Odd. But some women are made so. Marion Hathaway was that sort--she stuck
like a leech.
And now--the frivolous, feather-headed little wife, whom he had held so
cheap and wronged so lightly, urging her folly as almost a justification
of the wrong, she too--She appalled him with the terrific eternity of her
love. Was it possible that this feeling, which he had despised as the
blind craving and clinging of the feminine animal, could take a place
among the supreme realities, the things more living than flesh and blood,
which in his way he still contrived to believe in? The idea made him
extremely uncomfortable, and he put it from him. He had drifted into that
stagnant backwater of the soul where the scum of thought rises to the
surface. Molly was better than most women; but, poor little thing, there
was nothing transcendent about her virtues. She loved him after the
manner of her kind.
No--no--no. She loved him as no other woman had ever loved him before.
She loved him because she believed in him against the evidence of her
senses. If she only knew! A diabolical impulse seized him to awaken her
then and there and force her to listen to a full confession of his
iniquities, without reticence and without apology. Surely no woman's love
could stand before that appalling revelation? But no; what other women
would do he would not undertake to say; she would only look at him with
her innocent eyes, reiterating "It makes no difference."
Would he have cared more if she had cared less? On the whole--no. And
what if she had been a woman of a higher, austerer type? That woman would
have repelled him, thrown him back upon himself. She had drawn him by her
very foolishness. He had been brought back to her, again and again, by
the certainty of her unreasoning affection. By its purity also. That had
saved him from falling lower than a certain dimly defined level. If there
was a spark of good in him he owed it to her. He had never sunk so low as
in that intolerable moment when he had doubted her. For the behavior of
the brute is low enough in all conscience; but below that is the behavior
of the cad. Tyson had his own curious code of morals.
Yes; and in the raw enthusiasm of remorse he had made all manner of vows
and promises, and he felt bound in honor to keep them. He had talked of
a rupture with the past. A rupture with the past! You might as well talk
of breaking with your own shadow. The shadow of your past. Imbecile
expression! The past was in his blood and nerves; it was bone of his bone
and flesh of his flesh. It was he. Or rather it was this body of his that
seemed to live with a hideous independent life of its own. And yet, even
yet, there were moments when he caught a glimpse of his better self
struggling as if under the slough of dissolution; the soul that had never
seen the sun was writhing to leap into the light. He would have given the
whole world to be able to love Molly. There was no death and no
corruption like the death of love; and the spirit of his passion had
been too feeble to survive its divorce from the flesh.