“It is true,” replied Raine musingly. “As it can be the greatest joy. Once I could not bear to think of it, for the pain. It is strange--”
“What is strange?” asked Katherine in a low voice.
He was scarcely conscious how he had come to strike the chord of his own life. It seemed natural at the moment.
“It is strange how like a dream it all appears now; as if another than I--a bosom friend, whose secrets I shared--had gone through it.”
She put her hand lightly on his arm, and he felt the touch to his heart.
“Would you care for me to tell you? I should like to. It would seem a way of laying a ghost peacefully and reverently. It has never passed out of me yet--not even to my father.”
“Yes; mother and child. I was little else than a boy--an undergraduate. She was little else than a girl--yet she had been married--then deserted by her husband and utterly alone and friendless when I met her--in London. She was a dresser at a theatre--educated though, and refined far above her class. At first I helped her--then loved her--we couldn't marry--she offered--at first I refused. But then--well, you can end it. We loved each other dearly. If she had lived, I should have been true to her till this day--I should have married her, for she would soon have become a widow. When the child was born, I was one-and-twenty--she nineteen. We were wildly, ecstatically happy. Three months afterwards the child caught diphtheria--she caught it too from the baby--first the little one died--then the mother died in my arms. I seemed to have lived all my life before I had entered upon it. It was a heavy burthen for a lad.”
“I have shrunk morbidly from risking such torture a second time.”
“Yours is a nature to love altogether if it loves at all.”
“I reverence love too highly to treat it lightly,” he said. “Tell me,” he added, “do you think my punishment came upon me rightly? There are those that would. Are you one?”
“God forbid,” she replied in a low voice. “God forbid that I of all creatures should dare to judge others.”
The earnestness in her tone startled him. He caught a side-view of her face. It wore the same look of sadness as on the night they had seen “Denise” together in the winter. She had suffered. A great yearning pity for her rose in his heart.