Chapter 6

"No, but when I have been inconsiderate it was because you were myself, the best self that we overlook sometimes, but return to with unfailing loyalty. You were not bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; that is a very low and material view of what you have been and are to me, heart of my heart and soul of my soul. I cannot think of a life apart from you, for you are my life. Marriage is not a matter of a license and a ceremony and Mendelssohn and gaping crowds and a tour. We do not need any one to tell us that what God has joined cannot be sundered by man. All this year has been a long wedding of every thought and feeling and desire, until I have looked into your eyes to see my own wish. We have thought and thought, but that way madness lies. Now I feel that all the world we have lost, lives for us in every glorious possibility in each other. For I know that you love me."

"Yes," she said, "I think I have loved you all along, but it never entered my dreams that you could love me. Even now, when you tell me, it does not seem as if it could be so, either by the mental process, or by that of feeling."

He caught her in his arms and kissed her, a kiss so long and tender that it left her clinging to him, breathless and half awakened.

"Don't think," he said, "feel,--feel my heart and know that every beat is for you, that every atom of me calls for you, and every drop of blood obeys, as it would command you. I have tried to reach the ideal of the love that says, not 'thou must be mine,' but 'I must be thine,' but I have failed if you can doubt me."

She flung her arms around his neck with sudden passion.

"This is the greatest, the most perfect dream of all," she said; "I think it must be heaven."

"A new heaven and a new earth," he answered gently.

XV

Women alone know how much attraction there is in the respect which a master shows them.

BALZAC.

The derelict did not afford them much amusement or information. The waves soon beat her to pieces on the savage rocks. Apparently she had been a ship plying between Western ports, probably San Francisco and Honolulu. In the wreckage washed up there were a few pounds of rice, and some brooms of what they believed to be sugar-cane. There was nothing else.

"Not even a lemon!" Robin said disconsolately. "Think of living all one's natural life not only ten, but ten thousand miles from a lemon."

Adam laughed sympathetically. "It's like a yachting party I remember; we found that the boat we had engaged had been taken by somebody else, and our set had to be divided. Later in the evening we discovered that we had all the sugar and the other crowd all the lemons. ''Twas ever thus from childhood's hour, I've seen my fondest hopes decay: I never wanted something sour, but what molasses came my way.' Never mind, dear. We will go and plant our sugar, and by the time it is ready to sweeten anything, a whole cargo of lemons may have floated into harbor right at our door."

They crossed the ranges to the western coast, where there was lower ground, better fitted to the supposed requirements of rice and cane, and had a good deal of amusement out of their ignorance, neither of them having more than a misty idea about either rice or sugar before they reach the stage to be served together.

It was quite late when they were through and camped for supper. Remembering their trip of a few weeks previous, that now seemed so long ago, Adam said, "Are you too tired to sing, dear? It is so long since I have heard you."

She stood up and thought for a moment, and then putting back her loosened hair began with Bourdillon's "The night has a thousand eyes," and sang on and on. At last, turning to Adam with a little fond gesture, and altering the words slightly, she sang:

"Like a laverlock in the lift, sing, O bonny bride! All the world was Adam once, with Eve by his side. What's the world, my lad, my love? What can it do? I am thine, and thou art mine; life is sweet and new. If the world have missed the mark, let it stand by, For we two have gotten leave, and once more we'll try."

"'Once more,'" Adam repeated. "Once more, my darling! Oh, life is sweet and new for us; we can afford to lose the world! When will you come to me, love, when?"

She shook her head with a little wilful laugh, and all the glistening glory of her hair fell about her like a wedding veil.

"Wait," she said; "wait a little. The flax is not nearly ready for spinning yet; can a bride forget her attire? Besides, how can we be--" she paused, and let her silence fill the gap, "when I know we neither of us know any ceremony more dignified than hopping over a broomstick?"

They started homeward, walking slowly through the dimly lighted mountain gorges, talking the ineffable nonsense that lovers never weary of. As they came to a brook that rushed noisily down the ravine, Adam stepped across, and held out his hand to her.

"Wait a moment," he said, "just where you are, dear, and say this with me:--

"'Over running water: my love I give to you, my life I pledge to you, my heart I take not back from you while this water runs.

