Part 6

I woke next morning with a curious sense of pleasurable excitement; I whistled from very lightness of heart as I dressed. When I got down I found the landlady clearing away her breakfast things; I felt disappointed, and resolved to be down earlier in future. I didn't feel inclined to try the minnow; I put them in a tub in the yard, and tried to read and listen for her step. I dined alone; the day dragged terribly. I did not like to ask about her; I had a notion she might not like it. I spent the evening on the river; I might have filled a good basket, but I let the beggars rest: after all, I had caught fish enough to stock all the rivers in Great Britain; there are other things than trout in the world. I sit and smoke a pipe where she caught me last night. If I half close my eyes I can see hers, and her mouth in the smoke: that is one of the curious charms of baccy,--it helps to reproduce brain pictures. After a bit, I think perhaps she has left. I get quite feverish at the thought, and hasten back. I must ask. I look up at the window as I pass; there is surely a gleam of white. I throw down my traps and hasten up. She is leaning with her arms on the window-ledge, staring out into the gloom. I could swear I caught a suppressed sob as I entered. I cough, and she turns quickly and bows slightly. A bonnet and gloves and lace affair and a lot of papers are lying on the table. I am awfully afraid she is going. I say,--

"Please don't let me drive you away, it is so early yet. I half expected to see you on the river."

"Nothing so pleasant. I have been up in town [the tears have certainly got into her voice] all day; it was so hot and dusty. I am tired out."

The little servant brings in the lamp and a tray, with a bottle of lemonade. "Mistress hasn't any lemons, 'm; will this do?"

"Yes," she says wearily, she is shading her eyes with her hand; "anything, I am fearfully thirsty."

"Let me concoct you a drink instead. I have lemons and ice and things; my man sent me down supplies to-day; I leave him in town. I am rather a dab at drinks; learnt it from the Yankees: about the only thing I did learn from them I care to remember. Susan!"

The little maid helps me to get the materials, and she watches me quietly. When I give it to her she takes it with a smile (she _has_ been crying) that is an ample thank you. She looks quite old; something more than tiredness called up those lines in her face.

* * * * *

Well, ten days passed. Sometimes we met at breakfast, sometimes at supper; sometimes we fished together, or sat in the straggling orchard and talked; she neither avoided me nor sought me. She is the most charming mixture of child and woman I ever met; she is a dual creature. Now, I never met that in a man. When she is here, without getting a letter in the morning or going to town, she seems like a girl; she runs about in her gray gown and little cap, and laughs, and seems to throw off all thought like an irresponsible child; she is eager to fish, or pick cherries and eat them daintily, or sit under the trees and talk. But when she goes to town (I notice she always goes when she gets a lawyer's letter; there is no mistaking the envelope) she comes home tired and haggard-looking, an old woman of thirty-five. I wonder why. It takes her, even with her elasticity of temperament, nearly a day to get young again. I hate her to go to town; it is extraordinary how I miss her! I can't recall, when she is absent, her saying anything very wonderful; but she converses all the time. She has a gracious way of filling the place with herself; there is an entertaining quality in her very presence. We had one rainy afternoon; she tied me some flies (I sha'n't use any of them). I watched the lights in her hair as she moved,--it is quite golden in some places; and she has a tiny mole near her left ear, and another on her left wrist. On the eleventh day she got a letter; but she didn't go to town, she stayed up in her room all day. Twenty times I felt inclined to send her a line, but I had no excuse. I heard the landlady say as I passed the kitchen window, "Poor dear! I'm sorry to lose her!" Lose her? I should think not. It has come to this with me, that I don't care to face any future without her; and yet I know nothing about her, not even if she is a free woman. I shall find that out the next time I see her. In the evening I catch a glimpse of her gown in the orchard, and I follow her. We sit down near the river. Her left hand is lying gloveless next me in the grass.

"Do you think from what you have seen of me that I would ask a question out of any mere impertinent curiosity?"

She starts. "No, I do not!"

I take up her hand and touch the ring. "Tell me, does this bind you to any one?"

I am conscious of a buzzing in my ears and a dancing blur of water and sky and trees, as I wait--it seems to me an hour--for her reply. I felt the same sensation once before, when I got drawn into some rapids and had an awfully narrow shave; but of that another time.

The voice is shaking. "I am not legally bound to any one, at least; but why do you ask?" She looks me square in the face as she speaks, with a touch of haughtiness I never saw in her before.

Perhaps the great relief I feel, the sense of joy at knowing she is free, speaks out of my face; for hers flushes and she drops her eyes, her lips tremble. I don't look at her again, but I can see her all the same. After a while she says,--

"I half intended to tell you something about myself this evening, now I _must_. Let us go in; I shall come down to the sitting-room after your supper."

