The Chalice Of Courage: A Romance of ColoradoBrady, Cyrus Townsend
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The Chalice Of Courage: A Romance of Colorado
Brady, Cyrus Townsend
Colorado -- Fiction; Love stories; Western stories
Her action was quite different from his. She was putting away happiness
which she might have had in compliance with a higher law than that which
bids humanity enjoy. It was flattering to her mind. In his case it was
otherwise: he had no consciousness that he was a victim of misplaced
trust, of misinterpreted action; he thought the woman for whom he was
putting away happiness was almost as worthy, if infinitely less
desirable, as the woman whom he now loved.
Every sting of conscious weakness, every feeling of realized shame,
every fear of ultimate disloyalty, scourged him. She could glory in it;
he was ashamed, humiliated, broken.
She heard him savagely walking up and down the other room, restlessly
impelled by the same Erinnyes who of old scourged Orestes, the violater
of the laws of moral being, drove him on. These malign Eumenides held
him in their hands. He was bound and helpless; rage as he might in one
moment, pray as he did in another, no light came into the whirling
darkness of his torn, tempest tossed, driven soul. The irresistible
impulse and the immovable body the philosophers puzzled over were
exemplified in him. While he almost hated the new woman, while he
almost loved the old, yet that he did neither the one thing nor the
other absolutely was significant.
Indeed he knew that he was glad Enid Maitland had come into his life. No
life is complete until it is touched by that divine fire which for lack
of another name we call love. Because we can experience that sensation
we are said to be made in God's image. The image is blurred as the
animal predominates, it is clearer as the spiritual has the ascendency.
The man raved in his mind. White faced, stern, he walked up and down, he
tossed his arms about him, he stopped, his eyes closed, he threw his
hands up toward God, his heart cried out under the lacerations of the
blows inflicted upon it. No flagellant of old ever trembled beneath the
body lash as he under the spiritual punishment.
He prayed that he might die at the same moment that he longed to live.
He grappled blindly for solutions of the problem that would leave him
with untarnished honor and undiminished self-respect and fidelity, and
yet give him this woman; and in vain. He strove to find a way to
reconcile the past with the present, realizing as he did so the futility
of such a proposition. One or the other must be supreme; he must
inexorably hold to his ideas and his ideals, or he must inevitably take
the woman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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