He bent above her, glowing and passionate and daring. She trembled again, neither drew away, nor surrendered herself to the waiting grasp.
“I do not know,” she answered him, the globy tears suffusing her eyes till each one shone like the great star that hung its blue lamp in the zenith that night when they were lost upon the mountain. “Perhaps I cannot read my heart; but does a woman really love that which is less strong than herself? I must lean upon my husband, not he on me.”
“Am I so weak?” asked Reymund, with some bitterness, and a quiver on his lip. “Consider. If your own nature had been invested with a coarser flesh, left out thereby to coarser temptations,—since passions are things of the flesh,—what would have come of it? Then, if thrown in the midst of the revel, loving the flash of merriment, the excitement of chance, and wine and dice were going round—But, no! such speech is profanity. Yet, Orient, under all habit, under all action, I think there is that in my soul akin to yours, made to rule it and absorb it, hidden by the body; but there,—made to be loved by you, as you, all of you, flaws and beauties, are loved by me!”
“If I could only see your soul,” said Orient, half yielding, contrite, yet uncertain.
“One day perhaps you will,” answered Reymund, his repeater giving the hour to his finger-pressure. “Now I must go.”
He rose, stooped again and touched her smooth, cold forehead with his mouth. The touch sent the blood back to his heart. “With time,” he murmured. “O, with time! she shall yet—she shall! Good by,—till Saturday again at five o’clock!” and then was gone.
All that week Reymund walked through his work with an absent mind, as if his spirit had half left his body, disengaging itself from the automaton of bone and muscle, as one might say; abstracted and lost in his thoughts, his wishes, his absolute resolutions. Old haunts had no attraction for him, old faces brought him no satisfaction, he sought no pleasure but such as was to be found on the back of that horse possessed by the spirit of Satan. And so he existed till the sunrise of Saturday, when, before it should be quite time for the train, he had the horse brought round for a gallop, as if he would ride the wind and tame the whirlwind.
In the mean time Orient pursued her way in what, for her, was perturbation. There seemed to be a riddle in these days beyond her reading. Penitent over her pride in presuming herself to be stronger than her lover, conscious that she could not dispense with him, yet full as sure that she felt no perfect passion for him, there was nothing to do but marvel what it meant. “I am drawn to him,” she said to herself. “Ah, I know that well enough! But have I any right to be? If there were something to confirm me! If I thought the good and beautiful part were any abiding principle, were anything but love of me! If I could only see his soul!”
She was walking that Saturday afternoon in the woods that could be seen from her garden across the meadows. It was a clear October afternoon, the red leaves were dropping round her and leaving the bright blue sky more bare with every gentle gust that brought them to her feet; a bracing day of early autumn, when the wind fainted with the sweet freight of balsam from the pines, and all things only prophesied hope and lightsomeness. In spite of this, Orient could not tell why she had a constant sensation of gray and misty horizons, of marshy air and cold sea-wind all day; as she walked now, the fitful breeze in the tree-tops seemed the muffled murmur of waves on the distant beach, and once in a while she shivered as if a cold foam-wreath were flying by her face. She thought at first that all this damp and drear sensation was some sympathy with Reymund, now travelling along the sea-coast on his way to her. “But what absurdity!” she said. “Where the track lies, the sky is as blue as this one; the wind is scarcely more chilly there than here. Reymund is rolling along, comfortable among his cushions and books; and not a naked spirit all abroad in the sea-scented air!”
She went home on the causeway that was laid along the meadows,—hurrying a little, for she judged by the sinking sun that it must be nearly time for the arrival of the train. As she went, she heard her name called.