She takes a long look at the river and the inn, as if fixing the place in her memory; it strikes me with a chill that there is a good-by in her gaze. Her eyes rest on me a moment as they come back; there is a sad look in their gray clearness. She swings her little gray gloves in her hand as we walk back. I can hear her walking up and down overhead; how tired she will be, and how slowly the time goes! I am standing at one side of the window when she enters; she stands at the other, leaning her head against the shutter, with her hands clasped before her. I can hear my own heart beating, and I fancy hers, through the stillness; the suspense is fearful. At length she says,--

"You have been a long time out of England, you don't read the papers?"

"No." A pause; I believe my heart is beating inside my head.

"You asked me if I was a free woman. I don't pretend to misunderstand why you asked me. I am not a beautiful woman, I never was; but there must be something about me--there is in some women, 'essential femininity' perhaps--that appeals to all men. What I read in your eyes I have seen in many men's before; but before God I never tried to rouse it. To-day [with a sob] I can say I am free; yesterday morning I could not. Yesterday my husband gained his case, and divorced me!"

She closes her eyes and draws in her under-lip to stop its quivering. I want to take her in my arms but I am afraid to.

"I did not ask you any more than if you were free!"

"No; but I am afraid you don't quite take in the meaning. I did not divorce my husband, he divorced _me_; he got a decree _nisi_. Do you understand now? [She is speaking with difficulty.] Do you know what that implies?"

I can't stand her face any longer. I take her hands, they are icy cold, and hold them tightly.

"Yes, I know what it implies; that is, I know the legal and social conclusion to be drawn from it, if that is what you mean. But I never asked you for that information. I have nothing to do with your past; you did not exist for me before the day we met on the river. I take you from that day, and I ask you to marry me."

I feel her tremble, and her hands get suddenly warm. She turns her head and looks at me long and searchingly; then she says,--

"Sit down, I want to say something!"

I obey, and she comes and stands next the chair. I can't help it, I reach up my arm; but she puts it gently down.

"No, you must listen without touching me. I shall go back to the window. I don't want to influence you a bit by any personal magnetism I possess; I want you to listen. I have told you he divorced me. The co-respondent was an old friend, a friend of my childhood, of my girlhood. He died just after the first application was made, luckily for me; he would have considered my honor before my happiness. _I_ did not defend the case; it wasn't likely--ah, if you knew all! He proved his case, given clever counsel, willing witnesses to whom you make it worth while, and no defence, divorce is always attainable even in England. But remember, I figure as an adulteress in every English-speaking paper. If you buy last week's evening papers--do you remember the day I was in town?" I nod. "You will see a sketch of me in that day's; some one, perhaps he, must have given it; it was from an old photograph. I bought one at Victoria as I came out; it is funny [with an hysterical laugh] to buy a caricature of one's own poor face at a news-stall. Yet in spite of that I have felt glad. The point for you is that I made no defence to the world; and [with a lifting of her head] I will make no apology, no explanation, no denial to you, now nor ever. I am very desolate, and your attention came very warm to me; but I don't love you. Perhaps I could learn to [with a rush of color] for what you have said to-night; and it is because of that I tell you to weigh what this means. Later, when your care for me will grow into habit, you may chafe at my past; it is from that I would save you."

I hold out my hands, and she comes and puts them aside, and takes me by the beard and turns up my face and scans it earnestly. She must have been deceived a good deal. I let her do as she pleases; it is the wisest way with women, and it is good to have her touch me in that way. She seems satisfied. She stands leaning against the arm of the chair and says,--

"I must learn first to think of myself as a free woman again; it almost seems wrong to-day to talk like this. Can you understand that feeling?"

I nod assent.

"Next time I must be sure, and you must be sure," she lays her fingers on my mouth as I am about to protest, "S-sh! You shall have a year to think; if you repeat then what you have said to-day, I shall give you your answer. You must not try to find me; I have money. If I am living I will come here to you; if I am dead you will be told of it. In the year between I shall look upon myself as belonging to you, and render an account if you wish of every hour. You will not be influenced by me in any way, and you will be able to reason it out calmly. If you think better of it, don't come."

I feel there would be no use trying to move her; I simply kiss her hands and say,--

"As you will, dear woman; I shall be here."

We don't say any more; she sits down on a footstool with her head against my knee, and I just smooth it. When the clocks strike ten through the house, she rises, and I stand up. I see that she has been crying quietly,--poor, lonely, little soul! I lift her off her feet and kiss her, and stammer out my sorrow at losing her, and she is gone.

