Of sweeter than she, one fairer and more gentle, a woman kindlier, juster, yet more debonair, it was not within his power to conceive. She was still to him admirable in each respect, a woman whom as sister he would have adored, as another’s sister he would have envied, but who as wife left him as marble is, unmalleable, and chilling to the touch. Where had the emotions gone? Where were the roses of the yesteryear? Where was the vision he had sought to clasp? Though the flutter of her kiss still hovered, ambient, in the air, he told himself that her love had departed like his own, that between them but one thing subsisted—the sanctity of the marriage-vow, unbreakable by either. Of her, in that regard, he had, of course, no fear. And it was perhaps that very confidence, that security and facility in love, that had brought him to his present pass. Whoso has nothing to desire has nothing left to dread. But for himself he had trembled indeed. Claire had exhaled an atmosphere headier than the headiest breath of spring. There was about her an attraction, undiscerned till that night, but which, latent perhaps for days gone by, had suddenly enveloped and coerced him with its force. But now that too was gone.
Ah, yes, it was gone indeed; and he cracked the joints of his fingers in testimony to his deliverance from its spell. For a second he had been weaker, more unstable than water; and now, as he smiled a trifle grimly at the remembrance, he bethought him of the legends of the saints, of Saint Anthony, Saint Dominick, Saint Maur. It was a disaster which overtook all men. But it needed strength to combat—he would have added faith, but something choked the utterance down—it needed strength; and that strength was his. Again he smiled. He would have no need to cope again. Yet, for the moment, he wondered what sudden invocation of the flesh could have oppressed him so. Nothing, he could have sworn, in connection with that girl that lay sprawled on the sofa across the hall. No, it was not that: it was one of those ills which had afflicted and would continue to afflict many another more steadfast than he. Besides, independent of that, what had he of all men to do with such a thing? aside from his cloth, were not his temples gray? and, save spectacles, what better guarantee against love can there be?
In thought he had really tried to trick himself, but in an instant he was at the mirror again. At school, at the seminary, even so recently as the preceding summer, he had been spoken of as That Handsome Gonfallon. And as he sprang from his seat he remembered a bit of gossip that had been brought him, an anecdote culled in the vestibule of the church, a conversation overheard and apposite to the infatuation of his parishioners, in which the first speaker was reported to have said something about Dr. Gonfallon’s congregation, while the second, interrupting, had interjected a remark unreportable here.
But now, as he stood again before the glass, it was as though it pictured not the present alone but the past as well. He saw a lithe, dark-eyed lad, clear of feature and of mind, hurrying to some distant goal, arrested by a mirror that showed him back not youth, but age.
Through the window a moon luminous as sulphur shone. Beyond, the spires of Gethsemane pierced the night. The street was quiet. From afar came the accent of the Elevated, rushing, dragon-wise, in midair, lulling the neighborhood with the strain of its incessant surge. After a dusk in dead rose, the sky had become visibly blue.
And as he stood, interviewing the night, determining that the pulses should subside with years, from the hall came the rustle of a dress. For a second’s space he clutched at the wainscot. The glass gave him forty years, his blood nineteen. Then at once he was at the door, drawing the curtain on its rings aside.
“H’m,”—he affected a little cough, and held himself as though an accident had brought him there—“h’m, Claire, is that you? I thought you had gone to bed.”
“Going,” the girl answered, negligently, and yawned as she spoke. “One has to come to New York to go to bed early.”
Then, something that he could not afterwards explain, some one of those unanalyzed causes that transform the gentle to the brute, claimed him as its own. His cloth, his vows, the rectory itself, everything, even to the presence of Ruth on the floor above, vanished as had they never been. With a spring his arm was about her neck, his lips were on hers, the odor of her hair, of her face, the moisture of her mouth, were his, and just as he strove to clasp her closer yet, with an undulant movement the girl slipped from his embrace.
“There, don’t hurt a fellow,” she exclaimed; and as she retreated, smiling yet breathless, to a step beyond his reach, she added, with her faun-like ripple, “I say, Chris, you seem to like the breed.”
From strength to weakness there is but a kiss. During the moments that followed, Gonfallon felt as were he astride a runaway horse. At first, as he plunged through unimagined thickets, striving as best he could with knee and curb to stay the flight, a stirrup went, then another; the beast had got its head, and as with ever-increasing speed it bore him over quagmires, obstacles, and intervales, at last his own brain caught fire, and he urged with incitements of spur and of whip. In the distance was everything he had held most dear, the route was strewn with his illusions, gone were his unprompted vows, the truths that had
