V
The following Saturday afternoon, as Ridgeley and Field entered the office, Williams rose to meet them. He looked different; finer some way, Field imagined. At any rate, he was perfectly sober. He was freshly shaven, and though his clothes were rough, he looked like a man of education. His manner was cold and distant.
"I'd like to be paid off, Mr. Ridgeley," he said. "I guess what's left of my pay will take me out of this."
"Where do you propose to go?" Ridgeley said kindly.
Williams must have perceived his kindliness, for he answered: "I'm going home to my wife. I am going to try it once more."
After Williams went out Field said, "I wonder if he'll do it?"
"Oh, I shouldn't wonder. I've seen men brace up just as mysteriously as that and stay right by their resolutions. I thought he didn't look like a common lumber Jack when he came in."
"Oh, how happy his wife will be!" Mrs. Field cried when she heard of Williams's resolution. "She'll save him yet."
"Well, I don't know; depends on what kind of a woman she is."
[THE OWNER OF THE MILL FARM.]
Beyond his necessity, a tired man is not apt to be polite. This Mrs. Miner had generalized from long experience with her husband. She knew at a distance, by the way he wore his hat when he came in out of the field, whether he was in a peculiarly savage mood, or only in his usual state of sullen indifference.
As he came in out of the barn on this spring day, he turned to look up at the roof with a curse. Something had angered him. He did not stop to comb his hair after washing at the pump, but came into the neat kitchen and surlily took a seat at the table.
Mrs. Miner, a slender little woman, quite ladylike in appearance, had the dinner all placed in steaming abundance upon the table, and the children, sitting side by side, watched their father in silence. There was an air of foreboding, of apprehension, over them all, as if they feared some brutal outbreak on his part.
He placed his elbows on the table. His sleeves were rolled up, displaying his red and much sunburned arms. He wore no coat, and his face was sullen, and held, besides, a certain vicious quality, like that of a bad-tempered dog.
He had not spoken to his wife directly for many weeks. For years it had been his almost constant habit to address her through the children, by calling her "she" or "your mother." He had done this so long that even the little ones were startled when he said, looking straight at her:
"Say, what are you going to do about that roof?"
Mrs. Miner turned her large gray eyes upon him in sudden confusion. "Excuse me, Tom, I didn't——"
"I said 'What you goin' t' do with that roof?'" he repeated brutally.
"What roof?" she asked timidly.
"What roof?" he repeated after her. "Why, the barn, of course! It's leakin' and rottin' my oats. It's none o' my business," he went on, his voice containing an undercurrent of vicious insult. "Only I thought you'd like to know it's worse than ever. You can do as you like about it," he said again, and there was a peculiar tone in his voice, as if, by using that tone, he touched her upon naked nerves somewhere. "I guess I can cover the oats up."
A stranger would not have known what it all meant, and yet there was something in what he said that made his wife turn white. But she answered quietly:
"I'll send word to the carpenter this forenoon. I'm sorry," she went on, the tears coming to her eyes. She turned away and looked out of the window, while he ate on indifferently. At last she turned with a sudden impulse: "O Tom, why can't we be friends again? For the children's sake, you ought to——"
"Oh, shut up!" he snarled. "Good God! Can't you let a thing rest? Suits me well enough. I ain't complainin'. So, just shut up."
He rose with a slam and went out. The two children sat with hushed breath. They knew him too well to cry out.
Mrs. Miner sat for a long time at the table without moving. At last she rose and went sighfully at work. "Morty, I want you to run down to Mr. Wilber's and ask him to come up and see me about some work." She stood at the window and watched the boy as he stepped lightly down the road. "How much he looks like his father, in spite of his sunny temper!" she thought, and it was not altogether a pleasant thing to think of, though she did not allow such a thought to take definite shape.
The young carpenter whom Wilber sent to fill Mrs. Miner's order walked with the gay feet of youth as he passed out of the little town toward the river. When he came to the bridge, he paused and studied the scene with slow, delighted eyes. The water came down over its dam with a leap of buoyant joy, as if leaping to freedom. Over the dam it lay in a quiet pool, mirroring every bud and twig. Below, it curved away between low banks, with bushes growing to the water's edge, where the pickerel lay.
But the young man seemed to be saddened by the view of the mill, which had burned some years before. It seemed like the charred body of a living thing, this heap of blackened and twisted shafts and pulleys, lying half buried in tangles of weeds.
It appealed so strongly to young Morris that he uttered an unconscious sigh as he walked on across the bridge and clambered the shelving road, which was cut out of the yellow sandstone of the hillside.
The road wound up the sandy hillside and came at length to a beautiful broad terrace of farm land that stretched back to the higher bluffs. The house toward which the young fellow turned was painted white, and had the dark-green blinds which transplanted New-Englanders carry with them wherever they go.
Soldierly Lombardy poplar trees stood in the yard, and beds of flowers lined the walk. Mrs. Miner was at work in the beds when he came up.
"Good day," he said cordially. "Glorious spring weather, isn't it?" He smiled pleasantly. "Is this Mrs. Miner?"
"Yes, sir." She looked at him wonderingly.
"I'm one of Wilber's men," he explained. "He couldn't get away, so he sent me up to see what needed doing."
"Oh," she said, with a relieved tone. "Very well; will you go look at it?"
They walked, side by side, out toward the barn, which had the look of great age in its unpainted decay. It was gray as granite and worn fuzzy with sleet and snow. The young fellow looked around at the grass, the dandelions, the vague and beautiful shadows flung down upon the turf by the scant foliage of the willows and apple trees, and took off his hat, as if in the presence of something holy. "What a lovely place!" he said—"all but the mill down there; it seems too bad it burnt up. I hate to see a ruin, most of all, one of a mill." She looked at him in surprise, perceiving that he was not at all an ordinary carpenter. He had a thoughtful face, and the workman's dress he wore could not entirely conceal a certain delicacy of limb. His voice had a touch of cultivation in it.
"The work I want done is on the barn," she said at length. "Do you think it needs reshingling?"
He looked up at it critically, his head still bare. She was studying him carefully now, and admired his handsome profile. There was something fine and powerful in the poise of his head.
"You haven't been working for Mr. Wilber long," she said.
He turned toward her with a smile of gratification, as if he knew she had detected something out of the ordinary in him.
"No, I'm just out of Beloit," he said, with ready confidence. "You see that I'm one of these fellows who have to work my passage. I put in my vacations at my trade." He looked up at the roof again, as if checking himself. "Yes, I should think from here that it would have to be reshingled."
She sighed resignedly, and he knew she was poor. "Well, I suppose you had better do it."
She thought of him pleasantly, as he walked off down the road after the lumber and tools that were necessary. And, in his turn, he wondered whether she were a widow or not. It promised to be a pleasant job. She was quite handsome, in a serious way, he decided—very womanly and dignified. Perhaps this was his romance, he thought, with the ready imagination upon this point of a youth of twenty-one.
He returned soon with a German teamster, who helped him unload his lumber and erect his stagings. When noon came he was working away on the roof, tearing the old shingles off with a spade.
He was a little uncertain about his dinner. It was the custom to board carpenters when they were working on a farm, but this farm was so near town, possibly Mrs. Miner would not think it necessary. He decided, however, to wait till one o'clock, to be sure. At half past twelve, a man came in out of the field with a team—a short man, with curly hair, curly chin beard, and mustache. He walked with a little swagger, and his legs were slightly bowed. Morris called him "a little feller," and catalogued him by the slant on his hat.
"Say," called Morris suddenly, "won't you come up here and help me raise my staging?"
The man looked up with a muttered curse of surprise. "Who the hell y' take me for? Hired man?" he asked, and then, after a moment, continued, in a tone which was an insult: "You don't want to rip off the whole broad side of that roof. Ain't y' got any sense? Come a rain, it'll raise hell with my hay."
"It ain't going to rain," Morris replied. He wanted to give him a sharp reply, but concluded not to do so. This was evidently the husband. His romance was very short.
"Tom, won't you call the man in?" asked Mrs. Miner, as her husband came up to the kitchen door.
"No, call 'im yourself. You've got a gullet."
Mrs. Miner's face clouded a little, but she composed herself. "Morty, run out and tell the carpenter to come to dinner."
"Boss is in a temper," Morris thought, as he listened to Miner's reply. He came up to the well, where Morty brought him a clean towel, and waited to show him into the kitchen.
Miner was just sitting down to the table when Morris entered. His sleeves were rolled up. He had his old white hat on his head. He lounged upon one elbow on the table. His whole bearing was swinish.
"What do I care?" he growled, as if in reply to some low-voiced warning his wife had uttered. "If he don't like it, he can lump it, and if you don't like my ways," he said, turning upon her, "all you've got to do is to say so, and I git out."
Morris was amazed at all this. He could not persuade himself that he had rightly understood what had been said. There was something beneath the man's words which puzzled him and forbade his inquiry. He sat down near the oldest child and opposite Mrs. Miner. Miner began to eat, and Morris was speaking pleasantly to the child nearest him, when he heard an oath and a slap. He looked up to see Miner's hat falling from Mrs. Miner's cheek.
She had begun a silent grace, and her husband had thrown his hat in her face. She kept her eyes upon her plate, and her lips moved as if in prayer, though a flush of red streamed up her neck and covered her cheek.
Morris leaped up, his eyes burning into Miner's face. "H'yere!" he shouted, "what's all this? Did you strike her?"
"Set down!" roared Miner. "You're too fresh."
"I'll let you know how fresh I am," said the young fellow, shaking his brawny fist in Miner's face.
Mrs. Miner rose, with a ghastly smile on her face, which was now as pale as it had been flushed. "Please don't mind him; he's only fooling." Morris looked at her and understood a little of her feeling as a wife and mother. He sat down. "Well, I'll let him know the weight of my fist, if he does anything more of that business when I'm around," he said, looking at her, and then at her husband. "I didn't grow up in a family where things like that go on. If you'll just say the word, I—I'll——"
"Please don't do anything," she said, and he saw that he had better not, if he wished to shield her from further suffering. The meal proceeded in silence. Miner apparently gloried in what he had done.
The children were trembling with fear and could scarcely go on with their dinners. They dared not cry. Their eyes were fixed upon their father's face, like the eyes of kittens accustomed to violence. The wife tried to conceal her shame and indignation. She thought she succeeded very well, but the big tears rolling down from her wide unseeing eyes, were pitiful to witness.
Morris ate his dinner in silence, not seeing anything further to do or say. His food choked him, and he found it necessary to drink great draughts of water.
At last she contrived to say, "How did you find the roof?" It was a pitiful attempt to cover the dreadful silence.
"It was almost as good as no roof at all," he replied, with the desire to aid her. "Those shingles, I suppose, have been on there for thirty years. I suppose those shingles must have been rived out by just such a machine as Old Man Means used, in the 'Hoosier Schoolmaster.'" From this, he went on to tell about some of the comical parts of the story, and so managed to end the meal in a fairly presentable way.
"She's found another sympathizer," sneered the husband, returning to his habit of addressing his wife in the third person.
After eating his dinner, Miner lit his pipe and swaggered out, as if he had done an admirable thing. Morris remained at the table, talking with the children. After Miner had passed out of earshot, he looked up at Mrs. Miner, as if expecting her to say something in explanation of what had occurred. But she had again forgotten him, and sat biting her lips and looking out of the window. Her bosom heaved like that of one about to weep. Her wide-open eyes had unutterable sorrow in their beautiful depths.
Morris got up and went out, in order to prevent himself from weeping too. He hammered away on the roof like mad for an hour, and wished that every blow fell on that little villain's curly pate.
