“You do not believe that of me,” she said.
He was ready and unfaltering, and was able to smile at her, a bright, odd smile. “I believe it of any one.”
It was love that eyed him--love more stern, more relentless in its silence than if she had spoken it, and never had she been so near as when, sending her clarion of open warfare across the abyss, she said, “I will never change--to you.”
The words, the look,--a look of solemn defiance,--shattered forever the palace of pretence that they had dwelt in for so long. Till now, it might have stood for them. In its rainbow chambers they might still have smiled and sorrowed and eluded each other, only glanced through the glittering casements at the dark realities outside; but when the word of truth was spoken, casements, chambers, turrets, fell together and reality rushed in. She had spoken the word. After that it was impossible to pretend anything.
Gavan, among the wreck, had grown pale; but he kept his smile fixed, even while he, too, spoke the new language of reality.
Still he smiled. “I am afraid _for_ you.”
“Of course you are. You have your moments of humanity.”
“I have. And so I shall go to-morrow,” said Gavan.
She looked at him in silence, her face taking on its haggard, unbeautiful aspect of strange, rocky endurance. And never had his mind been more alert, more mocking, more aloof from any entanglement of feeling than while he saw her love and his; saw her sorrow and his sorrow--his strange, strange sorrow that, like a sick, helpless child, longed, in its darkness, its loneliness, to hide its head on her breast and to feel her arms go round it. Love and sorrow were far, far away--so far that it was as if they had no part at all in himself, as if it were not he that felt them.
“Are you so afraid as that?” Eppie asked.
“After last night?” he answered. “After what I felt when I saw you here, with him? After this? Of course I am as afraid as that. I must flee--for your life, Eppie. I am its shadow--its fatal shadow.”
“No, I am yours. Life is the shadow to you.”
“Well, on both sides, then, we must be afraid,” he assented.
She made no gesture, no appeal. Her face was like a rock. It was only that deep endurance and, under it, that deep threat. Never, never would she allure; never draw him to her; never build in her cathedral a Venusberg for him. He must come to her. He must kneel, with her, before her altar. He must worship, with her, her God of suffering and triumph. And, the dying light making her face waver before his eyes with a visionary strangeness, stern and angelic, he seemed to see, deep in her eyes, the burning of high, sacramental candles.