They had certainly come to an understanding, and for Ray at least there was release from the obscure sense of culpability which had so long harassed him. He knew that unless he was sure of his love for Peace, he was to blame for letting her trust it; but now that he had spoken, and spoken frankly, it had freed them both to go on and be friends without fear for each other. Her confession that there had been a time when she loved him flattered his vanity out of the pain of knowing that she did not love him now; it consoled him, it justified him; for the offence which he had accused himself of was of no other kind than hers. How wisely, how generously she had taken the whole matter!
The question whether she had not taken it more generously than he merited began to ask itself. She might have chosen to feign a parity with him in this. He had read of women who sacrificed their love to their love; and consented to a life-long silence, or practised a life-long deceit, that the men they loved might never know they loved them. He had never personally known of such a case, but the books were full of such cases. This might be one of them. Or it might much more simply and probably be that she had{372} received his strange declaration as she did in order to spare his feelings. If that were true she had already told her sister, and Mrs. Denton had turned the absurd side of it to the light, and had made Peace laugh it over with her.
A cold perspiration broke out over him at the notion, which he rejected upon a moment’s reflection as unworthy of Peace. He got back to his compassionate admiration of her, as he walked down to the ferry and began his homeward journey. He looked about the boat, and fancied it the same he had crossed to New York in, when he came to the city nearly a year before. The old negro who whistled, limped silently through the long saloon; he glanced from right to left on the passengers, but he must have thought them too few, or not in the mood for his music. Ray wondered if he whistled only for the incoming passengers. He recalled every circumstance of his acquaintance with Peace, from the moment she caught his notice when Mrs. Denton made her outcry about the pocket-book. He saw how once it had seemed to deepen to love, and then had ceased to do so, but he did not see how. There had been everything in it to make them more to each other, but after a certain time they had grown less. It was not so strange to him that he had changed; he had often changed; but we suppose a constancy in others as to all passions which we cannot exact of ourselves. He tried to think what he had done to alienate the love which she confessed she once had for him, and he could not remember anything unless it was his{373} cruelty to her when he found that she was the friend who would not look at his story a second time. She said she had forgiven him that; but perhaps she had not; perhaps she had divined a potential brutality in him, which made her afraid to trust him. But after that their lives had been united in the most intimate anxieties, and she had shown absolute trust in him. He reviewed his conduct toward her throughout, and he could find no blame in it except for that one thing. He could truly feel that he had been her faithful friend, and the friend of her whole uncomfortable family, in spite of all his prejudices and principles against people of that kind. In the recognition of this fact he enjoyed a moment’s sense of injury, which was heightened when he reflected that he had even been willing to sacrifice his pride, after his brilliant literary success, so far as to offer himself to a girl who worked for her living; it had always galled him that she held a place little better than a type-writer’s. No, he had nothing to accuse himself of, after a scrutiny of his behavior repeated in every detail, and applied in complex, again and again, with helpless iteration. Still he had a remote feeling of self-reproach, which he tried to verify, but which forever eluded him. It was mixed up with that sense of escape, which made him ashamed.
He lay awake in the sleeping-car the greater part of the night, and turned from side to side, seeking for the reason of a thing that can never have any reason, and trying to find some parity between his expectations and experiences of himself in such an affair. It went{374} through his mind that it would be a good thing to write a story with some such situation in it; only the reader would not stand it. People expected love to begin mysteriously, but they did not like it to end so; though life itself began mysteriously and ended so. He believed that he should really try it; a story that opened with an engagement ought to be as interesting as one that closed with an engagement; and it would be very original. He must study his own affair very closely when he got a little further away from it. There was no doubt but that when the chances that favored love were so many and so recognizable, the chance that undid it could at last be recognized. It was merely a chance, and that ought to be shown.
He began to wonder if life had not all been a chance with him. Nothing, not even the success of his book, in the light he now looked at it in, was the result of reasoned cause. That success had happened; it had not followed; and he didn’t deserve any praise for what had merely happened. If this apparent fatality were confined to the economic world alone, he would have been willing to censure civilization, and take his chance dumbly, blindly, with the rest. He had not found it so. On the contrary, he had found the same caprice, the same rule of mere casualty, in the world which we suppose to be ordered by law—the world of thinking, the world of feeling. Who knew why or how this or that thought came, this or that feeling? Then, in that world where we lived in the spirit, was wrong always punished, was right always rewarded?{375} We must own that we often saw the good unhappy, and the wicked enjoying themselves. This was not just; yet somehow we felt, we knew, that justice ruled the universe. Nothing, then, that seemed chance was really chance. It was the operation of a law so large that we caught a glimpse of its vast orbit once or twice in a lifetime. It was Providence.
The car rushed on through the night with its succession of smooth impulses. The thought of the old friends he should soon meet began to dispossess the cares and questions that had ridden him; the notion of certain girls at Midland haunted him sweetly, warmly. He told that one who first read his story all about Peace Hughes, and she said they had never really been in love, for love was eternal. After a while he drowsed, and then he heard her saying that he had got that notion of the larger law from old Kane. Then it was not he, and not she. It was nothing.