Ellis Meredith

The truth of truths is love.

Bailey.

As Adam went about his morning's work he was filled with a sense of gladness, an exaltation of life he had never known before. He stretched out his arms, as if to let all the glory of the earth meet the profounder splendor of his soul. As he walked down the garden path he looked with affection at the flowers they had planted together. But for the absurdity of it, he could have woven a chaplet of them and worn it. But the world had reached that height of civilization where the symbol of the glad and living thing was too emotional; always and everywhere we preferred the dead thing, the skin of the seal, the shroud of the silkworm, the straw that was left after the flowers were gone; and Adam was still civilized.

He accepted his happiness without a question. It was too real, too keen, too great a revelation for him to stop to analyze it. He knew it in every pulsation of his heart, in every imagination of his mind, and with the quickened senses of the lover he perceived that Robin's feelings differed from his own. For a year he had been lost in introspection; now they seemed to have changed places, and she grew silent and almost reserved.

"What is it, dear?" he said. "No, don't try to evade an answer. We must not stop being frank with each other now."

She did not reply at once, and when she did her voice was so low that he had to stoop to catch the words. "Do you think you do love me as fully as you might have loved some one else, younger and happier than I, better fitted to you? It doesn't seem as if you could; you never did in the old days, you never even thought of it."

Adam laughed lightly. "I beg of you spare me, for this isn't 'so sudden' at all." Then seeing that her mood forbade jest, he went on seriously: "Really, I mean it. It's true I never made you pretty speeches in the old days, nor stopped to consider whether I might have done so had things been different; but then I never made pretty speeches to any one. From the very beginning I have taken you as a matter of course. It always seemed as if we had known each other from the very first. You entered into my plans as if you had known them as you might if we had gone to the same little red schoolhouse. I wish we had! I'm jealous of the years when I didn't know you."

"But a whole year," she said doubtfully. "Are you sure it isn't just loneliness and propinquity?"

Adam kissed her fingers one at a time. "You are going to beg my pardon for that some day," he said. "You are not very vain, my sweetheart; how could I help loving you?"

"That's just what I am finding fault with," she said with a sudden twinkle of fun in her eyes. "You have managed to keep from it so long. But seriously, I am not the kind of a woman I should have fancied you would care for. I am, at least I was, very weary of life; I knew too much about it. And I am older than you."

He looked at her critically. "You were, a year ago," he answered; "I don't know how much, two or three years—"

"Five," she said.

"Well, five; but this last year you have been growing young. The very fact that you were tired of the old life made it less of a strain for you to give it up. The tired look is all gone, even from your eyes, whereas lots of gray has come into my hair. You had learned to live in yourself and your music. My whole scheme of life was wrapped up in the social existence of our time. In a way I lost more than you did. I have learned a good deal this past year. Five years ago, if I had loved you, there would have been many inequalities between us that do not exist to-day. Now it seems to me we are as absolutely mated, as much parts of one whole as the two halves of the brain, or the right and left ventricles of our hearts. It is no disparagement of you or of myself to say that no boy could appreciate you. The measure of a man's manhood is his ability to understand the highest type of womanhood. As to your being worldly, that's all nonsense." He stroked her hair a few minutes in silence, and then said, half quizzically, "You might question me, if I said it, but this is what Balzac said of women like you: 'A woman who has received a man's education possesses a faculty which is the most fertile in happiness for herself and her husband; but that woman is as rare as happiness itself.'"

She looked pleased, but she did not reply, and he went on.

"Do you still doubt me? Well, then, know that I have loved you from the very beginning, for love, when it comes, is a retroactive law of our being. If I had loved you less, if you had seemed less a part of me, I might have realized it sooner."

She shook her head. "I have known that I loved you for a long time, months," she said.

"Then you ought to have known I loved you," he answered quickly. "Don't you think it is possible to love with our souls, our subconsciousness, and realize with our slow brains, after months and years, what our hearts knew at once? Even love has become more or less of a mental process. We reason about things instead of feeling them, and yet when we come to our last analyses we don't know anything; we simply feel. When the scientist says, 'The amoeba moves out of the shade into the sunlight because it wants the sunlight,' he bases his postulate upon what he feels, and believes that the atom feels. This is all that he knows. We do not seek warmth because we have calculated its effects upon us, but because we feel cold. Oh, we have starved our feelings to feed our brains, until the mind believes it is the immortal part of us, instead of realizing that what we know, we are merely re-discovering, while what we feel is our apperception of the infinite. If we had the courage to be true to our feelings, instead of our thoughts, I believe it would be a better, as it would certainly be a truer, world."

"Do you really think more people are guided by thought than by feeling?" she asked with a good deal of surprise.

"Perhaps not in one sense," he answered. "A great many people are carried along by their impulses, their transitory emotions, which are not, properly speaking, feelings at all. They make what some one calls the 'fatal error of mistaking the eddy for the current.' But among educated people it seems to me that we think too much, especially of our own thoughts, and feel too little. All this year I have not said that I loved you; I don't know that I have thought it, but I have felt and lived it. Sometimes I have not been thoughtful—"

"You have always been too thoughtful," she interrupted.

"No, but when I have been inconsiderate it was because you were myself, the best self that we overlook sometimes, but return to with unfailing loyalty. You were not bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; that is a very low and material view of what you have been and are to me, heart of my heart and soul of my soul. I cannot think of a life apart from you, for you are my life. Marriage is not a matter of a license and a ceremony and Mendelssohn and gaping crowds and a tour. We do not need any one to tell us that what God has joined cannot be sundered by man. All this year has been a long wedding of every thought and feeling and desire, until I have looked into your eyes to see my own wish. We have thought and thought, but that way madness lies. Now I feel that all the world we have lost, lives for us in every glorious possibility in each other. For I know that you love me."

"Yes," she said, "I think I have loved you all along, but it never entered my dreams that you could love me. Even now, when you tell me, it does not seem as if it could be so, either by the mental process, or by that of feeling."

He caught her in his arms and kissed her, a kiss so long and tender that it left her clinging to him, breathless and half awakened.

"Don't think," he said, "feel,—feel my heart and know that every beat is for you, that every atom of me calls for you, and every drop of blood obeys, as it would command you. I have tried to reach the ideal of the love that says, not 'thou must be mine,' but 'I must be thine,' but I have failed if you can doubt me."

She flung her arms around his neck with sudden passion.

"This is the greatest, the most perfect dream of all," she said; "I think it must be heaven."

"A new heaven and a new earth," he answered gently.