第64章

IN the Country of the Spirit there is a certain high table-land that lies far on among the out-posts toward Eternity.Standing on that calm clear height, where the sun shines ever though it shines coldly, the wayfarer may look behind him at his own footprints of self-renunciation, below on his dark zones of storm, and forward to the final land where the mystery, the pain, and the yearning of his life will either be infinitely satisfied or infinitely quieted.But no man can write a description of this place for those who have never trodden it; by those who have, no description is desired: their fullest speech is Silence.For here dwells the Love of which there has never been any confession, from which there is no escape, for which there is no hope: the love of a man for a woman who is bound to another, or the love of a woman for a man who is bound to another.Many there are who know what that means, and this is the reason why the land is always thronged.But in the throng no one signals another; to walk there is to be counted among the Unseen and the Alone.

To this great wistful height of Silence he had struggled at last after all his days of rising and falling, of climbing and slipping back.It was no especial triumph for his own strength.His better strength had indeed gone into it, and the older rightful habitudes of mind that always mean so much to us when we are tried and tempted, and the old beautiful submission of himself to the established laws of the world.But more than what these had effected was what she herself had been to him and had done for him.Even his discovery of her at the window that last night had had the effect of bidding him stand off; for he saw there the loyalty and sacredness of wifehood that, however full of suffering, at least asked for itself the privilege and the dignity of suffering unnoticed.

Thus he had come to realize that life had long been leading him blindfold, until one recent day, snatching the bandage from his eyes, she had cried:

"Here is the parting of three ways, each way a tragedy: choose your way and your tragedy!"If he confessed his love and found that she felt but friendship for him, there was the first tragedy.The wrong in him would lack the answering wrong in her, which sometimes, when the two are put together, so nearly makes up the right.From her own point of view, he would merely be offering her a delicate ineffaceable insult.If she had been the sort of woman by whose vanity every conquest is welcomed as a tribute and pursued as an aim, he could never have cared for her at all.Thus while his love took its very origin from his belief of her nobility, he was premeditating the means of having her prove to him that this did not exist.

If he told her everything and surprised her love for him, there was the second tragedy.For over there, beyond the scene of such a confession, he could not behold her as anything else than a fatally lowered woman.The agony of this, even as a possibil-ity, overwhelmed him in advance.To require of her that she should have a nature of perfect loyalty and at the same time to ask her to pronounce her own falseness--what happiness could that bring to him? If she could be faithless to one man because she loved another, could she not be false to the second, if in time she grew to love a third? Out of the depths even of his loss of her the terrible cry was wrung from him that no love could long be possible between him and any woman who was not free to love him.

And so at last, with that mingling of selfish and unselfish motives, which is like the mixed blood of the heart itself, he had chosen the third tragedy: the silence that would at least leave each of them blameless.And so he had come finally to that high cold table-land where the sun of Love shines rather as the white luminary of another world than the red quickener of this.

Over the lofty table-land of Kentucky the sky bent darkest blue, and was filled with wistful, silvery light that afternoon as he walked out to the Falconers'.His face had never looked so clear, so calm; his very linen never so spotless, or so careful about his neck and wrists; and his eyes held again their old beautiful light--saddened.

>From away off he could descry her, walking about the yard in the pale sunshine.He had expected to find her preoccupied as usual; but to-day she was strolling restlessly to and fro in front of the house, quite near it and quite idle.When she saw him coming, scarce aware of her own actions, she went round the house and walked on quickly away from him.

As he was following and passing the cabin, a hand was quickly put out and the shutter drawn partly to.

"How do you do!"

That hard, smooth, gay little voice!

"You mustn't come here! And don't you peep! When are you going?"He told her.

"To-morrow! Why, have you forgotten that I'm married to-morrow! Aren't you coming? Upon my word! I've given you to the widow Babcock, and you are to ride in the procession with her.She has promised me not to laugh once on the way or even to allude to anything cheerful! Be persuaded!...Well, I'm sorry.I'll have to give your place to Peter, I suppose.And I'll tell the widow she can be natural and gay: Peter'll not mind! Good-bye! I can't shake hands with you."Behind the house, at the foot of the sloping hill, there was a spring such as every pioneer sought to have near his home; and a little lower down, in one corner of the yard, the water from this had broadened out into a small pond.Dark-green sedgy cane grew thick around half the margin.