"Poinsetta!"
"Pretty nearly," she agreed, critically.
I took the soft crepe between my fingers.
"Poet!" she smiled. "No, it isn"t quite poinsetta. It"s nearer the red-orange of a tree I remember one autumn, in the White Mountains, with the setting sun on it. But that wasn"t what we were talking about.
Laurels! Your laurels."
"My laurels," I repeated. "Such as they are, I fling them into your lap."
"Do you think they increase your value to me, Hugh?"
"I don"t know," I said thickly.
She shook her head.
"No, it"s you I like--not the laurels."
"But if you care for me--?" I began.
She lifted up her hands and folded them behind the knot of her hair.
"It"s extraordinary how little you have changed since we were children, Hugh. You are still sixteen years old, that"s why I like you. If you got to be the sultan of sultans yourself, I shouldn"t like you any better, or any worse."
"And yet you have just declared that power appeals to you!"
"Power--yes. But a woman--a woman like me--wants to be first, or nothing."
"You are first," I a.s.serted. "You always have been, if you had only realized it."
She gazed up at me dreamily.
"If you had only realized it! If you had only realized that all I wanted of you was to be yourself. It wasn"t what you achieved. I didn"t want you to be like Ralph or the others."
"Myself? What are you trying to say?"
"Yourself. Yes, that is what I like about you. If you hadn"t been in such a hurry--if you hadn"t misjudged me so. It was the power in you, the craving, the ideal in you that I cared for--not the fruits of it.
The fruits would have come naturally. But you forced them, Hugh, for quicker results."
"What kind of fruits?" I asked.
"Ah," she exclaimed, "how can I tell what they might have been! You have striven and striven, you have done extraordinary things, but have they made you any happier? have you got what you want?"
I stooped down and seized her wrists from behind her head.
"I want you, Nancy," I said. "I have always wanted you. You"re more wonderful to-day than you have ever been. I could find myself--with you."
She closed her eyes. A dreamy smile was on her face, and she lay unresisting, very still. In that tremendous moment, for which it seemed I had waited a lifetime, I could have taken her in my arms--and yet I did not. I could not tell why: perhaps it was because she seemed to have pa.s.sed beyond me--far beyond--in realization. And she was so still!
"We have missed the way, Hugh," she whispered, at last.
"But we can find it again, if we seek it together," I urged.
"Ah, if I only could!" she said. "I could have once. But now I"m afraid--afraid of getting lost." Slowly she straightened up, her hands falling into her lap. I seized them again, I was on my knees in front of her, before the fire, and she, intent, looking down at me, into me, through me it seemed--at something beyond which yet was me.
"Hugh," she asked, "what do you believe? Anything?"
"What do I believe?"
"Yes. I don"t mean any cant, cut-and-dried morality. The world is getting beyond that. But have you, in your secret soul, any religion at all? Do you ever think about it? I"m not speaking about anything orthodox, but some religion--even a tiny speck of it, a germ--harmonizing with life, with that power we feel in us we seek to express and continually violate."
"Nancy!" I exclaimed.
"Answer me--answer me truthfully," she said....
I was silent, my thoughts whirling like dust atoms in a storm.
"You have always taken things--taken what you wanted. But they haven"t satisfied you, convinced you that that is all of life."
"Do you mean--that we should renounce?" I faltered.
"I don"t know what I mean. I am asking, Hugh, asking. Haven"t you any clew? Isn"t there any voice in you, anywhere, deep down, that can tell me? give me a hint? just a little one?"
I was wracked. My pa.s.sion had not left me, it seemed to be heightened, and I pressed her hands against her knees. It was incredible that my hands should be there, in hers, feeling her. Her beauty seemed as fresh, as un-wasted as the day, long since, when I despaired of her. And yet and yet against the tumult and beating of this pa.s.sion striving to throb down thought, thought strove. Though I saw her as a woman, my senses and my spirit commingled and swooned together.
"This is life," I murmured, scarcely knowing what I said.
"Oh, my dear!" she cried, and her voice pierced me with pain, "are we to be lost, overpowered, engulfed, swept down its stream, to come up below drifting--wreckage? Where, then, would be your power? I"m not speaking of myself. Isn"t life more than that? Isn"t it in us, too,--in you?
Think, Hugh. Is there no G.o.d, anywhere, but this force we feel, restlessly creating only to destroy? You must answer--you must find out."
I cannot describe the pleading pa.s.sion in her voice, as though h.e.l.l and heaven were wrestling in it. The woman I saw, tortured yet uplifted, did not seem to be Nancy, yet it was the woman I loved more than life itself and always had loved.
"I can"t think," I answered desperately, "I can only feel--and I can"t express what I feel. It"s mixed, it"s dim, and yet bright and shining--it"s you."
"No, it"s you," she said vehemently. "You must interpret it." Her voice sank: "Could it be G.o.d?" she asked.
"G.o.d!" I exclaimed sharply.
Her hands fell away from mine.... The silence was broken only by the crackling of the wood fire as a log turned over and fell. Never before, in all our intercourse that I could remember, had she spoken to me about religion.... With that apparent snap in continuity incomprehensible to the masculine mind-her feminine mood had changed. Elements I had never suspected, in Nancy, awe, even a hint of despair, entered into it, and when my hand found hers again, the very quality of its convulsive pressure seemed to have changed. I knew then that it was her soul I loved most; I had been swept all unwittingly to its very altar.
"I believe it is G.o.d," I said. But she continued to gaze at me, her lips parted, her eyes questioning.
"Why is it," she demanded, "that after all these centuries of certainty we should have to start out to find him again? Why is it when something happens like--like this, that we should suddenly be torn with doubts about him, when we have lived the best part of our lives without so much as thinking of him?"
"Why should you have qualms?" I said. "Isn"t this enough? and doesn"t it promise--all?"
"I don"t know. They"re not qualms--in the old sense." She smiled down at me a little tearfully. "Hugh, do you remember when we used to go to Sunday-school at Dr. Pound"s church, and Mrs. Ewan taught us? I really believed something then--that Moses brought down the ten commandments of G.o.d from the mountain, all written out definitely for ever and ever. And I used to think of marriage" (I felt a sharp twinge), "of marriage as something sacred and inviolable,--something ordained by G.o.d himself. It ought to be so--oughtn"t it? That is the ideal."
"Yes--but aren"t you confusing--?" I began.