So when Miriam Strange elected to marry Conquest, he accepted the settled fact, for the time being, in the spirit in which he would have taken some disastrous manifestation of natural phenomena. Investigation of the motive of such a step was as little in his line as it would have been in the case of a destructive storm at sea. To his essentially simple way of viewing life it was something to be lamented, but to be borne as best one was able, while one said as little as one could about it.
And yet, somewhere in the wide, rarely explored regions of his nature there were wonderings, questionings, yearnings protests, cries, that forced themselves to the surface now and then, as the boiling waters within the earth gush out in geyser springs. It required urgent pressure to impel them forth, but when they came it was with violence. Such an occasion had been his night on Lake Champlain; such another was the evening when he announced to Miriam his intention of becoming Norrie Ford again. When these moments came they took him by surprise, even though afterward he was able to recognize the fact that they had been long preparing.
It was in this way, without warning, that his heart had sprung on him the question: Why should she marry him? At the minute when Conquest was leaving Miriam, he, Ford, was tramping the streets of New York, watching them grow alive with light, in glaring, imaginative ugliness--ugliness so dazzling in its audacity and so fanciful in its crude commercialism that it had the power to thrill. It was perhaps the electric stimulus of sheer light that quickened the pace of his slow mentality from the march of acceptance to the rush of protest, at an instant when he thought he had resigned himself to the facts.
Why should she marry Conquest? He was shouldering his way through the crowds when the question made itself heard, with a curious illuminating force that suggested its own answer. He was walking, partly to work off the tension of the strain under which these few days were pa.s.sing, and partly because he had got the idea that he was being shadowed. He had no profound objection to that, though he would have preferred to give himself up of his own free will rather than to be arrested. Perhaps, after all, it was only an accident that had caused him to catch sight of the same two men at different moments through the day, and just now it amused him to put them to the test by leading them a dance. He had come to the conclusion that he had been mistaken, or that he had outwitted them, when this odd question, irrelevant to anything he had directly in his thoughts, presented itself as though it had been asked by some voice outside him: Why should she marry him?
Up to the present his una.n.a.lytical mind would have replied--as it would have replied to the same query concerning any one else--that she was marrying him "because she wanted to." That would have seemed to him to cover the whole ground of any one"s affairs; but all at once it had become insufficient. It was as if the street had suddenly become insufficient as a highway, breaking into a chasm. He stopped abruptly, confronting, as it were, that bewildering void which a psychological situation invariably seemed to him. To get into a place where his few straightforward formulae did not apply gave him that sense of distress which every creature feels out of its native element.
It was a proof of the dependence with which, in matters requiring mental or emotional experience, he had come to lean on Miriam Strange, as well as of the directness with which he appealed to her for help, that he should face about on the instant, and turn his steps toward her.
Only a few minutes earlier she had seen Conquest go, and in the interval since his departure she had had time to detect the windings of his strategy, and to be content with the skill with which she had met them.
She understood him thoroughly, both in his fear of letting her go and his shame at holding her. Standing in her wide bay-window, her slight figure erect, her hands behind her back, she looked down, without seeing it, on the spangled city, as angels intent on their own high thoughts might pa.s.s over the Milky Way. She smiled faintly to herself, thinking how she should lead this kindly man, who for her sake had done so much for Norrie Ford, back to a sense of security and self-respect. When Norrie Ford went free she meant to live for nothing else but the happiness of the man who had cleared his name and given him back to the world. It would be a kind of consecration to her, like that of the nun who forsakes the dearest ties for a life of good works and prayer. Conquest had told her that she was paying a bigger price than she needed to pay for the services rendered, but that depended somewhat on the value one set on the services. In this case she would not have been content in paying less. To do so would seem to indicate that she was not grateful. Since perceiving his compunction as to claiming his reward, she was aware of an elation, an exaltation, in forcing it upon him.
She was in the glow of this sentiment when Ford was ushered in. He was so vitally in her thoughts that, though she did not expect him, his presence gave her no surprise. It helped her, in fact, to sustain the romantic quality in her mood to treat his coming as a matter of course, and make it a natural incident to the moment.
"Come and look down on the stars," she said, in the tone she might have used to another member of her household who had appeared accidentally.
"The view here, in the evening, makes one feel as if one had been wafted above the sky."
She half-turned toward him, but did not offer her hand as he took his place by her side. For a few seconds he said nothing, and when he spoke she accepted his words in the manner in which she had taken his coming.
"So you"re going to marry Conquest!"
It was to show that the abrupt remark had not perturbed her that she nodded her head a.s.sentingly, still with the smile that had greeted his arrival.
"Why?"
In spite of her efforts she manifested some surprise.
"What makes you ask that question--now?"
"Because it never occurred to me before that there might be a special reason."
"Well, there is one."
"Has it anything to do with me?"
She backed away from him slightly, to the side curve of the window, where it joined the straight line of the wall. In this position she had him more directly in view.
"I said there was a reason," she answered, after some hesitation. "I didn"t say I would tell you what it was."
"No, but you will, won"t you?"
"I don"t see why you should want to know."
"Is that quite true?" he queried, with a somewhat startling fixing of his eyes upon her. "Don"t you see? Can"t you imagine?"
"I don"t see why--in such circ.u.mstances as these--any man should want to know what a woman doesn"t tell him."
"Then I"ll explain to you. I want to know, because ... I think ... you"re marrying Conquest ... when you don"t love him ..."
"He never asked me to love him. He said he could do without that."
"... while ... you do love ... some one else."
She reflected before speaking. Under his piercing look she took on once more the appealing expression of forest creatures at bay.
"Even if that were true," she said, at last, "there would be no harm in it as long as there was what you asked me for at first--a special reason."
"Is there ever a reason for a step like that? I don"t believe it."
"But I do believe it, you see. That makes a difference."
"It would make a still greater difference if I begged you not to do it, wouldn"t it?"
She shook her head. "It wouldn"t--now."
"I let you see yesterday that I--I loved you."
"Since you force me to acknowledge it--yes."
"And you"ve shown me," he ventured, "within the last minute, that you--love me."
Her figure grew more erect against the background of exterior darkness.
Even the hand that rested on the woodwork of the window became tense.
Lambent fire in her eyes--the light that he used to call non-Aryan--took the place of the fugitive glance of the woodland animal; but she kept her composure.
"Well, what then?"
"Then you"d be committing a sacrilege against yourself--if you married any one else but me."
If her heart bounded at the words, she did nothing to betray it.
"You say that, because it seems so to you. I take another view of it. Love to me does not necessarily mean marriage, any more than marriage necessarily implies love. There have been happy marriages without love, and there can be honorable love that doesn"t ask marriage as its object.
If I married you now, I should seem to myself to be deserting a high impulse for a lower one."
"There"s only one sort of impulse to love."
"Not to my love. I know what you mean--but my love has more than one prompting, and the highest is--or I hope it is--to try to do what"s right."
"But this would not be right."
"I"m the only judge of that."
"Not if we love each other. In that case I become a judge of it, too."