CHAPTER X
IN WHICH A KISS IS GIVEN AND REGRETTED
Unconscious of the grim humour that lurked in the fact of their having selected it as a place to foregather, Emil and Rachel continued to meet at the old Burying Point. No other lovers came there, and as deaths were infrequent in Old Harbour and a funeral pageant an event, they were practically secure from interruption. There, where the wind bent the grass above the graves with a sound that struck pleasantly on the ear and the insect world was all abroad on busy wings, they found the isolation their spirits craved. The place was, at most, but a setting for their two selves, for their sweet, intoxicating emotions.
Emil would look at Rachel pensively, almost appealingly. She stirred in him depths of tenderness and often he would have been tempted into some indiscretion had not her Arcadian innocence disconcerted him. With a shrug of the shoulders and a sigh, he would turn away from her as if offended at something. Though neither of them guessed it, what raised the level of the situation and decreased its dangers, was the unflagging interest she exhibited in his work. A woman's interest in his achievement is always fruitful for a man. For the exuberant and egotistic inventor, it was as fuel to flame. It immensely increased his powers.
Had anyone, prompted by curiosity, troubled himself to spy on the pair, he would have discovered an enthusiastic young fellow ranting on matters scientific and a slip of a girl sitting nearby with delight and despair depicted on her mobile countenance. The delight, he would have remarked, was a fluctuating emotion; the despair in danger of becoming a lasting one.
The two had been meeting in this way for upwards of three weeks and the lithographic sheets and press were all but ready for triumphant shipment, when Rachel's patience came unexpectedly to an end. Her change of front was due directly to the weather. The temperature of Pemoquod on a particular afternoon in late August made the wearing of the muslin dress seem out of the question, for the day, while bright, was distinctly chilly and by the time she quitted the cemetery according to all reasonable calculations, the air would be cold. She therefore made no change in her dress at all, but in her every-day frock, with an old drab silk shawl, which had belonged to her mother, over her shoulders and a book from the circulating library under her arm, she took her way to Old Harbour, her prospects for a pleasant interview considerably damaged. In this dull attire she would forego Emil's lightning glances of pleasure, "For he might as well look at a rock or a stump," she told herself disconsolately, "as look at me the way I am to-day."
The weather beside the sea is nothing if not capricious, and by the time she reached the cemetery, the air had become warm. It was between four and five o'clock and the sun was sending long level shafts between the graves, as if looking for something, when Rachel took her accustomed place on the flat-topped tomb and let the shawl slip down her back till it lay about her in a semicircle of rippling folds.
"Just my bad luck!" she soliloquized. "It's warm enough for a gauze dress if one had such a thing. But I'd like to know what's the sense of all this?" she resumed indignantly. "It isn't fair that he should judge me by my clothes entirely and I'll not have it. I've a mind as well as he!"
Now there was no evidence that Emil had judged her as lacking this particular endowment, but she was in no mood to adhere closely to facts. She began turning the pages of her book at random. She was engaged in reading, with most imperfect attention it must be confessed, a glowing description of the sphinx, when he arrived.
From a distance he spied her and she appeared to him to light up with her grace the whole desolate place. For eight hours he had devoted himself solely to work; now like one who receives but his just reward, he drew near with a jovial smile on his lips. Rachel, though she was conscious of his approach in every fibre of her being, was all for concealing the fact. Partly through resentment, partly through coquetry, she kept her eyes to her page. Suddenly Emil halted. Of a truth, there was material enough in the picture she made, perched there on the old table-tomb, for twenty conquests.
Dressed in the famous muslin, the rarest quality of her beauty, a certain lurking mystery, was lost amid furbelows which simply emphasized her youth. Now clothed in a sober little frock that appeared to be as much part of her as its smooth bark is part of a sapling, there was nothing to divert attention from her actual self. There she sat with her book open on her lap, a kind of sibyl, while about her hummed and buzzed and fluttered tribes of nimble-bodied insects. Great blundering bees pilfered rude kisses from the willing lips of some pink phlox swaying at her knee, a butterfly came to rest on the tomb and even crawled with curious, quivering antennae toward the hand outspread on the stone. A thrush poured out its heart from a little whip of a tree over her head. In the midst of this place of death, she spoke compellingly of life.