He did not see Mrs. Miner to speak to her again till the next forenoon, when she came out to see how the work was getting on. He came down from the roof to meet her, and they stood side by side, talking the job over and planning other work. She spoke, at last, in a low, hesitating voice, and without looking at him:
"You mustn't mind what Mr. Miner does. He's very peculiar, and you're likely—that is, I mean——"
She could not finish her lie. The young man looked down on her resolutely. "I'd like to lick him, and I'd do it for a leather cent."
She put out her hand with a gesture of dismay. "Oh, don't make trouble; please don't!"
"I won't if you don't want me to, but that man needs a licking the worst of any one I ever saw. Mrs. Miner," he said, after a little pause, "I wish you'd tell me why he acts that way. Now, there must be some reason for it. No sane man is going to do a thing like that."
She looked away, a hot flush rising upon her face. She felt a distinct longing for sympathy. There was something very engaging in this young man's candid manner.
"I do not know who is to blame," she said at last, as if in answer to a question. "I've tried to be a good wife to him for the children's sake. I've tried to be patient. I suppose if I'd made the property all over to him, as most wives do, at first, it would have avoided all trouble." She paused to think a moment.
"But, you see" she went on suddenly, "father never liked him at all, and he made me promise never to let the mill or the farm go out of my hands, and then I didn't think it necessary. It belonged to us both, just as much as if I'd signed it over. I considered he was my partner as well as my husband. I knew how father felt, especially about the mill, and I couldn't go against his wish."
She had the impulse to tell it all now, and she sat down on a bunch of shingles, as if to be able to state it better. Her eyes were turned away, her hands pressed upon each other like timid, living things seeking aid, and, looking at her trembling lips, the young man felt a lump rise in his throat.
"It began all at once, you see. I mean the worst of it did. Of course, we'd had sharp words, as all people who live together are apt to have, I suppose, but they didn't last long. You see, everything was mine, and he had nothing at all when he came home with me. He'd had bad luck, and he—he never was a good business man."
The tears were on her face again. She was retrospectively approaching that miserable time when her suffering began. The droop of her head appealed to the young man with immense power. He had an impulse to take her in his arms and comfort her, as if she were his sister.
She mastered herself at last, and went on in low, hesitating voice, more touching than downright sobbing: "One day, the same summer the mill burned, one of the horses kicked at little Morty, and I said I'd sell it, and he said it was all nonsense; the horse wasn't to blame. And I told him I wouldn't have a horse around that would kick. And when he said I shouldn't sell it, I said a dreadful thing. I knew it would cut him, but I said it. I said: 'The horse is mine; the farm is mine; I can do what I please with my own, for all of you.'"
She fell silent here, and Morris was forced to ask, "What did he do then?"
"He looked at me, a queer, long look that made me shiver, and then he walked off, and he never spoke to me again directly for six months. And from that day he almost never speaks to me except through the children. He calls me names through them. He cuts me every time he can. He does everything he can to hurt me. He never dresses up, and he wears his hat in the house at all times, and rolls up his sleeves at the table, just because he knows it makes me suffer. Sometimes I think he is crazy, and yet——"
"Oh, no, he ain't crazy. He's devilish," Morris blurted out. "Great guns! I'd like to lay my hands on him."
She seemed to feel that a complete statement was demanded. "I can't invite anybody to the house, for there's no knowing what he'll do. He may stay in the fields all day and never come in at all, or he may come in and curse and swear at me or do something—I never can tell what he is goin' to do."
"Haven't you any relatives here?" Morris asked.
"Yes, but I'm ashamed to let them know about it, because they all said I'd repent; and then he's my husband, and he's the father of my children."
"A mighty poor excuse of one I call him," said the young man with decision.
"I tried to give him the farm, when I found it was going to make trouble, but he wouldn't take it then. He won't listen to me at all. He keeps throwing it up to me that he's earning his living, and if I don't think he is he will go any minute. He works in the field, but that's all. He won't advise with me at all. He says it's none of his business. He won't do a thing around the house or garden. I tried to get him to oversee the mill for me, but, after our trouble, he refused to do anything about it. I hired a man to run it, but it didn't pay that way, and then it was idle for a while, and at last it got afire some way and burned up—tramps, I suppose.
"Oh, dear!" she sighed, rising, "I don't see how it's going to end; it must end some time. Sometimes it seems as if I couldn't stand it another day, and then I think of my duty as a mother and wife, and I think perhaps God intended this to be my cross."
The young fellow was silent. It was a great problem. The question of divorce had never before been borne in upon him in this personal way. It seemed to him a clear case. The man ought to be driven off and the woman left in peace. He thought of the pleasure it would give her to hear the sound of the mill again.
They stood there side by side, nearly the same age, and yet the woman's face was already lined with suffering, and her eyes were full of shadow. There seemed no future for her, and yet she was young.
"Please don't let him know I've said anything to you, will you?"
"I'll try not to," he said, but he did not consider himself bound to any definite concealment.
They ate dinner together without Miner, who had a fit of work on hand which made him stubbornly unmindful of any call to eat. Moreover, he was sure it would worry his wife.
The meal was a pleasant one on the whole, and they found many things in common to talk about. Morris wanted to ask her a few more questions about her life, but she begged him not to do so, and started him off on the story of his college life. He was an enthusiastic talker and told her his plans with boyish frankness. He forgot his fatigue, and she lost for a time her premature cares and despairs. They were laughing together over some of his college pranks when Miner came in at the door.
"Oh, I see!" he said, with an insulting, insinuating inflection. "Now I understand the early dinner."
Morris sprang up and, walking over to the sneering husband, glared down at him with a look of ferocity that sat singularly upon his round, fresh face. "Now you shut up! If you open your mouth to me again I'll lick you till your hide won't hold pumpkins!"
Miner shrank back, turned on his heel, and went off to the barn. He did not return for his dinner.
Morris insisted on helping Mrs. Miner clear up the yard and uncover the grapevine. He liked her very much. She appealed to the protector in him, and she interested him besides, because of the melancholy which was lined on her delicate face, and voiced in her low, soft utterances.
He appealed to her, because of his delicacy as well as strength. He had something of the modern man's love for flowers, and did not attempt to conceal his delight in thus tinkering about at woman's work. He ate supper with her and worked on until it was quite dark, tired as he was, and then shook hands and said "Good night."
Morris came back to his work the next day with a great deal of pleasure. He had spent considerable thought upon the matter. He had almost determined on a course of action. He had thought of going directly to Miner and saying:
"Now look here, Miner, if you was half a man, you'd pull out and leave this woman in peace. How you can stand around here and occupy the position you do, I don't see."
But when he remembered Mrs. Miner's words about the children, another consideration came in. Suppose he should take the children with him—that was the point; that was the uncertain part of the problem. It did not require any thought to remember that the law took very little consideration of the woman's feelings. He said to himself that if he ever became judge, he would certainly give decisions that would send such a man as Miner simply whirling out into space.
Miner was in the barn when Morris clambered up the ladder with a bunch of shingles on his shoulder, about seven o'clock. He came out and said:
"Say, you want to fix that window up there."
"Get away from there!" shouted Morris, in uncontrollable rage, "or I'll smash this bunch of shingles on your cursed head. Don't you open that ugly p'tater trap at me, you bow-legged little skunk! I'm goin' to lick you like a sock before I'm done with you."
He would have done so then had he been on the ground, but he disdained taking the trouble to climb down. He planned to catch him when he came up to dinner. The more he thought of it the more his indignation waxed. As he grew to hate the man more, he began to entertain the suspicions, which Wilber confessed to in confidence, concerning the burning of the mill.
They had a cheerful meal together again, for Miner did not come in until one o'clock. During the nooning Morris finished spading the flower beds, in spite of Mrs. Miner's entreaties that he should rest. It gave him great pleasure to work there with her and the children.
"You see, I'm lonesome here," he explained. "Just out of school, and I miss the boys and girls. I don't know anybody except a few of the carpenters here, and so—well, I kind of like it. I always helped around the house at home. It's all fun for me, so don't you say a word. I've got lots o' muscle to spare, and you're welcome to it."
He spaded away without many words. The warm sun shone down upon them all, and they made a pretty group. Mrs. Miner, rake in hand, was pulverizing the beds as fast as he spaded, her face flushed and almost happy. The children were wrist-deep in the fresh earth, planting twigs and pebbles, their babble of talk some way akin to the cry of the woodpecker, the laugh of the robin, the twitter of the sparrow, the smell of spring, and the merry downpour of sunshine.
Mrs. Miner was silent. She was thinking how different her life would have been if her husband had only taken an interest in her affairs. She did not think of any one else as her husband, but only Miner in a different mood.
Morris went back to work. As the work neared the end, his determination to punish the scoundrel husband grew. His inclination to charge him with burning the mill grew stronger. He wondered if it wouldn't serve as a club. "Now, sir," he said, meeting Miner as he came out of the barn that night, "I'm done on the barn, but I'm not done on you. I'm goin' to whale you till you won't know yourself. I ought 'o 'a done it that first day at dinner." He advanced upon Miner, who backed away, scared at something he saw in the young man's eyes and something he heard in his inflexible tone of voice.
He thrust out his palm in a wild gesture. "Keep away from me! I'll split your heart if you touch me!"
Morris advanced another step, his eyes looking straight into Miner's with the level look of a tiger's. "No, y' won't! You're too much of an infernal, sneaky little whelp!"
At the word whelp, he cuffed him with his hammerlike fist, and Miner went down in a heap. He was so abject that the young man could only strike him with his open hand.
He took him by the shirt collar with his left hand and began to cuff him leisurely and terribly with his right. His blows punctuated his sentences. "You're a little [whack] villain. I'll thrash you till you won't see out of your blasted eyes for a month! I can't stand a man [here he jounced him up and down with his left hand, apparently with infinite satisfaction] who bullies his wife and children as you do [here he cuffed him again], and I'll make it my business to even things up——"
The prostrate man began to scream for help. He was livid with fear. He fancied murder in the blaze of his assailant's eye.
"Help! help! Minnie!"
"Call her by her first name now, will yeh? will yeh? Call her out to help yeh! Do you think she will? I want to tell you, besides, I know something about that mill burning. It's just like your contemptible mustard-seed of a soul to burn that mill!"
Mrs. Miner came flying out. She could not recognize her husband in the bleeding, dirty, abject thing squirming under the young man's knee.
"Why, Mr. Morris, who—why—why, it's Tom!" she gasped, her eyes distended with surprise and horror.
Morris looked up at her coolly. "Yes, it's Tom." He then gave his attention to the writhing figure under him. "Crawl, you infernal whelp! Lick the dust, confound you! Quick!" he commanded, growing each moment more savage.
Mrs. Miner clung to his arm. "Please don't," she pleaded. "You're killing him."
Morris did not look up. "Oh, no, I ain't. I'm giving him a little taste of his own medicine." He flopped Miner over on his face and dragged him around in the dust like an old sack. "Beg her pardon, or I'll thrash the ground with yeh!"
"Please don't," pleaded the wife, using her whole strength to stop him in his circuit with the almost insensible Miner.
"Beg!" he said again, "beg, or I'll cave your backbone in." There was a terrible upward inflection in his voice now, a half-jocular tone that was more terrible than the muffled snarl in which he had previously been speaking.
"I beg! I beg!" cried Miner.
Morris released him, and he crawled to a sitting posture. Mrs. Miner fell on her knees by his side, and began wiping the blood from his face. She was breathless with sobbing and the children were screaming. The tears streamed down her face, which was white and drawn into ghastly wrinkles.
"You've killed him!" she gasped.
Morris put his hands in his pockets and looked down on them both, with a curious feeling of having done something which he might repent of. He felt in a way cut off from the satisfactory ending of the thing he had planned.
