But the plum that tumbles into our lap without the asking is seldom as fine as the fruit we climb for, strain for, spend hours in thirsting after. Three weeks—and this fierce agitation of the senses had subsided. It was an excitement, a fever, which at the time had been augmented by so many equivocal influences; by the noise of the presses which had seemed to keep time to his pulses, by the gleam of the girl's jewels, by the softness of her attire, by the fact, more than all else, that she was his chief's daughter.
A whiff of sea air and Emil looked back on the affair with utter weariness. Without a conscience, he was accustomed to follow simply the dictates of his own nature. The memory of the girl irked him, therefore with heavy sighs like a weary horse, he destroyed her letters. However, the phantom of love had passed very close, and it was not in vain that all the electric currents of his being had been set in motion. He was awake now to another world than that in which he had hitherto dwelt,—awake, with his great inquisitive eyes, attentive.
It was at this juncture that Rachel Beckett dawned on his horizon. When she came round the rock leading the cow, a novel sensation convulsed that strange uncultivated heart of his. A man's heart is a garden in which, before the coming of death, many flowers of emotion bloom; and the history of these flowers is the history of his life.
CHAPTER VIII
IN THE CAUSE OF SCIENCE
Since the night of Emil's departure, which had brought such terror to her heart, a divine serenity had fallen upon Mrs. St. Ives. His frequent letters, filled with the vitality of his genius and all radiant with love, were to her a second baptism of youth. Palpitating with enthusiasm, she carried them to her room where she read and reread them. Sometimes she wept over them, and for days after the receipt of one, she went about with an expression of utter peace. But when, for some reason, a letter failed to arrive, then in that house far removed from the scenes among which he dwelt, she would clasp her hands in silent agony, she would be given over to anxiety, glancing about her, more nervous than any bird; she would rebuke the teasing grandchildren and fiercely demand the letter which, she imagined, her daughter-in-law kept from her. Then became evident in her no longer the triumph of youth but the tragedy of age.
Without doing anything to deserve her special affection, both Edgar and his wife were jealous of her absorbing love for Emil. They ridiculed this worship. And no one except the singular object of her devotion comprehended the extent of her suffering. Vague and unsatisfactory as he was in all other relations, where she was concerned he was gifted with an insight that might have done credit to a woman. Full well he comprehended that she was living her life in his, and, for that reason, he strove to make it gorgeous for her. Poor devil of an inventor, with his toes all but through his boots and his head in the clouds! He would often brood over her situation with tears in his eyes. He cherished the hope of one day having her with him, and, in the event of her coming, planned like a lover, to greet her royally. But once plunged in his work, it must be confessed that for days together he incontinently forgot all about her. Then, perhaps, a feeble scrawl would arrive, announcing a headache or some trifling woman's worry, and contrition would be rampant in him. Rousing himself, he would write her one of his long, characteristic letters, fairly pouring out his life on the page.
As may be conjectured, his being sent to Old Harbour to rest and, incidentally, to add the finishing touches to the metal plate and cylinder press, was subject matter for a glowing epistle, which brought to the mother a wealth of happiness and sent her to bed night after night with touching prayers of gratitude on her lips. Once settled in the hotel at Old Harbour, however, Emil abandoned the work in hand and fell to making a depth indicator. How think of anything else with the sea out there waiting to be plumbed? In vain Annie Lawless hinted that her father was anxious to install the press and counselled haste, as has been related, Emil destroyed her letters and went feverishly forward with his self-appointed task.
On the afternoon of the day of his meeting with Rachel he was in fine feather. The presence of the girl and the prospect of testing his invention filled him with animation. At moments, as he tinkered at the boat's rim, he whistled so shrilly that the sea gulls paused in their wheeling to listen; and this complicated energy, this unusual virility, was as much a tribute to her who sat in the grey nest of boulders, as a testimony of interest in the work. And so she understood it.
With her slight figure relieved against the skyline, she waited for him to complete his preparations. Now and then her eyes travelled, with unerring directness, to the mound of sand where he had that morning buried the letter. What did those hard-packed grains of sand conceal? Instinctively she played with the question and its import sat deep in her eye. As if by a stroke of art, she had placed herself in direct line with the figure-head, so that no one glancing that way could fail to be struck by the dissimilarity between image and maid. Mobility and an ardent capacity for a rich and varied existence were written all over her; that something which is the potency of womanhood itself seemed to have awakened suddenly from the torpor of youth in that little heart and to have come abroad for the first time experimentally. There she sat, and whenever he turned his head, he was struck anew with her, so that he must needs look again and yet again.