Walda: A Novel

by Mary Holland Kinkaid

It is a human trait to desire what is beyond one’s reach, and Everett acknowledged to himself that part of the charm which the girl of the colony cast upon him was due to her elusiveness and to her ignorance of all that pertained to what were the every-day experiences of ordinary women. She was the one woman that he might claim unsullied and untouched by love for any other man, and yet with a sudden sensation of shame he realized that he was presumptuous to feel himself entitled to a love that would, indeed, be sent from heaven.

Everett took from his pocket some of the letters that he had received during the week. All of them told of events that formerly had interested him. The letters took him back to his own place in the broad life of America. He reasoned with himself that he might leave Zanah within a week. He would go away without striving further to probe the mysterious nature of the prophetess of Zanah, and he would remember his sojourn in the colony as one of the many pleasant incidents in his varied life. Having settled the question to his own satisfaction, he experienced a sensation of relief. He strolled back to the village. Entering the inn, he found Diedrich Werther smoking a pipe behind the dog-eared register, which had not recorded a name since his own had been written there. He asked some questions about the hunting, and the innkeeper told him of a distant pond where ducks were plentiful. Everett announced that he meant to take his gun out early the next morning, and he asked whether Hans Peter might accompany him. Incidentally he dropped the remark that he expected to leave the colony within a few days. Then he borrowed the old-fashioned ink-horn and a quill-pen, which he took to one of the tables in a far corner of the main room of the inn. Selecting a dozen sheets of yellow paper from Diedrich Werther’s store of stationery, he began to write letters to the friends he had almost forgotten for a fortnight.

There was a woman in Newport to whom he had meant to send a note. He thought of her amusement when she would receive a sample of Diedrich Werther’s yellow stationery. He wrote the date line, and then he found it difficult to frame a graceful and conventional greeting to one whom he had quite forgotten for many days. He leaned back in his chair and tried to imagine how this woman and Walda would appear if he saw them together. The one was a typical product of American civilization, that educates its women broadly, giving them the liberty to mingle freely with the greatest of many lands—a woman born to wealth and station, one who knew how to value her extraordinary advantages, and how to make the most of them. She was still young, but she had learned much of the world, for she had travelled widely and had read books of every class. She had few illusions. He remembered that her broad grasp of life had sometimes shocked him. She had studied much of philosophy, and had but desultory connection with a fashionable church. She was witty, brilliant, fascinating. She was an aristocrat, in the best sense of the word. Her gowns were artistic masterpieces. A picture of her as he had seen her at an Easter ball came back to him. He recalled the shimmering satin and the frost of lace that set off her imperious beauty. That night he had been almost persuaded that she was the one woman in the world. For a moment he quite forgot Zanah. He was impatient to go back to the gay world that held so much of beauty and brightness. It was a strange vagary, this sojourn in the colony. He dipped the quill-pen into the ink-horn again. He drew the ugly sheet of yellow paper towards him, and then he heard the heavy step of Mother Werther as she hastened across the great kitchen to the porch.

“Walda, where art thou going?” she said.

Before he knew what he was doing, Everett had dropped his pen and sauntered out-of-doors into the little square where Walda had paused at the well. She was giving a cup of water to a child, and at first she did not see Everett. She was standing so that he could see only her profile, and its purity of outline made him say to himself that he had never beheld a face so clear-cut. The delicate line of the lips, which were always firmly closed, denoted a strength of character that the chin rather contradicted in its full curve. He went to her, and, taking the cup from her hand, hung it in its accustomed place.

“I am glad to have met you, Walda,” he said, with a little hesitation as he spoke her name, “for I am thinking of going away this week—”

The girl gave him a startled look.

“Nay, tell me not that, Stephen Everett,” she answered. “Truly, thou dost not mean thou wilt leave Zanah before the Untersuchung?”

“Surely, you do not care whether I go or stay?” he said.

The prophetess of Zanah knew no arts of coquetry. She did not understand the significance of his words, and she looked into his face with clear, untroubled eyes.