CHAPTER XXXIV
“I shall clasp thee again: and with God be the rest!”
HE had found her! He repeated breathlessly to himself the one great fact. Leslie Damores had searched all their old haunts in Paris, had wandered and waited and watched, and now at last found her in a great class-room of French students. He had come as a special favor to the master in whose studio they worked, and he could not signal her out for more than a word, but by a clever clumsiness he knocked over her drawing-board. As he picked it up and gave it to her all the great unspoken things passed between them. It proved the mocking inadequacy of words that all he could say was “When may I see you?” and that she could only answer “After the class.” The first blessed moment had gone, general criticisms had to be given, and French and English art discussed. An hour passed interminably; he could not always stand where the glint of red gold hair made of the studio a new heaven and a new earth. Then in a blessed skirmish of conflicting drawing-boards and parting chatter the class broke up, and somehow the master and the pupil found themselves once more in the streets of Paris, or the new Jerusalem. There was at that moment ridiculously little in a name. Their thoughts were only a happy chaos, and he could do nothing but repeat the only fact that mattered.
“I have found you at last,” he said.
“I don’t believe you ought to have looked for me,” she replied gravely, for she was afraid.
“What made you run away, Cynthia?” he asked. She could give him any reason but the right one. She chose to deny the charge.
“I didn’t run away,” she said; “I merely wanted to come to Paris.”
“Then why shouldn’t I look for you?” cried Leslie triumphantly; “I merely wanted to come too.”
“I don’t know where we are going to,” said Cynthia, looking at him to see if he was much altered.
“I don’t think it in the least matters providing we go there together,” laughed Damores. “As it happens, here’s a cemetery; shall we go in and look at the tombstones?” Cynthia laughed as well. It was too absurd to think of death. There were lines in his face; he must have missed her a good deal. They went into the cemetery together. A husband who had come to put some flowers on the grave of his dead wife thought them heartless. They were not heartless, they were only too happy to remember they had hearts at all.
“Now you have come, what are you going to do?” she asked at last. She could not meet his eyes now; the things they meant cried too loudly for an answer.
“I am going to marry you,” he replied smiling, “if you’ll let me. I don’t think anything else matters just at present.” Cynthia felt the color in great rebellious waves sweep over her face. She looked with unseeing eyes at the wreaths of absurdly artificial flowers.
“Do you fully realize what that means, Leslie?” she asked. “Can you face everything—everything?”
“Everything! everything!” said Leslie quietly, “with you; without you I cannot live my life. You are the best of everything I do. You never came to see my picture—it would have told you all. Once I made a tremendous mistake. It seems a crime when I look back. There is only one thing that can ever wipe it out. Cynthia, is it too late to ask you to be my wife, and overlook the past?” She could not speak, her heart thundered, and seemed to shake the ground she stood on.
God had given her a tremendous reward, a gift unspeakable after she had renounced what had been to her the very hope of joy, and from the lips of the man she loved pardon and oblivion swept her sin into the free, pure waters of love. She lifted up her eyes to him that he might read there all her heart and soul his eternally and for ever. For a long while silence came down and covered them. They turned at last, and slowly and without speaking left the place of tombs—the acre of God’s sleeping ones. The man who had been stung by their laughter, seeing their faces again, recalled his injury. “After all,” he thought, “they had their business here.” And he was right, for love and death live in no separate houses.