Part 4

To Margaret, in the untiring challenge of her self-questionings, his view brought an unworded solace. Her mind grasped eagerly at his thought, puzzled by itself, yet reaching for the visible spirituality of the man. His face, calm and with a tinge of almost priestly asceticism, was a tacit reassurance. A wish to hear him speak, to talk to him, came to her. He had lived longer than she, he knew so much more! If she could only ask him! If she only knew how to begin! If some instinct could only whisper to his mind’s ear the benumbing question her whole being battled with, without her having to put it into words! Even if she could--even if he could guess it--he might misunderstand. No girl ever had such thoughts before! They were only hers--only hers, to hide, to bury in silence! She blushed hotly to think that she had ever thought of voicing it to the air. A guilty horror, lest her face might betray what she was thinking, bathed her. She could never, never tell it! There could be no help from outside. Her mind must struggle with it alone.

She started visibly, with a feeling that she had been overheard, at a crunching step behind them. Her companion greeted the arrival with the heartiness of an old acquaintance.

“Ah, Condy,” he said, “much obliged for that salve of yours. It has quite made a new dog of Birdo.”

“Thet so?” inquired the newcomer, with interest. “Et’s a powerful good salve.” His straggling yellow beard and much-battered straw hat shed a mellow lustre on his leathery, sun-tanned face, where twinkled clear blue eyes.

“I’ve jest been up by th’ kennels,” he volunteered.

“I hope you found the family all well?” the rector inquired, with gravely humorous concern.

“Toler’ble. Th’ ole mastiff won’t let me git clost ’nough t’ say more’n howdy do. He’s wuss ’n a new town marshal!” He rasped a sulphur match against his trouser-leg and lit his short clay pipe, hanging his head awkwardly to do so, and disclosing the inquisitive muzzle and beady eyes of a diminutive setter pup, which he carried under his butternut coat, supported in his forearm. Margaret patted the cold nose, and its owner displayed it pridefully.

“He ain’t but three weeks old,” he said, “en’ I’m a-bringin’ him up on th’ bottle. Ef I fetch him eround he’ll make a fine setter one o’ these days, fer he’s got good points. Look at th’ shape o’ his toes! Et goes agin my grain t’ lose a puppy. Somehow et seems ez ef they hev ez much right t’ live ez some other people.” His mouth relaxed broadly about his pipe-stem, with a damp smile.

“What’s the matter with him?” asked the rector.

“Jest ailin’, puny like. Dogs ez a lot like babies; some on ’em could be littered en’ grow up in a snowdrift, en’ others could be born in a straw kennel en’ die ef you look at ’em. This one was so weakly thet Bess, my ole setter, wouldn’t look at him. Jest poked him eround with her nose, poor little devil! en’ wouldn’t give him ez much ez a lick. Et’s a funny thing,” he continued, stuffing down the embers in his pipe with a hard forefinger, “th’ difference there ez thet way between dogs en’ folks. I never seen a woman yit thet wouldn’t take all kinds o’ keer fer a sick baby, but a dog puts all her nussin’ on her healthy young uns en’ lets th’ ailin’ shift fer theirselves. Mebbe et’s because she hez so many all at once, but I guess it’d be the same with women ef they hed a dozen at once ez et ez now. The parson here”--he blinked at Margaret with a suspicion of levity--“says ez how et’s because th’ dogs ain’t got no souls. I don’t know how thet ez, but et looks ez ef et might be so.”

The rector laughed good-humoredly as the decreasing figure silhouetted itself against the field. “Condy’s a unique character,” he said, “but immensely likable. He has a quaint philosophy that isn’t down in the books, but it’s none the less interesting for that. I must be going now,” he continued; “sermons in stones and books in running brooks won’t do for my congregation.”

“You will go up to the house and see Lydia?”

