CHAPTER V

LOVE BY THE SEA

The road to Gray Arches runs for part of the way past smart summer cottages, but soon the spaces between the cottages grow longer, until the road, ambling on through that bright seaside country, suggests a string from which many beads are missing. In fact for quite five miles the road resembles a little empty, dust-coloured ribbon almost hidden in the lush marsh grass. But suddenly Gray Arches appears, the pendant of the ornament of which the railroad station is the clasp. However, the pendant is no match for the clasp; for the station fairly shines with paint whereas Gray Arches is as dull as a piece of old silver; the windows of the station gleam like imitation diamonds, whereas those of Gray Arches are the turbid green of clouded emeralds. None the less, the pendant is a handsome thing of princely value--a real mansion, though an ancient one in a sad state of neglect.

Under a sky littered with huge cumulus clouds fleecy as cotton, the house, in its wide lawn, seemed asleep. But something besides the sea out there, running up in little rippling waves to kiss the curve of the sandy beach, for all the world like children clambering a mother's knees,--something besides the sea was astir. With his pale and somewhat stealthy look Simon appeared in the glass door. Then he stepped out on the gravel path, and with his dignified and careful tread, he began pacing up and down. Up and down beneath the luxuriant, low-hanging boughs of the evergreen trees that still wore their mantle of dew, he walked. Despite his deliberate movements, a half-concealed eagerness showed itself in his eyes as he glanced from time to time at an upper window shaded by a striped awning. Presently he paused and stooping, picked up a shell. Holding it delicately between his thumb and forefinger, Simon studied it as he would have studied a jewel. But the next moment he tossed it aside. One watching him would scarcely have judged that a singular happiness pervaded his meditations on this particular morning, for his thoughts were written in cipher on his long pale face. He had some news for Rachel and was anticipating her pleasure in it.

Simon's jealousy of St. Ives was now at an end, or so he believed. He had never felt that Rachel really cared for Emil, and now he told himself with a sigh of thankfulness, that his hatred of the inventor no longer existed. During Rachel's illness, for which he looked upon himself as in a measure responsible, the agony of contrition he had experienced had obliterated the other torture. St. Ives he had never liked, nor did he like him now; but when he learned that the building in which Emil's workshops were located was to be extensively altered during the summer, and that these repairs would make it an inconvenient, if not an impossible place in which to carry on important work, he had acted at once.

In his present state of mind it had been a simple, even a gratifying thing for him to arrange to have Emil and all that pertained to the organ attachment, transferred temporarily to the gardener's cottage on this country estate. This action, defining his own position as nothing else could, had brought with it an immeasurable sense of relief. Morbidly constituted as he was, his own position in the matter was of paramount importance to Simon, and so engrossed was he in this supposed release from jealousy that Emil and Annie figured as scarcely more than the necessary factors for carrying out a course of conduct he had outlined. That his mood was overstrained; that it was one of those misleading, reactionary impulses to which sensitive peaceful natures are particularly prone, he never suspected. For the sake of maintaining his present lofty attitude, Simon was capable of blinding himself for a time to anything that might again threaten his repose.

By taking down a partition in the gardener's cottage, the organ had been installed, and Emil and Annie were living there now in great comfort. Filled with reproaches and recriminations, the visit which Annie had paid to her parents had been a mistake, but this the young girl did not acknowledge; nor did she confess that, despite her unhappiness with her husband, she was not able to live without him. When Mrs. St. Ives had recovered from the illness which had attacked her, Annie had rejoined Emil very simply; now in these new conditions she was even growing fresh and pretty. Simon, who had not been unmindful of the young wife when he decided to make the arrangement, could not help seeing that Annie was happier; and, for that matter, that Emil was happier, too. The inventor whistled shrilly over his work, and whenever he heard him, Simon was conscious of the expansive feeling that accompanies a generous action.

Presently there was the grating of a wheeled chair passing over gravel. The chair had been left by a former occupant of the house and Emily had found it, covered with dust, in one of the chambers. Rachel's face was as wan as the face of a martyr in a mediæval picture, though her cheeks caught a tinge from the pink "cloud" wrapped around her head. Her eyes under their slender brows, held the old vivid passionate look, and her mouth resembled a little bit of pale crumpled velvet in which gleamed, all at once, the fascinating white of her teeth.

