CHAPTER V. Maria Stands on Christopher's Ground
A broad yellow beam sliding under the door brought Maria into sudden consciousness, and rising hastily from the straw, where her figure had shaped an almost perfect outline, she crossed the dusky floor smelling of trodden grain and went out into the early sunshine, which slanted over the gray fields. A man trundling a wheelbarrow from the market garden, and a milkmaid crossing the lawn with a bucket of fresh milk, were the only moving figures in the landscape, and after a single hurried glance about her she followed the straight road to the house and entered the rear door, which Malindy had unlocked.
Meeting Fletcher a little later at breakfast, she found, to her surprise, that he accepted her presence without question and made absolutely no allusion to the heated conversation of the evening before. He looked sullen and dirty, as if he had slept all night in his clothes, and he responded to Maria's few good-humoured remarks with a single abrupt nod over his coffee-cup. As she watched him a feeling of pity for his loneliness moved her heart, and when he rose hastily at last and strode out into the hall she followed him and spoke gently while he paused to take down his hat from one of the old antlers near the door.
"If I could only be of some use to you, grandfather," she said; "are you sure there is nothing I can do?"
With his hand still outstretched, he hesitated an instant and stood looking down upon her, his heavy features wrinkling into a grin.
"I've nothing against you as a woman," he responded, "but when you set up and begin to charge like a judge, I'll be hanged if I can stand you."
"Then I won't charge any more. I only want to help you and to do what is best. If you would but let me make myself of some account."
He laughed not unkindly, and flecked with his stubby forefinger at some crumbs which had lodged in the folds of his cravat.
"Then I reckon you'd better mix a batch of dough and feed the turkeys," he replied, and touching her shoulder with his hat- brim, he went hurriedly out of doors.
When he had disappeared beyond the last clump of shrubbery bordering the drive, she remembered the lantern she had left hanging in the barn, and, going to look for it, carried it upstairs to her room. In the afternoon, however, it occurred to her that Christopher would probably need the light by evening, and swinging the handle over her arm, she set out across the newly ploughed fields toward the Blake cottage. The stubborn rustic pride which would keep him from returning to the Hall aroused in her a frank, almost tender amusement. She had long ago wearied of the trivial worldliness of life; in the last few years the shallowness of passion had seemed its crowning insult, and over the absolute sincerity of her own nature the primal emotion she had heard in Christopher's voice exerted a compelling charm. The makeshift of a conventional marriage had failed her utterly; her soul had rejected the woman's usual cheap compromise with externals; and in her almost puritan scorn of the vanities by which she was surrounded she had attained the moral elevation which comes to those who live by an inner standard of purity rather than by outward forms. In the largeness of her nature there had been small room for regret or for wasted passion, and until her meeting with Christopher on the day of her homecoming he had existed in her imagination only as a bright and impossible memory. Now, as she went rapidly forward along the little path that edged the field, she found herself wondering if, after all, she had worn unconsciously his ideal as an armour against the petty temptations and the sudden melancholies of the last six years.
As she neared the fence that divided the two farms she saw him walking slowly along a newly turned furrow, and when he looked up she lifted the lantern and waved it in the air. Quickening his steps, he swung himself over the rail fence with a single bound, and came to where she stood amid a dried fringe of last summer's yarrow.
"So you are none the worse for the night in the barn?" he asked anxiously.
"Why, I dreamed the most beautiful dreams," she replied, "and I had the most perfect sleep in the world."
"Then the mice kept away?"
"At least they didn't wake me."
"I stayed within call until sunrise," he said quietly. "You were not afraid?"
Her rare smile shone suddenly upon him, illumining the delicate pallor of her face. "I knew that you were there," she answered.
For a moment he gazed steadily into her eyes, then with a decisive movement he took the lantern from her hand and turned as though about to go back to his work.
"It was very kind of you to bring this over," he said, pausing beside the fence.
"Kind? Why, what did you expect? I knew it might hang there forever, but you would not come for it."
"No, I should not have come for it," he replied, swinging the lantern against the rails with such force that the glass shattered and fell in pieces to the ground.
"Why, what a shame!" said Maria; "and it is all my fault."
A smile was on his face as he looked at her.
"You are right—it is all your fault," he repeated, while his gaze dropped to the level of her lips and hung there for a breathless instant.
With an effort she broke the spell which had fallen over her, and, turning from him, pointed to the old Blake graveyard on the little hill.
"Those black cedars have tempted me for days," she said. "Will you tell me what dust they guard so faithfully?"
He followed her gesture with a frown.
"I will show you, if you like," he answered. "It is the only spot on earth where I may offer you hospitality."
"Your people are buried there?"
"For two hundred years. Will you come?"
While she hesitated, he tossed the lantern over into his field and came closer to her side. "Come," he repeated gently, and at his voice a faint flush spread slowly from her throat to the loosened hair upon her forehead. The steady glow gave her face a light, a radiance, that he had never seen there until to-day.
"Yes, I will come if you wish it," she responded quietly.
Together they went slowly up the low, brown incline over the clods of upturned earth. When they reached the bricked-up wall, which had crumbled away in places, he climbed over into the bed of periwinkle and then held out his hands to assist her in descending. "Here, step into that hollow," he said, "and don't jump till I tell you. Ah, that's it; now, I'm ready."
