“Oh, but you don’t have to.”
“I have always had much to do. I must have work now.”
She had no realisation of property; material poverty was a part of her temperament. She was superbly well, and could only remain so by the expenditure of ample energy. Bellair saw the Martha soul, the mother of men, a breadgiver. He thought of the passion of men for the vine-women, and of the clinging sons they bear.... He lingered over a ship, and another. They toiled together like two peasants in the open, the baby sitting in the sun, the house ashine within. She would have only the simple things. She loved fine textures, but only of the lasting fabrics in woods and wares. She was content to carry water and trim lamps. She loved the stones and the low open fires. Often she turned away seaward, as he had seen her from the Jade’s rail, and from the bow seat of the open boat. Once in the garden, he made the child laugh, to bring back her eyes, and she said:
“I love it so here, but I don’t want to love it, so that it would hurt terribly, if it were taken away.”
This was but one side. There were other moments, in which Bessie and New York and all that he and the Faraway Woman had been, seemed fused into a ball of mist whirling away, and they stood together, man and woman, touching sanity at last in a world of power and glory. It was not then a time for words.... Once their hands went out together, and holding for a moment, Bellair had the strange sense of the self sinking from him. He could not feel his hand or any part of his being—as if it were a part of her, two creatures blent into one, and an indescribable rush of something different than physical vitality.
And once sitting with her under the lamp in the evening, he drew again that sense of peace that had come in the queer darkness on the deck of the Jade. It had to do with the mountains—as if they had finished with the valleys, and were ascending together in the strong light of the mountains.
And then there was passion—that plain, straight earth drive. Bellair was strange about this with the Faraway Woman. This passion was like the return of an old hunting companion, so natural in the wilds, but strange and out of place in his newly-ordered life. It had come from the Unknowable, and he had supposed it lost in that wilderness. It dismayed him that she should call it forth, but she called from him everything day by day, and no day the same. He had lost much of the old, but not that passion. And the nature of it which she called had a bewildering beauty.... But there was much to keep the old native of the wilds from really entering. The world would have called Bellair’s idealism naïve; and there was something of Fleury in the very solution of their lives—not a finger-print of passion in all that relation. There was the Unfinished Story of Ogla’s Guest. Finally there was the Gleam.
Life was very full and rare to Bellair, but there seemed always a new ship in the harbour flying Blue Peter for California.... In the main, they forgot themselves, as unwatched man and woman, slept under the same roof and had their food together; at least, Bellair forgot it for hours at a time. It seemed the very nature of life; the purity of it all so obvious.... One afternoon he came up from the city in a cool south wind; a grey afternoon, the sunset watery and lemon-hued. He was thinking of the ship that would float Blue Peter to-morrow. The homely scent of damp bark burning quickened his senses, as he crossed the yard, and he heard her singing to the child. Somehow the woodsmoke had brought back to him a Spring day in the northern woods—grey light and dark pools, all foliage baby-new, a song-sparrow pair trilling back and forth from edge to open....
He saw her in one of the rare flashes of life. She was sitting by the fireplace, the nearest window across the room. Her figure was softened in the deep grey light to the pure sensousness of motherhood—except her face, hands and boots, and that which she held. These were mellowed in the faintest orange glow from the firelight. Her back was curved forward, her face bent to the baby’s head, held high in the hollow of her arms. The dress was caught tightly about her ankles—a covering pliant almost as a night-robe, but that was a mystery of the shadows. She was like the figure of some woman he had seen somewhere—some woman of the river-banks, but this a Madonna of the firelight. He passed on, and waited before speaking.
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