"Oh, you've killed him!"
"Oh, no, I haven't. He's all right." He looked at them a moment longer to see if there were any rage remaining in the face of the husband, and then at the wife to discover her feeling concerning his action. Then he looked back at the husband again, and apparently justified himself for what he had done by the memory of the ineffable shame to which the wife had been subjected.
"Now, if I hear another word of your abuse," he said, as he shook the dust from his own clothes and prepared to go, "I'll give you another that will make you think that this is all fooling. More than that," he said, turning again, "I know something that will put you where the crows won't eat you!—If I can be of any service to you, Mrs. Miner, at any time while I'm here, I hope you'll let me know. Good-by."
Mrs. Miner did not reply, and when Morris reached the gate and looked back she was still kneeling by the side of her husband, the sunlight shining down upon her graceful head. Some way the problem had increased in complexity. He felt a disgust of her weakness, mingled with a feeling that he was losing something very fine and tender which had but just come into his life.
He went back to his work on the other side of the river, where his crew was working. He was called home a few weeks later, and he never saw husband or wife again. He learned from Wilber, however, in a short letter that things were going much the same as ever.
"Dear Sir: I don't know much about Miner. Hees purty quiet I guess. Dock Moss thinks hees a little off his nut. I don't. I think its pur cussidness."
[OF THOSE WHO SEEK.]
[I. THE PRISONED SOUL.]
The Capitol swarmed with people.
Groups of legislators tramped noisily along the corridors, laughing loudly, gesticulating with pointed fingers or closed fists.
Squads of ragged, wondering, and wistful-eyed negroes, splashed with orange-colored mud from the fields, moved timidly on from magnificence to magnificence, keeping close to each other, solemn and silent. When they spoke they whispered. Others from the city streets laughed loudly and swaggered along to show their contempt for the place and their knowledge of its public character; but their insolence was halfassumed.
Lean and lank Southerners, with the imperial cut on their pale, brown whiskers, alternated with stalwart, slouch-hatted Westerners. Clean-shaven, pale clerks hurried to and fro; groups of sightseers infested every nook, and wore the look of those determined to see it all. They were accompanied often by one whose certainty of accent gave evidence of his fitness to be their guide. The sound of his voice proclaimed his judgments as he pushed his dazed wordless victims about.
In a group in the center of the checkered marble floor of the rotunda, a powerful Indian, dressed in semi-civilized fashion, was standing, looking wonderingly down into the upturned face of a little girl. The circle of bystanders silently studied both man and maid.
She was about eleven years of age and was tastefully dressed, and seemed a healthy child. Her face was solemn, sweet, and inquisitive. She held one half-opened hand in the air; with the other she touched the Indian's dark, strongly molded cheek, and pressed his long hair which streamed from beneath his broad white hat.
No one smiled. She was deaf and dumb and blind.
In her raised rosy little palm, with lightning-swift motion, fluttered the hand of her teacher. By the teacher's side stood an Indian interpreter, dressed in hunting shirt and broad hat.
"I am Umatilla," said the chief, in answer to a question from the teacher. His deep voice was like the mutter of a lion; he stood with gentle dignity still looking wonderingly down into the girl's sweet, solemn, and eager face.
A bystander said, "Poor child!" in a low, tremulous tone, followed by a sigh.
The little one's hand, light, swift, and seeking, touched the Indian's ringed ears and pressed again his long hair, while her teacher's swift fingers said, "This strange man comes from a far-off land, from vast mountains and forests away toward the western sea. The wind and sun have made his face dark, and the long hair is a protection from the cold. He is a chief."
Under her broad hat the child's exquisite mouth, with its dimpled corners, remained calm but touchingly wistful. Her eyes were in shadow. Her chin was a perfect oval, delicately beautiful, like the curving lines of a peach, with the clear transparency of color of a flower's chalice.
But the bystander said again, "Poor child!" as if a shudder of awe, of wordless compassion and bitterness, shook him.
She was so beautiful, so gifted in spirit, to be thus shut in! Her inclosing flesh was so fine and sweet, it seemed impossible it could be an impassable, almost impenetrable wall.
He thought: She will soon be a woman, with all the vague, unutterable longings and passions of the woman. Her lithe body will be as beautiful as her soul, and the warm oval of her face will flash and flame with her expanding, struggling life. Her caged soul will struggle for light and companionship, blindly, vainly.
Life to her must remain a cruel fragment. Light and color she may not miss; but wifehood, maternity, the touch of baby lips to her breast—these her soul will grope for in dumb maternal desire. She must inhabit her dark and soundless cavern alone.
Again she touched the chieftain's hair and earrings, and let her hand drop down along his sleeve to his hard, brown hand. Then her hand fell to her side with a resigned action.
As she walked away, a sweet smile of pleasure and gratitude flashed for an instant across the exquisite curving line of her lips, and then the sad and wistful repose of her face came back again as if her loneliness had only been lightened, not warmed.
The young man drew a long breath of pain keen as a physical hurt. The elderly gentleman said again, "Poor child!"
The Indian looked up again into the mighty dome soaring hundreds of feet above him, and wondered how those forms came to be set flying in mid-air, and his heart grew sad and wistful too, as if a realization of the power and majesty of the white man fell like a poisonous, fateful shadow over his people and himself.
[II. A SHELTERED ONE.]
The young man came in out of the cold dash of rain. The negro man received his outside garments and ushered him into the drawing-room, where a bright fire welcomed him like a smiling hostess.
He sat down with a sudden relaxation of his muscles. As he waited at his ease, his senses absorbed the light and warmth and beauty of the house. It was familiar and yet it had a new meaning to him. A bird was singing somewhere in the upper chambers, caroling with a joyous note that seemed to harmonize with the warmth and color of the room in which the caller sat.
The young man stared at the fire, his head leaning on his hand. There were lines of gloomy thought in his face. There were marks of bitter struggle on his hands. His dress was strong and good, but not in the mode. He looked like a young lawyer, with his lean, dark face, smoothly shaven save for a little tuft on either cheek. His long hands were heavy-jointed with toil.
He listened to the bird singing and to the answering, chirping call of a girl's voice. His head drooped forward in deep reverie.
How beautiful her life is! his thought was. How absolutely without care or struggle! She knows no uncertainty such as I feel daily, hourly. She has never a doubt of daily food; the question of clothes has been a diversion for her, a worry of choice merely. Dirt, grime, she knows nothing of. Here she lives, sheltered in a glow of comfort and color, while I hang by my finger-ends over a bottomless pit. She sleeps and dreams while I fight. She is never weary, while I sink into my bed each night as if it were my grave. Every hand held out to her is a willing hand—if it is paid for, it is willing, for she has no enemies even among her servants. O God! If I could only reach such a place to rest for just a year—for just a month! But such security, such rest is out of my reach. I must toil and toil, and when at last I reach a place to pause and rest, I shall be old and brutalized and deadened, and my rest will be merely—sleep.
He looked once more about the lovely room. The ocean wind tore at the windows with wolfish claws, savage to enter.
"The world howling out there is as impotent to do her harm as is that wind at the window," the young man added.
The bird's song again joined itself to the gay voice of the girl, and then he heard quick footsteps on the stairs, and as he rose to greet her the room seemed to glow like the heart of a ruby.
They clasped hands and looked into each other's eyes a moment. He saw love and admiration in her face. She saw only friendliness and some dark, unsmiling mood in his.
They sat down and talked upon the fringe of personalities which he avoided. She fancied that she saw a personal sorrow in his face and she longed to comfort him. She longed to touch his vexed forehead with her fingers.
They talked on, of late books and coming music. He noticed how clear and sweet and intelligent were her eyes. Refinement was in the folds of her dress and in the faint perfume which exhaled from her drapery. The firm flesh of her arms appealed to him like the limbs of a child so beautiful and tender!
He saw in her face something wistful, restless. He tried to ignore it, to seem unconscious of the adoration he saw there, for it pained him. It affected him as a part of the general misdirection of affection and effort in the world.
She asked him about his plans. He told her of them. He grew stern and savage as he outlined the work which he had set himself to do. His hands spread and clutched, and his teeth set together involuntarily. "It is to be a fight," he said; "but I shall win. Bribery, blackmail, the press, and all other forces are against me, but I shall win."
He rose at length to a finer mood as he sketched the plan which he hoped to set in action.
She looked at him with expanding eyes and quickened breath. A globed light each soft eye seemed to him.
He spoke more freely of the struggle outside in order to make her feel her own sweet security—here where the grime of trade and the reek of politics never came.
At last he rose to go, smiling a little as if in apology for his dark mood. He looked down at her slender body robed so daintily in gray and white; she made him feel coarse and rough.
Her eyes appealed to him, her glance was like a detaining hand. He felt it, and yet he said abruptly:
"Good night."
"You'll come to see me again!"
"Yes," he answered very simply and gravely.
And she, looking after him as he went down the street with head bent in thought, grew weak with a terrible weakness, a sort of hunger, and deep in her heart she cried out:
"Oh, the brave, splendid life he leads out there in the world! Oh, the big, brave world!"
She clinched her pink hand.
"Oh, this terrible, humdrum woman's life! It kills me, it smothers me. I must do something. I must be something. I can't live here in this way—useless. I must get into the world."
And looking around the cushioned, glowing, beautiful room, she thought bitterly:
"This is being a woman. O God, I want to be free of four walls! I want to struggle like that."
And then she sat down before the fire and whispered very softly, "I want to fight in the world—with him."
[III. A FAIR EXILE.]
The train was ambling across the hot, russet plain. The wind, strong and warm and dry, sweeping up from the south, carried with it the subtle odor of September grass and gathered harvests. Out of the unfenced roads the dust arose in long lines like smoke from some hidden burning which the riven earth revealed. The fields were tenanted with thrashing crews, the men diminished by distance to pygmies, the long belt of the engine flapping and shining like a ribbon in the flaming sunlight.
The freight cars on the accommodation train jostled and rocked about and heaved up laterally, till they resembled a long line of awkward, frightened, galloping buffaloes. The one coach was scantily filled with passengers, mainly poorly clothed farmers and their families.
A young man seated well back in the coach was looking dreamily out of the window, and the conductor, a keen-eyed young fellow, after passing him several times, said in a friendly way:
"Going up to Boomtown, I imagine."
"Yes—if we ever get there."
"Oh, we'll get there. We won't have much more switching. We've only got an empty car or two to throw in at the junction."
"Well, I'm glad of that. I'm a little impatient because I've got a case coming up in court, and I'm not exactly fixed for it."
"Your name is Allen, I believe."
"Yes, J. H. Allen, of Sioux City."
"I thought so. I've heard you speak."
The young lawyer was a tall, slender, dark-eyed man, rather somber in appearance. He did not respond to the invitation in the conductor's voice.
"When do you reach the junction?"
"Next stop. We're only a few minutes late. Expect to meet friends there?"
"No; thought I'd get a lunch, that's all."
At the junction the car became pretty well filled with people. Two or three Norwegian families came clattering in, the mothers clothed in heavy shawls and cheap straw hats, the flaxen-haired children in faded cottonade and blue denims. They filled nearly half the seats. Several drummers came in, laughing loudly, bearing heavy valises. Then Allen heard above the noise the shrill but sweet voice of a girl, and caught the odor of violets as two persons passed him and took a seat just before him.
The man he knew by sight and reputation as a very brilliant young lawyer, Edward Benson, of Heron Lake. The girl he knew instantly to be utterly alien to this land and people. She was like a tropic bird seen amid the scant foliage of northern hills. There was evidence of great care and taste in every fold of her modish dress. Her hat was simple but in the latest city fashion, and her gloves were spotless. She gave off an odor of cleanliness and beauty.
