Chapter 3

By night they were gone and he was left restless and miserable. He was so restless that he could not sleep but wandered down toward the spring. He stopped at the exact point at which he had stopped on the night of his arrival--at the top of the zigzag little path leading down the rocky incline. He stopped because he heard a sound of passionate sobbing. He descended slowly. He knew the sound--angry, fierce, uncontrollable--because he had heard it before. It checked itself the instant he reached the ground. Lodusky leaning against a projecting rock kept her eyes fixed upon the water.

“Why did you come here?” he demanded, a little excitedly. “What are you crying for? What has hurt you?”

“Nothing” in a voice low and unsteady.

He drew a little nearer to her and for the first time was touched. She would not look at him, she was softened and altered, in her whole appearance, by a new pallor.

“Have “--he began, “have I?”

“You!” she cried, turning on him with a bitter, almost wild gesture. “_You_ wouldn't keer if I was struck _dead_ afore ye!”

“Look here,” he said to her, with an agitation he could not master. “Let me tell you something about myself. If you think I am a passably good fellow you are mistaken. I am a bad fellow, a poor fellow, an ignoble fellow. You don't understand?” as she gazed at him in bewilderment. “No, of course, you don't. God knows I didn't myself until within the last two weeks. It's folly to say such things to you; perhaps I say them half to satisfy myself. But I mean to show you that I am not to be trusted. I think perhaps I am too poor a fellow to love any woman honestly and altogether. I followed one woman here, and then after all let another make me waver”--

“Another!” she faltered.

He fixed his eyes on her almost coldly.

“You,” he said.

He seemed to cast the word at her and wonder what she would make of it He waited a second or so before he went on.

“_You_, and yet you are not the woman I love either. Good God! What a villain I must be. I am an insult to every woman that breathes. It is not even you--though I can't break from you, and you have made me despise myself. There! do you know now--do you see now that I am not worth “--

The next instant he started backward. Before he had time for a thought she had uttered a low cry, and flung herself down at his feet.

“I don't keer,” she panted; “I wont keer fur nothin',--whether ye're good or bad,--only don't leave me here when ye go away.”

*****

A week later Lennox arose one morning and set about the task of getting his belongings together. He had been up late and had slept heavily and long. He felt exhausted and looked so.

The day before, his model had given him his last sitting. The picture stood finished upon the easel. It was a thorough and artistic piece of work, and yet the sight of it was at times unbearable to him. There were times again, however, when it fascinated him anew when he went and stood opposite to it, regarding it with an intense gaze. He scarcely knew how the last week had passed. It seemed to have been spent in alternate feverish struggles and reckless abandonment to impulse. He had let himself drift here and there, he had at last gone so far as to tell himself that the time had arrived when baseness was possible to him.

“I don't promise you an easy life,” he had said to Dusk the night before. “I tell you I am a bad fellow, and I have lost something through you that I cared for. You may wish yourself back again.”

“If you leave me,” she said, “I'll kill myself!” and she struck her hands together.

For the moment he was filled, as he often was, with a sense of passionate admiration. It was true he saw her as no other creature had ever seen her before, that so far as such a thing was possible with her, she loved him--loved him with a fierce, unreserved, yet narrow passion.

He had little actual packing to do--merely the collecting of a few masculine odds and ends, and then his artistic accompaniments. Nothing was of consequence but these; the rest were tossed together indifferently, but the picture was to be left until the last moment, that its paint might be dry beyond a doubt.

Having completed his preparations he went out. He had the day before him, and scarcely knew what to do with it, but it must be killed in one way or another. He wandered up the mountain and at last lay down with his cigar among the laurels. He was full of a strange excitement which now thrilled, now annoyed him.

He came back in the middle of the afternoon and laughed a rather half-hearted laugh at the excellent Mandy's comment upon his jaded appearance.

“Ye look kinder tuckered out,” she said. “Ye'd oughtn't ter walked so fur when ye was a-gwine off to-night. Ye'd orter rested.”

