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"It could not be!" he muttered, as he stumbled on in the dark. He was
oversuspicious. But how else could the facts be explained? Such deaths, he
knew, did not occur to men in Preston's condition,--calm, easy deaths,
without the agony of convulsion. _No_, it _must be_. Science was
stronger than desire, than character, than human imagination. To disbelieve
his scientific knowledge would be to deny the axioms of life.
And why should it not be? Was it not what he had reproached himself for not
doing, and reproached his medical brethren as cowards for not daring to do
in so many cases? The horror of it, the uncanniness of it, thus stopping
the human animal's course as one would stop an ill-regulated watch, had
never appealed to him before. "Prejudice!" he cried aloud. His involuntary
drawing back was but an unconscious result of the false training of
centuries. As a doctor, familiar with death, cherishing no illusions about
the value of the human body, he should not act like a nervous woman, and
run away! How brutal he had been to her!
His mind passed on, traversing vast areas of speculation by a kind of
cerebral shorthand. What would be the result upon humanity if all doctors
took this liberty of decision? Where could you draw the distinction between
murder and medicine? Was science advanced enough as yet to say any certain
thing about the human body and mind? There were always mysterious
exceptions which might well make any doctor doubtful of drastic measures.
And the value of human life, so cheap here in this thirsty million of
souls, cheap in the hospitals; but really, essentially, at the bottom of
things, who knew how cheap it was?
Thus for an hour or more his mind was let loose among the tenebra of life,
while his feet pushed on mechanically over the dusty roads that skirted the
lake. He had nowhere to go, now that he had broken with the routine of
life, and he gave himself up to the unaccustomed debauch of willess
thinking. He was conscious at length of traversing the vacant waste where
the service-buildings of the Fair had stood. Beyond were the shattered
walls of the little convent, wrapped in the soft summer night. There they
had sat together and watched the fire die out, while she told her story,
and he listened in love.
The real thing--was the woman. This thought stung him like a reproach of
cowardice. He had forgotten her! And she was but the instrument in the
deed, for he had taught her that this care of a worthless life was
sentimental, hysterical. He had urged her to put it away in some easy
fashion, to hide it at least, in some sort of an asylum. That she had
steadfastly refused to do. Better death outright, she had said. And that
which he had feared to undertake, she had done, fearlessly. He had
recoiled; it made him tremble to think of her in that act. What cowardice!
These were the consequences of his teaching, of his belief.
What had made her take this resolution so suddenly? There was time, all the
time in the world, and having once neglected the thing at the very start,
it was curious that she should now, at this late date, make her desperate
resolve. Preston had not been worse, more difficult to handle. In fact,
when the two women had grown used to his case, the management had been
simple enough. He had thought she was inured to the disgust and the
horror--placid almost, and taking the thing like one accustomed to pain.
What was the cause of her revolt from her burden? Those filthy words the
night they had come back late, when the fellow had stolen downstairs and
spied upon them at their coffee. Had the shame of it before him stung her
past enduring? Had it eaten into her mind and inflamed her?
But his feverish imagination was not content with this illumination of the
facts. Something more lay behind it all. He sat down beside a prostrate
column to penetrate the gloom. As he gazed before him into the dark
heavens, the blast furnace winked like an evil eye, then silently belched
flame and smoke, then relapsed into its seething self. The monster's breath
illumined the dusky sky for a few moments. Blackness then fell over all for
two minutes, and again the beast reappeared. Far away to the west came
through the night a faint roar, like the raving of men. There was a line of
light against the horizon: the mob was burning freight cars. Soon the
bonfire died down. The cries sounded more and more faintly, and more
distinctly came the sharp reports of revolvers or military rifles. The law
had taken a hand in the game.
It was a night like this when the first glow of joy had suffused his life;
and then had come that night, that wonderful night, which began, in the
lurid fire, and ended foully with Preston's words. Here was the key: she
too loved, as he had, and this feeling which had drawn them together from
the very moment when he had looked from the helpless form on the hospital
chair to her had grown, surging up in her heart as in his--until, until she
had taken this last stern step, and had--
He had begun to walk once more, heading south, retracing his steps by the
most direct line. To leave her thus, with all the horror; thus when she had
reached out to him--oh, the shame, the brutality of it! He hastened his
steps almost to a run. Perhaps it was already too late; his cold, hard
manner had killed her love, crushed her, and she had gone on to the next
step. The night was cold now, but his hands were damp with a feverish
sweat. How blind, not to have read at once, as she would have done, the
whole deed! What she had done, she had done for him, for both, and he had
left her to carry the full burden alone. Like a boy, he had wavered at the
sight of what she had accomplished so swiftly, so competently, for
_their_ sake. To love shamefully, that was not in her, and she had put
the cause of shame away. As he hurried on southwards, his thoughts flew out
on this new track. She had made the way clear; he must go to her, take her,
accept her acts with her love. They were one now.
