring, had reached it and locked it almost before the knob had fallen to its place.
Thurston was dead!
Absurd fool that she had been! Never had she thought of that possibility—never. Had she been mad, that, in a world where men and women died every day, fell each hour like spring blossoms past their use, she had never thought of Thurston and of death together? Sometimes she had had womanish fears for Camden, off on journeys; once, during a scourge of diphtheria, she had held her breath over the beds of her three children lest even her respiration might affright life, hovering on the verge of flight. But Thurston!
Their governess brought Dick and Winifred to the door for their late-afternoon half-hour with her, but impatiently, inarticulately, she denied herself to them. Miss Kenney rapped again, begging to know if her employer were ill, if there were anything—
"No, no! Please go away!" she cried.
The light grew dimmer. The early twilight of a sunless day crept, in opaque, foggy purple, against her windows. On her hearth the fire gently shivered into white ashes. By and by the boulevard fruited, in a single moment, with silver-globuled balls of light. A shaft struck through the gossamery curtains, fell upon her hands, twisting and untwisting in her lap. She gave a little shudder, and a breath, a broken crescendo of pain, passed through her lips. She looked about her uncertainly; how long had she been sitting there, telling herself that Thurston was dead?
Camden— No, Camden would not soon be coming in. Camden, thank God—oh, thank God!—had started to New York that morning. He would not be there that evening to intrude upon her widowhood. Camden? Who and what had he been—nay, what had Thurston's own child been to her? Nothing, nothing at all! That great, victorious-seeming battle of her life had been waged against Thurston; he had been her antagonist, and, for the second, it seemed to her that in such a fight as hers had been no one had really existed for her but him against whom she struggled. Love, honor, peace, activity, husband, children—what were they? Her reinforcements, no more.
Thurston was dead. Dead yesterday, out there in Algeria. And the universe had not vibrated from him to her; she had not known that he was dead, had not felt it. He had sent no thought, winging straight as a starbeam, to her. Thurston!—Thurston!—
Had some other woman, nurse or mistress or humble friend—for, oh, he could compel friendship, too—closed his eyes? Had some other woman's arms lifted those dear shoulders, held a cup to his lips in those last hours of his life? Through her whole being there ran, swifter than lightning, sharper than a sword, the flame of jealousy and hate.
Thurston!—Thurston!—
From somewhere in the room, it seemed to her, she heard a laugh—low, teasing, victorious, the laugh she had not heard for eighteen years. She half stumbled from her chair; then she sank back. He was dead in Algeria, four thousand miles away. He would never again mock her love, her anger, with that gay assurance of his.
A battle with him? No, her life had been a voyage, and the depths upon which it had been borne were the depths of their love or their hate—their union. What does the mighty deep reck of all the patter of activity upon the boats it upholds—the concerts, the promenades, the flirtations, the throbbing of the engines, the cunning mechanism of wheels and valves? When the waters rise in their resistless strength, when their vapors gather above them in impenetrable fog—what then of all that activity, all that triumph of busy commonplace?
Her life had been a voyage across the deep waters of her love for him. She had made it proudly, opulently, but it was now no more than if she had been some poor, wave-tossed derelict clinging in mid-ocean to a raft.
Thurston was dead. How amazingly she had deceived herself all these years! How she had deluded herself with the thought that she had put him out of her life—him who underlay the whole of it! How she had succeeded in convincing herself that she rejoiced in never encountering him—why, she must verily have lived in the expectation of that hour! All in vain. She had never thought of death in connection with him—of course! She in whom life was so insistent, and to whom the most insistent thing in life, after all, had been Thurston Eberlie.
Slowly the tempest in her subsided. Her soul had been like some frightened, wild thing suddenly caught in a trap and running madly about, dashing itself against bars. Now it cowered and quivered into quiet. The flame of her impatience at the thought of her husband went out. She no longer pictured with rancor the woman who had caught the last gleam in Thurston's eyes and all the women who had shared his laughter all these years. She dropped into an abyss of sorrow, of desolation.
