Nay, I cherished him the more for his childlike, savage simplicity.
"Carlotta," he said, "we shall leave everything. You grasp it?--everything."
"Yes," I replied. "Of all the things we have now, we shall have nothing but ourselves."
"If I thought it was a sacrifice for you, I would go out and never see you again."
n.o.ble fellow, proud now in the certainty that he sufficed for me! He meant what he said.
"It is no sacrifice for me," I murmured. "The sacrifice would be not to give up all in exchange for you."
"We shall be exiles," he went on, "until the divorce business is over.
And then perhaps we shall creep back--shall we?--and try to find out how many of our friends are our equals in moral courage."
"Yes," I said. "We shall come back. They all do."
"What do you mean?" he demanded.
"Thousands have done what we are going to do," I said. "And all of them have thought that their own case was different from the other cases."
"Ah!"
"And a few have been happy. A few have not regretted the price. A few have retained the illusion."
"Illusion? Dearest girl, why do you talk like this?"
I could see that my heart"s treasure was ruffled. He clasped my hand tenaciously.
"I must not hide from you the kind of woman you have chosen," I answered quietly, and as I spoke a hush fell upon my amorous pa.s.sion. "In me there are two beings--myself and the observer of myself. It is the novelist"s disease, this duplication of personality. When I said illusion, I meant the supreme illusion of love. Is it not an illusion? I have seen it in others, and in exactly the same way I see it in myself and I see it in you. Will it last?--who knows? None can tell."
"Angel!" he expostulated.
"No one can foresee the end of love," I said, with an exquisite gentle sorrow. "But when the illusion is as intense as mine, as yours, even if its hour is brief, that hour is worth all the terrible years of disillusion which it will cost. Darling, this precious night alone would not be too dear if I paid for it with the rest of my life."
He thanked me with a marvellous smile of confident adoration, and his disengaged hand played with the gold chain which hung loosely round my neck.
"Call it illusion if you like," he said. "Words are nothing. I only know that for me it will be eternal. I only know that my one desire is to be with you always, never to leave you, not to miss a moment of you; to have you for mine, openly, securely. Carlotta, where shall we go?"
"We must travel, mustn"t we?"
"Travel?" he repeated, with an air of discontent. "Yes. But where to?"
"Travel," I said. "See things. See the world."
"I had thought we might find some quiet little place," he said wistfully, and as if apologetically, where we could be alone, undisturbed, some spot where we could have ourselves wholly to ourselves, and go walks into mountains and return for dinner; and then the long, calm evenings!
Dearest, our honeymoon!"
Our honeymoon! I had not, in the pursuit of my calling, studied human nature and collected doc.u.ments for nothing. With how many brides had I not talked! How many loves did I not know to have been paralyzed and killed by a surfeit in the frail early stages of their existence!
Inexperienced as I was, my learning in humanity was wiser than the experience of my impulsive, generous, magnanimous lover, to whom the very thought of calculation would have been abhorrent. But I saw, I felt, I lived through in a few seconds the interminable and monotonous length of those calm days, and especially those calm evenings succeeding each other with a formidable sameness. I had watched great loves faint and die. And I knew that our love--miraculously sweet as it was--probably was not greater than many great ones that had not stood the test. You perceive the cold observer in me. I knew that when love lasted, the credit of the survival was due far more often to the woman than to the man. The woman must husband herself, dole herself out, economize herself so that she might be splendidly wasteful when need was. The woman must plan, scheme, devise, invent, reconnoitre, take precautions; and do all this sincerely and lovingly in the name and honour of love. A pa.s.sion, for her, is a campaign; and her deadliest enemy is satiety. Looking into my own heart, and into his, I saw nothing but hope for the future of our love. But the beautiful plant must not be exposed to hazard. Suppose it sickened, such a love as ours--what then? The misery of h.e.l.l, the torture of the d.a.m.ned!
Only its rich and ample continuance could justify us.
"My dear," I said submissively, "I shall leave everything to you. The idea of travelling occurred to me; that was all. I have never travelled further than Cannes. Still, we have all our lives before us."
"We will travel," he said unselfishly. "We"ll go round the world--slowly.
I"ll get the tickets at Cook"s to-morrow."
"But, dearest, if you would rather--"
"No, no! In any case we shall always have our evenings."
"Of course we shall. Dearest, how good you are!"
"I wish I was," he murmured.
I was glad, then, that I had never allowed my portrait to appear in a periodical. We could not prevent the appearance in American newspapers of heralding paragraphs, but the likelihood of our being recognised was sensibly lessened.
"Can you start soon?" he asked. "Can you be ready?"
"Any time. The sooner the better, now that it is decided."
"You do not regret? We have decided so quickly. Ah! you are the merest girl, and I have taken advantage--"
I put my hand over his mouth. He seized it, and kept it there and kissed it, and his ardent breath ran through my fingers.
"What about your business?" I said.
"I shall confide it to old Tate--tell him some story--he knows quite as much about it as I do. To-morrow I will see to all that. The day after, shall we start? No; to-morrow night. To-morrow night, eh? I"ll run in to-morrow and tell you what I"ve arranged. I must see you to-morrow, early."
"No," I said. "Do not come before lunch."
"Not before lunch! Why?"
He was surprised. But I had been my own mistress for five years, with my own habits, rules, privacies. I had never seen anyone before lunch. And to-morrow, of all days, I should have so much to do and to arrange. Was this man to come like an invader and disturb my morning? So felt the celibate in me, instinctively, thoughtlessly. That deep-seated objection to the intrusion of even the most loved male at certain times is common, I think, to all women. Women are capable of putting love aside, like a rich dress, and donning the _peignoir_ of matter-of-fact dailiness, in a way which is an eternal enigma to men.... Then I saw, in a sudden flash, that I had renounced my individual existence, that I had forfeited my habits and rules, and privacies, that I was a man"s woman. And the pa.s.sionate lover in me gloried in this.
"Come as soon as you like, dearest friend," I said.
"n.o.body except Mary will know anything till we are actually gone," he remarked. "And I shall not tell her till the last thing. Afterwards, won"t they chatter! G.o.d! Let "em."
"They are already chattering," I said. And I told him about Mrs. Sardis.
"When she met you on the landing," I added, "she drew her own conclusions, my poor, poor boy!"
He was furious. I could see he wanted to take me in his arms and protect me masculinely from the rising storm.
"All that is nothing," I soothed him. "Nothing. Against it, we have our self-respect. We can scorn all that." And I gave a short, contemptuous laugh.
"Darling!" he murmured. "You are more than a woman."
"I hope not." And I laughed again, but unnaturally.