At something in that white face of his, at something in his unsteady voice, Mrs. Caldwell grew very gentle: "Because I'm a blundering old woman, Peter dear. But, since I have blundered, let us talk frankly.

I did intend you to marry Sheila. I plotted and planned for it from the time she was a little girl in your rhetoric cla.s.s. I believed that in a marriage with you lay her chance to be both a happy and a wonderful woman. And then--Ted married her instead! But there's still something you can do for her. You can watch over her when I'm gone, Peter. You can put out a saving hand now and then, if you see she needs it. When I'm dead--and that will be soon, my dear--you'll be the only person in the world who understands her. If I can feel that you'll always be there ready to help her, I can die in peace. Bottled up genius is a dangerous thing. Sometimes I am afraid for Sheila! But if you'll promise to watch over her for me, I can die with my heart at rest."

"There is nothing I would not do for you or for her!" he said.

"I know that, Peter. What wonder that I had my dreams about you?"

"They were dreams, just dreams," he responded, and now he was speaking more easily. "I wasn't the right man for Sheila after all. If I had been, she would have realized it; she wouldn't have married some one else."

"How could she realize it--at twenty? And she was barely twenty when she married. Peter, there's a moment in a girl's life when, consciously or not, her whole being, soul and body, cries out for love.

And if a man is at hand then--any presentable man--to answer, '_I_ am love,' she believes him. That moment came to Sheila--and Ted was there!"

"Oh," cried Peter, "Oh, surely there was more to it than that! Surely there was real love!" And when she did not answer, he repeated earnestly, "Surely there was real love!"

"You plead for Ted?" asked Mrs. Caldwell with a touch of irony.

"I plead for her. Ted doesn't matter, and I don't matter. But _Sheila_--Oh, I can't bear that she should have only a second-rate thing, an imitation. I can't bear that."

"She thinks it's real love she feels for Ted. And as long as she thinks so, Peter, she'll be happy. What we have to do for her--what you have to do for her when I'm gone--is to keep her thinking that. It isn't her baffled gift I worry about; it's the discontent her gift may rouse in her; the awful _vision_ it may bring her. I see so clearly how she was married--and she must _never_ see! If ever you find her beginning to see, you must blindfold her somehow. I've often thought that women should be born blind--or that their eyes should be bandaged at birth."

"Horrible!" exclaimed Peter.

"No--_kind_! All the creatures of our love would be beautiful then; all the circ.u.mstances of our little destinies n.o.ble and splendid. We'd create them so in our own minds, and disillusionment could never touch us."

"It's the truth we need, men and women," insisted Peter.

"There's nothing so tragic as the truth--when it comes too late," said Mrs. Caldwell sadly. "Your grandfather and I found out that. He was already married, and I was on the eve of my wedding when--it happened.

We might have run away together; ours was a real pa.s.sion, Peter. But people didn't do that sort of thing so readily in our young days. They thought less of their individual rights then, and more of honor. It seemed to us that it was sin enough ever to have realized what we felt; ever to have acknowledged it. So we went on with our obligations, your grandfather and I. He was a good husband, and I was a good wife. Our lives were cast in pleasant lines, with dear, kindly companions, and we would have been happy if--if I hadn't, in a fatal hour, seen his heart and reflected it for him in my own eyes. We would have been happy if I had been blindfolded! As it was, we'd seen the truth, and to accept less was tragedy for us."

"You were both free at last," said Peter. "Why didn't you--Oh, why _didn't_ you--take what was left to you?"

"My dear, we were already old. Romance was still in our hearts, but we hadn't the courage to take it, publicly, into our lives. We had felt a great love, and been brave enough to deny it. But when we could have satisfied it honorably--we were afraid of the change in our lives; we were afraid of our children, of your father and Sheila's; we were even afraid of what the town would say! In the beginning we had striven not to dare. In the end we could not dare. It is sad that we should be like that, isn't it, Peter? It's sad that as the strength of our youth goes from us, the valor of our love should go too. But it is so, it is so for all of us, my dear. The day before your grandfather died, something flamed up in us again. The courage of new life came to him, and he made me promise to marry him the next day. But the next day he was--dead!"

She fell silent, her eyes fixed broodingly upon the fire, eyes that looked strangely young. Peter, silent too, was remembering that day before his grandfather's death; remembering Mrs. Caldwell's presence in the house, and the indescribable sense of some other presence also. He had felt it so strongly, that other presence, that the whole house had seemed to him to be pervaded and thrilled by it. His father was living then, and they two had spent the afternoon in the library, while Mrs.