She stopped the churn-dasher and regarded him with a good-natured air of interest.

“Hev ye seed Dusk to say good-by to her?” she added. “She's went over the mountain ter help Mirandy Stillins with her soap. She wont be back fur a day or two.”

He went into his room and shut the door. A fierce repulsion sickened him. He had heretofore held himself with a certain degree of inward loftiness; he had so condemned the follies and sins of other men, and here he found himself involved in a low and common villainy, in the deceits which belonged to his crime, and which preyed upon simplicity and ignorant trust.

He went and stood before his easel, hot with a blush of self-scorn.

“Has it come to this?” he muttered through his clinched teeth--“to _this!_”

He made an excited forward movement; his foot touched the supports of the easel, jarring it roughly; the picture fell upon the floor.

“What?” he cried out. “Beck! You! Great God!”

For before him, revealed by the picture's fall, the easel held one of the fairest memories he had of the woman he had proved himself too fickle and slight to value rightly.

It was merely a sketch made rapidly one day soon after his arrival and never wholly completed, but it had been touched with fire and feeling, and the face looked out from the canvas with eyes whose soft happiness stung him to the quick with the memories they brought. He had meant to finish it, and had left it upon the easel that he might turn to it at any moment, and it had remained there, covered by a stronger rival--forgotten.

He sat down in a chair and his brow fell upon his hands. He felt as if he had been clutched and dragged backward by a powerful arm.

When at last he rose, he strode to the picture lying upon the floor, ground it under his heel, and spurned it from him with an imprecation.

He was, at a certain hour, to reach a particular bend in the road some miles distant. He was to walk to this place and if he found no one there, to wait.

When at sunset that evening he reached it, he was half an hour before the time specified, but he was not the first at the tryst. He was within twenty yards of the spot when a figure rose from the roots of a tree and stood waiting for him--the girl Dusk with a little bundle in her hand.

She was not flushed or tremulous with any hint of mental excitement; she awaited him with a fine repose, even the glow of the dying sun having no power to add to her color, but as he drew near he saw her look gradually change. She did not so much as stir, but the change grew slowly, slowly upon her face, and developed there into definite shape--the shape of secret, repressed dread.

“What is it,” she asked when he at last confronted her, “that ails ye?”

She uttered the words in a half whisper, as if she had not the power to speak louder, and he saw the hand hanging at her side close itself.

“What is it--that ails ye?”

He waited a few seconds before he answered her.

“Look at me,” he said at last, “and see.”

She did look at him. For the space of ten seconds their eyes were fixed upon each other in a long, bitter look. Then her little bundle dropped on the ground.

“Ye've went back on me,” she said under her breath again. “Ye've went back on me!”

He had thought she might make some passionate outcry, but she did not yet. A white wrath was in her face and her chest heaved, but she spoke slowly and low, her hands fallen down by her side.

“Ye've went back on me,” she said. “An' _I knew ye would_.”

He felt that the odor of his utter falseness tainted the pure air about him; he had been false all round,--to himself, to his love, to his ideals,--even in a baser way here.

“Yes,” he answered her with a bitterness she did not understand, “I've gone back on you.” Then, as if to himself, “I could not even reach perfection in villainy.”

Then her rage and misery broke forth.

“Yer a coward!” she said, with gasps between her words. “Yer afraid! I'd sooner--I'd sooner ye'd killed me--_dead!_”

Her voice shrilled itself into a smothered shriek, she cast herself face downward upon the earth and lay there clutching amid her sobs at the grass.

He looked down at her in a cold, stunned fashion.

“Do you think,” he said hoarsely, “that you can loathe me as I loathe myself? Do you think you can call me one shameful name I don't know I deserve? If you can, for God's sake let me have it.”

She struck her fist against the earth.

“Thar wasn't a man I ever saw,” she said, “that didn't foller after me, 'n' do fur me, 'n' wait fur a word from me. They'd hev let me set my foot on 'em if I'd said it. Thar wasn't nothin' I mightn't hev done--not nothin'. An' now--an' now “--and, she tore the grass from its earth and flung it from her.

