Claire Part 24

There have been times when your impositions, so carelessly thrust upon me, because you were selfish, because you knew I must accept them from you, were almost unbearable. The touch of your thief-trained hands to steal from everything its beauty and self-respect has galled me beyond all endurance. My body has received its last vile grasp from you."

She stopped, appalled at his expression. She did not know, neither of them knew, that love, the ever-changing impulse of creation within men and women, speaks its desire through bitter scorn and abuse, when softer words are too slow in finding their way.

He was sitting there, white, anguished, cowering under her tongue, his whole life shaken. Her words made him feel that the thing she said was true. He had always feared it, realizing that in a measure it was inevitable, and his great strength was now turned against himself, against his bitter handicap, and he was in that tremendous upheaval that requires a rebuilding of one's faith. His belief in himself was broken.

His belief in his power was gone. Coming after weeks of thought and fear about blindness, Claire's words tore him asunder and made him feel that there was nothing for him but abject misery and dependence upon charity.

Instinctively, his hand went up as if to shield him from a blow, and he murmured, "For G.o.d's sake, Claire!"

There was to come a time, later, when experience would have taught him that there is a wild strain in the nature of human hearts which abuses out of a desire to be conquered. He did not yet realize that he had spoken truly when he said that this woman had hidden in her the savage warring s.e.xed tumult of all the struggling ages.

She saw him there, his hand up, and suddenly her emotion changed. It was love, still love crying out for expression, but now she was all compa.s.sion, tenderness, and fear. She read in his face what she had done, and her heart was gray with the pain at her own failure.

Now all love for her was buried, perhaps dead, under his shattered selfhood, slain in the wrecking earthquake that she had brought to pa.s.s with the ardor of her pa.s.sion. She had meant to sting him into taking her in his arms and forcing her to love him, and instead--"Oh, G.o.d!" she whispered, and slipped behind the curtain to throw herself on her bed and weep with heart wrung by self-condemnation and loving pity for the man whom she had clubbed with his own dread weakness. She had shattered into chaos the strong soul of the man she loved, with the only weapon he would have felt, and she realized now that it was her love, her desire to be his, to be his utterly, that had led her to do it.

Lawrence was too hurt to move. His mind repeated again and again the words she had spoken. He kept saying to himself: "Blindness has made me that, an egotist beggar." He did not reproach Claire. She had swept him too far from his habitual moorings for that. There was no rebellion against her, none, indeed, against life. Over him rolled wave after wave of self-contempt, distrust, and anguish that shook him with an agony that only the a.s.sured man knows when the one he loves most of all on earth strikes dead his faith in himself. He thought of a mult.i.tude of things that stabbed anew, but not once did he move in the interminable period that pa.s.sed before Philip returned.

When he did come, the Spaniard was amazed at the crouching, white-faced man whom he found before a dying fire. There was something so sad in the blind face that Philip felt no suspicion and no anger. He looked for Claire, but she was not visible. He stirred the fire and set about preparing supper while his mind began digging at the problem which he saw in the att.i.tude of the man there in the chair. Claire did not come out to help. She was too exhausted from the storm that had swept over her. In her bed she could hardly smother the scream that kept rising to her lips. She wanted to spring up and cry aloud to Lawrence for forgiveness. She was scarcely aware of Philip as he moved about.

She could have thrown herself at Lawrence's feet and pleaded with him.

She was discovering that her whole wild outbreak was a strange expression of her physical desire for this man whom she loved, and the discovery made her as self-detesting as she had been violent in her outbreak. It seemed to her that there was nothing, nothing she would not do to make amends to Lawrence for what she had said. She wanted to tell him what it had been that prompted her, but she dared not lest in revulsion at her viciousness he turn on her and kill her.

"G.o.d, G.o.d," she muttered, "what have I done!"

Philip was calling her to supper. She steadied her voice, and said humbly: "I can't come out. I'm not feeling very well. Go on without me, please."

She heard him speak to Lawrence, and she strained her ears to catch the answering movement toward the table, but there was none. At last Philip spoke again in a voice that was full of anxiety: "Lawrence, what in G.o.d's name has happened?"

Lawrence was moving now, and she waited with bated breath for his answer. He walked to the table and sat down. His voice was heavy. "I've found myself out, Philip. That's all. I know what I am."

There was a moment of silence. Claire covered her mouth with her hand to suppress a cry. She wanted to shout: "No, no, no, not that, but what I am, my beloved, my adored one."

"What do you mean?" Philip's voice seemed stern.

"I mean that I am indebted to you and Claire for the truth I needed."

Behind the curtain Claire turned on her face and burst into sobs.

Philip arose abruptly. "Lawrence," he said quietly, "I do not know what has happened to you this afternoon; I do not know what you mean; but this I do know: I am deeply sorry if anything I have done or said has made you feel that you are an unwelcome guest in my home."

Lawrence stood up and gathered his scattered senses.

