The Choir Invisible

He buried his face guiltily in his hands as he tried to shut out the

remembrance of how persistently of late, whithersoever he had turned, this

second image had reappeared before him, growing always clearer, drawing

always nearer, summoning him more luringly. Already he had begun to know the

sensations of a traveller who is crossing sands with a parched tongue and a

weary foot, crossing toward a country that he will never reach, but that he

will stagger toward as long as he has strength to stand.

During the past several days--following his last interview with Amy--he had

realized for the first time how long and how plainly the figure of Mrs.

Falconer had been standing before him and upon how much loftier a level.

Many a time of old, while visiting the house, he had grown tired of Amy; but

he had never felt wearied by her. For Amy he was always making apologies to

his own conscience; she needed none. He had secretly hoped that in time Amy

would become more what he wished his wife to be; it would have pained him to

think of her as altered. Often he had left Amy's company with a grateful

sense of regaining the larger liberty of his own mind; by her he always felt

guided to his better self, he carried away her ideas with the hope of making

them his ideas, he was set on fire with a spiritual passion to do his utmost

in the higher strife of the world.

For this he had long paid her the guiltless tribute of his reverence and

affection. And between his reverence and affection and all the forbidden

that lay beyond rose a barrier which not even his imagination had ever

consciously overleaped. Now the forbidding barrier had disappeared, and in

its place had appeared the forbidden bond--he knew not how or when. How

could he? Love, the Scarlet Spider, will in a night hang between two that

have been apart a web too fine for either to see; but the strength of both

will never avail to break it.

Very curiously it had befallen him furthermore that just at the time when

all these changes were taking place around him and within him, she had

brought him the book that she had pressed with emphasis upon his attention.

In the backwoods settlements of Pennsylvania where his maternal Scotch-Irish

ancestors had settled and his own life been spent, very few volumes had

fallen into his hands. After coming to Kentucky not many more until of late:

so that of the world's history he was still a stinted and hungry student.

When,therefore, she had given him Malory's "LeMorte D'Arthur," it was the

first time that the ideals of chivalry had ever flashed their glorious light

upon him; for the first time the models of Christian manhood, on which

western Europe nourished itself for centuries, displayed themselves to his

imagination with the charm of story; he heard of Camelot, of the king, of

that company of men who strove with each other in arms, but strove also with

each other in grace of life and for the immortal mysteries of the spirit.

She had said that he should have read this book long before but that

henceforth he would always need it even more than in his past: that here

were some things he had looked for in the world and had never found;

characters such as he had always wished to grapple to himself as his abiding

comrades: that if he would love the best that it loved, hate what it hated,

scorn what it scorned, it would help him in the pursuit of his own ideals to

the end.