Next morning the little maid brought me an envelope from the lady who left by the first train. It held a little gray glove. That is why I carry it always, and why I haunt the inn and never leave it for longer than a week; why I sit and dream in the old chair that has a ghost of her presence always, dream of the spring to come with the May-fly on the wing, and the young summer when midges dance, and the trout are growing fastidious; when she will come to me across the meadow grass, through the silver haze, as she did before,--come with her gray eyes shining to exchange herself for her little gray glove.

AN EMPTY FRAME.

It was a simple, pretty little frame, such as you may buy at any sale cheaply; its ribbed wood, aspinalled white, with an inner frame of pale-blue plush; its one noticeable feature that it was empty. And yet it stood on the middle of the bedroom mantelboard.

It was not a luxurious room; none of the furniture matched. It was a typical boarding-house bedroom.

Any one preserving the child habit of endowing inanimate objects with human attributes might fancy that the flickering flames of the fire took a pleasure in bringing into relief the bright bits in its dinginess; for they played over the silver-backed brushes and the cut-glass perfume bottles on the dressing-table, flicked the bright beads on the toes of coquettish small shoes and the steel clasps of a travelling bag in the corner, imparting a casual air of comfort such as the touch of certain dainty women lends to a common room.

A woman enters,--a woman wondrously soft and swift in all her movements. She seems to reach a place without your seeing how; no motion of elbow or knee betrays her. Her fingers glide swiftly down the buttons of her gown; in a second she has freed herself from its ensheathing; garment after garment falls from her, until she stands almost free. She gets into nightdress and loose woollen dressing-gown, and slips her naked feet into fur-lined slippers, with a movement that is somehow the expression of an intense nervous relief from a thrall. Everything she does is done so swiftly that you see the result rather than the working out of each action.

She sinks into a chair before the fire, and clasping her hands behind her head, peers into the glowing embers. The firelight, lower than her face, touches it cruelly; picks out and accentuates as remorselessly as a rival woman the autographs past emotions have traced on its surface; deepens the hollows of her delicate thoughtful temples and the double furrow between her clever irregular eyebrows. Her face is more characteristic than beautiful. Nine men would pass it, the tenth sell his immortal soul for it. The chin is strong, the curve of jaw determined; there is a little full place under the chin's sharp point. The eyes tell you little; they are keen and inquiring, and probe others' thoughts rather than reveal their own. The whole face is one of peculiar strength and self-reliance. The mouth is its contradiction; the passionate curve of the upper-lip with its mobile corners, and the tender little under-lip that shelters timidly under it, are encouraging promises against its strength.

The paleness of some strong feeling tinges her face; a slight trembling runs through her frame. Her inner soul-struggle is acting as a strong developing fluid upon a highly sensitized plate; anger, scorn, pity, contempt chase one another like shadows across her face. Her eyes rest upon the empty frame, and the plain white space becomes alive to her. Her mind's eye fills it with a picture it once held in its dainty embrace,--a rare head among the rarest heads of men, with its crest of hair tossed back from the great brow, its proud poise and the impress of grand, confident, compelling genius that reveals itself, one scarce knows how; with the brute possibility of an untamed, natural man lurking about the mouth and powerful throat. She feels the subduing smile of eyes that never failed to make her weak as a child under their gaze, and tame as a hungry bird. She stretches out her hands with a pitiful little movement, and then, remembering, lets them drop, and locks them until the knuckles stand out whitely. She shuts her eyes, and one tear after the other starts from beneath her lids, trickles down her cheeks, and drops with a splash into her lap. She does not sob, only cries quietly; and she sees, as if she held the letter in her hand, the words that decided her fate:--

"You love me; I know it, you other half of me. You want me to complete your life, as I you, you good, sweet woman; you slight, weak thing, with your strong will and your grand, great heart; you witch, with a soul of clean white fire. I kiss your hands,--such little hands! I never saw the like; slim child-hands, with a touch as cool and as soft as a snow-flake! You dear one, come to me; I want you, now, always. Be with me, work with me, share with me, live with me, my equal as a creature; above me, as my queen of women! I love you, I worship you; but you know my views. I cannot, I will not bind myself to you by any legal or religious tie. I must be free and unfettered to follow that which I believe right for me. If you come to me in all trust, I can and will give myself to you in all good faith,--yours as much as you will, forever! I will kneel to you; why should I always desire to kneel to you? It is not that I stand in awe of you, or that I ever feel a need to kneel at all; but always to you, and to you alone. Come! I will crouch at your feet and swear myself to you!"

And she had replied "No!" and in her loneliness of spirit married him who seemed to need her most out of those who admired her.

The door opens, and he comes in. He looks inquiringly at her, touches her hair half hesitatingly, and then stands with his hands thrust in his pockets and gnaws his mustache.

"Are you angry, little woman?"

"No," very quietly; "why should I be?"