Simon approached; then, with a glance at Emily, he kissed his wife's little, white, blue-veined hand which dropped so supplely from its wrist.

"Take me down the path," she commanded. "Oh, how heavenly this air is!--and the sea! Do you know, Simon, illness gives one a new pair of eyes?"

Emily Short looked after the couple uneasily. She had said what she could to Simon to prevent his carrying out his absurd scheme relative to St. Ives; she had objected as strongly as she dared on various pretexts. But Simon, bent on making clear to Rachel how completely he renounced his former attitude toward the inventor, had turned a deaf ear. Now Emily imagined that he was announcing the step he had taken, for from where she stood, she saw Rachel lift her head with a swift, frightened air. Then it slowly sank as though a weight had forced it to her breast.

Standing in the keen sunlight, a little, lean, homely figure with a worn face, Emily sighed. She herself had never known love, yet she sighed and knotted her fingers tightly together beneath her apron.

It was evident that Rachel did not wish to go in the direction of the gardener's cottage, for they turned into another path. Half an hour later when she knew Simon had left his wife in order to catch his train for the city, Emily went in search of the invalid. She found her drawn up in the shelter of a small, half-ruinous summer-house overrun with vines which stood at one corner of the grounds. As Emily approached, she saw Rachel crane forward, with her hands gripping the arms of the wheeled chair. A wonderful unrestrained tenderness beamed in her face.

Passing not twenty feet away and visible through the intricacies of the wall of leaves was Emil St. Ives. The stuff of his shirt rippled in the breeze and the material clung to his muscular shoulders; his hair was in a tousle, his lips, surrounded by their curling beard, emitted a gay shrillness of sound; he was whistling as a bird sings. Abruptly Rachel dropped back in the chair. Without looking at Emily, she signified a desire to return to the house.

Emily pushed the chair into the sunlight and the little group crept up the path; while, all unconscious, Emil went leaping down the sands to bathe in the sea.

During her illness, Rachel had been besieged by feverish thoughts. Not a phase of the situation but she had gone over innumerable times. Finally her resolution was taken: she would see Emil no more. The decision was an arduous one and she raged to make it. Love for one man, overmastering love, as Nature wills it, was in conflict with unswerving loyalty to another; and this latter feeling likewise had its roots in the very foundation of her character, so that her woman's heart had been for a season a disputed field, and the conflict had protracted her illness.

But when she rose at last, pitiful tender, heroic,--all woman in that she dreamed she had immolated the feeling that threatened the peace of her husband--lo, the situation awaiting her put her plans to confusion. Her husband's unexpected move had made her course a difficult if not an impossible one.

For more than three weeks by employing every stratagem, she succeeded in avoiding the inventor, and when the housemaid brought word, as she did on several occasions, that both Emil and Annie had come over to call on her, she pleaded weariness and refused to see them. But as her strength returned, this excuse failed, and she spent many hours with Emily, who had been persuaded to remain and carry on her trade of toy-making in an unused room of the house. Had Simon permitted it, Rachel would have returned to the city, but both her husband and the doctor opposed the move on the ground of her recent illness.

It was a state of things which could not endure.

One morning Emil came upon Rachel sitting on the sand. Worn out by her efforts to avoid him, beyond turning her face obstinately in the other direction, she made no attempt to escape.

As he advanced he examined her with his laughing eyes. "So I've found you at last!" he cried joyously.

After a moment, because there was nothing else to do, she turned her face to his.

"But you're not much of an invalid, are you?" he cried an surprise, and seated himself not far off. "You look," he said, indicating the sea, "as strong as those waves."

Hot blushes were uncommon with her, but now the unreasoning colour mounted full tide beneath her tanned skin. "Yes," she assented coldly, "I'm quite myself now;" and she began taking the sand into her hands and letting it trickle between her fingers.

"Well, why haven't you been over to see my new workroom?" he demanded in a different tone, as he followed these movements. "You don't take much interest in your neighbours, it strikes me."

