“I know it. I don’t want to be helped. I drift. I have no will to struggle. She plays with me like a cat with a mouse. I do not know what I am about half the time. I will take a double dose of morphine some night. I wonder if she would cry if she saw me dead. Men have done such things with less provocation; men of my temperament, too. Would you be sorry, Mystic?”
She stretched out her hands to take his hand in both hers: “Don’t talk so,” she said brokenly. “You know you do not mean it; why can’t you be brave and good? I didn’t know that men were so weak.”
“I am weak—I have strayed, I have wandered away—but I can go back.”
Long afterward she remembered these words; they, with his last “good-by, Mystic,” were all that she cared to remember among all the words that he had ever spoken to her.
She did not speak; she moved her fingers caressingly over his hand, thinking how pliant and feminine, how characteristic, it was.
“I know a woman’s heart,” he ran on lightly; “she is not a sacred mystery to me, as the fellows say in books. I dissected an old negro woman’s heart once; she died of enlargement of the heart, so that it was as much a study as the largest heart of her kind. Sue is going out to-night with Towne and his mother—it’s a pity that he wouldn’t step in now—she might let us all have a fair fight, and old Gesner, too, with his simpering voice! She would take Gesner only he doesn’t propose. ‘Thirty days hath September.’ I wish it had thirty thousand. When I was a youngster, and got a beating for not learning that, I little thought that one day I would learn it and count the days every night. Oh, that rare and radiant first of October! Do you know,” bending forward and lowering his tone, “that she is more than half inclined to throw him over?”
“She is never more than half inclined to do anything,” answered Tessa indignantly. “I wish that he were here to keep her out of mischief. Why do you stay so much with her? Surely you have business enough to keep you out of her presence.”
He laughed excitedly. “Keep a starving man away from bread when he has only to stretch out his hand and snatch it.”
“You have found that your doll is stuffed with sawdust, can’t you toss it aside?”
“I love sawdust,” he answered, comically.