She was very young and slender. Her face was piquant but not intellectual, and scarcely beautiful. It pleased rather by its life and motion and oddity than by its beauty. She looked at her companion in a peculiar way—trustfully almost reverently—and yet with a touch of coquetry which seemed perfectly native to every turn of her body or glance of her eyes.
The young lawyer was a fine Western type of self-made man. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but walked a little stooping, like a man of fifty. He wore a long Prince Albert frock coat hanging loosely from his rather square shoulders. His white vest was a little soiled by his watch chain and his tie was disarranged.
His face was very fine and good. His eyes were gray-blue, deep and quiet but slightly smiling, as were his lips, which his golden-brown mustache shaded but did not hide. He was kept smiling in this quizzical way by the nervous chatter of the girl beside him. His profile, which was the view Allen had of him, was handsome. The strong, straight nose and abrupt forehead formed a marked contrast to the rather characterless nose and retreating forehead of the girl.
The first words that Allen distinguished out of the merry war in which they seemed engaged were spoken in the tone of pretty petulance such women use, a coquette's defense.
"You did, you did, you did. Now! You know you did. You told me that. You told me you despised girls like me."
"I said I despised women who had no object in life but dress," he replied, rather soberly.
"But you were hopping on me; you meant me, now! You can't deny it. You despise me, I know you do!" She challenged his flattery in her pouting self-depreciation.
The young man tried to stop her in her course, to change her mood, which was descending to real feeling. His low words could not be heard.
"Yes, yes, try to smooth it over, but you can't fool me any more. But I don't want you to flatter me and lie to me the way Judge Stearns did," she said, with a sudden change of manner. "I like you because you're square."
The phrase with which she ended seemed to take on a new meaning uttered by those red lips in childish pout.
"Now, why are you down on the judge? I don't see," said the man, as if she had gone back to an old attack.
"Well, if you'd seen what I have you'd understand." She turned away and looked out of the window. "Oh, this terrible country! I'd die out here in six weeks. I know I should."
The young lawyer was not to be turned aside.
"Of course I'm pleased to have you throw the judge over, and employ me, but, all the same, I think you do him an injustice. He's a good, square man."
"Square man!" she said, turning to him with a sudden fury in her eyes. "Do you call it square for a man—married, and gray-haired, too—to take up with a woman like Mrs. Shellberg? Say, do you, now?"
"Well, I don't quite believe——"
"Oh, I lie, do I?" she said, with another swift change to reproach. "You can't take my word for Mrs. Shellberg's visit to his office."
"But he was her lawyer."
"But you know what kind of a woman she is! She didn't need to go there every day or two, did she? What did he always receive her in his private office for? Come, now, tell me that."
"I don't know that he did," persisted the lawyer.
A sort of convulsion passed over her face, her little hands clinched, and the tears started into her eyes. Her voice was very quiet.
"You think I lie, then?"
"I think you are mistaken, just as other jealous women have——"
"You think I'm jealous, do you?"
"You act like a jeal——"
"Jealous of that gray-haired old wretch? No, sir! I—I—" She struggled to express herself. "I liked him, and I hated to lose all my faith in men. I thought he was good and honest when he prayed—Oh, I've seen him pray in church, the old hypocrite!" her fury returned at the recollection.
Her companion's face grew grave. The smile went out of his eyes, leaving them dark and sorrowful.
"I understand you now," he said, at last. She turned to look at him. "My practice in the divorce business out here has almost destroyed my faith in women. If it weren't for my wife and sister——"
She broke in eagerly: "Now I know you know what I mean. Sometimes I think men are—devils." She thrust this word forth, and her little face grew dark and strained. "But the judge kept me from thinking—I never loved my father; he didn't care for me; all he wanted to do was to make ten thousand barrels of beer a year and sell it; and the judge seemed like a father to me till she came and destroyed my faith in him."
"But—well, let Mrs. S. go. There are lots of good men and pure women in the world. It's dangerous to think there aren't—especially for a handsome young woman like you. You can't afford to keep in that kind of a mood long."
She looked at him curiously. "That's what I like about you," she said soberly. "You talk to me as if I had some sense—as if I was a human being. If you were to flatter me, now, and make love to me, I never would believe in any man again."
He smiled again in his frank, good way, and drew a picture from his pocket. It was a picture of a woman bending down over a laughing, naked child, sprawling frogwise in her lap. The woman's face was broad and intellectual and handsome. The look of splendid maternity was in her eyes. They both looked at the picture in silence. The girl sighed.
"I wish I was as good as that woman looks."
"You can be if you try."
"Not with a big Chicago brewer for a father and a husband that beats you whenever the mood takes him."
"I admit that's hard. I think the atmosphere of that Heron Lake hotel isn't any great help to you."
"Oh, they're a gay lot there! We fight like cats and dogs." A look of slyness and boldness came over her face. "Mrs. Shellberg hates me as hard as I do her. She used to go around telling, 'It's very peculiar, you know'"—she imitated her rival's voice—"'but no matter which end of the dining room I sit, all the men look that way!'"
The young lawyer laughed at her in spite of himself.
"But they don't, now. That's the reason she hates me," she said, in conclusion. "The men don't notice her when I'm around."
To hear her fresh young lips utter those words with their vile inflections was like taking a sudden glimpse into the underworld where harlots dwell and the spirits of unrestrained lusts dance in the shadowy recesses of the human heart.
Allen, hearing this fragmentary conversation, fascinated yet uneasy, looked at the pair with wonder. They seemed unconscious of their public situation.
The young lawyer looked straight before him while the girl, swept on by her ignoble rage, displayed still more of the moral ulceration which had been injected into her young life.
"I don't see what men find about her to like—unless it is her eyes. She's got beautiful eyes. But she's vulgar—ugh! The stories she tells—right before men, too! She'd kill any one that got ahead of her, that woman would! And yet she'll come into my room and cry and cry and say: 'Don't take him away from me! Leave him to me.' Ugh! It makes me sick." She stamped her foot, then added, irrelevantly: "She wears a wig, too. I suppose that old fool of a judge thinks it's her own hair."
The lawyer sat in stony silence. His grave face was accusing in its set expression, and she felt it and was spurred on to do still deeper injustice to herself—an insane perversity.
"Not that I care a cent—I'm not jealous of her. I ain't so bad off for company as she is. She can't take anybody away from me, but she must go and break down my faith in the judge."
She bit her lips to keep from crying out. She looked out of the window again, seeking control.
The "divorce colony" never appeared more sickening in its inner corruptions than when delineated by this dainty young girl. Allen could see the swarming men about the hotels; he could see their hot, leering eyes and smell their liquor-laden breaths as they named the latest addition to the colony or boasted of their associations with those already well known.
The girl turned suddenly to her companion.
"How do those people live out here on their farms?"
She pointed at a small shanty where the whole family stood to watch the train go by.
"By eating boiled potatoes and salt pork."
"Salt pork!" she echoed, as if salt pork were old boot-heels or bark or hay. "Why, it takes four hours for salt pork to digest!"
He laughed again at her childish irrelevancy. "So much the better for the poor. Where'd you learn all that, anyway?"
"At school. Oh, you needn't look so incredulous! I went to boarding school. I learned a good deal more than you think."
"Well, so I see. Now, I should have said pork digested in three hours, speaking from experience."
"Well, it don't. What do the women do out here?"
"They work like the men, only more so."
"Do they have any new things?"
"Not very often, I'm afraid."
She sighed. After a pause she said:
"You were raised on a farm?"
"Yes. In Minnesota."
"Did you do work like that?" She pointed at a thrashing machine in the field.
"Yes, I plowed and sowed and reaped and mowed. I wasn't on the farm for my health."
"You're very strong, aren't you?" she asked admiringly.
"In a slab-sided kind of a way—yes."
Her eyes grew abstracted.
"I like strong men. Ollie was a little man, not any taller than I am, but when he was drunk he was what men call a—a—holy terror. He struck me with the water pitcher once—that was just before baby was born. I wish he'd killed me." She ended in a sudden reaction to hopeless bitterness. "It would have saved me all these months of life in this terrible country."
"It might have saved you from more than you think," he said quietly, tenderly.
"What do you mean?"
"You've been brought up against women and men who have defiled you. They've made your future uncertain."
"Do you think it's so bad as that? Tell me!" she insisted, seeing his hesitation.
"You're on the road to hell!" he said, in a voice that was very low, but it reached her. It was full of pain and grave reprimand and gentleness. "You've been poisoned. You're in need of a good man's help. You need the companionship of good, earnest women instead of painted harlots."
Her voice shook painfully as she replied:
"You don't think I'm all bad?"
"You're not bad at all—you're simply reckless. You are not to blame. It depends upon yourself now, though, whether you keep a true woman or go to hell with Mrs. Shellberg."
The conductor eyed them as he passed, with an unpleasant light in his eyes, and the drummers a few seats ahead turned to look at them. The tip had passed along from lip to lip. They were like wild beasts roused by the presence of prey. Their eyes gleamed with relentless lust. They eyed the little creature with ravening eyes. Her helplessness was their opportunity.
Allen, sitting there, saw the terror and tragedy of the girl's life. Her reckless, prodigal girlhood; the coarse, rich father; the marriage, when a thoughtless girl, with a drunken, dissolute boy; the quarrels, brutal beatings; the haste to secure a divorce; the contamination of the crowded hotels in Heron Lake—and this slender young girl, naturally pure, alert, quick of impulse—she was like a lamb among lustful wolves. His heart ached for her.
The deep, slow voice of the lawyer sounded on. His eyes turned toward her had no equivocal look. He was a brother speaking to a younger sister. The tears fell down her cheeks, upon her folded hands. Her widely opened eyes seemed to look out into a night of storms.
"Oh, what shall I do?" she moaned. "I wish I was dead—and baby too!"
"Live for the baby—let him help you out."
"Oh, he can't! I don't care enough for him. I wish I was like other mothers; but I'm not. I can't shut myself up with a baby. I'm too young."
He saw that. She was seeking the love of a man, not the care of a child. She had the wifely passion, but not the mother's love. He was silent; the case baffled him.
"Oh, I wish you could help me. I wish I had you all the time. I do! I don't care what you think, I do, I do!"
"Our home is open to you and baby, too," he said slowly. "My wife knows about you, and——"
"Who told her—did you?" she flashed out again, angrily, jealously.
"Yes. My wife is my other self," he replied quietly.
She stared at him, breathing heavily, then looked out of the window again. At last she turned to him. She seemed to refer to his invitation.
"Oh, this terrible land! Oh, I couldn't stay here. I'd go insane. Perhaps I'm going insane anyway. Don't you think so?"
"No, I think you're a little nervous, that's all."
"Oh! Do you think I'll get my divorce?"
"Certainly, without question."
"Can I wait and go back with you?"
"I shall not return for several days. Perhaps you couldn't bear the wait in this little town; it's not much like the city."
"Oh, dear! But I can't go about alone. I hate these men, they stare at me so! I wish I was a man. It's awful to be a woman, don't you think so? Please don't laugh."
The young lawyer was far from laughing, but this was her only way of defending herself. These pert, birdlike ways formed her shield against ridicule and misprision.
He said slowly, "Yes, it's an awful thing to be a woman, but it's an awful responsibility to be a man."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that we are responsible as the dominant sex for every tragic, incomplete woman's life."
"Don't you blame Mrs. Shellberg?" she said, forcing him to a concrete example with savage swiftness.
"No. She had a poor father and a poor husband, and she must earn her own living some way."
"She could cook, or nurse, or something like that."