"'Over running water: every seventh year, at this time of the year, at this hour of the night, I will meet you here to renew my troth; death alone to relieve me of this vow.'"

"Is that all?" she asked wonderingly. "Over running water, while this water runs, while there is any snow in the mountains, or rivers upon land, or waters in the seas, or clouds in the skies, when the world is old, and the sun burned out, and time grows weary, I shall love you still, always and forever. What is it all about, love?" He clasped her close, and did not answer at once. "Don't you know that old Irish troth," he said, "which would have been enough, even in that hard, unromantic world of ours, to have made you legally my wife, if said over any Scottish stream? I thought you knew; you are sure I would not trick you? You know I could not?" He put her head back on his shoulder and looked into her shining eyes. It seemed to him he could not bear even a look of reproach. She raised her hands almost as if she were placing an invisible crown upon his head, and let her arms fall about his shoulders.

"Then I am your wife while living water runs?"

"Forever and forever," he replied.

"Oh, wait, wait just a little," she answered.

XVI

All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.

BURKE.

Adam found a note beside his plate in the morning. "I will be back before five o'clock," it said; "I must think." He did not sit down to the table she had spread for him, but called the dogs; Prince was missing, and this was a relief to him. Nothing could happen to her when Prince was with her. His first impulse was to follow her, but he repelled it, and he too sat down to think. Lassie whined uneasily, and he stroked her head absent-mindedly, and finally went out and tried to work. The hours dragged away, and by four o'clock he could stand it no longer. He went to the gateway. As he unfastened it, he saw her coming toward him, but she stopped and he joined her, and together they turned back to the boulder. He noticed that she was very white, and that her eyes looked as if she had not slept, but he only said, "Have you thought?"

"Yes," she answered, "I have thought."

"And decided?"

"No," she said wearily; "we must decide together. We are not children, Adam, nor are we in any way the prototypes of those first parents of ours. I think sometimes that ever since their day their children have been walking in a blind circle, eating not the fruit of knowledge, but of the knowledge of good and evil. And what do we know, you and I, after all these years? Are you sure what we ought to do? It is as if God had taken us into a conspiracy to renew the old, or create a new, scheme of existence. Possibly we are being tried, tested, to prove whether or not we have learned our lesson. We must be brave enough to think, not what is our will, but what is our duty. Think of the awful responsibility, whichever way we choose."

"I can't," said Adam. "I can't think of anything but you."

"Nor I of aught but you," she said, moving away, "when you hold me so. But we _must_ think."

"I have," answered Adam, gravely. "All my life I have thought. I have wanted the perfect companionship of the one woman in all the world who could give it; I have always known she would come. I have wanted a home; I have wanted to see my sons and daughters grow up about me. I wanted to be a power for good in this world of which we are a part, and where we live for some good purpose, if there be any purpose in life. I have so conducted myself that I can look a good woman in the face, and offer her my life, for whatever it is worth, without damning recollections to come between us. My children will have a clean heritage of blood and name. The family tree was scoffed at in America, but, thank God, mine was an oak that had weathered many a gale. Not very great folk, but honest, upright, fearless men and women, true to their king or their country and their faiths; true to their ideals, too, when their fellows were content with realities only. Any man who gives his children such a heritage as that can say with more truth than Napoleon said to his soldiers, 'Fifty centuries look down upon you.' I wanted to make the world a little better for my life, and I wanted my children brought up to feel that their lives belonged first to their country, to live or die for her."

"I know," said Robin, softly; "I used to think I would drape the flag over my baby's cradle, and embroider it on his pinning blanket."

"We are probably a pair of sentimental fools," he went on, "but I believe in sentiment. A man could not say this out loud because sentiment was supposed to be essentially womanish. How those old distinctions weary one, with their scientific data to prove that men surpass women in the senses of feeling and taste, while women have better sight and hearing, and so on through every conceivable maundering of the human brain, forever harping on differences and accentuating them, forever dwelling on sex distinctions and never on a common humanity."

"It was a dreadfully scientific age," she assented, "a generation fearfully and wonderfully given over to statistics; and yet how many dreamers there were!"

