She drew his head to her. She was his mother and yearned, and yet was afraid, also. The man’s tired eyes looked into her eyes. He, too, had suffered in his male way as she had suffered. About his face there was a look, wistful and young and tender, such as it had been in the past when she had loved him passionately. She kissed his lips, thus wiping away his self-contempt.
“Do you remember, Olaf?” she whispered. “Do you remember the night you carried me down the mountain, when the horse stumbled on the trail and you were afraid to trust him again? Your arms were a shield about my body. I want them now, my husband!”
He saw that black night, the slipping sand and rocks beneath his feet, the precious body in his arms, the white face upturned to his. When he could go no farther safely, they had camped among the rocks under a scrawny fir. He had built a wind screen of brush against a boulder, and they had crawled within. There he had held her locked in his arms the whole night that she might rest while he watched and loved....
Other memories of their ardent years crowded this one. First she had taken the journeys with him, going to the mines, living in the camps. Then she had waited for him here at home, where he had placed her among her old friends, in this pleasant country house. He was often away, but he worked the more fiercely to get back to her. Once he had come wilfully, without warning, from British Columbia, three thousand six hundred miles, without a pause, hurled on his course by an irresistible desire to know that his joy was real, to see that she lived on the earth still and was his. He had arrived after dinner, and found her dressed to go out,—tall, white, beautiful,—more wonderful than in the camp he had dreamed she was. When she looked up and saw him,—the unexpected, welcome one,—she had given a glad cry, and lifted her arms and face to his, careless of the maid, her gown, his travel-stained self....
“I had two or three days, and I thought I would come on,” he had said, repaid already in good fact....
She had her memories, too. Her woman’s life was woven with the little intimacies of the seven married years. Their life together, their passion and joy,—it blazed before her in the stillness. She had thought it was to go on like that always, for many years, fading perchance when they were old into something gentler, less abundant. Now, suddenly, in the space of a few days, she was brought to see that such joy had a term set within her own experience. It was past!
“We have loved so much,” she murmured. “We have been so happy. That is over now.”
He nodded, bringing her hands to his lips. He knew what she meant. The old joy, the careless pleasure of their early selves, had gone under the shadow. Something out of them had been created in those hours of freedom, which was now asserting its control over them,—something from the past, unknown to them, gathered up and expressed through them. They were now to be less, and this which had come out of them was to be more. Sorrow or satisfaction, it was all one,—it was to be met and borne with. Youth had passed; selfish joy had been blown away—there remained their child.
“Little Oscar,” the mother murmured. “We must do what we can for him, mustn’t we?”
“All that can be done!” he exclaimed.