"It isn't easy to find opportunity to cook or nurse. If it were as easy to earn a living in a pure way as it is in a vicious way all men would be rich and virtuous. But what had you planned to do after your divorce?"
"Oh, I'm going to travel for two years. Then I'll try to settle down."
"What you need is a good husband and a little cottage where you'd have to cook your own food—and tend the baby."
"I wouldn't cook for any man living," she broke in, to express her bitterness that he could so coldly dispose of her future. "Oh, this terrible train! Can't it go faster? If I'd realized what a trip this was, I wouldn't have started."
"This is the route you all go," he replied with grim humor, and his words pictured a ceaseless stream of divorcées.
She resented his classing her with the rest, but she simply said: "You despise me, don't you? But what can we do? You can't expect us to live with men we hate, can you? That would be worse than Mrs. Shellberg."
"No, I don't expect that of you. I'd issue a divorce coupon with every marriage certificate, and done with it," he said, in desperate disgust. "Then this whole cursed business would be done away with. It isn't a question of our laxity of divorce laws," he said, after a pause, "it's a question of the senseless severity of the laws in other States. That's what throws this demoralizing business into our hands here."
"It pays, don't it? I know I've paid for everything I've had."
"Yes, that's the demoralizing thing. It draws a gang of conscienceless attorneys here, and it draws us who belong here off into dirty work, and it brings us into contact with men and women—I'm sick of the whole business."
She had hardly followed him in his generalizations. She brought him back to the personal.
"You're sick of me, I know you are!" She leaned her head on the window pane. Her eyes closed. "Oh, I wish my heart would stop beating!" she said, in a low tone.
Allen, sitting so close behind them, was forced to hear her, so piercingly sweet was her voice. He trembled for fear some one else might hear her. It seemed like profanation that any one but the woman's God should hear this outcry of a quivering, writhing soul.
She faced her companion again. "You're the only man I know, now, that I respect, and you despise me."
"No, I don't; I pity you."
"That's worse. I want you to help me. Oh, if you could go with me, or if I could be with you!" Her gloved hands strained together in the agony of her desire.
His calm lips did not waver. He did not smile even about the eyes. He knew her cry sprang from her need of a brother, not from the passion of a woman.
"Our home is yours, just as long as you can bear the monotony of our simple lives," he said, in his quiet way, but it was deep-throated and unmistakable in its sincerity.
She laid her hand on his arm and clasped it hard, then turned away her head, and they rode in silence.
After they left the car, Allen sat with savage eyes and grimly set mouth, going over the problem again and again. He saw that young and helpless creature walking the gantlet between endless ranks of lustful, remorseless men, snatching at her in selfish, bestial desire.
It made him bitter and despairing to think that women should be helpless—that they should need some man to protect them against some other man. He cursed the laws and traditions that had kept women subordinate and trivial and deceptive and vacillating. He wished they could be raised to the level of the brutes till, like the tigress or she-wolf, they could not only defend themselves, but their young.
He tried to breathe a sigh of relief that she had gone out of his life but—he could not. It was not so easy to shake off the shadow of his responsibility. He followed her on her downward path till he saw her stretching out her hands in pitiful need to casual acquaintances—alone and without hope; still petite, still dainty in spite of all, still with flashes of wit, and then——
He shuddered. "O my God! Upon whom does the burden of guilt lie?"
On the night of his return he sat among his romping babes debating whether he should tell the story to his wife or not. As the little ones grew weary, the noise of the autumn wind—the lonely, woeful, moaning prairie wind—came to his ears and he shuddered. His wife observed it.
"What is it, Joe? Did you get a chill?"
"Oh, no. The wind sounds a little lonesome to-night, that's all." But he took his little girl into his arms and held her close.
[IV. THE PASSING STRANGER.]
This was the story the mystic told:
It was about eleven o'clock of an October night. The street was one of the worst of the city, but it was Monday—one of its quiet nights.
The saloons flared floods of feverish light upon the walk, and breathed their terrible odors, like caverns leading downward into hell. Restless, loitering crowds moved to and fro, with rasping, uncertain footsteps, out of which the click of health had gone.
Policemen occasionally showed themselves menacingly, and the crowd responded to their impact by action quickened, like a python touched with a red-hot rod.
It was nearly time to close, and the barkeepers were beginning to betray signs of impatience with their most drunken customers.
A dark, tall man in cloak and fez moved slowly down the street. His face was serene but somber. In passing the window of a brilliantly lighted drinking place he stopped and looked in.
In the small stall, near the window and behind the counter, sat three women and two men. All had mugs of beer in their hands. The women were all young, and one of them was handsome. They were dressed nattily, jauntily, in modish, girlish hats, and their dainty jackets fitted closely to their slight figures.
Their liquor had just been served, and their voices were ringing with wild laughter. Their white teeth shone from their rouged faces with a mirth which met no answering smile from the strange young man without. He stood like a shadow against the pane.
The smile on the face of the youngest girl stiffened into a strange contortion. Her eyes looked straight ahead into the eyes of the stranger.
Her smile smoothed out. Her face paled; her eyes expanded with wonder till they lost their insane glitter, and grew sad and soft and dark.
"What is it, Nell?" the others asked.
She did not hear them. She seemed to listen. Her eyes seemed to see mountains—or clouds. A land like her childhood's home with the sunset light over it. Her mug fell with a crash to the table. She rose. Her hand silenced them, with beautiful finger raised:
"Listen! Don't you hear him? His eyes are calling me. It is Christ."
The others looked, but they saw only a tall figure moving away. He wore a long black cloak like a priest.
"Some foreign duffer lookin' in. Let 'im look," said one of the other girls.
"One o' them Egyptian jugglers," said another.
"What's the matter of ye, Nell? You look as if you'd seen a ghost of y'r grandmother. Set down an' drink y'r beer."
The girl brushed her hand over her eyes. "I'm going home," she said in a low voice from which all individuality had passed. Her face seemed anxious, her manner hurried.
"What's the matter, Nell? My God! Look at her eyes!—I'm going with her."
The girl put him aside with a gesture. Her look awed him.
One of the others began to laugh.
"Stop! You fool," one of the girls cried. They sat in silence as the younger girl went out, putting aside every hand stretched out to touch her. She walked like one in stupor—her face ghastly. The arch of her beautiful eyebrows was like that of Ophelia in her bitterest moment.
The others watched her go in silence.
One of them drew a sigh and said: "I'm going home, too; I don't feel well."
"I'll go with ye," one of the men said.
"Stay where you are!" said the girl sharply.
Once on the street, the younger girl hurried on the way the stranger had gone. His face seemed before her.
She could see it; she should always see it. It was the face of a young man. A firm chin, a strong mouth with a feminine curve in it, a face with a clear pallor that seemed foreign somehow. But the eyes—oh, the eyes!
They were deep and brown, and filled with an infinite sadness—for her. She felt it, and the knot of pain in the forehead, that was also for her. Something sweet and terrible went out from his presence. A knowledge of infinite space and infinite time and infinite compassion.
No man had ever looked at her like that. There was something divine in the penetrating power of his eyes.
Some way she knew he was not a priest, though his cloak and turban cap looked like it. He seemed like a scholar from some strange land—a man above passion, a man who knew God.
His eyes accused her and pitied her, while they called her.
No smile, no shrinking of lips into a sneer—nothing but pity and wonder, and something else——
And a voice seemed to say: "You are too good to be there. Follow me."
As she thought of him he seemed to stand on an immeasurable height looking down at her.
She had laughed at him—O God!—she flushed hot with shame from head to foot—but his eyes had not changed. His lips had kept their pitying droop, and his somber eyes had burned deep into the sacred places of her thought, where something sweet and girlish lay, unwasted and untrampled.
"He called me. He called me."
Under the trees where the moonlight threw tracing of shadows she came upon him standing, waiting for her. She held out her hand to him like a babe. He was taller than she thought.
He took her hands silently and she grew calm at once. All shame left her. She forgot her city life; she remembered only the sweet, merry life of the village where she was born. The sound of sleigh bells and song, and the lisp of wind in the grass, and songs of birds in the maples came to her.
His voice began softly:
"You are too good and sweet to be so devoured of beasts. In your little Northern home they are waiting for you. To-morrow you will go back to them."
He placed his hand, which was soft and warm and broad, over her eyes. His voice was like velvet, soft yet elastic.
"When you wake you will hate what you have been. No power can keep you here. You will go back to the simple life from which you should never have departed. You will love simple things and the pleasures of your native place."
Her face was turned upward, but her eyelids had fallen.
"When you wake you will not remember your life here. You will be a girl again, unstained and ready to begin life without remorse and without accusing memory. When I leave you at your door to-night, you will belong to the kingdom of good and not to the kingdom of evil."
He dropped her hands and pointed across the park.
"Now go to that gray house. Ring the bell, and you will be housed for the night. Remember you are mine. When the bell rings you will 'wake.'"
She moved away without looking back—moved mechanically like one still in sleep.
The man watched her until the door opened and admitted her; then he passed on into the shadow of the narrow street.
And this the listener gravely asked:
"One was chosen, the other left. Were the others less in need of grace?"
[BEFORE THE LOW GREEN DOOR.]
Matilda Bent was dying; there was no doubt of that now, if there had been before. The gruff old physician—one of the many overworked and underpaid country doctors—shook his head and pushed by Joe Bent, her husband, as he passed through the room which served as dining room, sitting room, and parlor. The poor fellow slouched back to his chair by the stove as if dazed, and before he could speak again the doctor was gone.
Mrs. Ridings was just coming up the walk as the doctor stepped out of the door.
"O doctor, how is she?"
"She is a dying woman, madam."
"Oh! don't say that, doctor. What's the matter?"
"Cancer."
"Then the news was true——"
"I don't know anything of the news, Mrs. Ridings, but Mrs. Bent is dying from the effects of a cancer primarily, which she has had for years—since her last child, which died in infancy, you remember."
"But, doctor, she never told me——"
"Neither did she tell me. But no matter now. I have done all I can for her. If you can make death any easier for her, go and do it. You will find some opiate powders there with directions. Keep the pain down at all hazards. Don't let her suffer; that is useless. She is likely to last a day or two—but if any change comes to-night, send for me."
When the good matron entered the dowdy, suffocating little room where Matilda Bent lay gasping for breath, she was sick for a moment with sympathetic pain. There the dying woman lay, her world narrowed to four close walls, propped up on the pillows near the one little window. Her eyes seemed very large and bright, and the brow, made prominent by the sinking away of the cheeks, gave evidence that it was an uncommon woman who lay there quietly waiting the death angel.
She smiled, and lifted her eyebrows in a ghastly way.
"O Marthy!" she breathed.
"Matildy, I didn't know you was so bad, or I'd 'a' come before. Why didn't you let me know?" said Mrs. Ridings, kneeling by the bed and taking the ghostly hands of the sufferer in her own warm and soft palms. She shuddered as she kissed the thin lips.
"I think you'll soon be around agin," she added, in the customary mockery of an attempt at cheer. The other woman started slightly, turned her head, and gazed on her old friend long and intently. The hollowness of her neighbor's words stung her.
"I hope not, Marthy—I'm ready to go. I want to go. I don't care to live."
The two women communed by looking for a long time in each other's eyes, as if to get at the very secretest desires and hopes of the heart. Tears fell from Martha's eyes upon the cold and nerveless hands of her friend—poor, faithful hands, hacked and knotted and worn by thirty years of ceaseless daily toil. They lay there motionless upon the coverlet, pathetic protest for all the world to see.
"O Matildy, I wish I could do something for you! I want to help you so. I feel so bad that I didn't come before. Ain't they somethin'?"