It was late, past midnight, when he reached the long cross street that led
to the lane of the cottage, and the buzz of the passing cars no longer
disturbed the hoarse chorus of frogs. Sommers crept up the lane stealthily
to the dark cottage, afraid for what he might find, chilled by the
forbidding aspect of the place. Instead of entering the door, he paused by
the open window and peered in. Within the gloom of the room he could make
out her bent figure, her head fallen forward over her arms. She was sitting
where he had left her, but the spell of her tense gaze had broken. She had
laid her head upon the table to weep, and had not raised it all these
hours. The night wind soughed into the room through the open window,
drifting a piece of paper about the floor, poking into the gloom of the
interior beyond.
Sommers noiselessly pushed open the door and entered the room. The bent
figure did not heed the tread of his steps. He stood over her, knelt down,
and wrapped her in his arms.
"Alves!" he whispered.
She roused herself as from a dream and turned her face to his, wonderingly.
"Alves," he stammered, reading eagerly the sombre lines of her face, "I
have come back--for always."
Then she spoke, and her voice had a mechanical ring, as if for a long time
it had not been used.
"But you left me--why did you come back?"
"You know," he answered, his feverish face close to her white forehead.
"You know!" The face was so cold, so large and sombre, that it seemed to
chill his fever.
"I have come to share--to have you, because I love, because we loved--from
the first, all through."
At his slow, trembling words, the woman's face filled with the warm blood
of returning life. Her flesh paled and flushed, and her eyes lit slowly
with passion; her arms that had rested limply on the table took life once
more and grasped him. The feeling sweeping into her lifeless body thrilled
him like fire. She was another woman--he had never known her until this
communicating clasp.
"You love me?" she asked, with a moan of inarticulate abandonment.
"Love you, love you, love you, Alves," he repeated in savage iteration.
"Now,--" he kissed her lips. They were no longer cold. "You are mine, mine,
do you understand? Nothing shall touch you. _That_ has passed!"
For a moment she looked at him in question. But instantly her face smiled
in content, and she flashed back his passion. She kissed him, drawing him
down closer and closer into her warm self.
With this long kiss a new love put forth its strength, not the pale
beatitude of his dream, with its sweet wistfulness, its shy desires. That
was large and vague and insubstantial, permeating like an odor the humdrum
purlieus of the day. This was savage, triumphant, that leaped like flame
from his heart to his mouth, that burned blood-red on the black night. It
swept away hesitation, a sick man's nicety and doubts, all the prejudices
of all times! This was love, unchained, that came like waters from the
mountains to quench the thirst of blazing deserts: parched, dry, in dust;
now slaked and yet ever thirsty.
"How could it have been otherwise," he murmured, more to himself than to
her.
"What?" she asked, startled, withdrawing herself.
"Don't think, don't think!" he exclaimed, in fear of the ebbing of the
waters.
Her doubts were calmed, and she yielded to his insistence, slipping into
his arms with an unintelligible cry, the satisfied note of desire. For all
the waiting of the empty years came this rich payment--love that satisfied,
that could never be satisfied.
* * * * *
In the first light of the morning the Ducharme woman, creeping from her
room in the rear, caught sight of them. Mrs. Preston's head was lying on
the doctor's arm, while he knelt beside the table, watching her pale face
in its undisturbed sleep. At the footfall, he roused her gently. Mrs.
Ducharme hastily drew back. She, too, did not seem to have passed a
peaceful night. Her flabby fat face was sickly white, and she trembled as
she opened the side door to the hot morning sun. She threw some small thing
into the waste by the door; then looking around to see that she was not
observed, she hurled with all her strength a long bottle toward the swamp
across the fence. The bottle fell short of the swamp, but it sank among the
reeds and the fleurs-de-lys of the margin. Then the woman closed the door
softly.
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