I haven't any
longer the courage.' 'Ah!' I exclaimed impatiently, 'say once for all,
outright, that you are tired of her, that you want to back out of it.'
'No,' he said drearily, 'it isn't that. I can't reproach myself with the
least wavering. I have had a single passion; I have given my life to it;
it is there still, consuming me. Only the girl I loved: it's as if she had
died. Yes, she is dead, as dead as Helen: and I have not the consolation of
knowing where they have laid her. Our marriage will be a ghastly mockery: a
marriage of corpses. Her heart, how can she give it me? She gave it years
ago to the man I was, the man who is dead. We, who are left, are nothing to
one another, mere strangers.'
One could not argue with a perversity so infatuate: it was useless to point
out, that in life a distinction so arbitrary as the one which haunted him
does not exist. It was only left me to wait, hoping that in the actual
event of their meeting, his malady would be healed. But this meeting,
would it ever be compassed? There were moments when his dread of it seemed
to have grown so extreme, that he would be capable of any cowardice, any
compromise to postpone it, to render it impossible.
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