I listened and I watched.

The sensuous beauty of her figure and her movements, swathed in that

soft and clinging serge, troubled my judgment; it seemed, as I saw her

little foot upon the pedal, that I felt with joy its pressure on my

heart and life. Something gross and abandoned stirred in me; I welcomed

her easy power and delighted in it. I feasted my eyes and ears, the

blood rose feverishly to my head. She did not look at me, yet knew that

I looked at her, and how. No longer ashamed, but with a fiery

pleasure in my heart, I spoke at last. Her song had ended. She softly

brushed the strings, her eyes turned downwards.

“Marion,” I said, agitation making my voice sound unfamiliar,

“Marion, dear, I am enthralled; your voice, your beauty——”

I found no other words; my voice stopped dead; I stood up, trembling

in every limb. I saw her in that instant as a maid of olden time,

singing the love-songs of some far-off day beside her native

instrument, and of a voluptuous beauty there was no withstanding. The

half-light of the dusk set her in a frame of terrible enchantment.

And as I spoke her name and rose, she also spoke my own, my

Christian name, and rose as well. I saw her move towards me. Upon her

face, in her eyes and on her lips, was a smile of joy I had never seen

before, though a smile of conquest, and of something more besides that

I must call truly by its rightful name, a smile of lust. God! those

movements beneath the clinging dress that fell in lines of beauty to

her feet! Those little feet that stepped upon my heart, upon my very

soul…. For a moment I loathed myself. The next, as she touched me and

my arms took her with rough strength against my breast, my repugnance

vanished, and I was utterly undone. I believed I loved. That which was

gross in me, leaping like fire to claim her glorious beauty, met and

merged with that similar, devouring flame in her; but in the merging

seemed cunningly transformed into the call of soul to soul: I forgot

the pity…. I kissed her, holding her to me so fiercely that she

scarcely moved. I said a thousand things. I know not what I said. I

loved.

Then, suddenly, she seemed to free herself; she drew away; she

looked at me, standing a moment just beyond my reach, a strange smile

on her lips and in her darkened eyes a nameless expression that held

both joy and pain. For one second I felt that she repelled me, that she

resented my action and my words. Yes, for one brief second she stood

there, like an angel set in judgment over me, and the next we had come

together again, softly, gently, happily; I heard that strange, deep

sigh, already mentioned, half of satisfaction, half, it seemed, of

pain, as she sank down into my arms and found relief in quiet sobbing

on my breast.

And pity then returned. I felt unsure of myself

again. This was the love of the body only; my soul was silent.

Yet—somehow, in some strange hidden way, lay this ambushed

meaning—that she had need of me, and that she offered her devotion and

herself in sacrifice.

II

THE brief marriage ran its course, depleting rather

than enriching me, and I know you realized before the hurried, dreadful

end that my tie with yourself was strengthened rather than endangered,

and that I took from you nothing that I might give it to her. That

death should intervene so swiftly, leaving her but an interval of a

month between the altar and the grave, you could foreknow as little as

I or she; yet in that brief space of time you learned that I had robbed

you of nothing that was your precious due, while she as surely realized

that the amazing love she poured so lavishly upon me woke no

response—beyond a deep and tender pity, strangely deep and singularly

tender I admit, but assuredly very different from love.

Now this, I think, you already know and in some

measure understand; but what you cannot know—since it is a portion of

her secret, of that ambushed meaning, as I termed it, given to me when

she lay dying—is the pathetic truth that her discovery wrought no

touch of disenchantment in her. I think she knew with shame that she

had caught me with her lowest weapon, yet still hoped that the highest

in her might complete and elevate her victory. She knew, at any rate,

neither dismay nor disappointment; of reproach there was no faintest

hint. She did not even once speak of it directly, though her fine,

passionate face made me aware of the position.