Part 13

“Why, Mrs. Carstang, I didn't know you were here!” he spoke, with warmth around the heart.

“We came at noon.”

“And I was in the woods all day.” Maurice greeted the red-cheeked, elderly Mr. Carstang, whom, according to half the world, his wife doted upon, and according to the other half, she simply endured. At any rate, he looked pleased with his lot.

While Maurice stood talking with Mrs. Carstang, the new grief and the old strangely neutralized each other. It was as if they met and grappled, and he had numb peace. The woman of his first love made him proud of that early bond. She was more than she had been then. But Lily moved past him with a smile. Her dancing was visible music. It had a penetrating grace—hers, and no other person's in the world. The floating of a slim nymph down a forest avenue, now separating from her partner, and now joining him at caprice, it rushed through Maurice like some recollection of the Golden Age, when he had stood imprisoned in a tree. There was little opportunity to do anything but watch her, for she was more in demand than any other girl in the casino. Hop nights were her unconscious ovations. He took a kind of aching delight in her dancing. For while it gratified an artist to the core, it separated her from her lover and gave her to other men.

Next morning he waited for her in the study with a restlessness which would not let him sit still. More than once he went as far as the oak-tree to watch for a glimmer. But when Lily finally appeared at the door he pretended to be very busy with papers on his desk, and looked up, saying, “Oh!”

The morning was chill, and she seemed a fair Russian in fur-edged cloth as she put her cold fingers teasingly against his neck.

“Are you working hard?”

“Trying to. I am behind.”

“But if there is a good wind this afternoon you are not to forget the Carstangs' sail They will be here only a day or two, and you mustn't neglect them. Mrs. Carstang told me if I saw you first to invite you.”

Maurice met the girl's smiling eyes, and the ice of her hand went through him.

“Isn't Mrs. Carstang lovely! As soon as I saw you come in last night, I knew she was—the other woman.”

“You didn't look at me.”

“I can see with my eyelashes. Do you know, I have often thought I should love her if I were a man!”

There was not a trace of jealousy in Lily's gentle and perfect manner.

“You resemble her,” said Maurice. “You have the blond head, and the same features—only a little more delicate.”

“I have been in her parlor all morning,” said Lily. “We talked about you. I am certain, Maurice, Mrs. Carstang is in her heart still faithful to you.”

That she should thrust the old love on him as a kind of solace seemed the cruelest of all. There was no cognizance of anything except this one maddening girl. She absorbed him. She wrung the strength of his manhood from him as tribute, such tribute as everybody paid her, even Mrs. Carstang. He sat like a rock, tranced by the strong control which he kept over himself.

“I must go,” said Lily. She had not sat down at all. Maurice shuffled his papers.

“Good-bye,” she spoke.

“Good-bye,” he answered.

She did not ask, “Are you coming down the trail with me?” but ebbed softly away, the swish of her silken petticoat subsiding on the grassy avenue.

Her lover stretched his arms across the desk and sobbed upon them with heart-broken gasps.

“It is killing me! It is killing me! And there is no escape. If I took my life my disembodied ghost would follow her, less able to make itself felt than now! I cannot live without her, and she is not for me—not for me!”

He cursed the necessity which drove him out with the sailing party, and the prodigal waste of life on neutral, trivial doings which cannot be called living. He could see Lily with every pore of his body, and grew faint keeping down a wild beast in him which desired to toss overboard the men who crowded around her. She was more deliciously droll than any comédienne, full of music and wit, the kind of spirit that rises flood-tide with occasion. He was himself hilarious also during this experience of sailing with two queens surrounded by courtiers and playing the deep game of fascination, as if men were created for the amusement of their lighter moments. Lily's defiant, inscrutable eyes mocked him. But Mrs. Carstang gave him sweet friendship, and he sat by her with the unchanging loyalty of a devotee to an altar from which the sacrament has been removed.

Next morning Lily did not come to the lime-kiln. Maurice worked furiously all day, and corrected proof in his room at night, though tableaux were shown in the casino, both Mrs. Carstang and Lily being head and front of the undertaking.

The second day Lily did not come to the lime-kiln. But he saw her pass along the grassy avenue in front of his study with Mrs. Carstang, a man on each side of them. They waved their hands to him.

Maurice sat with his head on his desk all the afternoon, beaten and broken-hearted. He told himself he was a poltroon; that he was losing his manhood; that the one he loved despised him, and did well to despise him; that a man of his age who gave way to such weakness must be entering senility. The habit of rectitude would cover him like armor, and proclaim him still of a chivalry to which he felt recreant. But it came upon him like revelation that many a man had died of what doctors had called disease, when the report to the health-officer should have read: “This man loved a woman with a great passion, and she slew him.”

The sigh of the woods around, and the sunlight searching for him through his door, were lonelier than illimitable space. It was what the natives call a “real Mackinac day,” with infinite splendor of sky and water.

Maurice heard the rustle of woman's clothes, and stood up as Lily came through the white waste of stones. She stopped and gazed at him with large hunted eyes, and submitted to his taking and kissing her hands. It was so blessed to have her at all that half his trouble fled before her. They sat down together on the bench.

Much of his life Maurice had been in the attitude of judging whether other people pleased him or not. Lily reversed this habit of mind, and made him humbly solicitous to know whether he pleased her or not. He silently thanked God for the mere privilege of having her near him. Passionate selfishness was chastened out of him. One can say much behind the lips and make no sound at all.

