Part 12

Had his love followed him up the green tangled height and sunk so swiftly to her death that it was accomplished without noise or outcry? To this hour only a few inhabitants locate the treacherous spot. He could not hide, even at Madame Clementine's, from all the talk of a community. This unreasonable tryst of thirty-five years raised for the first time doubts of his sanity. A woman might have kept such a tryst; but a man consoles himself.

Passers had been less frequent than usual, but again there was a crunch of approaching feet. Again he leaned forward, and the sparks in his eyes enlarged, and faded, as two fat women wobbled over the unsteady stones, exclaiming and balancing themselves, oblivious to the blue man and me.

“It is four o'clock,” said one, pausing to look at her watch. “This air gives one such an appetite I shall never be able to wait for dinner.”

“When the girls come in from golf at five we will have some tea,” said the other.

Returning beach gadders passed us. Some of them noticed me with a start, but the blue man, wrapped in rigid privacy, with his head sunk on his breast, still evaded curious eyes.

I began to see that his clothes were by no means new, though they suited the wearer with a kind of masculine elegance. The blue man's head had so entirely dominated my attention that the cut of his coat and his pointed collar and neckerchief seemed to appear for the first time.

He turned his face to me once more, but before our brief talk could be resumed another woman came around the jut of cliff, so light-footed that she did not make as much noise on the stones as the fat women could still be heard making while they floundered eastward, their backs towards us. The blue man had impressed me as being of middle age. But I felt mistaken; he changed so completely. Springing from the rock like a boy, his eyes glorified, his lips quivering, he met with open arms the woman who had come around the jut of the Giant's Stairway. At first glance I thought her a slim old woman with the kind of hair which looks either blond or gray. But the maturity glided into sinuous girlishness, yielding to her lover, and her hair shook loose, floating over his shoulder.

I dropped my eyes. I heard a pebble stir under their feet. The tinkle of water falling down its ferny tunnel could be guessed at; and the beauty of the world stabbed one with such keenness that the stab brought tears.

We have all had our dreams of flying; or floating high or low, lying extended on the air at will. By what process of association I do not know, the perfect naturalness and satisfaction of flying recurred to me. I was cleansed from all doubt of ultimate good. The meeting of the blue man and the woman with floating hair seemed to be what the island had awaited for thirty-five years.

The miracle of impossible happiness had been worked for him. It confused me like a dazzle of fireworks. I turned my back and bowed my head, waiting for him to speak again or to leave me out, as he saw fit.

Extreme joy may be very silent in those who have waited long, for I did not hear a cry or a spoken word. Presently I dared to look, and was not surprised to find myself alone. The evergreen-clothed amphitheatre behind had many paths which would instantly hide climbers from view. The blue man and the woman with floating hair knew these heights well. I thought of the pitfall, and sat watching with back-tilted head, anxious to warn them if they stirred foliage near where that fatal trap was said to lurk. But the steep forest gave no sign or sound from its mossy depths.

I sat still a long time in a trance of the senses, like that which follows a drama whose spell you would not break. Masts and cross-trees of ships were banded by ribbons of smoke blowing back from the steamers which towed them in lines up or down the straits.

Towards sunset there was a faint blush above the steel-blue waters, which at their edge reflected the blush. Then mist closed in. The sky became ribbed with horizontal bars, so that the earth was pent like a heart within the hollow of some vast skeleton.

I was about to climb down from my rock when two young men passed by, the first strollers I had noticed since the blue man's exit. They rapped stones out of the way with their canes, and pushed the caps back from their youthful faces, talking rapidly in excitement.

“When did it happen?”

“About four o'clock. You were off at the golf links.”

“Was she killed instantly?”

“I think so. I think she never knew what hurt her after seeing the horses plunge and the carriage go over. I was walking my wheel down-hill just behind and I didn't hear her scream. The driver said he lost the brake; and he's a pretty spectacle now, for he landed on his head. It was that beautiful old lady with the fly-away hair that we saw arrive from this morning's boat while we were sitting out smoking, you remember.”