"Philip, I beg your pardon, old man. It isn't that at all. The truth is"--and his voice broke--"I have lied to myself and to the world these many years. Much of it hasn't been my fault, but I must pay the price just the same. I am blind. That has led me to a sort of clamorous egoism which carried me on and on until I came to feel that I was really doing something. At last, I know that I am a narrow human parasite, worthless, utterly worthless. A blind, clinging, grasping, vagrant beast, fed upon the mercy of too kind-hearted humanity. I am sorry. It isn't my fault, but it is so."

Philip stood for a few minutes in silence. "You're ill, Lawrence," he said finally. "Get back to yourself if you can. Things do not stay at this point in human abas.e.m.e.nt. I know of what I speak. I have been through that myself. I cannot say anything comforting. No one can."

They went to bed with but a few commonplace remarks, and the cabin became silent. Lawrence lay awake through that night. Claire, unknown to him, spent her vigil in a great readjustment of her life.

CHAPTER XIV.

PHILIP TO THE RESCUE.

It is always the little things in human relations that have the most far-reaching results. Claire might have avoided much trouble with a few well-chosen words to Lawrence, but her own mental state prevented her from speaking.

On his part, Lawrence was so shaken by her outburst that his love for her was driven deep into his subconscious self, and for the time it lay there dormant. After the sudden volcanic upheaval of his entire universe, he was utterly absorbed in the immediate task of reconstructing his faith in himself. The primitive stages of his thinking did not allow for any relation between himself and the woman who had released the dam of self-abas.e.m.e.nt. She was unavoidably at hand, reminding him of her speech, and that alone delayed what otherwise would have been an unconscious process.

Claire was not able to forget the intense desire which, she now realized, had prompted her terrible diatribe. Humiliation held her in its throes, and she was reserved, distant, and unnatural toward him.

Philip saw it all, and his mind was filled with conjectures which made him less and less charitable toward Lawrence, more jealous, and more hopeful of a happy issue of his love for Claire. She turned to him eagerly for companionship. Instinctively she sought refuge from her own thoughts--and from Lawrence--by talking to Philip.

The morning after the incident between Lawrence and Claire there had been an austere reserve in the cabin. Claire had fled from the oppressive gloom into the open. Outside Philip joined her, and they walked together in silence. He was determined not to ask Claire what had happened, although he was extending her a silent sympathy which she felt and a little resented.

Lawrence, left alone in the cabin, gave small heed to their departure.

He had risen with a frightful headache and a fever. He lay on the bed and thought of his situation, his past life, and his future chances, in bitter, heartrending, self-condemnatory sarcasm which made his condition even less tolerable than it would have been otherwise.

"I am a miserable groveler at the feet of humanity," he thought, "clutching at shrinking shoestrings for a piece of bread in pity's name.

If I could see, G.o.d, if I only could!"

He thought of all the little things which his blindness made it absolutely necessary for others to do for him, and his excited mind magnified them into colossal proportions. If his landlady in New York had removed a spot from his clothes, as she had often done, that was a proof of his despised state. He fell to imagining that he was unkempt, dirty, disgustingly unclean, and that people had tolerated it because they had pitied him. At last, with a cry of anguish, he thought: "And my work, too, it is a botched mess which they are amused at and do not dare to tell me the truth about. It, too, is a jest that the world is having at my expense." He remembered praise and prizes that he had won in contests with other students, and he was too excited to see the folly of his answer: "That was charity, the award of kindness to me. I know now what they thought--that for a blind man the thing was nearly enough correct to be interesting and quite amusing."

His body felt hot, and he went outside to prowl about in the wind and snow, like a despairing beast. His mind kept up its terrible work, and he did not notice the continual drop in temperature. Round and round the cabin he walked, instead of going into the forest, as he would have done the day before. In his mind was a sudden doubt of his own ability, and he said that Claire had been right to keep him in. She was more aware of his pitiable weakness than he. At last, however, from sheer weariness he went inside. He was chilled through, but instead of rebuilding the fire and warming himself, he rolled up in a blanket and lay on the bed, chilling and burning by turns.

In the mean time Claire and Philip were discussing the man in the cabin.

Philip had finally broken the silence by saying: "Claire, you needn't feel so about whatever has happened. Remember he is blind and must be treated less critically than other men."

She knew that that was just what had made Lawrence so deadly white when she had spoken, and it filled her with sickening pain. She answered unsteadily: "That isn't true. It isn't Lawrence, anyway, it's myself who should be condemned."

Philip was thoughtful. "It is like you to take the blame on yourself.

You are so kind-hearted that way."

In her present state, his words seemed like a reproach. "Philip, don't,"

she said sadly. "I know better than that."

He persisted. "No, you do not. You are too sympathetic, and you let your heart get the better of you."

"I wish you wouldn't talk that way," she repeated. "You wouldn't, if you knew the truth."

"Of course, I do not know what happened," he said, "but I do know you--even better than you know yourself."

"Do you know what I've done?"

"No, and I do not care. It was right, I am sure. The queen can do no wrong." He was intensely serious.

"Isn't there any common sense left in you, Philip?" she railed. "Have you gone clear back into medieval nonsense in your feeling toward me? I tell you, you are indulging in foolishness."

"Am I?" He smiled. "Well, if that is the best I have to give--"