“Go on,” he said. “Go on and say your worst.”

Her worst was bad enough, but he almost exulted under the blows she dealt him. He felt the horrible sting a vague comfort. He had fallen low enough surely when it was a comfort to be told that he was a liar, a poltroon, and a scoundrel.

The sun had been down an hour when it was over and she had risen and taken up her bundle.

“Why don't ye ask me to forgive ye?” she said with a scathing sneer. “Why don't ye ask me to forgive ye--an' say ye didn't mean to do it?”

He fell back a pace and was silent. With what grace would the words have fallen from his lips? And yet he knew that he had not _meant_ to do it.

She turned away and at a distance of a few feet stopped. She gave him a last look--a fierce one in its contempt and anger, and her affluence of beauty had never been so stubborn a fact before.

“Ye think ye've left me behind,” she said. “An' so ye hev--but it aint fur allers. The time'll come when mebbe ye'll see me ag'in.”

He returned to New York, but he had been there a week before he went to Rebecca. Finally, however, he awoke one morning feeling that the time had come for the last scene of his miserable drama. He presented himself at the house and sent up his name, and in three minutes Rebecca came to him.

It struck him with a new thrill of wretchedness to see that she wore by chance the very dress she had worn the day he had made the sketch--a pale, pure-looking gray, with a scarf of white lace loosely fastened at her throat. Next, he saw that there was a painful change in her, that she looked frail and worn, as if she had been ill. His first words he scarcely heard and never remembered. He had not come to make a defense, but a naked, bitter confession. As he made it low and monotonously, in brief, harsh words, holding no sparing for himself, Rebecca stood with her hand upon the mantle looking at him with simple directness. There was no rebuke in her look, but there was weariness. It occurred to him once or twice and with a terribly humiliating pang, that she was tired of him,--tired of it all.

“I have lost you,” he ended. “And I have lost myself. I have seen myself as I am,--a poorer figure, a grosser one than I ever dreamed of being, even in the eyes of my worst enemy. Henceforth, this figure will be my companion. It is as if I looked at myself in a bad glass; but now, though the reflection is a pitiable one, the glass is true.”

“You think,” she said, after a short silence, “of going away?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“To Europe.”

“Oh,” she ejaculated, with a soft, desperate sound of pain.

His eyes had been downcast and he raised them.

“Yes,” he said, mournfully. “We were to have gone together.”

“Yes,” she answered, “together.”

Her eyes were wet.

“I was very happy,” she said, “for a little while.”

She held out her hand.

“But,” she added, as if finishing a sentence, “you have been truer to me than you think.”

“No--no,” he groaned.

“Yes, truer to me than you think--and truer to yourself. It was I you loved--I! There have been times when I thought I must give that up, but now I know I need not. It was I. Sometime, perhaps,--sometime,--not now”--

Her voice broke, she did not finish, the end was a sob. Their eyes rested upon each other a few seconds, and then he released her hand and went away.

He was absent for two years, and during that time his friends heard much good of him. He lived the life of a recluse and a hard worker. He learned to know his own strength, and taught the world to recognize it also.

At the end of the second year, being in Paris, he went one night to the _Nouvelle Opéra_. Toward the close of the second act he became conscious of a little excited stir among those surrounding him. Every glass seemed directed toward a new arrival who stood erect and cool in one of the stage-boxes. She might have been Cleopatra. Her costume was of a creamy satin, she was covered with jewels, and she stood up confronting the house, as it regarded her, with _sang froid_.

Lennox rose hurriedly and left the place. He was glad to breathe the bitterly cold but pure night air. She had made no idle prophecy. He had seen her again!

There hung upon the wall of his private room a picture whose completion had been the first work after his landing. He went in to it and looked at it with something like adoration.

“'Sometime'” he said, “perhaps now,” and the next week he was on his way home.