“Like what? Why, like my wanting you to see me!”
Easton merely laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. Her daring was delicious; he wanted her to talk on so forever. But she sat looking at him a full minute before she spoke.
“Well,” she said at last, “I don’t know what to make of such mercifulness. I’m not used to it. I think I might have been different if I hadn’t always been so sharply judged. What I do isn’t so very bad, that I can see, but people seem to think it is awful. The only people I’ve ever seen who could make any allowance for me are the Woodwards. I suppose it must seem very odd to you, my being with them so much, and so little with the other boarders. But you go where you find sympathy. It seems to me I’ve always been alone,” she said with passionate self-pity that dimmed her eyes. She dried them with Easton’s handkerchief, and turned her face away.
He could not have spoken now without pouring out his whole heart, and to speak of love to her in this mood would be like seizing an advantage which his fantastic notions of justice forbade him to take.
“You don’t know what good people they are,” she resumed, with her face still averted. “When I was sick with a fever here, two summers ago, they cared for me as if I were their own child. And there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for them—anything! I was very sick indeed,” she went on, turning her eyes upon him now, and speaking very solemnly, “and I suppose that I could not have lived without their nursing. It was in their busiest time, and they sent people away so that they could have a chance to care for me. Mr. Easton,” she cried, as if fired with a generous inspiration, “you must get better acquainted with Rachel Woodward. She and you are just of a piece. She’s quite as large-minded as you are, and as unsuspicious and—good. Yes, I know you’re good; you needn’t try to deceive me. I’m not. I’m full of vanity and vexation of spirit. I don’t know what I want; I’m restless, and perturbated, and horrid. But there’s nothing of that kind about Rachel Woodward; she’s a born saint, and goes round accepting self-sacrifice as if it were her birthright. For all she’s got such a genius for drawing, I suppose she’d settle down into a common country drudge without a murmur, if she found it in the line of duty. Duty! what is duty? It’s the greatest imposition of the age, I think.” Mrs. Farrell had now quite emerged from her clouds, and was able to share Easton’s joy in her nonsense. “I know Mr. Gilbert didn’t think so kindly of my coming back after that book,” she said, as if this were the natural sequence of what had gone before, and had been in her mind all the time.
Easton’s embarrassment appeared in his face, but he said nothing.
“Oh well, never mind,” said Mrs. Farrell, rising, “he’s welcome to hate me if he likes; and I suppose he’ll end by making you hate me, too. I’m sure it’s very good of you to respite me so long.” She gave the faintest sigh, and began to arrange her dress for walking away, looking first over one shoulder, and then over the other, at her skirt behind.
Neither of them said anything, as they quitted the place where they had been sitting, by a path that led homeward through a rocky dell, farther around than that they usually came and went by. In this dell there was a shade of maples thicker than elsewhere in the woods, and the heavy granite bowlders started from the soil in fantastic and threatening shapes, very different from the sterile repose that they kept in the neighboring fields and woods. Something of the old, elemental strife lingered there yet; the aspect of the place was wild, almost fierce; the trout-brook, that stole so still through the flat meadows on either side of the dell, quarreled along its rocky course in this narrow solitude, and filled it with a harsh din of waters. But the soil in the crevices and little spaces between the granite masses was richer than anywhere else on the farm. Earlier in the season, wherever the sun could look through the maple boughs it saw a host of wild flowers, and in its turn the shade detained the spring, and there were still violets here in July, and the shy water plants unfolded their bloom at every point along the margin of the fretted brook where they could find foothold. No maples yielded a more bounteous sweet than these in the shrewish April weather, when the Woodward boys came and tapped their gnarled trunks; and in the lower end of the valley stood the sugar house, with its rusty iron pans and kettles, and its half-ruinous brick oven and chimney, where they boiled the sap. Because the brook perhaps ran cooler here than in the meadows, the cattle from the neighboring pastures came to drink at the pool which its waters gathered into at one place, just before it took the final fray with the rocks and broke out into the open sunlight beyond, where it lulled itself among the grassy levels. An oriole had made its nest in the boughs that overhung this pool; and higher up in the same tree lived a family of red squirrels, some member of which was pretty sure to challenge every passer. In the bushes that thickened about the meadow-border in sight of the farmhouse lived thrushes and catbirds; and in the very heart of the dell, a rain crow often voiced his lugubrious foreboding.
Mrs. Farrell entered by the vagrant path that the cattle’s hoofs had made, and midway of the hollow she paused and, resting her arm on a tall bowlder, looked round the place with a certain joy in her face, as of kindred wildness. Her rich eyes glowed, her bosom rose, and her breaths were full and deep. If she could indeed have been some wild, sylvan thing, with no amenability to our criterions, one could not have asked more of her than to be as she was; but behind her came a man who loved her as a woman, and whose heart was building from its hopes of her that image of possession and of home which love bids the most hapless passion cherish. When he came up with her he looked into her face and said, as if no silence had followed her last speech, his thoughts had been so voluble to him, “Why do you talk to me about hating you?”
“Why?” she echoed with a look of alarm, and signs of that inward trepidation which every woman must feel at such a moment. “Oh,” she added, with a weak effort to jest fate aside, “I suppose that I thought you ought to hate me.”