She Buildeth Her House

by Will Levington Comfort

Had all the seismologists of civilization gathered in Saint Pierre, and uttered a verdict that the volcano was an imminent menace, Charter would not have turned a more serious look at Pelée than he did that moment.... At the Palms, he found Peter Stock and a joyous welcome. They arranged for luncheon together, and the Capitalist hurried down into the city.... That proved a memorable luncheon, since Peter Stock at the last moment persuaded Miss Wyndam to join them.

Charter was disturbed with the thought that he had seen her before; and amazed that he could have forgotten where. He could only put it far back among the phantasmagoria of drinking days. Certainly the sane, restored Charter had never met this woman and forgotten. His veins were dilated as by a miraculous wine.

"The name is new to me, but I seem to have seen you somewhere, Miss Wyndam," he declared.

"That's the second time you've said that, young man," Mr. Stock remarked. "Don't your sentences register?"

"It's always bewildering—I know how Mr. Charter feels," Paula managed to say. "I'm quite sure we were never introduced, though I know Mr. Charter's work."

"That's good of you, indeed," he said. "I don't mean—to know my work—but to help me out with Friend Stock. It is bewildering that I have forgotten. I feel like a boy in an enchanted forest. Pelée has been working wonders all day."

"I can't follow you," the Capitalist sighed. "Your sentences are puckered."

They hardly heard him. Paula, holding fast with all her strength to the part she had planned to play, sensed Charter's blind emotion, distinct from her own series of shocks. To her it was that furious moment of adjustment, when a man and his ideal meet for the first time in a woman's heart. As for this heart, she feared they would hear its beating. Instantly, she knew that he had not come to Saint Pierre expecting to find her; knew that she was flooding into his subconsciousness—that he felt worlds and could not understand. She found the boy in his eyes—the boy of his old picture—and the deep lines and the white skin of a man who has lived clean, and the brow of a man who has thought many clean things. He was thinking of the Skylark, and "Wyndam" disturbed him.... Always when he hesitated in his speech, the right word sprang to her lips to help him. She caught the very processes of his thinking; his remoteness from the thought of food, was her own.... For hours, since she had heard his voice below, Paula had paced the floor of her room, planning to keep her secret long. She would play and watch his struggle to remember the Skylark; she would weigh the forces of the conflict, stimulate it; study him among men, in the presence of suffering, and in the dread of the mountain. All this she had planned, but now her whole heart went out to the boy in his eyes—the boy that smiled. All the doubts which at best she had hoped for the coming days to banish were erased in a moment; she even believed in its fullness the letter from Selma Cross—because he was embarrassed, brimming with emotions he could not understand, quite as the boy of her dreams would be. She lived full-length in his silences, hardly dared to look at him now, for she felt his constant gaze. She knew that she was colorless, but that her eyes were filled with light.... Presently she realized that they were talking of Father Fontanel.

"He's a good old man," said Peter Stock. "He works day and night—and refuses to call it work. Just think of having a servant with a God like Father Fontanel's to make work easy!"

"He's even a little bit sorry for Pelée," Charter said. "I'm never quite the same in Saint Pierre. Many times up in the States, I ask myself, if it isn't largely in my mind about Father Fontanel's spirit and his effect upon me. It isn't. Stronger than ever it came to me this morning. You know him?" He turned the last to the woman.