The Bird in the Box

by Mary M. Mears

"Take me down the path," she commanded. "Oh, how heavenly this air is!—and the sea! Do you know, Simon, illness gives one a new pair of eyes?"

Emily Short looked after the couple uneasily. She had said what she could to Simon to prevent his carrying out his absurd scheme relative to St. Ives; she had objected as strongly as she dared on various pretexts. But Simon, bent on making clear to Rachel how completely he renounced his former attitude toward the inventor, had turned a deaf ear. Now Emily imagined that he was announcing the step he had taken, for from where she stood, she saw Rachel lift her head with a swift, frightened air. Then it slowly sank as though a weight had forced it to her breast.

Standing in the keen sunlight, a little, lean, homely figure with a worn face, Emily sighed. She herself had never known love, yet she sighed and knotted her fingers tightly together beneath her apron.

It was evident that Rachel did not wish to go in the direction of the gardener's cottage, for they turned into another path. Half an hour later when she knew Simon had left his wife in order to catch his train for the city, Emily went in search of the invalid. She found her drawn up in the shelter of a small, half-ruinous summer-house overrun with vines which stood at one corner of the grounds. As Emily approached, she saw Rachel crane forward, with her hands gripping the arms of the wheeled chair. A wonderful unrestrained tenderness beamed in her face.

Passing not twenty feet away and visible through the intricacies of the wall of leaves was Emil St. Ives. The stuff of his shirt rippled in the breeze and the material clung to his muscular shoulders; his hair was in a tousle, his lips, surrounded by their curling beard, emitted a gay shrillness of sound; he was whistling as a bird sings. Abruptly Rachel dropped back in the chair. Without looking at Emily, she signified a desire to return to the house.

Emily pushed the chair into the sunlight and the little group crept up the path; while, all unconscious, Emil went leaping down the sands to bathe in the sea.

During her illness, Rachel had been besieged by feverish thoughts. Not a phase of the situation but she had gone over innumerable times. Finally her resolution was taken: she would see Emil no more. The decision was an arduous one and she raged to make it. Love for one man, overmastering love, as Nature wills it, was in conflict with unswerving loyalty to another; and this latter feeling likewise had its roots in the very foundation of her character, so that her woman's heart had been for a season a disputed field, and the conflict had protracted her illness.

But when she rose at last, pitiful tender, heroic,—all woman in that she dreamed she had immolated the feeling that threatened the peace of her husband—lo, the situation awaiting her put her plans to confusion. Her husband's unexpected move had made her course a difficult if not an impossible one.

For more than three weeks by employing every stratagem, she succeeded in avoiding the inventor, and when the housemaid brought word, as she did on several occasions, that both Emil and Annie had come over to call on her, she pleaded weariness and refused to see them. But as her strength returned, this excuse failed, and she spent many hours with Emily, who had been persuaded to remain and carry on her trade of toy-making in an unused room of the house. Had Simon permitted it, Rachel would have returned to the city, but both her husband and the doctor opposed the move on the ground of her recent illness.

It was a state of things which could not endure.