If ever he
had denied to his own soul this Margret, called her alien or
foreign, it called her now, when it was too late, to her rightful
place; there was not a thought nor a hope in the darkest depths
of his nature that did not cry out for her help that night,--for
her, a part of himself,--now, when it was too late. He went over
all the years gone, and pictured the years to come; he remembered
the money that was to help his divine soul upward; he thought of
it with a curse, getting up and pacing the floor of the narrow
room, slowly and quietly. Looking out into the still starlight
and the quaint garden, he tried to fancy this woman as he knew
her, after the restless power of her soul should have been
chilled and starved into a narrow, lifeless duty. He fancied her
old, and stern, and sick of life, she that might have been what
might they not have been, together? And he had driven her to this
for money,--money!
It was of no use to repent of it now. He had frozen the love out
of her heart, long ago. He remembered (all that he did remember
of the blank night after he was hurt) that he had seen her white,
worn-out face looking down at him; that she did not touch him;
and that, when one of the sisters told her she might take her
place, and sponge his forehead, she said, bitterly, she had no
right to do it, that he was no friend of hers. He saw and heard
that, unconscious to all else; he would have known it, if he had
been dead, lying there.
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