In that
brilliant sunshine, amid all that beauty, Myra's life had been snuffed
out like a blown candle flame--to no purpose. Or was there some
purpose in it all? Was some sentient force chastening him, scourging
him with rods for the good of his soul? Was it for some such
inscrutable purpose that men died by the hundred thousand in Europe?
Was that why Doris Cleveland had been deprived of her sight? Why Myra
had been torn by contradictory passions during her troubled life and
had perished at last, a victim of passions that burst control? All
this evil that some hidden good might accrue? Hollister bared his
teeth in defiance of such a conclusion. But he was in a mood to defy
either gods or devils. In that mood he saw the Toba valley, the whole
earth, as a sinister place,--a place where beauty was a mockery, where
impassive silence was merely the threatening hush before some
elemental fury. This serene, indifferent beauty was hateful to him in
that moment, the Promethean rock to which circumstance had chained him
to suffer. It needed only as a capsheaf the gleam of incredulous
dismay which should appear in his wife's eyes when she looked first
upon the mutilated tissue, the varying scars and cicatrices, the
twisted mask that would be revealed to her as the face of her
husband.
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