"Yes, but in the twentieth century a young man dreamed dreams and saw visions at his own risk. While he dreamed of the brotherhood of man, his classmate with the corporation practice distanced him in the pursuit of position. While he led himself through the valley of the shadow of temptation, and feared no evil because of the Madonna vision in his soul, even the Madonnas preferred Lancelot and Tristram to Galahad. It wasn't an easy world for a man who wanted to keep faith with himself. It was a pinchbeck world, of pretence and pull,--that world that lies drowned out there. And yet I believe it was infinitely better than the lost Atlantis, better than the deluged planet of Noah, nobler and finer than the best civilization of which we have any trace. I never despaired of it, and yet as I grew older I wondered if I was not foolish and mistaken in daring to hope and to dream."

"I know," she said again. "I think I did despair, for it seemed to me a dreadful, a terrible world. I used to wonder how conscientious men and women could bring other human beings into it, to be and to suffer and to faint in the frantic struggle for the unrealities that made us miserable or happy. Consider how paltry they were. If we built a new house, we were infinitely more concerned to see that the contractor used pressed brick than we were to see that the construction of our own characters was true. When we grew wealthy we moved into houses of more stories; but how often did we say: 'Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul'? I had as clean and strong a heritage as you, but a different one. It is no use to comfort oneself with nice little aphorisms about the needle's eye, and saws about filthy lucre, and telling God's estimate of money from the kind of people He gives it to; I tell you biting poverty is a terrible thing, an unspeakable thing. It is a misfortune for a child to grow up under a sense of injustice. I used to have times of revolt against it all, when I hated with the blind, ferocious hate of a child, and I saw what David never saw,--the righteous forsaken, and his seed begging, not bread, but a chance to earn his bread, and begging for it without being able to make just terms. I saw my home sold under the sheriff's hammer, and my parents struggle all their lives because of the lack of money, when they had everything else, nobility, character, truth, and education. My girlhood was a long series of going-withouts. Finally I married a man who promised me everything. Ah, well, when has the Apple of Sodom failed to deceive the eye and undeceive the tongue? At least he did care for my voice, and through that I learned that all those years I had carried in my own throat the golden notes to have altered everything, and I sang a little gladness into my parents' lives before they ended, thank God."

"How did you come to sing in opera? Do not tell me if the recollection is unpleasant. I wondered then."

"Because after--after things went wrong, I could not take his money. I knew how to sing, and I loved it; but even there it was the same story of suspicion and jealousy, till it seemed to me that hate and fear ruled the world. I went to so many, many cities, but there was no city beautiful, and in all the country I found no Arcady. I had money then, it is true; but the jingle of the guinea doesn't help the artist who sings, or paints, or writes, or plays, because God has put it into his soul to do this thing; at least not after the very first, when it stands as a tangible assurance of success. The cities were 'cities of dreadful night,' and awful days; there were places that were not hives, but styes of human beings, fighting for what they called life, to die, never having lived. Sometimes I went into those jungles of civilization and sang to them. It was the only thing I could give them all. It was there I got my lesson. I had been singing 'All Tears,' when an old woman said in her feeble, trembling voice, 'Ye mun loe us, young leddy, to come to sic a place an' sing o' Him wha sa loed the warld that He sent His only begotten Son ta it, for it's only great loe that casts out fear, and this is a fearsome spot.' Since then I haven't hated anything, except wanton cruelty, and I know love rules when it is fearless, but that is very seldom. We were afraid to say, I love you, to anything more sensitive than a stray kitten, though the world has hungered and thirsted after the love we have feared to give even to our own children. And yet just the love a man and woman may bear each other, unconsciously, is enough to transform the earth. We have not been cross to each other; I do not believe we have spoken unkindly to anything this year."

He drew her into his arms. "Is it enough to regenerate the earth?"

"And keep it regenerated?" she echoed. "Do you know?"

"Do you remember telling me, long ago, of a story in which the woman said she had never seen but one man whose mother she would be willing to be? And you said you felt so about me? I was very proud of it then, but I am prouder of it now, since, feeling so, you cannot be unwilling to be the mother of my children. You are not, are you?"