Ah, had she but left herself free for this moment! Had she but left herself the sacred liberty of sorrow, the liberty to wear the weeds of her grief! With what face should she be able to greet Camden again—the interloper, the obstruction between her and her right of agony? Camden, whom now, at last, she wronged with great unfaithfulness, longing to obliterate all the years of wifehood with him, that, unhindered, she might immolate herself upon Thurston's funeral pyre? Never had she been dull wife to Thurston, never had her feeling for him been this sober hearth-fire; no, she had been all lover, all untamed, devastating blaze. Why had she declined upon the lesser thing?
Thank God that Camden was away! A few days' respite she would have—
There were steps, voices, outside her door. Miss Kenney, her low tones not smothering her anxiety, spoke to some one. Leila listened, tense. The girl's steps retreated down the hall.
"Leila, may I come in? It is I—"
How had he been detained? What should she say to him? She dragged herself to the locked door and opened it. Her husband came in.
"I thought you had gone to New York." Her voice was dull, but hostile. He was bending over the fireplace, laying on new sticks, starting a fresh blaze. She felt peevishly resentful of his occupation, yet it suddenly struck her that she had been chilly, that she had wanted the comfort of heat. The blaze sprang up before he answered her.
"I had started," he said, "but I saw the afternoon papers while we waited at Fort Wayne. I came back on the next train."
The room was lighted by the leaping of the fresh flames. She could read his face above her, read the concern and pity in his eyes.
"Why?" she asked slowly, stupidly—she who had never been stupid, but who had made her life out of intelligence and unshakable purpose. "Why did you come back?"
"I came back, Leila, because I knew that you would be suffering, and I hoped that I might be of some comfort or some use to you."
"You knew that I would be suffering?" Had all her heart, then, been open to him while she herself had not had knowledge to read it?
"Of course, my dear."
They were both silent, looking at each other. By and by he spoke again.
"I have cabled to our consul at Oran. The despatch mentioned no relatives, no connections, no disposition of his ashes. If there is no one closer, we will attend to all of that—memorials and all. I thought"—and still his voice held steady, unemotional—"you might like that."
"We have never spoken of him at all, you and I," she said, irrelevantly. "Never—since I told you everything that time before we were married."
"I know that we have not. But—he was part of you, Leila. I took that part, too, when I married you."
Again silence. Then she spoke.
"I am glad you did that, Camden—the cabling, I mean—"
"I thought you would be glad."
Once more she brooded silently. Again he waited. At last it came.
"I am going to say something which may sound cruel, Camden. I never knew until to-day how irrevocably I had loved him."
"I have known it, Leila."
No reproach, no self-pity in his voice, only quiet and assurance. She stared at him, her thoughts rudderless.
"And you have not cared?" she said, slowly.
"Cared? Do you mean by that, doubted the reality of our life together? No, I have never doubted that. Been jealous of Eberlie? No. I have been jealous sometimes, I suppose, of the closed door, but not of what was behind it, Leila; I have been hurt at your shutting me out of part of your life, but not of the part itself. Do you understand me? I have known that your love for him was irrevocable—for it was love. As your love for me is irrevocable, my dear, whatever you may think now, because it is love—"
He stopped abruptly, for across the handsome, controlled features grief, unashamed, open, began to stir like the wind upon a pool. Her shadowed gray eyes grew luminous with crowding tears. In another minute the saving outburst came; sobs, short and harsh, shook the words from her lips.
"Camden!—Oh, Camden!" she cried, going to him and finding against his breast some human assuagement for all her incommunicable sorrow. "My poor Thurston! my poor boy!"
Holding her there while she grieved for the lover of her youth, while she admitted the indestructibility of that ancient love and the vastness of life in which only the untrue perishes, of life that recognizes no fitness save reality, no unfitness save falsity, thankfulness flowed over him. At last his wife had surrendered her heart to him; at last, confessing that presence so long its prisoned tenant, she told him the completeness of her love for him.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1933, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 90 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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