第80章

Not through fault of hers,--ah, no; she was blameless throughout;but because she did not, could not, understand.what any touch of hers must mean to me.In her dear life, there had never been another man; that much I knew by unerring instinct and by her own admission.

I have sometimes thought that she may have had an ideal in her girlish days, against whom, in after years, she measured others, and, finding them come short, held them at arm's length.But, if Iam right in this surmise, he must have been a blind fool, unconscious of the priceless love which might have been his, had he tried to win it.For I am certain that, until that night, no man's love had ever flamed about her; she had never felt herself enveloped in a cry which was all one passionate, in-articulate, inexplicable, boundless need of herself.While I thought she understood and responded,--Heaven knows I DID think it,--she did not in the least understand, and was only trying to be sympathetic and kind."The doctor stirred in his chair, slowly crossed one leg over the other, and looked searchingly into the blind face.He was finding these confidences of the "other man" more trying than he had expected.

"Are you sure of that?" he asked rather huskily.

"Quite sure," said Garth."Listen.I called her--what she was to me just then, what I wanted her to be always, what she is forever, so far as my part goes, and will be till death and beyond.That one word,--no, there were two,--those two words made her understand.Isee that now.She rose at once and put me from her.She said I must give her twelve hours for quiet thought, and she would come to me in the village church next morning with her answer.Brand, you may think me a fool; you cannot think me a more egregious ass than I now think myself; but I was absolutely certain she was mine; so sure that, when she came, and we were alone together in the house of God, instead of going to her with the anxious haste of suppliant and lover, I called her to me at the chancel step as if I were indeed her husband and had the right to bid her come.She came, and, just as a sweet formality before taking her to me, I asked for her answer.It was this: 'I cannot marry a mere boy.'"Garth's voice choked in his throat on the last word.His head was bowed in his hands.He had reached the point where most things stopped for him; where all things had ceased forever to be as they were before.

The room seemed strangely silent.The eager voice had poured out into it such a flow of love and hope and longing; such a revealing of a soul in which the true love of beauty had created perpetual youth; of a heart held free by high ideals from all playing with lesser loves, but rising to volcanic force and height when the true love was found at last.

The doctor shivered at that anticlimax, as if the chill of an empty church were in his bones.He knew how far worse it had been than Garth had told.He knew of the cruel, humiliating question: "How old are you?" Jane had confessed to it.He knew how the outward glow of adoring love had faded as the mind was suddenly turned inward to self-contemplation.He had known it all as abstract fact.Now he saw it actually before him.He saw Jane's stricken lover, bowed beside him in his blindness, living again through those sights and sounds which no merciful curtain of oblivion could ever hide or veil.

The doctor had his faults, but they were not Peter's.He never, under any circumstances, spoke BECAUSE he wist not what to say.

He leaned forward and laid a hand very tenderly on Garth's shoulder.

"Poor chap," he said."Ah, poor old chap."And for a long while they sat thus in silence.