“Not that one!”

“That was the woman. Had a black maid with her. She's a Southerner. I looked on the register.”

The other young fellow whistled.

“I'm glad I was at the links and didn't see it. She was a stunning woman.”

Dusk stalked grimly down from eastern heights and blurred the water earlier than on rose-colored evenings, making the home-returning walker shiver through evergreen glooms along shore. The lights of the sleepy Old Mission had never seemed so pleasant, though the house was full of talk about that day's accident at the other side of the island.

I slipped out before the early boat left next morning, driven by undefined anxieties towards Madame Clementine's alley. There is a childish credulity which clings to imaginative people through life. I had accepted the blue man and the woman with floating hair in the way which they chose to present themselves. But I began to feel like one who sees a distinctly focused picture shimmering to a dissolving view. The intrusion of an accident to a stranger at another hotel continued this morning, for as I took the long way around the bay before turning back to Clementine's alley I met the open island hearse, looking like a relic of provincial France, and in it was a coffin, and behind it moved a carriage in which a black maid sat weeping.

Madame Clementine came out to her palings and picked some of her nasturtiums for me. In her mixed language she talked excitedly about the accident; nothing equals the islander's zest for sensation after his winter trance when the summer world comes to him.

“When I heard it,” I confessed, “I thought of the friend of your blue gentleman. The description was so like her. But I saw her myself on the beach by the Giant's Stairway after four o'clock yesterday.”

Madame Clementine contracted her short face in puzzled wrinkles.

“There is one gentleman of red head,” she responded, “but none of blue—pas du tout.”

“You must know whom I mean—the lodger who has been with you thirty-five years.”

She looked at me as at one who has either been tricked or is attempting trickery.

“I don't know his name—but you certainly understand! The man I saw in that room at the foot of the stairs when you were showing my friend and me the chambers day before yesterday.”

“There was nobody. De room at de foot of de stair is empty all season. Tout de suite I put in some young lady that arrive this night.”

“Madame Clementine, I saw a man with a blue skin on the beach yesterday—” I stopped. He had not told me he lodged with her. That was my own deduction. “I saw him the day before in this house. Don't you know any such person? He has been on the island since that young lady was brought to your house with the cholera so long ago. He brought her to you.”

A flicker of recollection appeared on Clementine's face.

“That man is gone, madame; it is many years. And he was not blue at all. He was English Jersey man, of Halifax.”

“Did you never hear of any blue man on the island, Clementine?”

“I hear of blue bones found beyond Point de Mission.”

“But that skeleton found in the hole near the Giant's Stairway was a woman's skeleton.”

“Me loes!” exclaimed Madame Clementine, miscalling her English as she always did in excitement. “Me handle de big bones, moi-même! Me loes what de doctor who found him say!”

“I was told it was an Indian girl.”

“You have hear lies, madame. Me loes there was a blue man found beyond Point de Mission.”

“But who was it that I saw in your house?”

“He is not in my house!” declared Madame Clementine. “No blue man is ever in my house!” She crossed herself.

There is a sensation like having a slide pulled from one's head; the shock passes in the fraction of a second. Sunshine, and rioting nasturtiums, the whole natural world, including Clementine's puzzled brown face, were no more distinct to-day than the blue man and the woman with floating hair had been yesterday.

I had seen a man who shot down to instant death in the pit under the Giant's Stairway thirty-five years ago. I had seen a woman, who, perhaps, once thought herself intentionally and strangely deserted, seek and meet him after she had been killed at four o'clock!

This experience, set down in my note-book and repeated to no one, remains associated with the Old World scent of ginger. For I remember hearing Clementine say through a buzzing, “You come in, madame—you must have de hot wine and jahjah!”

THE INDIAN ON THE TRAIL

Maurice Barrett sat waiting in the old lime-kiln built by the British in the war of 1812—a white ruin like much-scattered marble, which stands bowered in trees on a high part of the island. He had, to the amusement of the commissioner, hired this place for a summer study, and paid a carpenter to put a temporary roof over it, with skylight, and to make a door which could be fastened. Here on the uneven floor of stone were set his desk, his chair, and a bench on which he could stretch himself to think when undertaking to make up arrears in literary work. But the days were becoming nothing but trysts with her for whom he waited.

