“Will you let me help you find it, and arrange your affairs?”
“Nothing could be happier for me—if you would.”
“We’ll go back to Auckland to-night, and start out looking from there.”
Mainly they followed the shore during their days of search; but sometimes they found woods and little towns. There was no coming to the end of her; she put on fresh perfections every day, and there were moments in which he was meshed in his own stupidity for not seeing the splendour of her at the first moment. He became possessed of a healthful wonder about women—how men like himself wait for years for some companion-soul, finally believing her to be in the sky, only to find that the nearest was waiting all the time. The world is so full of illusions, and a man’s mind is darkest when it seems most clear.
The days were like entering one walled garden after another, always her spirit vanishing at the far gate. Beside him was a strong frail comrade, loving the water and air and sky and wood, as only a natural woman can love them—her eyes shining softly, her lips parted and red as the sleeping child’s. He was struck with the miracle of her mouth’s freshness. It was like the mouth of a city-bred woman, a woman who had forced her way for years through the difficult passages of a man’s world, who had met the fighting of the open, and the heavier-line fighting of solitude.... Here Bellair’s diffidence intervened. Moreover, it was a mouth that could say unerring things.
“She is a fine weave,” he would say, after the partings at night.
She held through every test. The enthralling advance guard never failed—that winged immortal something ahead. Often in some little inn or in the hotel at Auckland during the nights, he found himself in rebellion because he could not go to her. Always in the open boat he had awakened to find her there, and on the night that Fleury passed, she had asked to have him within call—but those times were gone. The world had intervened that little bit.... There was one summer day and a bit of forest to enter, a moment surpassing all. Her arms and fingers, her eyes and breast were all fused with emotions. She gave him back his boyhood that afternoon in a solemn wordless ceremony, but all his diffidence of boyhood came with it.
The woods were full of fairies to her; there were meanings for her eyes in the drift of the wind over the brown pools. She caught the woodland whispers, was a part of sweet, low vibrations of the air.... Her eyes had come up to his, fearless and tender; yet for the life of him, he could not have been sure that they wanted anything he could give. For the first time he marvelled now at the genius of self-protection which women have put on, instinct by instinct, throughout all this age of man, this age of muscle and brain, in which the driving spirit of it all has no voice.... There was one branch above her that was like hawthorn, and full of buds. The little Inverness cape that she wore was tossed back, and her arms were held up to the branches.... Strangely that instant he thought of her story—the coming of The Guest—the thought she had held all the years, the strange restless beauty of its ideal—the mothering beauty of it that seemed to him now endless in power. Such a mystery came to him from her arms—as if she were holding them up to receive perfection, some great spiritual gift.... It was startlingly native to her, this expectancy—the pure receptivity of it, and the thought of beauty in her mind. A woman could command heaven with that gesture, he thought, and call to earth an archangel—if her ideal were pure enough.
A sudden gust of love came over him for her child. He thought he had loved it before, but it was startling now, filling him, turning his steps back toward the place where it lay....
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