Not Without Thorns

“I prided myself on my high principle and superiority to low influences, jealousy and selfishness, and all such unworthy feelings. And I fancied, too, I had so much self-command, even in thought,” she said to her lover, sadly, when, after Eugenia was fairly out of danger, she confessed to him the cruel storm of feeling, the anguish of self-reproach through which she had passed the day of the accident; “and see what I am in reality! Imagine the horrible, the repulsive selfishness of my feeling as I did at such a time, even for an instant.”

“But it was partly my fault,” said Gerald. “I had expressed myself badly. Don’t you see how it was? I was so afraid of deceiving you in any way, of in the least concealing from you what I had felt for another woman (though indeed you knew it already) that I misrepresented it. I mixed up past and present. Thinking it over since, indeed, I wonder you didn’t refuse to have anything to say to me. I don’t feel proud of my way of expressing myself that afternoon, I assure you.”

“I told you at the time you very nearly made me propose to you,” said Roma, half laughing in spite of her seriousness.

“But you misunderstood me, you did indeed,” he persisted. “I hardly like to talk about it, but to speak plainly, my love for Eugenia died, completely and for ever, the day I first learnt to think of her as the wife, the promised or actual wife – it all seemed one to me – of another. Had there been no other in the question, had it been a simple question of winning her by long devotion to care for me, I don’t say what limits there would have been to my perseverance. But as it was – ”

“Don’t explain,” interrupted Roma. “I don’t want you to explain. It can’t make me feel myself the least bit less despicable. I that have always despised other women so for being run away with by their feelings, even good ones. Oh, Gerald, are you sure you wouldn’t rather give me up now you know how bad I am?”

He smiled.

“Do you remember how I offended you long, long ago,” he said, “by persisting that you were no judge of your own character? Even then, at first sight, I doubted your belonging to the easy-going, prosaic order of beings you declared yourself to be one of. There are doubtless in all of us,” he went on more gravely, after a little pause, “possibilities of evil, of selfishness – the root of it all, I suppose, but I am no metaphysician – which we may well tremble to recognise. And in the lurid light of tempests of feeling, these are apt to show themselves in exaggerated blackness and enormity. But you cannot think, Roma, that I would love you less for seeing more of the depth of your character, the depth, and the strength, and the truth of it?” he added, tenderly.

So Roma was comforted. And Eugenia’s prediction that her two friends would “step straight into happiness,” was fulfilled as thoroughly as any prophecy of the kind can be fulfilled in a world where so very many things are crooked, more crooked than needs be, because so very few people have faith and patience sufficient to await the slow-coming, far-off, eventual “making straight” – faith and patience enough to work cheerily meanwhile in their own corner of the great vineyard. For though the tools be poor and imperfect, the soil hard, the light dim and fitful, oftentimes indeed delusive, the results of the labour all but invisible, what then?

“Is not our failure here but a triumph’s evidence

For the fulness of the days?”

The End.