CHAPTER X

IN WHICH A KISS IS GIVEN AND REGRETTED

Unconscious of the grim humour that lurked in the fact of their having selected it as a place to foregather, Emil and Rachel continued to meet at the old Burying Point. No other lovers came there, and as deaths were infrequent in Old Harbour and a funeral pageant an event, they were practically secure from interruption. There, where the wind bent the grass above the graves with a sound that struck pleasantly on the ear and the insect world was all abroad on busy wings, they found the isolation their spirits craved. The place was, at most, but a setting for their two selves, for their sweet, intoxicating emotions.

Emil would look at Rachel pensively, almost appealingly. She stirred in him depths of tenderness and often he would have been tempted into some indiscretion had not her Arcadian innocence disconcerted him. With a shrug of the shoulders and a sigh, he would turn away from her as if offended at something. Though neither of them guessed it, what raised the level of the situation and decreased its dangers, was the unflagging interest she exhibited in his work. A woman's interest in his achievement is always fruitful for a man. For the exuberant and egotistic inventor, it was as fuel to flame. It immensely increased his powers.

Had anyone, prompted by curiosity, troubled himself to spy on the pair, he would have discovered an enthusiastic young fellow ranting on matters scientific and a slip of a girl sitting nearby with delight and despair depicted on her mobile countenance. The delight, he would have remarked, was a fluctuating emotion; the despair in danger of becoming a lasting one.

The two had been meeting in this way for upwards of three weeks and the lithographic sheets and press were all but ready for triumphant shipment, when Rachel's patience came unexpectedly to an end. Her change of front was due directly to the weather. The temperature of Pemoquod on a particular afternoon in late August made the wearing of the muslin dress seem out of the question, for the day, while bright, was distinctly chilly and by the time she quitted the cemetery according to all reasonable calculations, the air would be cold. She therefore made no change in her dress at all, but in her every-day frock, with an old drab silk shawl, which had belonged to her mother, over her shoulders and a book from the circulating library under her arm, she took her way to Old Harbour, her prospects for a pleasant interview considerably damaged. In this dull attire she would forego Emil's lightning glances of pleasure, "For he might as well look at a rock or a stump," she told herself disconsolately, "as look at me the way I am to-day."

The weather beside the sea is nothing if not capricious, and by the time she reached the cemetery, the air had become warm. It was between four and five o'clock and the sun was sending long level shafts between the graves, as if looking for something, when Rachel took her accustomed place on the flat-topped tomb and let the shawl slip down her back till it lay about her in a semicircle of rippling folds.

"Just my bad luck!" she soliloquized. "It's warm enough for a gauze dress if one had such a thing. But I'd like to know what's the sense of all this?" she resumed indignantly. "It isn't fair that he should judge me by my clothes entirely and I'll not have it. I've a mind as well as he!"

Now there was no evidence that Emil had judged her as lacking this particular endowment, but she was in no mood to adhere closely to facts. She began turning the pages of her book at random. She was engaged in reading, with most imperfect attention it must be confessed, a glowing description of the sphinx, when he arrived.

From a distance he spied her and she appeared to him to light up with her grace the whole desolate place. For eight hours he had devoted himself solely to work; now like one who receives but his just reward, he drew near with a jovial smile on his lips. Rachel, though she was conscious of his approach in every fibre of her being, was all for concealing the fact. Partly through resentment, partly through coquetry, she kept her eyes to her page. Suddenly Emil halted. Of a truth, there was material enough in the picture she made, perched there on the old table-tomb, for twenty conquests.

Dressed in the famous muslin, the rarest quality of her beauty, a certain lurking mystery, was lost amid furbelows which simply emphasized her youth. Now clothed in a sober little frock that appeared to be as much part of her as its smooth bark is part of a sapling, there was nothing to divert attention from her actual self. There she sat with her book open on her lap, a kind of sibyl, while about her hummed and buzzed and fluttered tribes of nimble-bodied insects. Great blundering bees pilfered rude kisses from the willing lips of some pink phlox swaying at her knee, a butterfly came to rest on the tomb and even crawled with curious, quivering antennae toward the hand outspread on the stone. A thrush poured out its heart from a little whip of a tree over her head. In the midst of this place of death, she spoke compellingly of life.

"I've come!"

Emil's voice trembled. The blood beat in his temples.

"How long have you been here?" he questioned, as he opened his hand grudgingly and released her fingers. "How much have I missed of you?"

She ignored the form of the question. "Oh, I've not been here long, I think," with disconcerting calmness, "though when I have a book I lose all track of time."

At this unexpectedly repressing manner, he moved a few paces off.

"What is your book?" he inquired after a pause.

"'Impressions of the Nile Country,'" and she made a motion as if to hand him the volume. But he kept his face away. Thereupon she plucked a spear of grass and placed it carefully between the pages, while a peculiarly significant and feminine expression played about her mouth.