First came the heavenly morning walk and the opening of his study, then the short half-hour of labor, which ravelled off to delicious suspense. He caught through trees the hint of a shirt-waist which might be any girl's, then the long exquisite outline which could be nobody's in the world but hers, her face under its sailor hat, the blown blond hair, the blue eyes. Then her little hands met his out-stretched hands at the door, and her whole violet-breathing self yielded to his arms.

They sat down on the bench, still in awe of each other and of the swift miracle of their love and engagement. Maurice had passed his fiftieth year, so clean from dissipation, so full of vitality and the beauty of a long race of strong men, that he did not look forty, and in all out-door activities rivalled the boys in their early twenties. He was an expert mountain-climber and explorer of regions from which he brought his own literary material; inured to fatigue, patient in hardship, and resourceful in danger. Money and reputation and the power which attends them he had wrung from fate as his right, and felt himself fit to match with the best blood in the world—except hers.

Yet she was only his social equal, and had grown up next door, while his unsatisfied nature searched the universe for its mate—a wild sweetbrier-rose of a child, pink and golden, breathing a daring, fragrant personality. He hearkened back to some recognition of her charm from the day she ran out bareheaded and slim-legged on her father's lawn and turned on the hose for her play. Yet he barely missed her when she went to an Eastern school, and only thrilled vaguely when she came back like one of Gibson's pictures, carrying herself with stateliness. There was something in her blue eyes not to be found in any other blue eyes. He was housed with her family in the same hotel at the island before he completely understood the magnitude of what had befallen him.

“I am awfully set up because you have chosen me,” she admitted at first. He liked to have her proud as of a conquest, and he was conscious of that general favor which stamped him a good match, even for a girl half his age.

“How much have you done this morning?” she inquired, looking at his desk.

“Enough to tide over the time until you came. Determination and execution are not one with me now.” Her hands were cold, and he warmed them against his face.

“It was during your married life that determination and execution were one?”

“Decidedly. For that was my plodding age. Sometimes when I am tingling with impatience here I look back in wonder on the dogged drive of those days. Work is an unhappy man's best friend. I have no concealments from you, Lily. You know I never loved my wife—not this way—though I made her happy; I did my duty. She told me when she died that I had made her happy. People cannot help their limitations.”

“Do you love me?” she asked, her lips close to his ear.

“I am you! Your blood flows through my veins. I feel you rush through me. You don't know what it is to love like that, do you?”

She shook her head.

“When you are out of my sight I do not live; I simply wait. What is the weird power in you that creates such gigantic passion?”

“The power is all in your imagination. You simply don't know me. You think I am a prize. Why, I—flirt—and I've—kissed men!”

He laughed. “You would be a queer girl, at your age, if you hadn't—kissed men—a little. Whatever your terrible past has been, it has made you the infinite darling that you are!”

She moved her eyes to watch the leaves twinkling in front of the lime-kiln.

“I must go,” she said.

“‘I must go'!” he mocked. “You are no sooner here than—'I must go'!”

“I can't be with you all the time. You don't care for appearances, so I have to.”

“Appearances are nothing. This is the only real thing in the universe.”

“But I really must go.” She lifted her wilful chin and sat still. They stared at each other in the silence of lovers. Though the girl's face was without a line, she was more skilled in the play of love than he.

“Indeed I must go. Your eyes are half shut, like a gentian.”

“When you are living intensely you don't look at the world through wide-open eyes,” said Maurice. “I never let myself go before. Repression has been the law of my life. Think of it! In a long lifetime I have loved but two persons—the woman I told you of, and you. Twenty years ago I found out what life meant. For the first time, I knew! But I was already married. I took that beautiful love by the throat and choked it down. Afterwards, when I was free, the woman I first loved was married. How long I have had to wait for you to bloom, lotus flower! This is living! All the other years were preparation.”