“I have already seen her. She told me I should find you somewhere in the fields, she thought. Your cousin is a great sufferer,” he added gently. “She is a beautiful character--uncomplaining under a most grievous affliction. I am deeply sorry for her, and yet”--there was a note of perplexity in his voice--“sometimes I believe I pity her husband even more! I am not well acquainted with him personally. I wish I might know him better. She often speaks to me of him. Her love for him is most exquisite; it always reminds me of the perfume of the night-blooming-cereus.”

He took his leave of Margaret with grave courtesy and left her standing on the leaf-littered grass, with the red berries of the nightshade gleaming through the rank green foliage above her head.

VIII.

Lydia’s reclining chair had been rolled close to the window and Margaret sat beside her, contemplating a melancholy drizzle, mingled with sweeping gusts of rain. The chickens stood in huddled groups under the garden shrubs, and the white and yellow chrysanthemums, from their long, bordering beds, shook out their frowsy petals and drank rejoicingly. Margaret loved to watch the splash of the shower upon the fallen leaves. Her nature reflected no neutral tints; rain and gray weather to her had never been coupled with sadness.

The emaciated hands by her side moved restlessly in the afghan. “What a bad day for Mell,” she said. “He is fond of the saddle, and now he will come home wet and cold, before his ride is half finished.”

Margaret looked at her curiously. She recalled Sempire’s stone-bruise and Creed’s version of it. Melwin she had left only a few minutes before, sitting statue-like in the library, with his chin upon his hands. She felt with a smarting of her eyelids that the pathetic deception was but a part of the consideration, the tender, watching guard with which he surrounded the invalid’s every thoughtfulness of him.

“Margaret!” Lydia spoke almost appealingly, laying a hand upon her arm, “do you think Mell seemed happy to-day? You remember him when we were married? I’ve seen him toss you many a time, as a little girl, on his shoulder. Don’t you remember how he used to laugh when he would pretend to let you fall over backward? Does he seem to you to be any different now? Not older--I don’t mean that (of course he is some older)--but soberer. He used to have friends out from the city, and be always bird-hunting or playing polo. I could go with him then; he liked to have me. He used to say he wanted to show me off. He seems to be so much more alone now, and to care less for such things. At first it made me happy to think that he couldn’t enjoy them any longer when I couldn’t share them with him. That was very selfish, I know, and now his not taking pleasure in them is a pain to me. I want him to. He is so good to me! It seems sometimes as if I were a reproach to him. I am so helpless, useless--such a hindering burden. I can’t do anything but go on loving him. If I could only help him! If I could dust his desk, or fill his pipe, or tend the primroses he loves, or put the buttons in his shirts for him, or do any one of the thousand little foolish things that a woman loves to do for her husband!”

Reaching over, Margaret patted her hand gently. The patient eyes looked up at her hungrily.

“Oh, Margaret, if I could only know that he was happy! If I could only fill his life wholly, completely, to the brim! I feel so bodiless lying here. Other women must mean so much more to their husbands. I used to pray to die--to be taken away from him. I thought that he would love me better dead. Love doesn’t die that way--it’s living that kills love. And I couldn’t bear to think that I might live to see it die slowly, horribly, little by little; and I watched, oh, so jealously! for the first sign. It’s a dreadful thing to be jealous of life! I have thought that if it could be right for him to marry another woman while I was still his wife--one who could give him all I lack--that I would even be content, if he were only happy! There is just my mind left now for him to love, and the mind, so denied, rusts away.”

“But your _soul_ is alive,” said Margaret softly, “and that is what we love and love with. It seems to me that the most beautiful thing in the world is a love like Melwin’s for you--one that is all spirit. It is like the love of a child for a white star, that is not old and dusty like the earth, but pure and shining and very, very far above its head. When I was little I used to have one particular star that I called my own. I wouldn’t have been happier to have touched it or to have had it any nearer. I was contented just to look up to it and love it.”