Caldwell had sat with his grandfather in the room above. He had said to his father--he recalled it quite clearly--"I feel something--_something_--in the very air." And his father had appeared startled and had replied, "Perhaps death is in the air." But Peter knew now that it had not been death he had felt; that it had not been death that had filled the air as if with rushing wings and shooting stars and invisible, ineffable glories. It had not been death; it had been love. And glancing at Mrs. Caldwell's musing eyes, something like envy came into his own. He went to her, knelt, and kissed her thin old hand.

"After all, you _had_ love," he murmured. And then, "I wish you had been my grandmother. I _wish_ you had."

"Oh, Peter!" she cried. "Oh, Peter! Peter!" And suddenly her arms were around his neck.

As she clung to him, her tears on his face and her heart's secret in his hands, he almost told her; he almost said what he had resolved never to say. And yet he did not.

"He's never loved her," concluded Mrs. Caldwell when he had gone.

"There was a moment when he looked as if--but he's never loved Sheila.

If he'd loved her--ever--he would have told me."

CHAPTER XIII

Had Mrs. Caldwell seen Peter pacing the floor of his little hotel room that night, she would have been less certain that he did not love Sheila. She had said to him, "There's nothing so tragic as the truth--when it comes too late!" And it was this tragedy with which Peter grappled now.

He had not known that he loved Sheila until Mrs. Caldwell told him that he should have married her; but those words had been for him a revelation; an illumination of the last ten years and more. Suddenly he saw, as if a searchlight had been flung upon them, the innermost, secret depths of his own heart--saw them filled with the image of another man's wife. So swiftly, so entirely without warning had self-knowledge dawned upon him that the cry had been wrung from him, "Why do you tell me this now--when it is too late?" But after the one betraying exclamation, he had put all his strength into the attempt to conceal his discovery. Mrs. Caldwell had spoken of the honor of her generation as of a thing that had not survived, in its purity, to a later one. Yet Peter's sense of honor was too scrupulous to permit him the confession to anyone that he loved another's wife. To the single end of concealment he had set himself through the rest of that interview. He had gone through it as through some nerve-racking nightmare, struggling for self-control as one struggles for safety in dreams of horrid peril.

He must not admit that he loved Sheila! He must not admit that he loved her! That was what he had told himself over and over, fighting all the while for the mastery of his face, his voice, lest they proclaim what his lips did not utter.

Yet in spite of the struggle, in spite of the sense of awful calamity, of absolute wreckage, that had descended upon him, he had been keenly, piteously conscious of every word that Mrs. Caldwell had said; and he had realized fully the impossibility and the irony of the task she had imposed upon him.

Having failed to marry Sheila himself, he must now undertake to keep her in love with the man who had married her! This was all which was required of him; this was _all_! His devotion to Mrs. Caldwell had not faltered; but now, facing his tragedy alone and in the freedom to suffer, he felt a great bitterness toward his old friend for her request. It seemed to him incredibly stupid that she should think for an instant that he, an unmarried man, could a.s.sume the post of guardian over a wife's love for her husband. It implied, in the first place, an intimacy which Sheila was far too fine-grained to permit; for however confidential she might become on the subject of her work, she would never be confidential with him in regard to Ted. Whatever he might perceive, she would never give him the opportunity to say to her, "I think that your affection for your husband is waning. Let us put fresh fuel on the fire."

It implied, too, that request of Mrs. Caldwell's, a sharing of Sheila's life which Shadyville would never tolerate; which his own awakened heart could not tolerate. He could not be much with Sheila henceforth.

For once, Shadyville's narrow restrictions would be right.

So, he told himself, Mrs. Caldwell had been stupid.

And--unconsciously, of course--she had been cruel.

And yet--she was leaving Sheila, leaving her to an essentially alien companion. What wonder that, in her pa.s.sionate solicitude, she had reached out to the one person whose understanding sympathy she could count upon? What wonder that, however unpractically, she had made an appeal to one whose heart she had divined better than she knew? What wonder, even, that he had made her a sort of promise? "There is nothing I would not do for you or Sheila!" he had said to her; and that was true. There was nothing he would not do for them--if he could.

Only--Ted himself must keep what was his own! He had been man enough to win Sheila; now he must keep her!

Ted had been man enough to win her; and he, Peter, had not been! That was what he realized now--with measureless self-scorn. _He_ had not even been man enough to know that he loved her; much less man enough to make her his. And now, because he could not make her his, his life was charred to ashes--but his soul was an anguished, unquenchable flame.

He had long thought that he knew the worst of himself; his discreditable indolence; his reluctance for effort and conquest; his insufficient courage to follow his emotions into poverty; and that negligible fineness of his which had held him back from advantages that he could not repay with genuine emotion. He had known all that of himself, calling it his worst, and feeling a certain pride in it, too, as in a failure that was of more delicate fiber than the successes of others. But he had never really known the worst of himself until now.

