CHAPTER XXVIII.

TWO HISTORIES ARE ALMOST FINISHED.

Hermia saw a great deal of Quintard. They walked together, they rode together, and circumstances frequently forced them into each other’s society for hours at a time. She liked him more with every interview, but she did not feel a throb of love for him. The snow on her nature’s volcano was deep as the ashes which buried Pompeii.

He had many opportunities to put his wearing qualities to the test. Once they met at a fashionable winter rendezvous in the country. The other women were of the Helen Simms type; the rest of the men belonged to the Winston brotherhood. For the greater part of four days Hermia and Quintard devoted themselves exclusively to each other. When they were not riding across the country or rambling through the windy woods, they sat in the library and told stories by the fire.

One day they had wandered far into the woods and come upon a hemlock glen, down one side of which tumbled melting snow over great jutting rocks that sprang from the mountain side. Quintard and Hermia climbed to a ledge that overhung one of the rocky platforms and sat down. About and above them rose the forest, but the wind was quiet; there was no sound but the dull roar of the cataract. A more romantic spot was not in America, but Quintard could not have been more matter-of-fact had he been in a street-car. He had never betrayed any feeling he may have had for her by a flash of his eye. He discussed with her subjects dangerous and tender, but always with the cold control of the impersonal analyst.

He smoked for a few moments in silence and then said abruptly: “Don’t imagine that I am going to discuss religion with you; it is a question which does not interest me at all. But do you believe in the immortality of the soul?”

“No,” said Hermia.

“Why not?”

Hermia lifted her shoulders: “I have never thought agnosticism needed defense.”

“Agnosticism is the religion of the intellectual, of course. But I have some private reasons for going a step beyond agnosticism, and believing in the persistence of personality. Do you want to hear them?”

“Yes,” said Hermia, “but it all comes down to the same proposition. Religion has its stronghold in Ego the Great. _La vie, c’est moi!_ I am, therefore must ever be! Now and forever! World without end!”

“I refuse to be snubbed beforehand. Why are children so frequently the ancestors of their family’s talent? When heredity cannot account for genius, what better explanation than that of the re-embodiment of an unquenchable individuality? The second reason is a more sentimental one. Why is a man never satisfied until he meets the woman he really loves, and why are his instincts so keen and sure when he does meet her? Why, also, does he so often dwell with the ideal of her before he sees her in material form?”

Hermia felt herself paling, but she exclaimed impatiently: “Don’t talk to me of ideals—those poor, pale photographs of ourselves, who have neither mind nor will nor impulse; who jump out like puppets as the strings are pulled; who respond to every mood and grin to every smile! They are born of the supreme egoism of human nature, which admits no objective influence to any world of its own creating—an egoism which demands vengeance for the humiliation of spirit one is called upon to endure in the world of men. Your other arguments were good, however. I like them, although I will not discuss them until you have further elaborated. In the mean time solve another problem. What is the reason that, when a woman falls in love, she immediately, if a believer, has an increase of religious feeling; if a non-believer, she has a desire to believe, so that she may pray? Sentimentality? The softening of her nature under the influence of love? The general awakening of her emotional possibilities?”

“Neither—or all, indirectly. She is not drawn to God in the least. She is drawn to the idealized abstraction of her lover, who, in the mists of her white-heated imagination, assumes the lineaments of the being most exalted by tradition. If there were a being more exalted still than God, her lover’s phantom would be re-christened with his name instead. It is to her lover that she prays—the intermediate being is a pretty fiction—and she revels in prayer, because it gives her a dreamy and sensuous nearness to her lover.”

Hermia sprang to her feet and paced the narrow platform with rapid steps. “It is well I have no ‘pretty fictions,’” she said, “you would shatter them to splinters.”

He rose also. “No,” he said, “I would never shatter any of your ideals. Such as you believe in and I do not, I will never discuss with you.”

Hermia stood still and looked away from him and through the hemlock forest, with its life outstretched above and its death rotting below. The shadows were creeping about it like ghosts of the dead bracken beneath their feet. The mist was rolling over the mountain and down the cataract; it lay like a soft, thin blanket on the hurrying waters. Hermia drew closer to Quintard and looked up into his face.

“Do you believe,” she said, “that perfect happiness can be—even when affinities meet?”

“Not perfect, because not uninterrupted,” he replied, “except in those rare cases where a man and woman, born for each other, have met early in youth, before thought or experience had formed the character of either. When—as almost always happens—they do not meet until each is incased in the armor of their separate and perfected individualities, no matter how united they may become, there must be hours and days of terrible spiritual loneliness—there must be certain sides of their natures that can never touch. But”—he bent his flushed face to hers and his voice shook—“there are moments—there are hours—when barriers are of mist, when duality is forgotten. Such hours, isolated from time and the world——”

She broke from him as from an invisible embrace and stood on the edge of a rock. She gave a little, rippling laugh that was caught and lost in the rush and thunder of the waters. “Your theories are fascinating,” she cried, “but this unknown cataract is more so. I should like to stand here for an hour and watch it, were not these rocks so slippery——”

Quintard turned his head. Then he leaped down the path beneath the ledge. Hermia had disappeared. He was about to swing himself out into the cataract when he staggered and leaned against the rock; his heart contracted as if there were fingers of steel about it. With a mighty resolution, he overcame the physical weakness which followed in the wake of the momentary pain, and, planting his feet on one of the broad stones over which the torrent fell, he set his shoulder against a projecting rock and looked upward. Hermia lay on a shelf above; the force of the cataract was feebler at its edges and had not swept her down. Quintard crawled slowly up, his feet slipping on the slimy rocks, only saving himself from being precipitated into the narrowing body of the torrent below by clinging to the roots and branches that projected from the ledges. He reached Hermia; she was unconscious, and it was well that he was a strong man. He took her in his arms and went down the rocks. When he stepped on to the earth again his face was white, and he breathed heavily. “My heart beats as if I were a woman,” he muttered impatiently, “what is the matter with me?”

He laid Hermia on the ground, and for a moment was compelled to rest beside her. Then he aroused himself and bent anxiously over her. She had had a severe fall; it was a wonder her brains had not been dashed out. He lifted her and held her with her body sloping from feet to head. She struggled to consciousness with an agonized gasp. She opened her eyes, but did not appear to see him, and, turning her face to the torrent, made a movement to crawl to it. Quintard caught her in his arms and stood her on her feet.

“What are you doing?” he asked roughly.

She put her hand to her head. “I like to watch it, but the rocks are so slippery,” she said confusedly, yet with a gleam of cunning in her shadowed eyes.

Quintard caught her by both shoulders and shook her. “My God!” he exclaimed, “did you do it purposely?”

The blood rushed to her head and washed the fog from her brain. “You are crazy,” she said; “let us go home.”

* * * * *