“You’re a genuine comforter!” said Lydia, a smile of something more nearly approaching joy than Margaret had yet seen there playing upon her lips. “I am ungrateful. It is wicked of me to repine as I do! God has given me Mell’s love, and every day it winds closer around me. And he loves my soul. I ought to think how much more blest I am than other women whose husbands do not care for them! I ought to spend my time thinking of him and not of myself! Perhaps I could plan more little pleasures for him. We used to make so many pretty surprises for each other, and we got so much happiness out of them. It is the small things in life that please us most. When we were first married, I studied all the little ways. I wore the colors he was fond of, and did my hair as he thought was most becoming. Why, I wouldn’t have put on a ribbon or a flower that I thought he did not like! He set so much store by those things. Do you see that big closet on the other side of the room? Open the door. There are all the dresses that Mell liked me in when we were married. Do you see that pearl liberty silk with the valenciennes? I had that on the last night we ever danced together--the night before I was hurt. He liked me best of all in that.”

She passed her hand caressingly over the shimmering lengths which Margaret had spread out across her knees. “You would look well in such a gown,” she said. “Your hair is like mine was, only a shade darker. Put the skirt on. There! It fits you, too!”

A stir of anticipation, of excitement, overspread her languor. “I want you to do me a favor; I don’t believe you’ll mind! Take dinner to-night with Melwin downstairs. I am tired to-day and I shall go to sleep early. Wear the dress; maybe it will remind him of the way I looked then, when I had the same roses in my cheeks. He called them holly berries. Will you wear it?”

Margaret turned away under pretense of examining the yellow lace. “Oh, yes,” she said, “and I have a cameo pin that will just suit to clasp it at the throat.”

“No, no!” Lydia had half raised herself on her elbow. “In my box on the dresser is a string of pearls. Mell gave me them to go with it.”

She took the ornament and, with an exclamation of delight, unfastened the neck of her nightgown and clasped it around her throat. Dropping her chin to see how the lustreless spheres drooped across the pitiful hollows of her neck, she gave them back with a sigh that was sadder than any words and turned her head wearily on the pillow.

Margaret gathered up the garments tenderly, and bent over and left a light kiss on the faded cheek as she went from the room.

IX.

Margaret stood before the cheval-glass in Lydia’s gown, smiling at the quaint reflection. It showed a figure with slim, pointed waist between billowy paniers, flounced with Spanish frill after the fashion of a decade before. The neck was square-cut and the tight sleeves reached to the elbow, ending in a fall of lace. It was not unbecoming to her. Her brown eyes had borrowed from the pearl tint a misty violet and the springing growth of her hair had taken on the shade of wet broom-straw. A faint glow rose in her cheeks as she surveyed her own stirring image. She clasped the close necklace of pearls about her throat. Poor Lydia! Something as fair she must have looked in that old time so rudely ended! Poor Melwin!

The wide dining-room doors stood open, and she did not pause, but went directly in. The old butler stood in the hall, and she noticed wonderingly that he gazed at her with a scared expression and moved backward, his arms stretched behind him in an instinctive gesture of fright which puzzled her. Were even the ancient servitors of the house as incomprehensible as was their master?

Melwin stood leaning against the polished rosewood sideboard, his unseeing gaze fixed on a glass-prismed candelabra of antique workmanship, whose pendants vibrated ceaselessly. His lifted stare, which went beyond, suddenly caught and fastened itself upon her in a look of startled fascination. His lean fingers gripped the edge of the wood and he stiffened all over like a wild animal couched to spring. His shrunken features were marked with a convulsion of fearful anguish. Margaret shrank back dismayed at the lambent fire that had leaped into his colorless eyes.

“Lydia!” The cry burst from his lips as he made a quick step toward her.

“Why, Melwin!” she gasped, “what is the matter?”

The table was between them, but she could see that he was shaking. His eyes turned from her to the opposite wall, then back again. Her gaze followed his and rested upon a splendid full-length portrait. She knew at once that it was Lydia. But she saw in that one instant more than this; she saw her own face, radiant, sparkling, the same lightened, straw-tinted hair, the same shadowy violet eyes, the same gown, pearl gray, quaintly cut, that had faced her in the depths of the cheval-glass.

“Melwin, don’t you know me? Why, it’s I--Margaret!”

