Lifted Masks Part 25

Her start and the tears which rushed to her eyes told him he was right about her feeling. She did not seem able to say anything. Her chin was trembling.

"I see that the time has come," he said, "when a younger man can do more for the school than I can hope to do for it."

Still she said nothing at all, but her eyes were deepening and she had that very steadfast, almost inspired look that had so many times quickened him in the cla.s.s-room.

She was not going to deny it! She was not going to pretend!

After the first feeling of not having got something needed he rose to her high ground--ground she had taken it for granted he would take.

"And will you believe it, Gretta," he said, rising to that ground and there asking, not for the sympathy that bends down, but for a hand in pa.s.sing, "there comes a hard hour when first one feels the time has come to step aside and be replaced by that younger man?"

She nodded. "It must be," she said, simply; "it must be very much harder than any of us can know till we come to it."

She brought him a sense of his advantage in experience--his riches.

To be sure, there was that.

And he was oddly comforted by the honesty in her which could not stoop to dishonest comforting. In what superficially might seem her failure there was a very real victory for them both. And there was nothing of coldness in her reserve! There was the fulness of understanding, and of valuing the moments too highly for anything there was to be said about it. There was a great spiritual dignity, a n.o.bility, in the way she was looking at him. It called upon the whole of his own spiritual dignity. It was her old demand upon him, but this time the tears through which her eyes shone were tears of pride in fulfilment, not of sorrowing for failure.

Suddenly he felt that his life had not been spent in vain, that the lives of all those men of his day who had fought the good fight for intellectual honesty--spiritual dignity--had not been spent in vain if they were leaving upon the earth even a few who were like the girl beside them.

It turned him from himself to her. She was what counted--for she was what remained. And he remained in just the measure that he remained through her; counted in so far as he counted for her. It was as if he had been facing in the wrong direction and now a kindly hand had turned him around. It was not in looking back there he would find himself. He was not back there to be found. Only so much of him lived as had been able to wing itself ahead--on in the direction she was moving.

It did not particularly surprise him that when she at last spoke it was to voice a shade of that same feeling. "I was thinking," she began, "of that younger man. Of what he must mean to the man who gives way to him."

She was feeling her way as she went--groping among the many dim things that were there. He had always liked to watch her face when she was thinking her way step by step.

"I think you used a word wrongly a minute ago," she said, with a smile. "You spoke of being replaced. But that isn't it. A man like you isn't replaced; he's"--she got it after a minute and came forth with it triumphantly--"fulfilled!"

Her face was s.h.i.+ning as she turned to him after that. "Don't you see? He's there waiting to take your place because you got him ready. Why, you made that younger man! Your whole life has been a getting ready for him. He can do his work be cause you first did yours. Of course he can go farther than you can! Wouldn't it be a sorry commentary on you if he couldn't?"

Her voice throbbed warmly upon that last, and during the pause the light it had brought still played upon her face. "We were talking in cla.s.s about immortality," she went on, more slowly. "There's one form of immortality I like to think about. It's that all those who from the very first have given anything to the world are living in the world to-day." There was a rush of tears to her eyes and of affection to her voice as she finished, very low: "You'll never die.

You've deepened the consciousness of life too much for that."

They sat there as twilight drew near to night, the old man and the young girl, silent. The laughter of boys and girls and the good-night calls of the birds were all around them. The fragrance of life was around them. It was one of those silences to which come impressions, faiths, longings, not yet born as thoughts.

Something in the quality of that silence brought the rescuing sense of its having been good to have lived and done one's part--that sense which, from places of desolation and over ways rough and steep and dark, can find its way to the meadows of serenity.

THE END