If she had confessed her love in
words, and promised to be my own, I could have endured to leave her for a
time. How well she knew men! How well she had maintained just that
appearance which kept my thoughts on her night and day, which made me
unwilling to lose sight of her, and which would have made me instantly
responsive to any summons that she might have sent me from any part of
the forest!
So, then, there were two sides, two appearances, to this woman. The one,
the good side, that which I had seen, that which had been the joy of my
life, was not real, was but a seeming, had no existence but in pretence.
The other, the wicked side, was the real one, was the actual woman. I had
never known her. What I had known was but an assumption; it had no being.
Was this credible? Could a bad woman so delude one with an angelic
pretence, so conceal her wicked self? If so, to what depths of vileness
might she not be capable of descending? Was it, then, not that I had lost
my beloved, but that she had never existed? At thought of it, I felt a
sickness within, a weakness, a choking, a giving way. And then her image
came before me again, as she had stood in the moonlit garden, and my
beloved was born again. The woman I had known was the real one. I had
done her incredible wrong to have thought otherwise. But whether good or
bad, whether or not my betrayer, I loved her; I longed for her; I would
see her face; I would clasp her in my arms; I would claim her as my own;
I would hold her against her own will and the world's.
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