“You are a brave man, Matthew Towns, brave and great. You have sacrificed your life for me.”
Matthew smiled whimsically.
“I am a small man, small and selfish and singularly short of sight. I served myself as well as you, and served us both ill, because I was dreaming selfish little dreams. Now I am content; for life, which was twisting itself beyond my sight and reason, has become suddenly straight and simple. Your Royal Highness”—he saw the pain in her eyes, and he changed: “My Princess,” he said, “your path of life is straight before you and clear. You were born to power. Use it. Guide your groping people. You will go back now to the world and begin your great task as the ruler of millions and the councilor of the world’s great leaders.
“Your dream of the emancipation of the darker races will come true in time, and you will find allies and helpers everywhere, and nowhere more than in black America. Join the hands of the dark people of the earth. Discover in the masses of groveling, filthy, ignorant black and brown and yellow slaves of modern Europe, the spark of manhood which, fanned with knowledge and health, will light anew a great world-culture. Yours is the great chance—the solemn duty. I had thought once that I might help and in some way stand by the arm posts of your throne. That dream is gone. I made a mistake, and now I can only help by bowing beneath the yoke of shame; and by that very deed I am hindered—forever—to help you—or anyone much, I—am proud—infinitely proud to have had at least your friendship.”
The Princess spoke, and as she talked slowly, pausing now and then to search for a word, she seemed to Matthew somehow to change. She was no longer an icon, crimson and splendid, the beautiful perfect thing apart to be worshiped; she became with every struggling word a striving human soul groping for light, needing help and love and the quiet deep sympathy of great, fine souls. And the more she doffed her royalty and donned her sweet and fine womanhood, the further, the more inaccessible, she became to him.
He knew that what she craved and needed for life, he could not give; that they were eternally parted, not by nature or wealth or even by birth, but by the great call of her duty and opportunity, and by the narrow and ever-narrowing limit of his strength and chance. She did not even look at him now with that impersonal glance that seemed to look through him to great spaces beyond and ignore him in the very intensity and remoteness of her gaze. She stood with downcast eyes and nervous hands, and talked, of herself, of her visit to America, of her hopes, of him.
“I am afraid,” she said, “I seem to you inhuman, but I have come up out of great waters into the knowledge of life.” She looked up at him sadly: “Were you too proud to accept from me a little sacrifice that cost me nothing and meant everything to you?”
“It might have cost you a kingdom and the whole future of the darker world. It was just some such catastrophe that the Japanese and Indians rightly feared.”
“And so, innocent of crime, you are going to accept the brand and punishment of a criminal?”
“My innocence is only technical. I was a deliberate co-conspirator with Perigua. I—murdered Jimmie!”
“No—no—how can you say this! You did not dream of peril to your friend, and your pact with Perigua was a counsel of despair!”
“My moral guilt is real. I should have remembered Jimmie. I should have guided Perigua.”
“But,” and she moved nearer, “if the dead man was—Perigua, what harm now to tell the truth?”
“I will not lay my guilt upon the dead. And, too—if I confessed that much, men might probe—further.”
“And so in the end I am the one at fault!”
“No—no.”
“Yes, I know it. But, oh, Matthew, are you not conscience-mad? You would have died for your friend had you known, just as now you go to jail for me and my wild errand. But even granted, dear friend, some of the guilt of which you so fantastically accuse yourself—can you not balance against this the good you can do your people and mine if free?”
“I have thought of this, and I much doubt my fitness. I know and feel too much. Dear Jimmie saw no problem that he could not laugh off—he was valuable; indispensable in this stage of our development. He should be living now, but I who am a mass of quivering nerves and all too delicate sensibility—I am liable to be a Perigua or a hesitating complaining fool—untrained or half-trained, fitted for nothing but—jail.”
“But—but afterward—after ten little years or perhaps less you will still be young and strong.”
“No, I shall be old and weak. My spirit will be broken and my hope and aspirations gone. I know what jail does to men, especially to black men—my father—”
“You are then deliberately sacrificing your life to me and my cause!”
“I am making the only effective and final atonement that I can to the Great Cause which is ours. I might live and work and do infinitely less.”
“You have ten minutes more,” said the guard.
“Is there nothing—is there not something I can do for you?”
“Yes—one thing: that is, if you are able—if you are permitted and can do it without involving yourself too much with me and my plight.”
“Tell me quickly.”
“I would not put this request if I had any other way, if I had any other friend. But I am alone.” She gripped his hands and was silent, looking always straight into his eyes with eyes that never dropped or wavered. “I have a mother in Virginia whom I have forgotten and neglected. She is a great and good woman,
