The Divine Fire
May Sinclair
CHAPTER LXI Page 2
Till now she had left the manuscript lying in her lap, where unconsciously her hands covered it with a gentle protecting touch. But as he spoke she took it up and put it away from her with an irresistible impulse of rejection. He knew that he was answered.
She turned, as he had seen her turn once and only Once before, in reproach that was almost anger.
"Perhaps not. That doesn't prevent my thinking of you. But I was thinking of myself, too. Supposing I had done this thing that you would have loathed; even though you had never known it, I should have felt that I had betrayed your trust, that I had taken something from you that I had no right to take, something that you would never have given me if you had known. What was I to do?"
She did not answer him. Once before, he remembered, when his honour was in difficulties, she had refused to help it out, left it to struggle to the light; which was what it did now.
"It would have been better to have said nothing and done nothing."
He expected her to close instantly with that view of his behaviour which honour had presented as the final one, but this she did not do.
"If you had said nothing you might have done what you liked."
"I see. It's my saying it that makes the difference?"
"That is _not_ what I meant. I meant that you were free to publish what you have written. You are not free to say these things to me."
"For the life of me I don't know why I said them. It means perdition for my poems and for me. I knew that was all I had to gain by telling you the truth."
"But it _isn't_ the truth. You know it isn't. You don't even think it is."
"And if it were, would it be so terrible to you to hear it?"
She did not answer. She only looked at him, as by looking she could read the truth. For his face had never lied.
He persisted. "If it were true, what would you think of me?"
"I should think it most dishonourable of you to say so. But it isn't true."
He smiled. "Therefore it can't be dishonourable of me to say so."
"No, not that. You are not dishonourable; therefore it can't be true. Let us forget that you ever said it."
"But I can't forget that it's true any more than I can make it untrue. You think me dishonourable, because you think I've changed. But I haven't changed. It always was so, ever since I knew you; and that's more than five years ago now. I am dishonourable; but that's not where the dishonour comes in. _The_ dishonourable thing would have been to have left off caring for you. But I never did leave off. There never was a minute when it wasn't true, nor a minute when I didn't think it. If I was sure of nothing else I was always sure of that. Where the dishonour came in was in caring for another woman, in another way."
"That is not so, but you can say it is, if it makes you any happier."
"It does make me happier to think that it's your genius, not you, that says these things. For I can forgive your genius; but I couldn't have forgiven you."
At that moment he felt a savage jealousy of his genius, because she loved it. "And yet, you said a little while ago you couldn't separate the two."
All the time she was miserably aware that she was trying to defend herself with subtleties against the impact of a terrible reality. And because that reality must weigh more heavily on him than her, she was trying to defend him too, against himself, to force on him, against himself, her own subtilizing, justifying view.
But his subtlety was a match for hers. "Your cousin once did me the honour to say I was one-seventh part a poet, and upon my honour I prefer his estimate to yours."
"What is mine?"
"That I'm nothing but a poet. That there wasn't enough of me left over to make a man."
"That is not my estimate, and you know it. I think you so much a man that your heart will keep you right, even though your genius has led you very far astray."
"Is that all you know about it?"
"Well, I'm not sure that it is your genius, this time. I rather think it's your sense of honour. I believe you think that because you once cared for me you've got to go on caring, lest I should accuse you of being faithless to your dream." ("Surely," she said to herself, "I've made it easy for him now?")
But the word was too much for him. "For Goodness' sake don't talk to me any more about my dream. You may think any mortal thing you like about me, so long as you don't do that."
She smiled faintly, as if with an effort at forbearance. "Very well then, I won't talk about your dream. I'll say you were afraid lest I should think you had been faithless to _me_. It would never have occurred to you if you hadn't seen me again. It will not occur to you after I am gone. It will be all over by to-morrow."
"Why to-morrow?" He spoke stupidly. Fear had made him stupid. "Why to-morrow?"
"Because I am going to-morrow."
Then he knew that it was indeed all over. The door which had been open to him was about to close; and once closed it would never be open to him again.
"I think you have done very wrong, and that our talking about it only makes it worse. And so--I'm sorry--but I must ask you to leave me."
But he did not leave her. "And I must ask you to forgive me," he said gently.
"I? I have nothing to forgive. You haven't done anything to me. But I should never forgive you if I thought this foolishness could make one moment's difference to--to Flossie."
"It never has made any difference to her," he replied coldly, "or to my feeling for her. I never felt towards any woman as I feel towards you. It isn't the same thing at all. Heaven knows I thought I cared enough for her to marry her. But it seems I didn't. That's why I say it makes no difference to her. Nothing is altered by it. As far as Flossie is concerned, whether I marry her or not I shall have behaved abominably. I don't know which is the more dishonourable."
"Don't you?"
"No. I only know which I'm going to do."
She turned head away. And that turning away was intolerable. It was the closing of the door.
"Is it so very terrible to you?" he said gently.
He could not see the tears in her eyes, but he heard them in her voice, and he knew that he had wounded her, Hot in her pride, but in her tenderness and honour--Lucia's honour.
"To me? I'm not thinking of myself--not of myself at all. How could I think of myself? I'm thinking of _her_." She turned to him and let her tears gatin her eyes unheeded. "Don't you see what you've done?"
Oh, yes; he saw very well what he had done. He had taken the friendship she had given to him to last his life and destroyed it in a moment, with his own hands. All for the sake of a subtlety, a fantastic scruple, a question asked, a thing said under some obscure compulsion. He had been moved by he knew not what insane urgency of honour. And whatever else he saw he did not see how he could have done otherwise. The only alternative was to say nothing, to do nothing. Supposing he had suppressed both his passion and the poems that immortalized it, what would she have thought of him then? Would she not have thought that he had either dedicated to her a thing that he was afterwards ashamed of, or that he had meant nothing by the dedication?
These thoughts swept through her brain like one thought, as she contemplated the misery she had made. They came with the surging of the blood in her cheeks, so swiftly that she had no time to see they hardly exhausted the aspects of her case. And it was not her own case that she was thinking of.
She turned to him pleading. "Don't you see that I could never forgive myself if I thought that I had hurt her? You are not going to make me so unhappy?"
"Do you mean, am I going to marry her?"
She said nothing; for she was conscious now, conscious and ashamed of using a power that she had no right to have; ashamed, too, of being forced to acknowledge the truth of the thing she had so passionately denied.
"You needn't be afraid," he said. "Of course I am going to marry her."
But the terrible thing had to be done. She had got to return the manuscript, the gift that should never have been given. She gathered the loosened sheets tenderly, like things that she was grieved to part from. He admitted that she was handling her sword with all gentleness so as to avoid as far as possible any suggestion of a thrust.
"You must take them back," she said. "I can't keep them--or--or have anything to do with them after what you told me. I should feel as if I'd taken what belonged to some one else."
As he took the sheets from her and pocketed them, she felt that again he was pocketing an insult as well as a stab.
But the victim was no longer an inexperienced youth. So he smiled valorously, as beseemed his manhood. "And yet," he murmured, "you say it isn't true."
She did not contradict him this time. And as he turned he heard behind him the closing of the door.