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As deep as the sea
by
“Wait–wait one moment,” she answered. “Before you go I want you to hear what I’ve been reading over and over to myself just now. It is from a book I got from Quebec, called When Time Shall Pass. It is a story of two like you and me. The man is writing to the woman, and it has things that you have said to me–in a different way.”
“No, I don’t talk like a book, but I know a star in a dark night when I see it,” he answered, with a catch in his throat.
“Hush!” she said, catching his hand in hers as she read, while all around them the sounds of summer–the distant clack of a reaper, the crack of a whip, the locusts droning, the whir of a young partridge, the squeak of a chipmunk–were tuned to the harmony of the moment and her voice:
“‘Night and the sombre silence, oh, my love, and one star shining! First, warm, velvety sleep, and then this quick, quiet waking to your voice which seems to call me. Is it–is it you that calls? Do you sometimes, even in your dreams, speak to me? Far beneath unconsciousness is there the summons of your spirit to me?… I like to think so. I like to think that this thing which has come to us is deeper, greater than we are. Sometimes day and night there flash before my eyes–my mind’s eyes–pictures of you and me in places unfamiliar, landscapes never before seen, activities uncomprehended and unknown, bright, alluring glimpses of some second being, some possible, maybe never-to-be-realized future, alas! Yet these swift-moving shutters of the soul, or imagination, or reality–who shall say which?–give me a joy never before felt in life. If I am not a better man for this love of mine for you, I am more than I was, and shall be more than I am. Much of my life in the past was mean and small, so much that I have said and done has been unworthy–my love for you is too sharp a light for my gross imperfections of the past! Come what will, be what must, I stake my life, my heart, my soul on you–that beautiful, beloved face; those deep eyes in which my being is drowned; those lucid, perfect hands that have bound me to the mast of your destiny. I cannot go back, I must go forward: now I must keep on loving you or be shipwrecked. I did not know that this was in me, this tide of love, this current of devotion. Destiny plays me beyond my ken, beyond my dreams. “O Cithoeron!” Turn from me now–or never, O my love! Loose me from the mast, and let the storm and wave wash me out into the sea of your forgetfulness now–or never!… But keep me, keep me, if your love is great enough, if I bring you any light or joy; for I am yours to my uttermost note of life.'”
“He knew!–he knew!” Rawley said, catching her wrists in his hands and drawing her to him. “If I could write, that’s what I should have said to you, beautiful and beloved. How mean and small and ugly my life was till you made me over! I was a bad lot.”
“So much hung on one little promise,” she said, and drew closer to him. “You were never bad,” she added; then, with an arm sweeping the universe, “Oh, isn’t it all good, and isn’t it all worth living?”
His face lost its glow. Over in the town her brother faced a ruined life, and the girl beside him a dark humiliation and a shame which would poison her life hereafter, unless–his look turned to the little house where the quack-doctor lived. He loosed her hands.
“Now for Caliban,” he said.
“I shall be Ariel and follow you–in my heart,” she said. “Be sure and make him tell you the story of his life,” she added, with a laugh, as his lips swept the hair behind her ears.