“Do you never see her?” inquired the girl.

“Who? That first one? I have avoided her.”

“She loved you?”

“With the blameless passion that we both at first thought was the most perfect friendship.”

“Wouldn't you marry her now if she were free?”

“No. It is ended. We have grown apart in renunciation for twenty years. I am not one that changes easily, you see. You have taken what I could not withhold from you, and it is yours. I am in your power.”

They heard a great steamer blowing upon the strait. Its voice reverberated through the woods. The girl's beautiful face was full of a tender wistfulness, half maternal. Neither jealousy nor pique marred its exquisite sympathy. It was such an expression as an untamed wood-nymph might have worn, contemplating the life of man.

“Don't be sad,” she breathed.

Vague terror shot through Maurice's gaze.

“That is a strange thing for you to say to me, Lily. Is it all you can say—when I love you so?”

“I was thinking of the other woman. Did she suffer?”

“At any rate, she has the whole world now—beauty, talent, wealth, social prestige. She is one of the most successful women in this country.”

“Do I know her name?”

“Quite well. She has been a person of consequence since you were a child.”

“I couldn't capture the whole world,” mused Lily. Maurice kissed her small fingers.

“Some one else will put it in your lap, to keep or throw away as you choose.”

The hurried tink-tank of an approaching cow-bell suggested passers. Then a whir of wheels could be heard through tangled wilderness. The girl met his lips with a lingering which trembled through all his body, and withdrew herself.

“Now I am going. Are you coming down the trail with me?”

Maurice shut the lime-kiln door, and crossed with her a grassy avenue to find among birches the ravelled ends of a path called the White Islander's Trail. You may know it first by a triangle of roots at the foot of an oak. Thence a thread, barely visible to expert eyes, winds to some mossy dead pines and crosses a rotten log. There it becomes a trail cleaving the heights, and plunging boldly up and down evergreen glooms to a road parallel with the cliff. Once, when the island was freshly drenched in rain, Lily breathed deeply, gazing down the tunnel floored with rock and pine-needles, a flask of incense. “It is like the violins!”

In that seclusion of heaven Maurice could draw her slim shape to him, for the way is so narrow that two are obliged to walk close. They parted near the wider entrance, where a stamp reared itself against the open sky, bearing a stick like a bow, and having the appearance of a crouching figure.

“There is the Indian on the trail,” said Lily. “You must go back now.”

“He looks so formidable,” said Maurice; “especially in twilight, and, except at noon, it is always twilight here. But when you reach him he is nothing but a stump.”

“He is more than a stump,” she insisted. “He is a real Indian, and some day will get up and take a scalp! It gives me a shiver every time I come in sight of him crouched on the trail!”

“Do you know,” complained her lover, “that you haven't told me once to-day?”

“Well—I do.”

“How much?”

“Oh—a little!”

“A little will not do!”

“Then—a great deal.”

“I want all—all!”

Her eyes wandered towards the Indian on the trail, and the bow of her mouth was bent in a tantalizing curve.

“I have told you I love you. Why doesn't that satisfy you?”

“It isn't enough!”

“Perhaps I can't satisfy you. I love you all I can.”

“All you can?”

“Yes. Maybe I can't love you as much as you want me to. I am shallow!”

“For God's sake, don't say you are shallow! There is deep under deep in you! I couldn't have staked my life on you, I couldn't have loved you, if there hadn't been! Say I have only touched the surface yet, but don't say you are shallow!”

The girl shook her head.

“There isn't enough of me. Do you know,” she exclaimed, whimsically, “that's the Indian on the trail! You'll never feel quite sure of me, will you?”

Maurice's lips moved. “You are my own!”

She kept him at bay with her eyes, though they filled slowly with tears.

“I am a child of the devil!” exclaimed Lily, with vehemence. “I give people trouble and make them suffer!”

“She classes me with 'people'!” Maurice thought. He said, “Have I ever blamed you for anything?”

“No.”

“Then don't blame yourself. I will simply take what you can give me. That is all I could take. Forgive me for loving you too much. I will try to love you less.”