She steadily regarded the sea. "So far I haven't done anything," she said in a low voice, and then added, as if the words were forced from her, "I shall go back to the city when the doctor will allow it."

"What would be the sense of that?" he demanded in amazement. "Why it's fine here! Just the place for you. Is it possible you don't like it?"

Rachel's lip curled slightly. "Where's Annie?" she asked after a moment's pause.

Emil turned his head. "Why she's somewhere about; she came down on the beach a little while ago."

"Won't you find her? I should like to see her."

Nonplussed, he lifted himself from the sand. After staring about, he struck off in search of his wife. But when Annie appeared by his side, wrinkling up her face in the sunlight and holding out her hand, Rachel had little to say. Immediately afterward she left them.

A few days later as she was crossing the lawn, Rachel met Emil and he accosted her. This time there was umbrage in his tone.

"I say," he cried, and he placed himself directly in her path, "why don't you ever come over and let me show you that organ attachment? I can play for you now, in a sort of way; in fact I'm quite a musician."

Again she avoided his look and attempted to put him off. "I have promised to drive over to the station this afternoon and meet Mr. Hart," she said, "but I will come--sometime."

"But when?" he demanded, scowling at her, and his countenance was no longer good natured but fierce and aggressive. "You used to show some interest in my work, but now you withdraw it all of a sudden--just like a woman. And I tell you, I can't finish the thing without it," he concluded angrily. "I can't go on alone--you've accustomed me to something else."

A shiver ran through her like that which takes a young bird that feels the air for the first time beneath its tentatively fluttering wings. Her impulse was to sail away in the atmosphere of love his crude unconscious confession breathed about her. She dared not raise her eyes because of the involuntary joy that filled them.

"I'll come over this evening with Simon," she said, softly. And everything about himself and about herself she loved passionately.

Life, by all of us, is felt vaguely to be a tapestry of which we see the under side. But now in a flash Rachel saw the pattern that Fate was weaving imperturbably; a pattern premeditated from the beginning; and well she knew that nothing she could do or he could do, could stay that weaving hand. Though no word of love was ever spoken, the design in all its beauty was complete, for words and acts are human lumber, unessential to the accomplishment of the spiritual miracle; present, they follow the design inaccurately; absent, the design is seen the clearer because of no gross accompaniment. And Rachel wondered if Emil saw at last what she saw; if he did not now, he would see,--he would! And neither was any more responsible for the fact that filled the world with new meaning than he was responsible for the fact of life. From these meditations she roused herself, emerging as from an enchanted mist.

"I'll come over this evening with Simon," she repeated, and Emil, who had been staring at her, drew himself up and reluctantly accepted the promise.

When he moved away from her, his face wore an expression of astonishment.

As Ding Dong had gone to the city on an errand for Emil and did not return on the usual train in the evening, there was no one at the cottage to pump the organ, for Simon evidently considered it beneath his dignity to perform so menial a service. He sat in a rocking-chair near a window, and from time to time with a meditative eye, he scanned the walls of the room which were decorated with mottoes and lithographs in colours. He was estimating the probable cost of replacing the partition when Emil should have finished with the cottage.

The inventor, restless and keenly disappointed, went again and again to the outer door, where he remained straining his eyes through the salty darkness, though there was no chance now that Ding Dong would appear until morning. Rachel sat by a little table turning over the leaves of a current magazine with her long fingers; she was impatient with her husband and whenever Emil entered the room, she looked at him, and her face between the loopings of her hair, had a faint, remote, mysterious smile.

Annie issued from the kitchen and going up to Emil leaned against his shoulder, and he nonchalantly encircled her little figure. Instantly, Rachel grew hot all over with a violent jealousy such as she had never before experienced.

All the way home while she walked by Simon's side and felt beneath her elbow his thin fingers supporting her, her hands beneath her cloak were pressed against her heart. Oh, the intensity of her love and the paleness of his! She had a picture of Life irrevocably linked to Death. With the vision came such a sense of desolation that, turning her face aside, she sobbed under her breath.