"Yes, Marthy—jest set there—till I die—it won't be long," whispered the pale lips. The sufferer, as usual, was calmer than her visitor, and her eyes were thoughtful.
"I will! I will! But oh! must you go? Can't somethin' be done. Don't yo' want the minister to be sent for?"
"No, I'm all ready. I ain't afraid to die. I ain't worth savin' now. O Marthy! I never thought I'd come to this—did you? I never thought I'd die—so early in life—and die—unsatisfied."
She lifted her head a little as she gasped out these words with an intensity of utterance that thrilled her hearer—a powerful, penetrating earnestness that burned like fire.
"Are you satisfied?" pursued the steady lips. "My life's a failure, Marthy—I've known it all along—all but my children. O Marthy, what'll become o' them? This is a hard world."
The amazed Martha could only chafe the hands, and note sorrowfully the frightful changes in the face of her friend. The weirdly calm, slow voice began to shake a little.
"I'm dyin', Marthy, without ever gittin' to the sunny place we girls—used to think—we'd git to, by an' by. I've been a-gittin' deeper 'n' deeper—in the shade—till it's most dark. They ain't been no rest—n'r hope f'r me, Marthy—none. I ain't——"
"There, there! Tillie, don't talk so—don't, dear. Try to think how bright it'll be over there——"
"I don't know nawthin' about over there; I'm talkin' about here. I ain't had no chance here, Marthy."
"He will heal all your care——"
"He can't wipe out my sufferin's here."
"Yes, He can, and He will. He can wipe away every tear and heal every wound."
"No—he—can't. God himself can't wipe out what has been. O Mattie, if I was only there!—in the past—if I was only young and purty agin! You know how tall I was! how we used to run—O Mattie, if I was only there! The world was all bright then—wasn't it? We didn't expect—to work all our days. Life looked like a meadow, full of daisies and pinks, and the nicest ones and the sweetest birds was just a little ways on—where the sun was—it didn't look—wasn't we happy?"
"Yes, yes, dear. But you mustn't talk so much." The good woman thought Matilda's mind was wandering. "Don't you want some med'cine? Ain't your fever risin'?"
"But the daisies and pinks all turned to weeds," she went on, waiting a little, "when we picked 'em. An' the sunny place—has been always behind me, and the dark before me. Oh! if I was only there—in the sun—where the pinks and daisies are!"
"You mustn't talk so, Mattie! Think about your children. You ain't sorry y' had them. They've been a comfort to y'. You ain't sorry you had 'em."
"I ain't glad," was the unhesitating reply of the failing woman; and then she went on, in growing excitement: "They'll haf to grow old jest as I have—git bent and gray, an' die. They ain't ben much comfort to me; the boys are like their father, and Julyie's weak. They ain't no happiness—for such as me and them."
She paused for breath, and Mrs. Ridings, not knowing what to say, did better than speak. She fell to stroking the poor face, and the hands getting more restless each moment. It was as if Matilda Fletcher had been silent so long, had borne so much without complaint, that now it burst from her in a torrent not to be stayed. All her most secret doubts and her sweetest hopes seemed trembling on her lips or surging in her brain, racking her poor, emaciated frame for utterance. Now that death was sure, she was determined to rid her bosom of its perilous stuff. Martha was appalled.
"I used to think—that when I got married I'd be perfectly happy—but I never have been happy sence. It was the beginning of trouble to me. I never found things better than they looked; they was always worse. I've gone further an' further from the sunshiny meadow, an' the birds an' flowers—and I'll never git back to 'em again, never!" She ended with a sob and a low wail.
Her face was horrifying with its intensity of pathetic regret. Her straining, wide-open eyes seemed to be seeing those sunny spots in the meadow.
"Mattie, sometimes when I'm asleep I think I am back there ag'in—and you girls are there—an' we're pullin' off the leaves of the wild sunflower—'rich man, poor man, beggar man'—and I hear you all laugh when I pull off the last leaf; an' when I come to myself—and I'm an old, dried-up woman, dyin' unsatisfied!"
"I've felt that way a little myself, Matildy," confessed the watcher in a scared whisper.
"I knew it, Mattie; I knew you'd know how I felt. Things have been better for you. You ain't had to live in an old log house all your life, an' work yourself to skin an' bone for a man you don't respect nor like."
"Matildy Bent, take that back! Take it back, for mercy sake! Don't you dare die thinkin' that—don't you dare!"
Bent, hearing her voice rising, came to the door, and the wife, knowing his step, cried:
"Don't let him in! Don't! I can't bear him—keep him out; I don't want to see him ag'in."
"Who do you mean? Not Joe?"
"Yes. Him."
Had the dying woman confessed to murder, good Martha could not have been more shocked. She could not understand this terrible revulsion in feeling, for she herself had been absolutely loyal to her husband through all the trials which had come upon them.
But she met Bent at the threshold, and, closing the door, went out with him into the summer kitchen, where the rest of the family were sitting. A gloomy silence fell on them all after the greetings were over. The men were smoking; all were seated in chairs tipped back against the wall. Joe Bent, a smallish man, with a weak, good-natured face, asked in a hoarse whisper:
"How is she, Mis' Ridings?"
"She seems quite strong, Mr. Bent. I think you had all better go to bed; if I want you I can call you. Doctor give me directions."
"All right," responded the relieved man. "I'll sleep on the lounge in the other room. If you want me, just rap on the door."
When, after making other arrangements, Martha went back to the bedroom, she was startled to hear the sick woman muttering to herself, or perhaps because she had forgotten Martha's absence.
"But the shadows on the meadow didn't stay; they passed on, and then the sun was all the brighter on the flowers. We used to string sweet-williams on spears of grass—don't you remember?"
Martha gave her a drink of the opiate in the glass, adjusted her on the pillow, and threw open the window, even to the point of removing the screen, and the gibbous moon flooded the room with light. She did not light a lamp, for its flame would heat the room. Besides, the moonlight was sufficient. It fell on the face of the sick woman, till she looked like a thing of marble—all but her dark eyes.
"Does the moon hurt you, Tilly? Shall I put down the curtain?"
The woman heard with difficulty, and when the question was repeated said slowly:
"No, I like it." After a little—"Don't you remember, Mattie 'how beautiful the moonlight seemed? It seemed to promise happiness—and love—but it never come for us. It makes me dream of the past now—just as it did o' future then; an' the whip-poor-wills too——"
The night was perfectly beautiful, such a night as makes dying an infinite sorrow. The summer was at its liberalest. Innumerable insects of the nocturnal sort were singing in unison with the frogs in the pools. A whip-poor-will called, and its neighbor answered it like an echo. The leaves of the trees, glossy from the late rain, moved musically to the light west wind, and the exquisite perfume of many flowers came in on the breeze.
When the failing woman sank into silence, Martha leaned her elbow on the window sill, and, gazing far into the great deeps of space, gave herself up to unwonted musings upon the problems of human life. She sighed deeply at times. She found herself at moments in the almost terrifying position of a human soul in space. Not a wife, not a mother, but just a soul facing the questions which harass philosophers. As she realized her condition of mind she apprehended something of the thinking of the woman on the bed. Matilda had gone beyond or far back of the wife and mother.
The hours wore on; the dying woman stirred uneasily now and then, whispering a word or phrase which related to her girlhood—never to her later life. Once she said:
"Mother, hold me. I'm so tired."
Martha took the thin form in her arms, and, laying her head close beside the sunken cheek, sang, in half breath, a lullaby till the sufferer grew quiet again.
The eastern moon passed over the house, leaving the room dark, and still the patient watcher sat beside the bed, listening to the slow breathing of the dying one. The cool air grew almost chill; the east began to lighten, and with the coming light the tide of life sank in the dying body. The head, hitherto restlessly turning, ceased to move. The eyes grew quiet and began to soften like a sleeper's.
"How are you now, dear?" asked the watcher several times, bending over the bed, and bathing back the straying hair.
"I'm tired—tired, mother—turn me," she murmured drowsily, with heavy lids drooping.
Martha adjusted the pillows again, and turned the face to the wall. The poor, tortured, restless brain slowly stopped its grinding whirl, and the thin limbs, heavy with years of hopeless toil, straightened out in an endless sleep.
Matilda Fletcher had found rest.
[UPON IMPULSE.]
The seminary buildings stood not far from the low, lodgelike railway station, and a path led through a gap in the fence across the meadow. People were soberly converging toward its central building, as if proceeding to church.
Among the people who alighted from the two o'clock train were Professor Blakesly and his wife and a tall, dark man whom they called Ware.
Mrs. Blakesly was plump and pretty, plainly the mother of two or three children and the sovereign of a modest suburban cottage. Blakesly was as evidently a teacher; even the casual glances of the other visitors might discover the character of these people.
Ware was not so easy to be read. His face was lean and brown, and his squarely clipped mustache gave him a stern look. His body was well rounded with muscle, and he walked alertly; his manner was direct and vigorous, manifestly of the open air.
As they entered the meadow he paused and said with humorous irresolution, "I don't know what I am out here for."
"To see the pretty girls, of course," said Mrs. Blakesly.
"They may be plain, after all," he said.
"They're always pretty at graduation time and at marriage," Blakesly interpreted.
"Then there's the ice cream and cake," Mrs. Blakesly added.
"Where do all these people come from?" Ware asked, looking about. "It's all farm land here."
"They are the fathers, mothers, and brothers of the seminary girls. They come from everywhere. See the dear creatures about the door! Let's hurry along."
"They do not interest me. I take off my hat to the beauty of the day, however."
Ware had evidently come under protest, for he lingered in the daisied grass which was dappled with shadows and tinkling with bobolinks and catbirds.
A broad path led up to the central building, whose double doors were swung wide with most hospitable intent. Ware ascended the steps behind his friends, a bored look on his dark face.
Two rows of flushed, excited girls with two teachers at their head stood flanking the doorway to receive the visitors, who streamed steadily into the wide, cool hall.
Mrs. Blakesly took Ware in hand. "Mr. Ware, this is Miss Powell. Miss Powell, this is Mr. Jenkin Ware, lawyer and friend to the Blakeslys."
"I'm very glad to see you," said a cool voice, in which gladness was entirely absent.
Ware turned to shake hands mechanically, but something in the steady eyes and clasp of the hand held out turned his listless manner into surprise and confusion. He stared at her without speaking, only for a second, and yet so long she colored and withdrew her hand sharply.
"I beg your pardon, I didn't get the name."
"Miss Powell," answered Mrs. Blakesly, who had certainly missed this little comedy, which would have been so delicious to her.
Ware moved on, shaking hands with the other teachers and bowing to the girls. He seized an early moment to turn and look back at Miss Powell. His listless indifference was gone. She was a fine figure of a woman—a strong, lithe figure, dressed in a well-ordered, light-colored gown. Her head was girlish, with a fluff of brown hair knotted low at the back. Her profile was magnificent. The head had the intellectual poise, but the proud bosom and strong body added another quality. "She is a modern type," Ware said, remembering a painting of such a head he had seen in a recent exhibition.
As he studied her she turned and caught him looking, and he felt again a curious fluttering rush at his heart. He fancied she flushed a little deeper as she turned away.
As for him, it had been a very long while since he had felt that singular weakness in the presence of a young woman. He walked on, trying to account for it. It made him feel very boyish. He had a furtive desire to remain in the hall where he could watch her, and when he passed up the stairs, it was with a distinct feeling of melancholy, as if he were leaving something very dear and leaving it forever.
He wondered where this feeling came from, and he looked into the upturned faces of the girls as if they were pansies. He wandered about the rooms with the Blakeslys, being bored by introductions, until at last Miss Powell came up the stairway with the last of the guests.