“No,” the girl demurred. “I don't want you to do that.”

“I am very unreasonable,” he said, humbly. “But the rest of the world is a shadow. You are my one reality. There is nothing in the universe but you.”

She brushed her eyes fiercely. “I mustn't cry. I'll have to explain it if I do, and the lids will be red all day.”

The man felt internally seared, as by burning lava, with the conviction that he had staked his all late in life on what could never be really his. She would diffuse herself through many. He was concentrated in her. His passion had its lips burned shut.

“I am Providence's favorite bag-holder,” was his bitter thought. “The game is never for me.”

“Good-bye,” said Lily.

“Good-bye,” said Maurice.

“Are you coming into the casino to-night?”

“If you will be there.”

“I have promised a lot of dances. Good-bye. Go back and work.”

“Yes, I must work,” said Maurice.

She gave him a defiant, radiant smile, and ran towards the Indian on the trail. He turned in the opposite direction, and tramped the woods until nightfall.

At first he mocked himself. “Oh yes, she loves me! I'm glad, at any rate, that she loves me! There will be enough to moisten my lips with; and if I thirst for an ocean that is not her fault.”

Why had a woman been made who could inspire such passion without returning it? He reminded himself that she was of a later, a gayer, lighter, less strenuous generation than his own. Thousands of men had waded blood for a principle and a lost cause in his day. In hers the gigantic republic stood up a menace to nations. The struggle for existence was over before she was born. Yet women seemed more in earnest now than ever before. He said to himself, “I have always picked out natures as fatal to me as a death-warrant, and fastened my life to them.”

The thought stabbed him that perhaps his wife, whom he had believed satisfied, had carried such hopeless anguish as he now carried. Tardy remorse for what he could not help gave him the feeling of a murderer. And since he knew himself how little may be given under the bond of marriage, he could not look forward and say, “My love will yet be mine!”

He would, indeed, have society on his side; and children—he drew his breath hard at that. Her ways with children were divine. He had often watched her instinctive mothering of, and drawing them around her. And it should be much to him that he might look at and touch her. There was life in her mere presence.

He felt the curse of the artistic temperament, which creates in man the exquisite sensitiveness of woman.

Taking the longest and hardest path home around the eastern beach, Maurice turned once on impulse, parted a screen of birches, and stepped into an amphitheatre of the cliff, moss-clothed and cedar-walled. It sloped downward in three terraces. A balcony or high parapet of stone hung on one side, a rock low and broad stood in the centre, and an unmistakable chair of rock, cushioned with vividly green-branched moss, waited an occupant. Maurice sat down, wondering if any other human being, perplexed and tortured, had ever domiciled there for a brief time. Slim alder-trees and maples were clasped in moss to their waists. The spacious open was darkened by dense shade overhead. Bois Blanc was plainly in view from the beach. But the eastern islands stretched a line of foliage in growing dusk. Maurice felt the cooling benediction of the place. This world is such a good world to be happy in, if you have the happiness.

When the light faded he went on, climbing low headlands which jutted into the water, and sliding down on the other side; so that he reached the hotel physically exhausted, and had his dinner sent to his room. But a vitality constantly renewing itself swept away every trace of his hard day when he entered the gayly lighted casino.

He no longer danced, not because dancing ceased to delight him, but because the serious business of life had left no room for it. He walked along the waxed floor, avoiding the circling procession of waltzers, and bowing to a bank of pretty faces, but thinking his own thought, in growing bitterness: “They who live blameless lives are the fools of fate. If I had it to do over again, I would take what I wanted in spite of everything, and let the consequences fall where they would!” Looking up, he met in the eyes the woman of his early love.

She was holding court, for a person of such consequence became the centre of the caravansary from the instant of her arrival; and she gave him her hand with the conventional frankness and self-command that set her apart from the weak. Once more he knew she was a woman to be worshipped, whose presence rebuked the baseness he had just thought.

“Perhaps it was she who kept me from being worse,” Maurice recognized in a flash; “not I myself!”