第52章

He buried his face guiltily in his hands as he tried to shut out the remembrance of how persistently of late, whithersoever he had turned, this second image had reappeared before him, growing always clearer, drawing always nearer, summoning him more luringly.Already he had begun to know the sensations of a traveller who is crossing sands with a parched tongue and a weary foot, crossing toward a country that he will never reach, but that he will stagger toward as long as he has strength to stand.

During the past several days--following his last interview with Amy--he had realized for the first time how long and how plainly the figure of Mrs.

Falconer had been standing before him and upon how much loftier a level.

Many a time of old, while visiting the house, he had grown tired of Amy; but he had never felt wearied by her.For Amy he was always making apologies to his own conscience; she needed none.He had secretly hoped that in time Amy would become more what he wished his wife to be; it would have pained him to think of her as altered.Often he had left Amy's company with a grateful sense of regaining the larger liberty of his own mind; by her he always felt guided to his better self, he carried away her ideas with the hope of making them his ideas, he was set on fire with a spiritual passion to do his utmost in the higher strife of the world.

For this he had long paid her the guiltless tribute of his reverence and affection.And between his reverence and affection and all the forbidden that lay beyond rose a barrier which not even his imagination had ever consciously overleaped.Now the forbidding barrier had disappeared, and in its place had appeared the forbidden bond--he knew not how or when.How could he? Love, the Scarlet Spider, will in a night hang between two that have been apart a web too fine for either to see; but the strength of both will never avail to break it.

Very curiously it had befallen him furthermore that just at the time when all these changes were taking place around him and within him, she had brought him the book that she had pressed with emphasis upon his attention.

In the backwoods settlements of Pennsylvania where his maternal Scotch-Irish ancestors had settled and his own life been spent, very few volumes had fallen into his hands.After coming to Kentucky not many more until of late:

so that of the world's history he was still a stinted and hungry student.

When,therefore, she had given him Malory's "LeMorte D'Arthur," it was the first time that the ideals of chivalry had ever flashed their glorious light upon him; for the first time the models of Christian manhood, on which western Europe nourished itself for centuries, displayed themselves to his imagination with the charm of story; he heard of Camelot, of the king, of that company of men who strove with each other in arms, but strove also with each other in grace of life and for the immortal mysteries of the spirit.

She had said that he should have read this book long before but that henceforth he would always need it even more than in his past: that here were some things he had looked for in the world and had never found;characters such as he had always wished to grapple to himself as his abiding comrades: that if he would love the best that it loved, hate what it hated, scorn what it scorned, it would help him in the pursuit of his own ideals to the end.

Of this and more he felt at once the truth, since of all earthly books known to him this contained the most heavenly revelation of what a man may be in manliness, in gentleness, and in goodness.And as he read the nobler portions of the book, the nobler parts of his nature gave out their immediate response.

Hungrily he hurried to and fro across the harvest of those fertile pages, gathering of the white wheat of the spirit many a lustrous sheaf: the love of courage, the love of courtesy, the love of honour, the love of high aims and great actions, the love of the poor and the helpless, the love of a spotless name and a spotless life, the love of kindred, the love of friendship, the love of humility of spirit, the love of forgiveness, the love of beauty, the love of love, the love of God.Surely, he said to himself, within the band of these virtues lay not only a man's noblest life, but the noblest life of the world.