His lips lifted from his teeth. Even through the strained agony of his face, she could have imagined him about to laugh. It seemed a minute before his voice came, and when it did it scourged her like a sting of a lash. She cringed under its livid fury.

“How dare you? How _dare_ you come to me like that? Do you think a man is a stone? Do you think he has no feeling, that you can torture him like this? Do you think he never remembers or suffers? Is there nothing in his past that’s too sacred to lay hands upon?”

“It was Lydia, Melwin,” cried Margaret, her fingers wandering stumblingly along the low neck of the gown; “she asked me to do it. She thought it would please you. She thought it would remind you of the way she used to look.”

“She told you?” A softer expression came to his face. The hard lines fell away; the weary ghost of an unborn smile hovered on his lips, trembling and pathetic.

“Don’t care! Please, please don’t look so! I didn’t think! I will go away at once and take the dress off.”

He laid his arms upon the back of a chair and dropped his head upon them. “Don’t mind me, child,” he said brokenly; “you couldn’t help it. You didn’t understand. When a man’s flesh has been bruised with pincers, when his sinews have been wrenched and dragged as mine have, he does not take kindly to the rack. You could have wrung my heart out of my body to-night with your hands, and it would not have hurt so much.”

“I am so sorry!” Margaret breathed, warm gushes of pity sweeping over her. “You could never guess how sorry I am!”

“I suppose,” he said more calmly, “that I have been a puzzle to you. You were too young to know me when I _lived_. I am only half alive now. Life has gone by and left me stranded. Look at that picture, child. That was Lydia--the Lydia of the best years of my life--the Lydia that I loved and won and married! Twelve years! How long ago it seems!”

Margaret had seated herself opposite him and leaned forward, her bare elbows on the table and her locked fingers against her cheek. “I--understand now.” Her voice was a strenuous whisper.

“You will know what that is some time--to feel one nearer than all the world--to tremble when her arm presses yours, to listen for the swish of her skirt, to turn hot and cold at the smell of her hair or the touch of her lips! She was beautiful--more beautiful to me than any woman I had ever seen, or ever shall see. She filled every corner of me! Life was complete. It had nothing left to give me. Can you think what that means? You know what happened then. It came crashing in upon my youth like a falling tower. Since then the years have gone by, but they stopped for me that day.”

An intenser look was in Margaret’s eyes. “But you have Lydia--you love her!”

He breathed sharply. “Have her!” he repeated. “I have her mind, her soul, the intellect that answered mine, the soul that leaned to my soul, but _her_--_her_--the body I held, the woman I caressed, the fragrant life I touched--where is it? Where? I love her!” he cried with abrupt passion. “I loved her then; I love her now. I have never loved another woman! I never think a thought that is not of her. My very dreams, my imagination are hers! I would rather die than love another woman!

“I suppose people pity me and think how hard it was that Lydia’s accident couldn’t have happened before we were married instead of afterward. Fools! _Fools!_ As though that would make it different! If it must have been, I wouldn’t have it otherwise. Not to possess wholly the woman one loves is the cruelty of Love; the pain of knowing that no other love can possess you is the mercy of Love. Such misery is dearer than all other joys. She is _mine_, and with every breath that I curse Fate with I thank God for her!”

“Isn’t that happiness?”

He laughed, a short, jarring, mirthless laugh that hurt her. “Do you think,” he said, “that that is all a man craves? Can a man--a living, breathing man--live on soul alone? Can you feed a starving human being on philosophy? His stomach cries for bread! You can quench his spiritual thirst while his heart dries up with physical drought. He wants both sides. With one unsatisfied, he goes halting, crippled. I live in my past and feed on the husks of it. Do you think they fill me? I tell you, I go always hungry--always famishing for what other men have!”