"Oh," she sighed with sudden fervour, "how I should like to travel! particularly how I should love to travel in Egypt."

"But why Egypt?" and he swung round.

"The sphinx;" she explained briefly. "It sits there gazing before it forever and forever, and it never reveals the secret of the hands that fashioned it, while the sun scorches it and the sands blow over it and will finally throttle it, I suppose, but it will never tell."

With her arms crossed on her lap, she was staring at a near-by shrub. It was a starved old rose-bush which had long since ceased to bear, but she seemed to see in it a vision, for a smile unclosed her lips and narrowed her eyes. She looked up at him and her bosom lifted.

"Yes," she repeated softly, "I should like mightily to see the sphinx."

He was regarding her with a strange, fixed attention. Now he thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket with a convulsive movement.

"You're something by way of being a sphinx yourself," he said unsteadily.

Reaching behind her she slowly drew up the shawl until straight folds of the material fell about her face. Then she extended a hand on either knee and gazed before her. The imitation was admirable. Not a feature or limb stirred. The sun penetrated the worn silken shawl and vaguely defined her round little form. It gilded her forehead and chin and traced a line of humid light along the lids of the eyes the pupils of which were so obstinately contemplating Eternity. But what that celestial body could not accomplish with its bold steady gaze, was given to a mortal to achieve with a single glance. St. Ives bent over her.

The sphinx was lost in the woman.

Throbbing with delicious dread, Rachel gave him her eyes. She returned look for look, while her breathing ceased and her little hands, still stretched along her knees, trembled. Lower and lower he bent his head, higher and higher she lifted hers, to the length of its delicate, palpitating throat. At the very brink--an ecstatic, troubled, reeling pause, then--their lids sank, their lips met.

About them the insects continued their aggressive activity. A bee, greedy for the last drop of honey, lit on a purple aster and the whole light spray of blossoms swayed to his weight. The butterfly that had lately visited Rachel's hand, joined its mate high up in the thin blue air. From the branch of a sapling the thrush swelled its throat once more in a joyful song. Ignorant that those two motionless heads announced creatures differing in aught from themselves, the host of creeping and winged things enrolled them for the nonce in their lists.

Rachel was the first to recoil from the caress. She drew back,--sweetly ashamed, shyly-radiant, with that in her eyes a man would have died rather than lessen.

But on Emil the shock of the caress had a contrary effect.

"In Heaven's name!" he cried, without looking at her, "forgive me." The words leaped forth from his very heart. He wasn't half worthy that kiss and he had the astonishing grace to know it.

As though any apology were necessary, however, as though events could have happened otherwise! The kiss had been as sure to come as the imminent meeting of evening with deep dark night. And so Rachel, by her manner, seemed to say. In an anguish of expectancy she looked up at him--ready to be assured, or ready to be stricken in her pride as never maid was stricken before.

Before Emil could answer, Zarah Patch appeared round a turn of the roadway. Concealed by hedges and clumps of shrubbery, his approach had been unnoticed by the pair. Now he brought the white mare to a halt while he shot a look at the girl. Some inkling of the gossip concerning his friend's young granddaughter had reached even his old ears.

"I'm going back to the Point directly, Rachel," he called, "be ye inclined to come along?"

She sent a mute, tremulous question to Emil. His eyes were rivetted on the ground. A powerful struggle was taking place within him. A desire for love had flamed in his heart and, with his lips on hers, for one brief fiery instant he had tasted the sweetness of his power over her. None the less, what he now experienced was an intolerable sense of shame. It set the seal of dignity on his ardour, if she had but understood. But she totally misread him.

Pride sent up its secret cry: Perhaps he regretted the kiss, perhaps he had no right to kiss her?

"Want to come along?" urged Zarah. "I've been hauling sod and the cart is some muddied, but if yer'e keerful gittin' in, ye won't hurt yer dress none."

Rachel suddenly signified her assent.

Emil raised his head in a singular and wild fashion. He made an imploring gesture. But it was too late.

Under cover of a manner of perfect nonchalance she rose to the supposed situation. Haughtily, under his fiercely-miserable eyes and the curious eyes of the old man, she proceeded to the cart.

Emil strode forward. He looked passionate. But she ignored his proffered hand and accepted Zarah's assistance into the cart. Once perched on the high seat, she nodded proudly in the direction of him whom she had so lately kissed.

Like many another woman if she could have erased the tender incident from the scroll of her days, if she even could have told herself with honesty that Emil had been the only moved one, she would willingly have given half her life.

"But I kissed him back--I did! I did! and there's no use pretending otherwise," she confessed in helpless stony abasement.

And throughout the night, in intervals of sleeplessness, she continued to sigh because of the torturing memory.