At his words, she made a sudden. spring forward, her dress caught on the wall, and she slipped lightly into his outstretched arms. For the half of a second he held her against his breast; then, as she released herself, he drew back and lifted his eves to meet the serene composure of her expression. He was conscious that his own face flamed red hot, but to all outward seeming she had not noticed the incident which had so moved him. The calm distinction of her bearing struck him as forcibly as it had done at their first meeting. "What a solemn place," she said, lowering her voice as she looked about her.
For answer he drew aside the screening boughs of a cedar and motioned to the discoloured marble slabs strewn thickly under the trees.
"Here are my people," he returned gravely. "And here is my ground."
Pausing, she glanced down on his father's grave, reading with difficulty the inscription beneath the dry dust from the cedars.
"He lived to be very old," she said, after a moment.
"Seventy years. He lived exactly ten years too long."
"Too long?"
"Those last ten years wrecked him. Had he died at sixty he would have died happy."
He turned from her, throwing himself upon the carpet of periwinkle, and coming to where he lay, she sat down on a granite slab at his side.
"One must believe that there is a purpose in it," she responded, raising a handful of fine dust and sifting it through her fingers, "or one would go mad over the mystery of things."
"Well, I dare say the purpose was to make me a tobacco-grower," he replied grimly, "and if so, it has fulfilled itself in a precious way. Why, there's never been a time since I was ten years old when I wouldn't have changed places, and said 'thank you,' too, with any one of those old fellows over there. They were jolly chaps, I tell you, and led jolly lives. It used to be said of them that they never won a penny nor missed a kiss."
"Nor learned a lesson, evidently. Well, may they rest in peace; but I'm not sure that their wisdom would carry far. There are better things than gaming and kissing, when all is said."
"Better things? Perhaps."
"Have you not found them?"
"Not yet; but then, I can't judge anything except tobacco, you know."
For a long pause she looked down into his upturned face.
"After all, it isn't the way we live nor the work we do that matters," she said slowly, "but the ideal we put into it. Is there any work too sordid, too prosaic, to yield a return of beauty?"
"Do you think so?" he asked, and glanced down the hill to his ploughshare lying in the ripped-up field. "But it is not beauty that some of us want, you see—it's success, action, happiness, call it what you will."
"Surely they are not the same. I have known many successful people, and the only three perfectly happy ones I ever met were what the world calls failures."
"Failures?" he echoed, and remembered Tucker.
Her face softened, and she looked beyond him to the blue sky, shining through the interlacing branches of bared trees.
"Two were women," she pursued, clasping and unclasping the quiet hands in her lap, "and one was a Catholic priest who had been reared in a foundling asylum and educated by charity. When I knew him he was on his way to a leper island in the South Seas, where he would be buried alive for the remainder of his life. All he had was an ideal, but it flooded his soul with light. Another was a Russian Nihilist, a girl in years and yet an atheist and a revolutionist in thought, and her unbelief was in its way as beautiful as the religion of my priest. To return to Russia meant death; she knew, and yet she went back, devoted and exalted, to lay down her life for an illusion. So it seems, when one looks about the world, that faith and doubt are dry and inanimate forms until we pour forth our heart's blood, which vivifies them."
She fell silent, and he started and touched softly the hem of her black skirt.
"And the other?" he asked.
"The other had a stranger and a longer story, but if you will listen I'll tell it to you. She was an Italian, of a very old and proud family, and as she possessed rare loveliness and charm, a marriage was arranged for her with a wealthy nobleman, who had fallen in love with her before she left her convent. She was a rebellious soul, it seems, for the day before her wedding, just after she had patiently tried on her veil and orange blossoms, she slipped into the dress of her waiting-maid and ran off with a music-teacher—a beggarly fanatic, they told me—a man of red republican views, who put dangerous ideas into the heads of the peasantry. From that moment, they said, her life was over; her family shut their doors upon her, and she fell finally so low as to be seen one evening singing in the public streets. Her story touched me when I heard it: it seemed a pitiable thing that a woman should be wrecked so hopelessly by a single moment of mistaken courage; and after months of searching I at last found the place she lived in, and went one May evening up the long winding staircase to her apartment—two clean, plain rooms which looked on a little balcony where there were pots of sweet basil and many pigeons. At my knock the door opened, and I knew her at once in the beautiful white face and hands of the woman who stood a little back in the shadow. Her forty years had not coarsened her as they do most Italian women, and her eyes still held the unshaken confidence of extreme youth. Her husband was sleeping in the next room, she said; he had but a few days more to live, and he had been steadily dying for a year. Then, at my gesture of sympathy, she shook her head and smiled.
"I have had twenty years," she said, "and I have been perfectly happy. Think of that when so many women die without having even a single day of life. Why, but for the one instant of courage that saved me, I myself might have known the world only as a vegetable knows the garden in which it fattens. My soul has lived, and though I have been hungry and cold and poorly clad, I have never sunk to the level of what they would have made me. He is a dreamer," she finished gently, "and though his dreams were nourished upon air, and never came true except in our thoughts, still they have touched even the most common things with beauty." While she talked, he awoke and called her, and we went in to see him. He complained a little fretfully that his feet were cold, and she knelt down and warmed them in the shawl upon her bosom. The mark of death was on him, and I doubt if even in the fulness of his strength he were worthy of the passion he inspired—but that, after all, makes little difference. It was a great love, which is the next best thing to a great faith."
As she ended, he raised his eyes slowly, catching the fervour of her glance.
"It was more than that—it was a great deliverance," he said.
Then, as she rose, he followed her from the graveyard, and they descended the low brown hill together.