And so, at length, Lane's black demon of despair overthrew even his thoughts of Mel, and fettered him there, in darkness and strife of soul. He was an atom under the grinding, monstrous wheels of his morbid mood.
Sometime, after endless moments or hours of lying there, with crushed breast, with locked thoughts hideous and forlorn, with slow burn of pang and beat of heart, Lane heard a heavy thump on the porch outside, on the hall inside, on the stairs. Thump—thump, slow and heavy! It roused him. It drove away the drowsy, thick and thunderous atmosphere of mind. It had a familiar sound. Blair's crutch!
Presently there was a knock on the door of his room and Blair entered. Blair, as always, bright of eye, smiling of lip, erect, proud, self-sufficient, inscrutable and sure. Lane's black demon stole away. Lane saw that Blair was whiter, thinner, frailer, a little farther on that road from which there could be no turning.
“Hello, old scout,” greeted Blair, as he sat down on the bed beside Lane. “I need you more than any one—but it kills me to see you.”
“Same here, Blair,” replied Lane, comprehendingly.
“Gosh! we oughtn't be so finicky about each other's looks,” exclaimed Blair, with a smile.
But neither Lane nor Blair made further reference to the subject.
Each from the other assimilated some force, from voice and look and presence, something wanting in their contact with others. These two had measured all emotions, spanned in little time the extremes of life, plumbed the depths, and now saw each other on the heights. In the presence of Blair, Lane felt an exaltation. The more Blair seemed to fade away from life, the more luminous and beautiful the light of his countenance. For Lane the crippled and dying Blair was a deed of valor done, a wrong expiated for the sake of others, a magnificent nobility in contrast to the baseness and greed and cowardice of the self-preservation that had doomed him. Lane had only to look at Blair to feel something elevating in himself, to know beyond all doubt that the goodness, the truth, the progress of man in nature, and of God in his soul, must grow on forever.
Mel Iden had been in her home four days when Lane first saw her there.
It was a day late in June when the rich, thick, amber light of afternoon seemed to float in the air. Warm summer lay on the land. The bees were humming in the rose vines over the porch. Mrs. Iden, who evidently heard Lane's step, appeared in the path, and nodding her gladness at sight of him, she pointed to the open door.
Lane halted on the threshold. The golden light of the day seemed to have entered the room and found Mel. It warmed the pallor of her skin and the whiteness of her dress. When he had seen her before she had worn something plain and dark. Could a white gown and the golden glow of June effect such transformation? She came slowly toward him and took his hand.
“Daren, I am home,” was all she could say.
Long hours before Lane had braced himself for this ordeal. It was himself he had feared, not Mel. He played the part he had created for her imagination. Behind his composure, his grave, kind earnestness, hid the subdued and scorned and unwelcome love that had come to him. He held it down, surrounded, encompassed, clamped, so that he dared look into her eyes, listen to her voice, watch the sweet and tragic tremulousness of her lips.
“Yes, Mel, where you should be,” replied Lane.
“It was you—your offer to marry me—that melted father's heart.”
“Mel, all he needed was to be made think,” returned Lane. “And that was how I made him do it.”
“Oh, Daren, I thank you, for mother's sake, for mine—I can't tell you how much.”
“Mel, please don't thank me,” he answered. “You understand, and that's enough. Now say you'll marry me, Mel.”
Mel did not answer, but in the look of her eyes, dark, humid, with mysterious depths below the veil, Lane saw the truth; he felt it in the clasp of her hands, he divined it in all that so subtly emanated from the womanliness of her. Mel had come to love him.
And all that he had endured seemed to rise and envelop heart and soul in a strange, cold stillness.
“Mel, will you marry me?” he repeated, almost dully.
Slowly Mel withdrew her hands. The query seemed to make her mistress of herself.
“No, Daren, I cannot,” she replied, and turned away to look out of a window with unseeing eyes. “Let us talk of other things.... My father says he will move away—taking me and—and—all of us—as soon as he sells the home.”
“No, Mel, if you'll forgive me, we'll not talk of something else,” Lane informed her. “We can argue without quarreling. Come over here and sit down.”
She came slowly, as if impelled, and she stood before him. To Lane it seemed as if she were both supplicating and inexorable.
“Do you remember the last time we sat together on this couch?” she asked.
“No, Mel, I don't.”
“It was four years ago—and more. I was sixteen. You tried to kiss me and were angry because I wouldn't let you.”
“Well, wasn't I rude!” he exclaimed, facetiously. Then he grew serious. “Mel, do you remember it was Helen's lying that came between you and me—as boy and girl friends?”
“I never knew. Helen Wrapp! What was it?”
“It's not worth recalling and would hurt you—now,” he replied. “But it served to draw me Helen's way. We were engaged when she was seventeen.... Then came the war. And the other night she laughed in my face because I was a wreck.... Mel, it's beyond understanding how things work out. Helen has chosen the fleshpots of Egypt. You have chosen a lonelier and higher path.... And here I am in your little parlor asking you to marry me.”
“No, no, no! Daren, don't, I beg of you—don't talk to me this way,” she besought him.
“Mel, it's a difference of opinion that makes arguments, wars and other things,” he said, with a cruelty in strange antithesis to the pity and tenderness he likewise felt. He could hurt her. He had power over her. What a pang shot through his heart! There would be an irresistible delight in playing on the emotions of this woman. He could no more help it than the shame that surged over him at consciousness of his littleness. He already loved her, she was all he had left to love, he would end in a day or a week or a month by worshipping her. Through her he was going to suffer. Peace would now never abide in his soul.
“Daren, you were never like this—as a boy,” she said, in wondering distress.
“Like what?”
“You're hard. You used to be so—so gentle and nice.”
“Hard! I? Yes, Mel, perhaps I am—hard as war, hard as modern life, hard as my old friends, my little sister——” he broke off.
“Daren, do not mock me,” she entreated. “I should not have said hard. But you're strange to me—a something terrible flashes from you. Yet it's only in glimpses.... Forgive me, Daren, I didn't mean hard.”
Lane drew her down upon the couch so that she faced him, and he did not release her hand.
“Mel, I'm softer than a jelly-fish,” he said. “I've no bone, no fiber, no stamina, no substance. I'm more unstable than water. I'm so soft I'm weak. I can't stand pain. I lie awake in the dead hours of night and I cry like a baby, like a fool. I weep for myself, for my mother, for Lorna, foryou ....”