The miracle was rapidly accomplishing; she was passing out of herself,--out of her scruples, her pity, her fears.

She was wandering on the sands and knew not where she went, save that the need for movement was imperative. She had left Gray Arches far behind. What matter that from the dun-coloured clouds a slant of rain descended, straight and fine as the locks a princess engaged in combing her hair? Secretly, noiselessly, the rain touched the sands, save at intervals when a land breeze seized it; then these liquid tresses were torn and tangled into drifting masses as by the hand of a rude lover who violently seizes the locks of his mistress. And the rain hissed as it met the sands and ran away in little curling, twisting rivulets like serpents.

Enjoying the caress of the moisture on her face, Rachel walked on. The vigour of her childhood was in her limbs, the spirit of it in her heart, and she remembered her old turbulent longing for freedom. But love was the supreme liberator. And in an ecstasy, she drew herself together and her craving for this supposed liberation of the spirit was so intense and penetrating, that she wavered uncertainly as if about to fall.

At that instant, a voice, muffled by the falling of the rain and the soft plash of the waves on the beach, reached her. It came to her out of the distance; but the space that separated her from him who called was so great and the curtain of rain that divided them, at the moment, so dense, that she could not see him. Yet that voice in which no words were distinguishable, quickened and reanimated her. For an instant with her arms curved fearfully above her head, she looked back.

A spot on that barren coast was growing larger, it was moving toward her; and all at once the breeze brought her the message above the wash of the waves.

"W-a-i-t! W-a-i-t!"

Emil was hallooing, he was calling to her with his hand to his lips. Suddenly he broke into a run, and the impulse of flight was communicated to her.

With bated breath she sped before him, and she was conscious that he took up the chase after a momentary pause of amazement.

Across those sands pitted by rain, once more the old race was run, the exciting elemental pursuit of woman by man. And as if in joy the waves lapped the beach with a sound of applause, and the rain, as if delighted at this return of happy antique life, now baffled and pelted and blinded the pair, and now, in a lull, revealed them each to the other.

Rachel's hair, escaping its bonds, streamed behind her; her skirts impeded her movements; yet wildly, excitedly, across that expanse of sand, she ran. And the blood beat exultantly in her veins and she felt that the goal toward which she was making was that fugitive band of colour that persisted, despite the drifting mist, at the end of the beach. Through this uncertain band of colour, the sky, elsewhere dull and scattered with clouds, appeared to be smiling with huge, mobile, kindly lips. Ah, if she could but bathe in the light of that understanding smile which the sky cast over the beach! A piece of driftwood brought her precipitately to a halt, but instantly she was up and away like a sea-bird.

He who followed with long strides was gaining on her, plainly he was gaining on her. With her skirts and her shorter stature, she was no match for him. Finally, with both hands clasped beneath her bosom, she sank to her knees. Her sight swam, she gasped for breath. They had traversed in this way a distance of a quarter of a mile. The only object in sight was an old fishing-boat, drawn up on the sands. On this boat her glance rested. The next moment she saw Emil. As he ran, something emanated from him.

Instantly she was up; and straight and slim and fleet, she darted across his path and was into the old fishing boat. There was but one oar, and, as she pushed off, a burst of fresh laughter gurgled in her throat and illuminated her face. The tide, in tantalizing fashion, carried her beyond his reach and she saw him stop. Then his eyes, imperative and gleaming, like two fierce lights, sought hers. After that look he waded into the water; then swam.

Two or three strokes and he was beside the skiff. When he grasped its edge with his dripping fingers, that shone out white and strong in the steadily increasing light, Rachel laid hold of his clothing.

Their heads were on a level--they exchanged a look.

Wild, flashing, dominating, it leapt from his face, all pale and streaming with water, to hers; and all the secret of her woman's heart mounted to her eyes; they were no longer mysterious, but frank as daylight, revealing.

The sun which, like a curious watcher, had cleared the cloud-bank, beat upon the sea in joyous fashion, and the waves beat upon the sand; and all along the beach and in the air and in the waters under the boat, there was a murmur as if Nature, the great mother, sighed in the fulness of her content.