While the girls sang and went through some pretty drills Ware again studied Miss Powell. Her appeal to his imagination was startling. He searched for the cause of it. It could not be in her beauty. Certainly she was fine and womanly and of splendid physique, but all about her were lovely girls of daintier flesh and warmer color. He reasoned that her power was in her eyes, steady, frank as sunlight, clear as water in a mountain brook. She seemed unconscious of his scrutiny.
At last they began moving down the stairs and on to the other buildings. Ware and Blakesly waited for the ladies to come down. And when they came they were in the midst of a flood of girls, and Ware had no chance to speak to them. As they moved across the grass he fell in behind Mrs. Blakesly, who seemed to be telling secrets to Miss Powell, who flushed and shook her head.
Mrs. Blakesly turned and saw Ware close behind her, and said, "O Mr. Ware, where is my dear, dear husband?"
"Back in the swirl," Ware replied.
Mrs. Blakesly artfully dropped Miss Powell's arm and fell back. "I must not desert the poor dear." As she passed Ware she said, "Take my place."
"With pleasure," he replied, and walked on after Miss Powell, who seemed not to care to wait.
How simply she was dressed! She moved like an athlete, without effort and without constraint. As he walked quickly to overtake her a finer light fell over the hills and a fresher green came into the grass. The daisies nodding in the wind blurred together in a dance of light and loveliness which moved him like a song.
"How beautiful everything is to-day!" he said, as he stepped to her side. He felt as if he had said, "How beautiful you are!"
She flashed a quick, inquiring glance at him.
"Yes; June can be beautiful with us. Still, there is a beauty more mature, when the sickle is about to be thrust into the grain."
He did not hear what she said. He was thinking of the power that lay in the oval of her face, in the fluffy tangle of her hair. Ah! now he knew. With that upward glance she brought back his boy love, his teacher whom he had worshiped as boys sometimes will, with a love as pure as winter starlight. Yes, now it was clear. There was the same flex of the splendid waist, the same slow lift of the head, and steady, beautiful eyes.
As she talked, he was a youth of seventeen, he was lying at his teacher's feet by the river while she read wonderful love stories. There were others there, but they did not count. Then the tears blurred his eyes; he remembered walking behind her dead body as it was borne to the hillside burying ground, and all the world was desolate for him.
He became aware that Miss Powell was looking at him with startled eyes. He hastened to apologize and explain. "Pardon me; you look so much like a schoolboy idol—I—I seem to see her again. I didn't hear what you said, you brought the past back so poignantly."
There was something in his voice which touched her, but before he could go on they were joined by Mr. and Mrs. Blakesly and one of the other teachers. There was a dancing light in Mrs. Blakesly's eyes as she looked at Ware. She had just been saying to her husband: "What a splendid figure Miss Powell is! How well they look together! Wouldn't it be splendid if——"
"Oh, my dear, you're too bad. Please don't match-make any more to-day. Let Nature attend to these things," Mr. Blakesly replied with manifest impatience; "Nature attended to our case."
"I have no faith in Nature any more. I want to have at least a finger in the pie myself. Nature don't work in all cases. I'm afraid Nature can't in his case."
"Careful! He'll hear you, my dear."
"Where do we go now, Miss Powell?" asked Blakesly as they came to a halt on the opposite side of the campus.
"I think they are all going to the gymnasium building. Won't you come? That is my dominion."
They answered by moving off, Mrs. Blakesly taking Miss Powell's arm. As they streamed away in files she said: "Isn't he good-looking? We've known him for years. He's all right," she said significantly, and squeezed Miss Powell's arm.
"Well, Lou Blakesly, you're the same old irrepressible!"
"Blushing already, you dear! I tell you he's splendid. I wish he'd take to you," and she gave Miss Powell another squeeze. "It would be such a match! Brains and beauty, too."
"Oh, hush!"
They entered the cool, wide hall of the gymnasium, with its red brick walls, its polished floor, and the yellow-red wooden beams lining the ceiling.
There were only a few people remaining in the hall, most of them having passed on into the museum. As they came to the various appliances, Miss Powell explained them.
"What are these things for?" inquired Mrs. Blakesly, pointing at the row of iron rings depending from long ropes.
"They are for swinging on," and she leaped lightly upward and caught and swung by one hand.
"Mercy! Do you do that?"
"She seems to be doing it now," Blakesly said.
"I am one of the teachers," Miss Powell replied, dropping to the floor.
It was glorious to see how easily she seized a heavy dumb-bell and swung it above her head. The front line of her body was majestic as she stood thus.
"Gracious! I couldn't do that," exclaimed Mrs. Blakesly.
"No, not with your style of dress," replied her husband.—"I have to pin her hat on this year," he said to Ware.
"I love it," said Miss Powell, as she drew a heavy weight from the floor and stood with the cord across her shoulder. "It adds so much to life! It gives what Browning calls the wild joy of living. Do you know, few women know what that means? It's been denied us. Only the men have known
"'The wild joys of living! the leaping from rock
up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree,
the cool silver shock
Of a plunge in the pool's living water.'
I try to teach my girls 'How good is man's life, the mere living!'"
The men cheered as she paused for a moment flushed and breathless.
She went on: "We women have been shut out from the sports too long—I mean sports in the sun. The men have had the best of it. All the swimming, all the boating, wheeling, all the grand, wild life; now we're going to have a part."
The young ladies clustered about with flushed, excited faces while their teacher planted her flag and claimed new territory for women.
Miss Powell herself grew conscious, and flushed and paused abruptly.
Mrs. Blakesly effervesced in admiring astonishment. "Well, well! I didn't know you could make a speech."
"I didn't mean to do so," she replied.
"Go on! Go on!" everybody called out, but she turned away to show some other apparatus.
"Wasn't she fine?" exclaimed Mrs. Blakesly to Ware.
"Beyond praise," he replied. She went at once to communicate her morsel of news to her husband, and at length to Miss Powell.
The company passed out into other rooms until no one was left but Mrs. Blakesly, the professor, and Ware. Miss Powell was talking again, and to Ware mainly. Ware was thoughtful, Miss Powell radiant.
"I didn't know what life was till I could do that." She took up a large dumb-bell and, extending it at arm's length, whirled it back and forth. Her forearm, white and smooth, swelled into strong action, and her supple hands had the unwavering power and pressure of an athlete, and withal Ware thought: "She is feminine. Her physical power has not coarsened her; it has enlarged her life, but left her entirely womanly."
In some adroit way Mrs. Blakesly got her husband out of the room and left Ware and Miss Powell together. She was showing him the view from the windows, and they seemed to be perfectly absorbed. She looked around once and saw that Mrs. Blakesly was showing her husband something in the farther end of the room. After that she did not think of them.
The sun went lower in the sky and flamed along the sward. He spoke of the mystical power of the waving daisies and the glowing greens which no painter ever seems to paint. While they looked from the windows their arms touched, and they both tried to ignore it. She shivered a little as if a cold wind had blown upon her. At last she led the way out and down the stairs to the campus. They heard the gay laughter of the company at their cakes and ices, up at the central building.
He stopped outside the hallway, and as she looked up inquiringly at him, he said quietly: "Suppose we go down the road. It seems pleasanter there."
She acquiesced like one in a pleasure which made duty seem absurd.
Strong and fine as she was, she had never found a lover to whom she yielded her companionship with unalloyed delight. She was thirty years of age, and her girlhood was past. She looked at this man, and a suffocating band seemed to encircle her throat. She knew he was strong and good. He was a little saddened with life—that she read in his deep-set eyes and unsmiling lips.
The road led toward the river, and as they left the campus they entered a lane shaded by natural oaks. He talked on slowly. He asked her what her plans were.
"To teach and to live," she said. Her enthusiasm for the work seemed entirely gone.
Once he said, "This is the finest hour of my life."
On the bank of the river they paused and seated themselves on the sward under a tree whose roots fingered the stream with knuckled hands.
"Yes, every time you look up at me you bring back my boyish idol," he went on. "She was older than I. It is as if I had grown older and she had not, and that she were you, or you were she. I can't tell you how it has affected me. Every movement you make goes deep down into my sweetest, tenderest recollections. It's always June there, always sweet and sunny. Her death and burial were mystical in their beauty. I looked in her coffin. She was the grandest statue that ever lay in marble; the Greek types are insipid beside that vision. You'll say I idealized her; possibly I did, but there she is. O God! it was terrible to see one die so young and so lovely."
There was a silence. Tears came to her eyes. He could only exclaim; weeping was denied him. His voice trembled, but grew firmer as he went on:
"And now you come. I don't know exactly in what way you resemble her. I only know you shake me as no other human being has done since that coffin-lid shut out her face." He lifted his head and looked around. "But Nature is beautiful and full of light and buoyancy. I am not going to make you sad. I want to make you happy. I was only a boy to her. She cared for me only as a mature woman likes an apt pupil, but she made all Nature radiant for me, as you do now."
He smiled upon her suddenly. His somber mood passed like one of the shadows of the clouds floating over the campus. It was only a recollected mood. As he looked at her the old hunger came into his heart, but the buoyancy and emotional exaltation of youth came back also.
"Miss Powell, are you free to marry me?" he said suddenly.
She grew very still, but she flushed and then she turned her face away from him. She had no immediate reply.
"That is an extraordinary thing to ask you, I know," he went on; "but it seems as if I had known you a long time, and then sitting here in the midst of Nature with the insects singing all about us—well, conventions are not so vital as in drawing rooms. Remember your Browning."
She who had declaimed Browning so blithely now sat silent, but the color went out of her face, and she listened to the multitudinous stir and chirp of living things, and her eyes dreamed as he went on steadily, his eyes studying her face.
"Browning believed in these impulses. I'll admit I never have. I've always reasoned upon things, at least since I became a man. It has brought me little, and I'm much disposed to try the virtue of an impulse. I feel as certain that we can be happy together as I am of life, so I come back to my question, Are you free to marry me?"
She flushed again. "I have no other ties, if that is what you mean."
"That is what I mean precisely. I felt that you were free, like myself. I might ask Blakesly to vouch for me, but I prefer not. I ask for no one's opinion of you. Can't you trust to that insight of which women are supposed to be happily possessed?"
She smiled a little. "I never boasted of any divining power."
He came nearer. "Come, you and I have gone by rule and reason long enough. Here we have a magnificent impulse; let us follow. Don't ask me to wait, that would spoil it all; considerations would come in."
"Ought they not to come in?"
"No," he replied, and his low voice had the intensity of a trumpet. "If this magnificent moment passes by, this chance for a pure impulsive choice, it is lost forever. You know Browning makes much of such lost opportunities. Seeing you there with bent head and blowing hair, I would throw the world away to become the blade of grass you break. There, will that do?" He smiled.
"That speech should bring back youth to us both," she said.
"Right action now will," he quickly answered.
"But I must consider."
"Do not. Take the impulse."
"It may be wayward."
"We've both got beyond the wayward impulse. This impulse rises from the profound deeps. Come, the sun sinks, the insect voices thicken, a star passes behind the moon, and life hastens. Come into my life. Can't you trust me?"
She grew very white, but a look of exaltation came into her face. She lifted her clear, steady eyes to his. She reached her hand to his. "I will," she said, and they rose and stood together thus.
He uncovered his head. A sort of awe fell upon him. A splendid human life was put into his keeping.
"A pure choice," he said exultingly—"a choice untouched by considerations. It brings back the youth of the world."
The sun lay along the sward in level lines, the sky was full of clouds sailing in file, like mighty purple cranes in saffron seas of flame, the wind wavered among the leaves, and the insects sang in sudden ecstasy of life.
The two looked into each other's faces. They seemed to be transfigured, each to the other.