Margaret felt as if she were being wafted through some intangible inferno of suffering. She felt smothered, as by the dust of some dead thing into whose open grave she had unwittingly stumbled. The real Melwin that she had waked terrified her. The glimpse through the torn mask, into the distorted face, with its marks of branding, shook the depths of her nature. She had always thought of Melwin abstractly, as of a beautiful personality, crowned with spiritual stars and haloed with pain; now she saw him as he was--a half-man, decrepit, moribund, his passion no living glow, but a flitting and unreal fox-fire, which he must follow, follow, grasping at, but never gaining. The dreadful unfulfilment of his life’s promise sat upon his brow and cried to her from every word and gesture. She felt as if she was gazing at some mysterious and but half-indicated problem to which there could be no answer.

* * * * *

That was a meal which Margaret never afterward remembered without a recoil. A chilling self-consciousness had fallen upon her and clogged her tongue. Melwin ate hastily and almost fiercely, saying nothing, and once half rising, it seemed in utter forgetfulness of her presence, and then sitting down again. She excused herself before the coffee and slipped away, running hastily up the stair to her room, her feet catching in the unaccustomed tightness of the old-fashioned skirt.

As she turned the key in the lock, she fancied she heard a moan through the thick walls of Lydia’s room, and she tore off the garments with feverish haste, shutting them from her sight in the carved Dutch chest which filled one corner, releasing, as she did so, a pungent odor of cedar; not the fresh, resinous smell of sappy forest-growth, but the dead-faint aroma of the past--the perfume that belonged to Lydia’s gown, to Melwin, and to that gloomy house and all it contained.

She pushed open the heavy blinds and leaned across the window ledge, questioning. Melwin was a man--but Lydia? Had she also this inner buried side, which in him had been shocked into betrayal? Were men and women alike? Were their longings and cravings the same? Was there something in the one which felt and answered the every need of the other? Was spiritual attraction forever dependent for its completion upon physical love? The thought came to her that in the long years Melwin had become less himself; that his brooding mind had perhaps lost its balance; that what to a healthier mind would be but a shadow had grown for him a threatening phantom. Her heart was full of a vague protest against the suggestion which had thrust itself upon her.

Her spiritual side reached out groping hands for comfort and sustenance.

Drawing down the window, she turned into the room. A ponderous Bible in huge blocked leathern covers lay on the low table, its antiquated silver clasps winking in the light from the pronged candlestick. With a sudden impulse, she threw it open, leaning forward, her fingers nervously ruffling its edges. This was the soul-comforter of the ages. It must help her.

“Hadad died also. And the dukes of Edom were; duke Timnah, duke Aliah, duke Jetheth,

“Duke Aholibamah, duke Elah, duke Pimon.”

The musty chronicle meant nothing. She turned again, parting the leaves near to the end.

“Salute Prisca and Aquila, and the household of Onesiphorus.

“Erastus abode at Corinth: but Trophimus have I left at Miletum sick.”

She almost laughed at the banality of her haphazard choice. She knew the pages full of condemnation for the unworthy thought. Now they mocked her. Impatiently she opened the huge volume wide in the middle. A new and intense eagerness illumed her face as her eyes rested on the page:

“Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes.

“My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

“By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.

“My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand.

“His head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy, and black as a raven.

“His eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set.

“His cheeks are as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers: his lips like lilies, dropping sweet-smelling myrrh.* * *

“His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely.”

She looked up startled, her breath struggling in her breast; a deep, vivid blush spread over her face and neck, glowing crimson against the whiteness of her apparel.

The room seemed suddenly dense with a dank, spicy smell of roses mixed with salty wind. It spread from the pages of the book and hung wreathing about her till the air was filled with fiery flowers. She felt herself burning hot, as if a flame were scorching her flesh. In the emptiness of the room, she caught her hands to her cheeks shamedly, lest the world could see that tell-tale color. Even the dim candles’ light angered her, and she blew them out, creeping into the soft bed hastily, as though into a hiding-place.

X.

For some days after her unforgettable meeting with Daunt in the woods, Margaret had not left the house. She had spent much of her time reading to Lydia. There was a never lessening sorrow in the invalid’s gaze that affected her, full as was her mind of her own thoughts, and she had been glad to sit with her to escape the slow-burning fires that haunted her in Melwin’s opaque eyes.