I love you more
than the universe and its Maker. A thousand times rather would I
cease to live, than live without you to love me. I have loved you
for years and years--longer than I know. I was loving you with
heart and soul and brain and eyes when you went away and left
me."
"Cousin Godfrey!" shrieked Letty, "don't you know I belong to
Tom?"
And she dropped like one lifeless on the grass at his feet.
Godfrey felt as if suddenly damned; and his hell was death. He
stood gazing on the white face. The world, heaven, God, and
nature were dead, and that was the soul of it all, dead before
him! But such death is never born of love. This agony was but the
fog of disappointed self-love; and out of it suddenly rose what
seemed a new power to live, but one from a lower world: it was
all a wretched dream, out of which he was no more to issue, in
which he must go on for ever, dreaming, yet acting as one wide
awake! Mechanically he stooped and lifted the death-defying lover
in his arms, and carried her to the house. He felt no thrill as
he held the treasure to his heart. It was the merest material
contact. He bore her to the room where his mother sat, laid her
on the sofa, said he had found her under the oak-tree--and went
to his study, away in the roof. On a chair in the middle of the
floor he sat, like a man bereft of all. Nothing came between him
and suicide but an infinite scorn.
Pages:
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552