SHE TOOK THE PISTOL FROM HIS RELAXED HOLD
"No, it's cotton; do you like it?"
"Very much. Oh, please don't get up—Zaidee wasn't calling you. I won't eat another mouthful unless you stay just where you are—please!"
"Well!" said Dosia, with laughing pleasure.
"Besides, I've been wanting to consult you about the Alexanders," he went on, leaning across the table toward her, intimately. "It's so beautiful to see them together, that to feel that they're in trouble distresses me beyond words. You're so near to them both, I thought that perhaps"—His face clouded partly. "Do you know anything about the real state of Mr. Alexander's affairs?"
Dosia shook her head. "No; only that he is very much worried over them."
"He wanted to sell the island; he sent me off on that business lately. He'll sell it sometime, of course, but I don't know how complicating the delay is. He's the kind of man you can't ask; you have to wait until he tells you. You can't make a person have confidence in you. Won't you please have some of these strawberries with me? Do!"
"No; you must eat them all," said Dosia, with charming authority, her arms before her on the table, elbow-sleeved, white and dimpled, as she regarded him. He seemed to take up all the corner, against the background of the green honeysuckle in the fresh morning light. With that smile upon his face, he seemed extraordinarily masculine and absorbing, yet appealing, too.
Dosia felt carried out of herself by a sudden heady resolution—or, rather, not a new resolution, but one that she had had in mind for a long, long time, before, oh, before she had even known who this man was. She had planned over and over again how she was to say those words, and now the time had come. She could not sit here with him in this new, sweet friendliness without saying them. She had imagined the scene in so many different ways! When she had gone over it by herself, her cheeks had flushed, her eyes had shone with the tears in them. The words as she spoke them had gone deeply, convincingly, from heart to heart—or perhaps, in an assumed, tremulous lightness, the meaning in her impulse had shown all the clearer to one who understood. For a year and a half the uttered thought had been the climax to which her dreams had led; it would have seemed a monstrous, impossible thing that it had not been reached before.
She began now, in a moment's pause, only to find, too late, that all warmth and naturalness had left her with the effort. Fluent dream-practice is only too apt to make one uncomfortably crude and conscious in real life.
"I want to thank you for being so kind to me the night of that accident on the train coming up from the South." Poor Dosia instantly felt committed to a mistake. Her eyes fell for a moment on his hand, as it lay upon the table, with a terribly disconcerting remembrance that hers had not only rested in it, but that in fancy she had more than once pillowed her cheek upon it, and, knowing that he had seen the look, she continued in desperation, with still increasing stiffness and formality: "I have always known, of course, that it was you. You must pardon me for not thanking you before."
The old unapproachable manner instantly incased him, as if in remembrance of something that hurt. "Oh, pray don't mention it," he said, with a formality that matched hers. "It was nothing but what anyone would have done—little enough, anyway."
What happened afterward she did not know, except that in a few minutes he had gone.
She watched him go off down the path with that swift, long, easy step; watched till the last vestige of the gray suit was out of sight—he had a fashion of wearing gray!—before clearing off the table. Then she went and sat on the back steps that led into the little garden, bright with the sunshine and a blaze of tulips at her feet....
She had never supposed that any girl could care for a man until he had shown that he cared for her—it was the unmaidenly, impossible thing. And now—how beautiful he was, how dear! A wistful smile trembled around her lips. All that had gone before with other men suddenly became as nothing, forgotten and out of mind, and she herself made clean by this purifying fire. Even if she never had anything more in her whole life, she had this—even if she never had anything more. Yet what had she? Nothing and less than nothing. If he had ever thought of her, if he had ever dreamed of her, if her soft, frightened hand trustfully clinging fast to his, only to be comforted by his touch, had been a sign and a symbol to him of some dearer trust and faith for him alone—if in some way, as she dimly visioned it, the thought had once been his, it had gone long ago. Every action showed it. And yet, and yet—so unconquerably does the soul speak that, though he might deny her attraction for him, she knew that she had it. It was something to which he might never give way, but it was unalterably there—as it was unalterably there with her. All that year at home, when she believed she had not been thinking of him, she really had been thinking of him. We learn to know each other sometimes in long absences. She began to perceive in him now a humility and a pride strangely at variance with each other and both equally at variance with the bright assurance of his outer manner. He gave to every one; he would work early and late for others, in his yearning sympathy and affection: yet he himself, from the very intenseness of his desire for it, stood aloof, and drew back from the insistence of any claim for himself. They might meet a hundred times and grow no closer; they might grow farther and farther away.
Dosia felt that other women must have loved him—how could they have helped it? She had a pang of sorrow for them—for herself it made no difference. If she had pain for all her life afterward, she was glad at this moment that he was worthy to be loved; she need never be ashamed of loving him—he was "good." The word seemed to contain some beautiful comfort and uplifting. No matter what experience he had passed through in his struggle with the world, he had held some simple, honorable, clean quality intact. The Dosia who must always have some heart-warm dream to live by had it now; for all her life she could love him, pray for him. She had always thought that to love was to be happy; now she was to love and be unhappy—yet she would not have it otherwise.
So slight, so young, so lightly dealt with, Dosia had the pathetically clear insight and the power that comes to those who see, not themselves alone, their own desires and hopes, but the universe in which they stand, and view their acts and thoughts in relation to it. She must see Truth, "and be glad, even if it hurt."
The sunshine fell upon her in the garden; she was bathed in it. Whether she had nights of straining, bitter wakefulness and days of heartache afterward, this joy of loving was enough for her to-day—the joy of loving him. She saw in that lovely, brooding thought of him what that first meeting had taught of his character, and molded in with it her knowledge of him now, to make the real man far more imperfect, though far dearer. Yet, if he ever loved her as she loved him, part of that for which she had always sought love would have to be foregone—she could never come to him, as she had fondly dreamed of doing, and pour out to him all those hopes and fears, those struggles and mistakes and trials and indignities, the shame and the penitence that had been hers. She could never talk of Lawson—her past must be forever unshriven and uncomforted. Bailey Girard would be the last man on earth to whom she could bare her heart in confession; these were the things that touched him on the raw. He "hated the sound of Lawson's name." How many times had George Sutton's face blotted out hers? If he knew that! She must forever be unshriven. There would be things also, perhaps, that she could not bear to hear! The eternal hurt of love, that it never can be truly one with the beloved, touched her with its sadness, and then slipped away in the thought of him now—not the man who was just to help and protect her with his love, but the man whom she longed to help also. His pleased eyes, his lips, the way his hair fell over his forehead—She thought of him with the fond dream-passion of the maiden, that is often the shyest thing on earth, ready to veil itself and turn and elude and hide at the first chance that it may be revealed.
"Dosia! Dosia, where are you?"
Suddenly she saw that the sunshine had faded out, the sky had grown gray, a chill wind had sprung up. All the trouble, all the stress of the world, seemed to encompass her with that tone in the voice of Lois.