“If I drench her with my love and she does not know it,” thought Maurice, “it cannot annoy her. Let me take what she is willing to give, and ask no more.”

“The Carstangs are gone,” said Lily.

“Yes; I bade them good-bye this morning before I came to the lime-kiln.”

“You don't say you regret their going.”

“I never seek Mrs. Carstang.”

He sat holding the girl's hands and never swerving a glance from her face, which was weirdly pallid—the face of her spirit. He felt himself enveloped and possessed by her, his will subject to her will. He said within himself, voicelessly: “I love you. I love the firm chin, the wilful lower lip, and the Cupid's bow of the upper lip. I love the oval of your cheeks, the curve of your ears, the etched eyebrows, and all the little curls on your temples. I love the proud nose and most beautiful forehead. Every blond hair n that dear head is mine! Its upward tilt on the long throat is adorable! Have you any gesture or personal trait which does not thrill me? But best of all, because through them you yourself look at me, revealing more than you think, I adore your blue eyes.”

“What are you thinking?” demanded Lily.

“Of a man who lay face downward far out in the desert, and had not a drop of water to moisten his lips.”

“Is he in your story?”

“Yes, he is in my story.”

“I thought perhaps you didn't want me to come here any more,” she said.

“You didn't think so!” flashed Maurice.

“But you turned your cheek to me the last time I was here. You were too busy to do more than speak.”

Voicelessly he said: “I lay under your feet, my life, my love! You walked on me and never knew it.” Aloud he answered; “Was I so detestable? Forgive me. I am trying to learn self-control.”

“You are all self-control! If you have feeling, you manage very well to conceal it.”

“God grant it!” he said, in silence, behind his lips. “For the touch of your hand is rapture. My God! how hard it is to love so much and be still!” Aloud he said, “Don't you know the great mass of human beings are obliged to conceal their feelings because they have not the gift of expression?”

“Yes, I know,” answered Lily, defiantly.

“But that can never be said of you,” Maurice went on. “For you are so richly endowed with expression that your problem is how to mask it.”

“Are you coming down the trail with me? It is sunset, and time to shut the study for the day.”

He prepared at once to leave his den, and they went out together on the trail, lingering step by step. Though it was the heart of the island summer, the maples still had tender pink leaves at the extremities of branches; and the trail looked wild and fresh as if that hour tunnelled through the wilderness. Sunset tried to penetrate western stretches with level shafts, but none reached the darkening path where twilight already purpled the hollows.

The night coolness was like respite after burning pain. Maurice wondered how close he might draw this changeful girl to him without again losing her. He had compared her to a wild sweetbrier-rose. She was a hundred-leaved rose, hiding innumerable natures in her depths.

They passed the dead pines, crossed the rotten log, and came silently within sight of the Indian on the trail, but neither of them noted it. The Indian stood stencilled against a background of primrose light, his bow magnified.

It was here that Maurice felt the slight elastic body sag upon his arm.

“I am tired,” said Lily. “I have been working so hard to amuse your friends!”

“Would that I were my friends!” responded Maurice. He said, silently: “I love you! I wonder if I shall ever learn to love you less?”

The unspoken appeal of her swaying figure put him off his guard, and he found himself holding her, the very depths of his passion rushing out with the force of lava.

“It is you I want!—the you that is not any other person on earth or in the universe! Whatever it is—the identity—the spirit—that is you—the you that was mated with me in other lives—that I have sought—will seek—must have, whatever the price in time and anguish!—understand!—there is nobody but you!”

Tears oozed from under her closed lids. She lay in his arms passive, as in a half-swoon.

“You do the talking,” she breathed. “I do the loving!”

Without opening her eyes she met him with her perfect mouth, and gave herself to him in a kiss. He understood a spirit so passionately reticent that it denied to itself its own inward motions. The wilfulness of a solitary exalted nature melted in that kiss. All the soft curves of her face concealed and belied the woman who opened her wild blue eyes and looked at him, passionately adoring, fierce for her own, yet doubtful of fate.

“If I let you know that I loved you all I do, you would tire of me!”

“How can you say I could ever tire of you?”

“I know it! When you are not quite sure of me, you love me best!”

Maurice laughed against her lips. “You said that was the Indian on the trail—my never being quite sure of you! Will you take an oath with me?”

“Yes.”

“This is the oath: I swear before God that I love you more than any one else on earth; more than any one else in the universe.”

She repeated: “I swear before God that I love you more than any one else on earth; more than any one else in the universe!”

Maurice held her blond head against his breast, quivering through flesh and spirit. That was the moment of life. What was conquering the dense resistance of material things, or coming off victor in bouts with men? The moment of life is when the infinite sea opens before the lover.

The heart of the island held them like the heart of Allah. The pines sang around them.

“We must go on,” spoke Lily. “It is so dark we can't see the Indian on the trail.”

“There isn't any Indian on the trail now,” laughed Maurice. “You can never frighten me with him again.”

THE END

┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Transcriber's Note: │ │ │ │ The original spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation have been │ │ retained, with the exception of apparent typographical errors │ │ which have been corrected. │ │ │ │ Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained. │ │ │ │ Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant │ │ form was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed. │ │ │ │ Italicized words are surrounded by underline characters, _like │ │ this_. │ │ │ │ Mid-paragraph illustrations have been moved between paragraphs │ │ and some illustrations have been moved closer to the text that │ │ references them. The list of illustrations paginations were │ │ changed accordingly. │ └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