He buried his face guiltily in his hands as he tried to shut out the
remembrance of how persistently of late, whithersoever he had turned, this
second image had reappeared before him, growing always clearer, drawing
always nearer, summoning him more luringly. Already he had begun to know the
sensations of a traveller who is crossing sands with a parched tongue and a
weary foot, crossing toward a country that he will never reach, but that he
will stagger toward as long as he has strength to stand.
During the past several days--following his last interview with Amy--he had
realized for the first time how long and how plainly the figure of Mrs.
Falconer had been standing before him and upon how much loftier a level.
Many a time of old, while visiting the house, he had grown tired of Amy; but
he had never felt wearied by her. For Amy he was always making apologies to
his own conscience; she needed none. He had secretly hoped that in time Amy
would become more what he wished his wife to be; it would have pained him to
think of her as altered. Often he had left Amy's company with a grateful
sense of regaining the larger liberty of his own mind; by her he always felt
guided to his better self, he carried away her ideas with the hope of making
them his ideas, he was set on fire with a spiritual passion to do his utmost
in the higher strife of the world.
For this he had long paid her the guiltless tribute of his reverence and
affection. And between his reverence and affection and all the forbidden
that lay beyond rose a barrier which not even his imagination had ever
consciously overleaped. Now the forbidding barrier had disappeared, and in
its place had appeared the forbidden bond--he knew not how or when. How
could he? Love, the Scarlet Spider, will in a night hang between two that
have been apart a web too fine for either to see; but the strength of both
will never avail to break it.
Very curiously it had befallen him furthermore that just at the time when
all these changes were taking place around him and within him, she had
brought him the book that she had pressed with emphasis upon his attention.
In the backwoods settlements of Pennsylvania where his maternal Scotch-Irish
ancestors had settled and his own life been spent, very few volumes had
fallen into his hands. After coming to Kentucky not many more until of late:
so that of the world's history he was still a stinted and hungry student.
When,therefore, she had given him Malory's "LeMorte D'Arthur," it was the
first time that the ideals of chivalry had ever flashed their glorious light
upon him; for the first time the models of Christian manhood, on which
western Europe nourished itself for centuries, displayed themselves to his
imagination with the charm of story; he heard of Camelot, of the king, of
that company of men who strove with each other in arms, but strove also with
each other in grace of life and for the immortal mysteries of the spirit.
She had said that he should have read this book long before but that
henceforth he would always need it even more than in his past: that here
were some things he had looked for in the world and had never found;
characters such as he had always wished to grapple to himself as his abiding
comrades: that if he would love the best that it loved, hate what it hated,
scorn what it scorned, it would help him in the pursuit of his own ideals to
the end.