"You must not go back," he said. "They would not understand you nor me. We will never be so near a great happiness, a great holiday. It is holiday time. Let us go to the mountains."
She drew a sigh as if all her cares and duties dropped from her, then she smiled and a comprehending light sparkled in her eyes.
"Very well, to the clouds if you will."
[THE END OF LOVE IS LOVE OF LOVE.]
They lay on the cliff where the warm sun fell. Beneath them were rocks, lichen-spotted above, and orange and russet and pink beneath.
Around the headland the ocean ravened with roaring breath, flinging itself ceaselessly on the land, only to fall back with clutching snarl over the pebbles.
The smell of hot cedars was in the air. The distant ships drove by with huge sails bellying. Occasional crickets chirped faintly. Sandpipers skimmed the beach.
The man and woman were both gray. He lay staring at the sky. She sat with somber eyes fixed on the distant sea, whose crawling lines glittered in ever-changing designs on its purple sweep.
They were man and wife; both were older than their years. They were far past the land of youth and love.
"O wife!" he cried, "let us forget we are old; let us forget we are disillusioned of life; let us try to be boy and girl again."
The woman shivered with a powerful, vague emotion, but she did not look at him.
"O Esther, I'm tired of life!" the man went on. "I'm tired of my children. I'm tired of you. Do you know what I mean?"
The woman looked into his eyes a moment, and said in a low voice:
"No, Charles." But the man knew she meant yes. The touch of her hand grew cold.
"I'm tired of it all. I want to feel again the wonder and mystery of life. It's all gone. The love we have now is good and sweet and true; that of the old time was sweeter. It was so marvelous. I trembled when I kissed you, dear. I don't now. It had more of truth, of pure, unconscious passion, and less of habit. Oh, teach me to forget!"
He crept nearer to her, and laid his head in her lap. His face was knotted with his passion and pain.
The wife and mother sighed, and looked down at his hair, which was getting white.
"Well, Charles!" she said, and caressingly buried her fingers in his hair. "I'll try to forget for your sake."
He could not understand her. He did not try. He lay with closed eyes, tired, purposeless. The sweet sea wind touched his cheek, white with the indoor pallor of the desk worker. The sound of the sea exalted him. The beautiful clouds above him carried him back to boyhood. There were tears on his face as he looked up at her.
"I'm forgetting!" he said, with a smile of exultation.
But the woman looked away at the violet-shadowed sails, afar on the changeful purple of the sea, and her throat choked with pain.
THE END
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THE STORY OF THE WEST SERIES.
Edited by Ripley Hitchcock.
"There is a vast extent of territory lying between the Missouri River and the Pacific coast which has barely been skimmed over so far. That the conditions of life therein are undergoing changes little short of marvelous will be understood when one recalls the fact that the first white male child born in Kansas is still living there; and Kansas is by no means one of the newer States. Revolutionary indeed has been the upturning of the old condition of affairs, and little remains thereof, and less will remain as each year goes by, until presently there will be only tradition of the Sioux and Comanches, the cowboy life, the wild horse, and the antelope. Histories, many of them, have been written about the Western country alluded to, but most if not practically all by outsiders who knew not personally that life of kaleidoscopic allurement. But ere it shall have vanished forever we are likely to have truthful, complete, and charming portrayals of it produced by men who actually knew the life and have the power to describe it."—Henry Edward Rood, in the Mail and Express.
NOW READY.
THE STORY OF THE INDIAN. By George Bird Grinnell, author of "Pawnee Hero Stories," "Blackfoot Lodge Tales," etc. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.
"In every way worthy of an author who, as an authority upon the Western Indians, is second to none. A book full of color, abounding in observation, and remarkable in sustained interest, it is at the same time characterized by a grace of style which is rarely to be looked for in such a work, and which adds not a little to the charm of it."—London Daily Chronicle.
"Only an author qualified by personal experience could offer us a profitable study of a race so alien from our own as is the Indian in thought, feeling, and culture. Only long association with Indians can enable a white man measurably to comprehend their thoughts and enter into their feelings. Such association has been Mr. Grinnell's."—New York Sun.
THE STORY OF THE MINE. By Charles Howard Shinn. Illustrated. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.
"The author has written a book, not alone full of information, but replete with the true romance of the American mine."—New York Times.
"Few chapters of recent history are more fascinating than that which Mr. Shinn has told in 'The Story of the Mine.'"—The Outlook.
"Both a history and a romance.… Highly interesting, new, and thrilling."—Philadelphia Inquirer.
IN PREPARATION.
The Story of the Trapper. By Gilbert Parker.
The Story of the Cowboy. By E. Hough.
The Story of the Soldier. By Capt. J. McB. Stembel, U.S.A.
The Story of the Explorer.
The Story of the Railroad.
New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue.
D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS.
NOVELS BY MAARTEN MAARTENS.
THE GREATER GLORY. A Story of High Life.
By Maarten Maartens, author of "God's Fool," "Joost Avelingh," etc. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.
"Until the Appletons discovered the merits of Maarten Maartens, the foremost of Dutch novelists, it is doubtful if many American readers knew that there were Dutch novelists. His 'God's Fool' and 'Joost Avelingh' made for him an American reputation. To our mind this just published work of his is his best.… He is a master of epigram, an artist in description, a prophet in insight."—Boston Advertiser.
"It would take several columns to give any adequate idea of the superb way in which the Dutch novelist has developed his theme and wrought out one of the most impressive stories of the period.… It belongs to the small class of novels which one can not afford to neglect."—San Francisco Chronicle.
"Maarten Maartens stands head and shoulders above the average novelist of the day in intellectual subtlety and imaginative power."—Boston Beacon.
GOD'S FOOL. By Maarten Maartens. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.
"Throughout there is an epigrammatic force which would make palatable a less interesting story of human lives or one less deftly told."—London Saturday Review.
"Perfectly easy, graceful, humorous.… The author's skill in character-drawing is undeniable."—London Chronicle.
"A remarkable work."—New York Times.
"Maarten Maartens has secured a firm footing in the eddies of current literature.… Pathos deepens into tragedy in the thrilling story of 'God's Fool.'"—Philadelphia Ledger.
"Its preface alone stamps the author as one of the leading English novelists of to-day."—Boston Daily Advertiser.
"The story is wonderfully brilliant.… The interest never lags; the style is realistic and intense; and there is a constantly underlying current of subtle humor.… It is, in short, a book which no student of modern literature should fail to read."—Boston Times.
"A story of remarkable interest and point."—New York Observer.
JOOST AVELINGH. By Maarten Maartens. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.
"So unmistakably good as to induce the hope that an acquaintance with the Dutch literature of fiction may soon become more general among us."—London Morning Post.
"In scarcely any of the sensational novels of the day will the reader find more nature or more human nature."—London Standard.
"A novel of a very high type. At once strongly realistic and powerfully idealistic."—London Literary World.
"Full of local color and rich in quaint phraseology and suggestion."—London Telegraph.
"Maarten Maartens is a capital story-teller."—Pall Mall Gazette.
"Our English writers of fiction will have to look to their laurels."—Birmingham Daily Post.
New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue.
D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS.
RUDYARD KIPLING'S NEW BOOK.
THE SEVEN SEAS. A new volume of poems by Rudyard Kipling, author of "Many Inventions," "Barrack-Room Ballads," etc. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50; half calf, $3.00; morocco, $5.00.
"The spirit and method of Kipling's fresh and virile song have taken the English reading world.… When we turn to the larger portion of 'The Seven Seas,' how imaginative it is, how impassioned, how superbly rhythmic and sonorous!… The ring and diction of this verse add new elements to our song.… The true laureate of Greater Britain."—E. C. Stedman, in the Book Buyer.
"The most original poet who has appeared in his generation.… His is the lustiest voice now lifted in the world, the clearest, the bravest, with the fewest false notes in it.… I do not see why, in reading his book, we should not put ourselves in the presence of a great poet again, and consent to put off our mourning for the high ones lately dead."—W. D. Howells.
"The new poems of Mr. Rudyard Kipling have all the spirit and swing of their predecessors. Throughout they are instinct with the qualities which are essentially his, and which have made, and seem likely to keep, for him his position and wide popularity."—London Times.
"He has the very heart of movement, for the lack of which no metrical science could atone. He goes far because he can."—London Academy.
"'The Seven Seas' is the most remarkable book of verse that Mr. Kipling has given us. Here the human sympathy is broader and deeper, the patriotism heartier and fuller, the intellectual and spiritual insight keener, the command of the literary vehicle more complete and sure, than in any previous verse work by the author. The volume pulses with power—power often rough and reckless in expression, but invariably conveying the effect intended. There is scarcely a line which does not testify to the strong individuality of the writer."—London Globe.
"If a man holding this volume in his hands, with all its extravagance and its savage realism, is not aware that it is animated through and through with indubitable genius—then he must be too much the slave of the conventional and the ordinary to understand that Poetry metamorphoses herself in many diverse forms, and that its one sovereign and indefeasible justification is—truth."—London Daily Telegraph.
"'The Seven Seas' is packed with inspiration, with humor, with pathos, and with the old unequaled insight into the mind of the rank and file."—London Daily Chronicle.
"Mr. Kipling's 'The Seven Seas' is a distinct advance upon his characteristic lines. The surpassing strength, the almost violent originality, the glorious swish and swing of his lines—all are there in increased measure.… The book is a marvel of originality and genius—a brand-new landmark in the history of English letters."—Chicago Tribune.
"In 'The Seven Seas' are displayed all of Kipling's prodigious gifts.… Whoever reads 'The Seven Seas' will be vexed by the desire to read it again. The average charm of the gifts alone is irresistible."—Boston Journal.
New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue.
D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS.
YEKL. A Tale of the New York Ghetto. By A. Cahan. Uniform with "The Red Badge of Courage." 12mo. Cloth, $1.00.
"A new and striking tale; the charm, the verity, the literary quality of the book depend upon its study of character, its 'local color,' its revelation to Americans of a social state at their very doors of which they have known nothing."—New York Times.
"The story is a revelation to us. It is written in a spirited, breezy way, with an originality in the telling of which is quite unexpected. The dialect is striking in its truth to Nature."—Boston Courier.
"Is in all probability the only true picture we have yet had of that most densely populated spot on the face of the earth—the ghetto of the metropolis, rather the metropolis of the ghettos of the world."—New York Journal.
"A series of vivid pictures of a strange people.… The people and their social life the author depicts with marvelous success."—Boston Transcript.
"The reader will become deeply interested in Mr. Cahan's graphic presentation of ghetto life in New York."—Minneapolis Journal.
"A strong, quaint story."—Detroit Tribune.
"Every feature of the book bears the stamp of truth.… Undoubtedly 'Yekl' has never been excelled as a picture of the distinctive life of the New York ghetto."—Boston Herald.
THE SENTIMENTAL SEX. By Gertrude Warden. 12mo. Cloth, $1.00.
"The cleverest book by a woman that has been published for months.… Such books as 'The Sentimental Sex' are exemplars of a modern cult that will not be ignored."—New York Commercial Advertiser.
"There is a well-wrought mystery in the story and some surprises that preserve the reader's interest, and render it, when all is said, a story of considerable charm."—Boston Courier.
"An uncommonly knowing little book, which keeps a good grip on the reader up to the last page.… The author's method of handling the plot is adroit and original."—Rochester Herald.
"Miss Warden has worked out her contrasts very strikingly, and tells her story in a cleverly flippant way, which keeps the reader on the qui vive for the cynical but bright sayings she has interspersed."—Detroit Free Press.
"The story forms an admirable study. The style is graphic, the plot original and cleverly wrought out."—Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.
New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue.