"His--destroyers?" he faltered. "What do you mean--by that?"

And she answered, with a directness before which dissembling and evasion crumbled away: "Read the answer in your own heart.

"And if you cannot look into your own heart," she went on, unsparingly, "if your own heart has been shut away so long that it is closed even to yourself, then look into your looking-gla.s.s and read the answer there.

Let the grey hairs in your own head, the lines in your own face,--yes, the words of your own mouth--tell you what you would know of Karl's destroyers."

He drew in his lips in that way of his; one side of his face twitched uncontrollably. He had come to reach her soul, reach it if must be through channels of suffering. He had not thought of her reaching his like this.

But she could not stop. "And if you want to know what I have gone through, look back to what you have gone through yourself--then make some of those hours just as much stronger as love is stronger than friendship--and perhaps you can get some idea of what it has been to me!"

He was dumb before that. Putting it that way there was not a word to say.

He saw now the real change. It was more than hollowed cheeks and eyes from which the light of other days had gone, more than soft curves surrendered to grief and youth eaten out by bitterness. It was a change at the root of things. A great tide had been turned the other way. But in the days when happiness softened her and love made it all harmonious he had never felt her force as he felt it now. Reach this? Turn this? The moment brought new understanding of the paltriness of words.

It was she who spoke. "Dr. Parkman,"--looking at him with a keenness in which there was almost an affectionate understanding--"you did not say what you intended to say when you came into this room. You intended to speak of me--but the room swept you back to Karl. Oh--I know. And it is just because you _were_ swept back--care like this--that I am going to tell you something.

"Doctor,"--blinded with tears--"we never understood. None of us ever knew what it meant to Karl to be blind. After--after he had gone--I found something. In this book"--reaching over to Karl's copy of Faust--"I found a letter--a very long letter Karl wrote in those last few days, when he was there--alone. I found it the day I went out to the library alone--the day before they--broke it up. Oh doctor--_what it told!_ I want you to know--" but she could not go on.

When she raised her head the fierce light of hate was burning through the tears. "Can you fancy how I hate the light? Can you fancy with what feelings I wake in the morning and see it come--light from which Karl was shut out--which he craved like that--and could not have? Do you see how it symbolises all those other things taken from him and me? He talked of another light--light he must gain for himself--light which the soul must have. And Karl was longing for the very light I was ready to bring! He would have believed in it--turned to it eagerly--the letter shows that.

Do you _wonder_ that there is nothing but darkness in my soul--that I want nothing else? Look at Karl's life! Always cut off just this side of achievement! Every battle stopped right in the hour of victory! Made great only to have his greatness buffetted about like--_held up for sport!_--I _will_ say it! "--in fierce response to his protesting gesture--"It's true!"

He tried to speak, but this was far too big for words which did not come straight from the soul.

"Do you know what I am doing now?" She laughed--and none of it had told as much as that laugh revealed. "I am making patchwork quilts! Can you fancy anything more worthless in this world than a patchwork quilt?--cutting things up and then sewing them together again, and making them uglier in the end than they were in the beginning? Do you know anything more futile to do with life than that? Well that's where my life is now. My aunt had begun some, and I am finishing them up. And once--once--" but the sob in her voice gathered up the words.

He wanted to speak then; that sob brought her nearer. But she went on:

"I sit sewing those little pieces together--a foolish thing to do, but one must be doing something, and as I think how useless it is there comes the thought of whether it is any more useless than all the other things in life. Is it any more useless than surgery? For can a great surgeon save his best friend? Is it any more useless than science--for can science do anything for her own? Is it any more useless than ambition and purpose and hope--for does not fate make sport of them all? Is it any more useless than books--for can books reach the hearts which need them most? Is it any more useless than art--for does art reach realities? Is it any more useless than light--for can light penetrate the real darkness? Is it,"--she wavered, quivered; she had been talking in low, quick voice, her eyes fixed on something straight ahead, as though reading her words out there before her. And now, as she held back, and he saw what she saw and could not say, he asked for her, slowly: "Is it any more useless than love?"

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

ASH HEAP AND ROSE JAR

As she broke then to the sobs for which he had hoped, something of tremendous force stirred within the man; and he felt that if he could bring her from the outer darkness where she had been carried, back to the things which were her soul's own, that his own life, his whole life, with all of the dark things through which it had pa.s.sed, would have found justification. He had tried to save Karl, and failed. But there was left Ernestine. And it seemed to him--he saw it simply, directly, unquestioningly--that after all he would not have failed Karl if he could do what it was in his heart to do now for her.

Looking at her bowed head he saw it all--the complete overthrow, the rich field of life rendered barren waste. Barren waste--but was that true for Ernestine? Did there not remain for her the scent of the field? The memory of that glorious, luxuriant growth? With _him_ barren waste--but for her did there not grow in the field of life some things which were everlasting? With the quickness with which he saw everything he saw that it was the picture of his own barrenness could show her most surely the things which for her remained.

He drew back from the thought as one draws away from the rude touch upon a wound. Lay bare the scars of his life that another profit by their ugliness? Years of habit were against it; everything fundamentally himself was against it. But he was a man who had never yet shrunk from the thing he saw was right to do. The cost of an accomplishment never deterred him from a thing he saw must be accomplished. With each second of listening to her sobs, he was becoming once more the man who masters, the man ruthless and unsparing in his purposefulness.

"Ernestine," he began, and his voice was very strange, for it knew it was to carry things it had never carried before, "you and I are similarly placed in that we have both lost the great thing of life. But there is something remains to each of us. Life has left something to us both. To you it has left a rose jar. To me--a heap of ashes."

It came with the moment's need. It comprehended it so well the channels long closed seemed of themselves to open. In the clearness with which he saw it, the fullness with which he felt it, he lost himself.

"Do you know that you have no right to cry out against life? Do you know that there are men and women who would lay down their lives--yes, and give up their immortal souls--for hours which you have had? Do you know that you have no right to say Karl Hubers was mocked by fate, made sport of, buffetted about? Do you know,"--his face went white as he said this, slowly--"that I would be a thousand times willing to give up my two eyes--yes, and lay down my life--just to _know_, as he knew, that love was great and life was good?"

The tears remained undried upon her cheek. He held her.

"Look deeper. There is another way to read Karl's life--a deeper truth than those truths you have been seeing.

"Ernestine, we all dream of love; we all desire it. It is only at rare, rare times it comes as it came to you. And I say to you--and I mean it from the bottom of my heart--that if you had been forced to give up your love in the first hour of its fulfillment, for all that you should thank G.o.d through the remainder of your life that it had been yours. For you _had_ it!--and nothing, loss, death, defeat, disappointment of every kind, can strip from your soul the consciousness that once, no matter for how short a time, love in its fullness and perfection was yours. Long, lonely years may come, and all hard things may come, but through it all the thing to keep your soul in tune is the memory of some one perfect hour."

Stillness followed that, the stillness which was silence. She had not moved.

"You dreamed your dream,"--and in his voice now the beautiful things of appreciation and understanding. "I know your dream. You dreamed of growing old together; of taking from life everything there was together; of achieving to the uttermost; of rejoicing in each other's victories, growing more and more close together. I know your dream--a beautiful dream. Giving up some things as the changing years do their work, and taking on the other things, the more quiet, in fact finer things, that come with the years. Oh, yes--don't think I do not know that dream. To walk together down the years, meet them fearlessly, gladly, in the thought that they but add to the fullness of your love--I know--I know.

And now that it is not to be as you thought, you say life has left nothing to you; that you hate it; will have none of it. Oh, Ernestine, if you could only know how rich you are!"

Then harshly, rudely, the change; the voice which had seemed to caress each word was now like a lash.

"Suppose you didn't have the luxury of giving yourself up to your own heart? Suppose that every day and night of your life, you had to fight memory, knowing it held nothing for you but jeers and mockery and things too d.a.m.nable for words! Suppose you had to fairly forbid yourself to think of the beautiful things of life! Suppose that what had been the most beautiful moments of your life were made, by memory, the most hideous! Suppose the memory of his kiss always brought with it the consciousness of his falseness; that his words of love never came back to you without the knowledge that he had been laughing at you in his heart all the time! Suppose you could never get away from the d.a.m.ning truth that what you gave from the depth of your heart was tossed aside with a laugh! Suppose you had given the great pa.s.sion of your life, the best that was in you, to a liar and a hypocrite! Suppose you had been made a fool of!--easy game! _Then_ what of life?--your belief in love?--thoughts of fate? Great G.o.d, woman, can't you see what you have got?"

After the throbbing moment which followed that there came a great quiet; slowly pa.s.sion settled to sadness. He seemed to have forgotten her, to be speaking instead to his own heart, as he said, very low, his voice touched with the tenderness of unrelinquished dreams: "To have had one hour--just one perfect hour, and then the memory of that untarnished forever--it would be enough."

Her heart rushed pa.s.sionately to its own defence; she wanted to tell him no! She wanted to tell him it was cruel to be permitted to live for a time in a beautiful country, only to be turned out into the dark. She wanted to tell him that to know love was to need it forever. But his head had fallen to his hand; he seemed entirely lost to her, and even now she knew his answer to what she would say. "But you _had_ it," he would reply. "The cruel thing would be to awaken and find no such country had ever existed." They would get no closer than that, and with new pa.s.sionateness her heart went out to Karl. Karl would understand it as it was to her!

He too felt that they could come no closer than this. They sat there in the gathering twilight with their separate thoughts as souls sit together almost in the dark, seeing one another in shadow, across dim s.p.a.ces.

The tearing open of his heart had left him weakened with pain. Perhaps that was why he was so very tired, and perhaps it was because he was so tired that this thought of growing old came back to him. It seemed to him now, leaning back in his chair and filled with the things of which he had spoken, that almost as great as a living presence with which to share the years, would be that thing of growing old with a beautiful memory. It would be a supreme thing to have a hand in your hand, a face against your face, a heart against your heart as you stepped on into the years; but if that could not be, and perfection is not given freely in this life, surely it would keep the note of cheer in one's voice, the kindly gleam in one's eye, to bring with one into old age the memory of a perfect love. It would be lonely then when one sat in the twilight and dreamed--but what another loneliness! If instead of holding one's self away from one's own heart, one could turn to it with: "She loved me like that. Her arms have been about my neck in true affection; her whole being radiated love for me; she had no words to tell it and could tell it only with her eyes and with the richness and the lavishness of her kisses. She would have given up the world for me; she inspired me to my best deeds; she comforted me in my times of discouragement and rejoiced with me in my hours of cheer. She is not here now, and it is lonely, but she has left me, in spirit, the warmth of her presence, the consciousness that she loved me with a love in which there was no selfishness nor faltering, and the things she has left me I can carry through life and into eternity."

And all of that was Ernestine's could she but see her way to take it!

He knew that it was growing late. "I must go," he said, but still he sat there, knowing he had not finished what he had come to say. But need he say it? Would it avail anything? Must not all human souls work their own way through the darkness? And when the right word came, must it not come from Karl himself, through some memory, some strange breath of the spirit? _He_ knew, but she would have to see it for herself. That each one's seeing it for one's self was what made life hard. Would there not surely come a day, somewhere in the upward scale, where souls could reach one another better than this?

But he had stirred her; he knew that by the way she was looking at him now. Finally she asked, tremblingly, a little resentfully: "Dr. Parkman, what is it you would have me do?"

"Do something with your life," was his prompt reply. "Help make it right for Karl."

She caught that up breathlessly. "Make it right for Karl?"

"You say he was always cut off just this side of achievement. Then you achieve something which will at least show what he was able to inspire."

That sunk so deep that her face went very white.

"But you do not understand," she whispered pa.s.sionately. "You mean that I should paint--and I tell you I _cannot_. I tell you it is _dead!_"

"Not necessarily that you should paint. Not just now, if you cannot. But come back into touch with life. Do something to force yourself back into it, and then let life itself show you that the other things are not dead after all."

"But I do not want to!" came bitterly from her.

"Sometimes," he said, with more of his usual manner, "we do things we do not want to, and through the doing of them, we get to want to. Do something!--whether you want to or not. Stop doing futile things and dwelling on the sense of their futility. Why, Ernestine, come up to the hospital and go to work as a nurse! Heaven knows I never expected to advise you to do that, but _anything_--painting pictures or scrubbing floors--that will bring you back to a sense of living--the obligations of life--show you that something is _yours_ that life and death and _h.e.l.l_ can't take from you!"

And still he sat there, thinking. In just a moment he must go--go away leaving her alone with the years which awaited her. For just an instant it seemed as though all of the past and all of the future were in his keeping. What word leave with her? He knew by her pa.s.sionate breathing that he had reached her. And now he was going away. Could he have done more--reached deeper? In this, too, had he failed? What word leave with her? His heart was so full of many things that his mind did not know what to choose. He remembered the day she had come to him filled with the spirit to ride down an adverse fate and win triumph from defeat. Her splendid spirit then! Would that spirit ever come again? Could it?

Karl was very close in those final moments, and even more close than Karl was the spirit of love. Many precious things seemed in his keeping just then.