She closes her eyes again, and after five minutes' silence he begins to undress. He does it very slowly, looking perplexedly at her. When he has finished, he stands with his back to the fire, an unlovely object in sleeping suit.

"Would you like to read her letter?"

She shakes her head.

"I suppose I ought to have sent her back her letters before, you know. She hadn't heard I was married."

"Yes," she interjects, "it would have been better to start with a clean bill; but why talk about it?"

He looks at her awhile, then gets into bed and watches her from behind the pages of the "Field." It seems unusually quiet. His watch that he has left in his waistcoat pocket, thrown across the back of a chair, seems to fill the whole room with a nervous tick.

He tosses the paper on to the floor. She looks up as it falls, rises, turns off the gas-jet, sinks back into her old position, and stares into the fire. He gets up, goes over, and kneels down next her.

"I am awfully sorry you are put out, old girl. I saw you were when I answered you like that; but I couldn't help feeling a bit cut up, you know. She wrote such an awfully nice letter, you know, wished--"

"You all sorts of happiness," with a snap, "and hopes you'll meet in a better world?"

He rises to his feet and stares at her in dumb amazement. How could she know? She smiles with a touch of malicious satisfaction, as she sees the effect of her chance shot.

"It's a pity, isn't it, that you both have to wait so long?"

He imagines he sees light, and blunders ahead like an honest man.

"I wouldn't have sent those things back now if I had thought you cared. By Jove, it never entered my head that you'd be jealous!"

"Jealous?" She is on her feet like a red white flash. "I, jealous of her?" Each word is emphasized. "I couldn't be jealous of her, _Nur die Dummen sind bescheiden_! Why, the girl isn't fit to tie my shoe-strings!"

This is too much; he feels he must protest.

"You don't know her," feebly. "She is an awfully nice girl!"

"Nice girl! I don't doubt it; and she will be an awfully nice woman, and under each and every circumstance of life she will behave like an awfully nice person. Jealous! Do you think I cried because I was jealous? Good God, no! I cried because I was sorry, fearfully sorry, for myself. She"--with a fine thin contempt--"would have suited you better than I. Jealous! no, only sorry. Sorry because any nice average girl of her type, who would model her frocks out of the 'Lady's Pictorial,' gush over that dear Mr. Irving, paint milking-stools, try poker-work, or any other fashionable fad, would have done you just as well. And I"--with a catch of voice--"with a great man might have made a great woman; and now those who know and understand me [bitterly] think of me as a great failure."

She finishes wearily; the fire dies out of eyes and voice. She adds half aloud, as if to herself,--

"I don't think I quite realized this until I saw how you took that letter. I was watching your face as you read it; and the fact that you could put her on the same level, that if it had not been for a mistake she would have suited you as well, made me realize, don't you see? that I would have done some one else better!"

He is looking at her in utter bewilderment, and she smiles as she notes his expression; she touches his cheek gently, and leans her head against his arm.

"There it's all right, boy! Don't mind me. I have a bit of a complex nature; you couldn't understand me if you tried to, and better not try!"

She has slipped, while speaking, her warm bare foot out of her slipper, and is rubbing it gently over his chilled ones.

"You are cold, better go back to bed; I shall go too!"

She stands a moment quietly as he turns to obey, and then takes the frame, and kneeling down puts it gently into the hollowed red heart of the fire. It crackles crisply, and little tongues of flame shoot up; and she gets into bed by their light.

* * * * *

When the fire has burnt out, and he is sleeping like a child with his curly head on her breast, she falls asleep too, and dreams that she is sitting on a fiery globe rolling away into space; that her head is wedged in a huge frame, the top of her head touches its top, the sides its sides, and it keeps growing larger and larger, and her head with it, until she seems to be sitting inside her own head, and the inside is one vast hollow.

UNDER NORTHERN SKY.

I.

HOW MARIE LARSEN EXORCISED A DEMON.

There has been a mighty storm; it has been raging for two days,--a storm in which the demon of drink has reigned like a sinister god in the big white house, and the frightened women have cowered away, driven before the hot blast of the breath upon which curses danced, and the blaze of ire in the lurid eyes of the master. Only the pale little mistress has stood unmoved through the whirlwind of his passion. Who knows? Maybe that roused him to higher, madder paroxysms of impotent rage; for he abuses her most when he loves her most,--a way man has, he being a creature of higher understanding.

All yesterday the bells jangled, until one by one a violent jerk snapped the connecting wire, and hurled them with a last echoing crash on the hall floor. The serving-men kept out of it, as men do. The horses cowered to the sides of their boxes, and set their hind legs hard, and pointed their ears when they heard his halting step. The great hounds shrank shiveringly into their boxes, and refused to come forth at his threatening call; and when he lashed their houses in his rage they winced at each blow, and showed their fangs when he turned away.