Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/82

76 Gaspard lighted the candle with a slow precision governed by a touch of ceremony. Then he regarded it for a moment, and his lips moved. Latham judged he might be recalling some prayer devoted to the season, and turned his glance away. But in a moment Gaspard was beside him. He looked unmoved, though his eyes were perhaps brighter than before.

"I am going out, m'sieu'," he said.

Latham had a feeling that Gaspard plunged into the woods at the crisis of an emotion, to breathe again and recover his self-mastery. Perhaps, too, in this trysting with his twin, he could find her better through the dark.

"I'll watch the candle," he said, and Gaspard noiselessly was gone.

Latham lay there, the fire leaping in the foreground of his vision, but his eyes following past it and fixed upon the candle gleam. Quiet fell upon him. It was not content. It was acceptance of the lot circumstance had forced upon him, illuminated now, for the moment, by this pale radiance. It seemed, by some unconscious process, to bring him nearer the life from which he was cut off—the life of homes and certainties—because he shared through it a custom of the earth. All the world this night burned its Christmas candle. With a sudden resulting thought of his only neighborly suggestion here, he got up, and putting his hands beside his face, looked out across the frozen lake. He breathed contentedly. The light was there. It burned, as it did nightly, from the one house in his direct range, an old tavern turned into a private dwelling, and remote from the village as it was from him. But solitary as he lived, by his own will, he had grown to depend on that lonesome light. It had a vague constancy. Now, as the candle was a nearer star, this was a far-off one in the early dark.

He went up to the candle to regard it for a moment, and lay down again, his gaze still dwelling there. Then, as he had resolved not to do, but as he did at moments of involuntary stress, he began to think about his parting from his wife. It was an old habit. Over and over he had traversed all the paths that led to it; now they were worn and stale. They had met too late, he and Winifred: not too late for tempestuous passion, but late to turn their steps into those ampler fields young love is destined for. Young love is rich. It can afford to spend itself in the fury of its own egotism, and then equalize its pulses and still them to content. Habit has years to form in. But Winifred and he had met when she was thirty-five and well equipped for all the customs of a complex life, and he was older. She had her ambitions, her brilliant sophistries, her mobile fiats on the possibilities of woman's destiny; he had his work and the habit of devotion to it. He was, he told himself now in humility, a man to live the hermit life and paint pictures in it: not one to invade a woman's kingdom and rule, prince consort, there. It had been a sharp warfare between them, and the more terrible that she fought it for his sake alone. All her ambitions turned his way, like a too hot sun, scorching, not fostering. Or they were like a rain well meant to bring his buds to bear, yet flooding them to ruin; or an earth too rich for wholesome nourishment. Instead of a painter who had, in silence and almost the secrecy of nature, built up a name for her pride to rest in, a man who had lived much in the woods, and come back now and then bringing green leaves with him, what had she tried to make of him? She had sought to train his natal honesties for social courts. She had tried to supplement the shyness of his art by fine expedients. He had earned his fame. She would have had him wear it like a medal. And meantime her rich, swift nature was choking him like the vine invading the tree that was growing straight and tall before, its clean, firm leaves too sparse to heed the wind. In that year with her he had ruled an alien kingdom: her own, not his. The silence that covered his working force, his reserves whereunder art lay fructifying, seemed at last to her a constraint, wilful and hostile. He was not happy, and she saw it. Then came the night it hurt him to remember, like a blow on naked nerves. He refused now to recall the words that indexed cruel certainty, but he felt still how they bit. The woman there before him seemed not to be his wife. She was an im-