For the worst of him was that he had not recognized the true love of his life when it came to him. Those early fancies of his for girls whom he deemed too poor to marry--what had they been but fancies indeed? He had despised himself once or twice for not committing himself, but what was the offense of failing a mere fancy compared to the offense of not recognizing the one true love when it was in his life? He would have had courage enough to follow it to the world's end, in sharpest poverty and hardship, but he had so sheltered himself from any mischance in love that he had not known love when it came.

Blind fool that he was, he had not known it when it came!

Even now he could not tell just when it had come. Looking back along the years, it seemed to him to have been there always, for every memory of Sheila, since her little girlhood, took him by the throat.

He saw her as he--and Ted!--had seen her one April day when she was but twelve years old; a slender, black-haired, dreaming-eyed child, lying upon the pale, spring gra.s.s and looking up into the flowering cherry-tree branches above her head; a child who was herself an embodied poem, so akin she was to all of April's magic, to the spring's lovely miracles. He saw her, too, in his cla.s.s-room, eager, earnest, exquisitely responsive to every perception, every thought of his own; a little girl while he was already a man, and yet his comrade, his comrade in every phase of life had he but discerned and willed it! He saw her as a young girl, with her pure eyes and her generous mouth and her sweet, slender throat; a being still untouched by life, but beautifully ready, touchingly desirous for life's shaping hands. And he saw her as she had been yesterday, walking by his side, the woman at last--yet strangely immature, incomplete. He had thought her immature and incomplete because she had not developed her gift. Now there came to him another thought--bred of all those flashing pictures of her in which she seemed so much his own--the thought that she was incomplete because she had not really loved.

It was impossible that she should really love Ted; Ted who could give neither comprehension nor response to the greater part of her nature.

It was impossible! He had felt that at the time of her marriage; he remembered now how resentfully! He had felt it when Mrs. Caldwell had shown him--only too convincingly--how that marriage had occurred. He had cried out to Mrs. Caldwell that Sheila must have loved Ted, but he had realized, then, that she had not. And he realized it now. It had been love's hour with her, but it had not been love. It had not been love because he himself, who could have given her such a love as she needed, who could have compelled such a love from her, had failed her.

Back and forth he paced in his little room; a creature caged, not by mere walls, but by an irreparable mistake; a creature agonized and helpless. For it was too late for this vision of utter truth now. His life was spoiled--and hers!

Yes, he had spoiled her life! For a little while, he forgot his own disaster in contemplating hers. He had said that he was not the right man for her; but with all his soul and all his brain and all his blood, he knew that he was the right man for her. Throughout her whole life she had turned to him with that simple trust which is bred of love, or at least of potential love, alone. She had said to him once--long ago--with an innocent and tender wonder, "There is nothing I cannot tell you, Peter--nothing!" And that had been true--until Ted had lured her into bondage. While she had been free, there had not been a door in her heart or her spirit that would not have opened at his touch.

She had been his--his for the taking! And he had not taken her.

He had left her to Ted; to Ted for whom so many doors of her nature must be closed forever. He had left her to that most terrible loneliness of all--loneliness in a shared life. The thoughts that she could not speak to Ted--how they must beat about in the prison of her mind; how they must cry for release, for answer! He seemed to feel them against his own temples, those unuttered thoughts that were Sheila's very self; he seemed to feel their ache, their hunger.

Nothing would be born of those thoughts now; that gift of expression which had been a part of Sheila's soul would go barren to the grave.

This was one of the wrongs he had done her--but it was not the worst.

For the worst that had befallen her through him, he told himself, was not that her gift had missed expression, but that she herself had missed the blinding glory of true love.

She was immature, she was undeveloped, because he had not made her his.

And he wanted to make her his. Oh, my G.o.d, he wanted to make her his!

His life was charred to ashes, but his soul was the quivering, torturing flame of his pa.s.sion. It would not be quenched; it would not, in the least, be stilled; it drove him about the shabby little room as if it were literally a flame from which he must try to escape--though he knew he could not.

He had broken his heart over the disaster to Sheila's life, but as the night advanced and his pa.s.sion flared the fiercer in hours securely dark and secret, self rose up within him and shrieked and cursed over his own disaster.

He wanted her! He was forty-six years old; not too old to love, but far, far too old to love calmly. The desires of half a lifetime were in him, desires that had lain low and fed upon his years until, in their acc.u.mulated strength, they were terrible--wild beasts that tore him, fires that burned him to the bone. And they were strangely compounded of instincts evil and lawless--when felt for another man's wife--and longings wholly innocent and sweet.