Her eyes came to his face wistfully. He held the keys of that beyond.... Something had snapped in his well-ordered mechanism, and he was going, going, drifting will-lessly into feeling and longing. And the next moment he held her, looking into a face that burned with love. There were no words. Life had been too strong for his little plans; it had mocked him and driven him passionward, like a bit of straw caught in a gale. The hours swam on unheeded, while they rested there face to face. Then came the going home across the afternoon woods; she silent and content, he trying to account for himself. When he had speculated about such matters, he had seen himself discussing, quite properly, the serious affairs of life with some tall girl of distinguished carriage, some one of the many young women whose acquaintance had made up his Boston parties. He had expected that their conversation would grow more serious as this intimacy deepened, and that at last, having found themselves of one accord on the sober ideals of life, he should broach to her this final proposition involving both their lives. He had half imagined such a situation with several fine young women; the scene had always been played out in a drawing-room filled with bric-à-brac and heavy hangings, he in his long black afternoon coat. There had been a touch of solemnity in it, a weighty sense of responsibility that would have made their first kiss a little sepulchral.
Now, this! Her hand touched his; his mind left these bizarre images, and suddenly it seemed that life was one wilderness of woods in the late afternoon sun, down which he was fated to wander in a lethargic dream. One dominant feeling of tenderness; one indifference to the baying of reason—merely love, and the soft, warm earth, and the greenness of living things, and the woman whose dress brushed his arm. Ah! that was sweet and precious at any price.
VIII
He had put something in motion on that languid July day, and suddenly he was whirled along in a stream of consequences. There was an interview with Mr. Ellwell, a sudden opening of the Ellwell family arms, and he was one of them—not much to his relish. Ruby Ellwell brought out her engagement to Bradley, the young stock broker her father had chummed with. The Four Corners renewed its worldly life in a garden-party, at which both engagements were announced. Thornton had to stand in line with his new brother-in-law, and for all this disagreeable business, the sole consolation was the happiness the woman he loved found in it. For her it was a rehabilitation of the family, the first dawn of those better times she had looked for all these years.
He remembered for all his lifetime how his father had met her; how he had walked across the lawn, old, and gray, and aloof, and had taken both her hands. He had smiled at her tenderly, as if she were a little girl, much as he had smiled years before at Jarvis's mother. Then he had kissed her on both cheeks, and had stood patting her hands in a gentle caress. Later he had slipped away in the same quiet abstracted manner. For the rest of the day Jarvis Thornton had been a little sad, as well as bored, without knowing exactly why.
They had planned a simple wedding for September; they would walk to the village church, the old white box of a meeting-house where the first Roper Ellwell had led his congregation. Martinson, Thornton's youthful hero at the Camberton Theological School, would meet them in his episcopal robes on the little green in front of the church, and then the party, not more than a dozen, could walk together into the bare old building, and in the solemn quiet of the country noon complete the marriage. A quiet dinner, and then away from the Four Corners.
But it could not be so. The handsome Ruby wished to have a "function," some of the conventional excitements of this entertainment. The two sisters must be married together; a special train must come from Boston; a grand reunion would be held of all the old family friends who had shaken their heads over the Ellwell misfortunes. So the two quieter souls yielded, and the marriage left a bad taste in the young bridegroom's cup of joy.
Almost at once they had gone abroad to Berlin, where Thornton proposed to work for an indefinite time. It seemed to him that he should accomplish more than one object, by carrying on his work in Europe; he could insensibly divide himself and his wife from the Ellwell connection. All went sweetly for his first months; he had begun to regard his marriage as an idyl slipped in between pages of prose. But when their child was coming, his wife grew restless; she must go home, he saw; it was natural that she should long to return to her mother at such a time.
So back to Boston they had gone, Thornton contenting himself with the reflection that he could go ahead in Boston almost as well as in Europe; that fortunately he was not tied by money wants, and that the Camberton laboratories were always open to him. When the little daughter came he schemed a new move; he was offered a headship of a laboratory somewhere in the middle West. He began to feel the force of his father's remarks about transplanting.