Miserable, undecided, overwhelmed with self-reproach, I stood there looking upon the unconscious sleeper. Sunlight faded from the patterned wall; that violet tint, which lingers with us in the north after the sun has set, deepened to a sadder color, then slowly thickened to obscurity; and from the window I saw the new moon hanging through tangled branches, dull as a silver-poplar leaf in November.
What if I die here on the frontier? The question persisted, repeating itself again and again. And my thoughts ran on in somber disorder: If I die--then we shall never know wedded happiness--never know the sweetest of intimacies. Our lives, uncompleted, what meaning is there in such lives? As for me, were my life to end all incomplete, why was I born? To live on, year after year, escaping the perils all are heir to, and then, when for the first instant life's true meaning is disclosed, to die, sterile, blighting, desolating another life, too? And must we put away offered happiness to wait on custom at our peril?--to sit cowed before convention, juggling with death and passion?
Darkness around me, darkness in my soul, I stood staring at her where she lay, arms bent back and small hands doubled up; and an overwhelming rush of tenderness and apprehension drew me forward to bend above her, hovering there, awed by the beauty of her--the pure lids, the lashes resting on the cheeks, the red mouth so exquisitely tranquil, curled like a scarlet petal of a flower fallen on snow.
Her love and mine! What cared we for laws that barred it?--what mattered any law that dared attempt to link her destiny with that man who might, perhaps, wear a title as her husband--and might not. Who joined them? No God that I feared or worshiped. Then, why should I not sunder a pact inspired by hell itself; and if the law of the land made by men of the land permitted us no sanctuary in wedlock, then why did we not seek that shelter in a happiness the law forbids, inspired by a passion no law could forbid?
I had but to reach forward, to bend and touch her, and where was Death's triumph if I fell at last? What vague and terrible justice could rob us of these hours? Never, never had I loved her as I did then. She breathed so quietly, lying there, that I could not see her body stir; her stillness awed me, fascinated me; so still, so inert, so marvelously motionless, that her very soul seemed asleep within her. Should I awake her, this child whose calm, closed lids, whose soft lashes and tinted skin, whose young soul and body were in my keeping here under a strange roof, in a strange land?