She nestled a little closer to him, and put her hand about his neck. He stooped and kissed it, and repeated his question.

"Unwilling? No; how could I be? I never dreaded maternity except when--and that lasted such a little while. I do not dread it now. It seems to me it would be a blessed thing for us. But, Adam, Adam, tell me, for I have sat here all day asking myself, whether it is a blessed thing to be born, or a penalty that others pay."

"I think it would be a blessing to be your son," he said steadily.

"And I think it would be a benediction to be yours," she answered; "but he would not be yours nor mine, but ours, plus everything in the past, verily heir of all the ages, and the ages were full of pain and sorrow. Oh," she said passionately, "could you and I who love him so, this son who is only our wish, could you and I who know the weight of this weary world, bind it upon the shoulders of our baby boy, and send him staggering down the centuries, the new Atlas of this old earth?"

They sat in silence for a long time. Then Adam said slowly, "I don't know, dearest; but I do know that you are tired and hungry, and I am going to take you home."

They rose and disappeared through the gateway together.

XVII

Love gives us a sort of religion of our own; we respect another life in ourselves.

BALZAC.

Robin was shelling peas. Adam was reading her the story of their deluge. He paused, dissatisfied, and said impatiently,--

"I have not described it at all. I have said all I had to say in less than a thousand words; one would think such a scene deserved a hundred thousand."

Robin smiled her little inscrutable smile. "I think you have done it very well. It isn't intended to be scientific. You haven't told all the strata that were turned skyward for a moment when that crevasse opened between us and the town. You will find, if you turn to the first chapter of Genesis, that there is very little detail; but I am sure that the one line, 'He made the stars also,' is as eloquent as a treatise on the nebular theory. If you were learned in geology and astronomy and so on, you would load it down with an avalanche of scientific hypotheses, about which you would really know nothing, except by deduction, and over which future scientists would wrangle, part of them making you a god, and the rest proving you a fool. Be content to 'climb where Moses stood,' and produce literature."

"'Why should an author fret about The judgment of posterity? It is not, and it never was, And it, perhaps, may never be,'"

quoted Adam, cynically. "I wonder what they will call us, Robin, and who will lecture on my mistakes in seven or eight thousand years, and show how it never could have happened. Do you suppose there is any one else on earth? Did the Atlantis people leave any literature behind them?"

Robin shook her head. "Who really knows? God has not left Himself without a witness, at any time. In some way the story of creation has gone on and on. Every nation has its Eden and flood and Saviour. Esther was the first, I think, to have her wish granted 'even to the half of my kingdom,' and all the fairy stories since have borrowed the phrase. Cinderella is almost as old as Job; and the Irish, the Fenians, claim that Cadmus, the Phoenician, was one of their forebears. Wide as race distinctions were, there were strange and almost unaccountable similarities."

She went indoors to see to her baking, and coming back went on with her work. Adam watched her silently for awhile, and then said curiously, "I wonder what you have missed most this year?"

"Pins and needles, and until Christmas, books and shoes and stockings and sugar and a cook-stove and a piano," answered Robin, promptly. "I can live without the opera and a telephone, but if you only knew how I cherish my stock of pins, and with what dread I look forward to the day when, like a poor white trash family I used to know, I shall refer to _the_ needle. I used to think you could do anything with a pair of pliers and a bit of wire, but I tremble lest you may not be able to compass a needle." She looked up, and seeing Adam's troubled face said quickly, "Forgive me for being frivolous; I am so happy, I can't help it. What were you thinking of, Adam?"

He got up and walked away a few yards, and cut one of the long thick yucca leaves, and stripped it down to the central spine, while he went on speaking to her. "I was thinking," he said, "of what Mill said about inventions, and how they hadn't helped the laboring man; that they had neither decreased his number of working hours, nor increased his comforts, and wondering whether it would be better for a new race to find an electric light plant alongside their other plants, or whether they would better work out their own salvation, a little at a time, by main strength and awkwardness. I was thinking how strange our books would seem to men and women who knew nothing of the--the late earth." He held out to her what looked something like a needle threaded with coarse white linen thread. "Will your Majesty deign to look at this?"

She took it, and looked at it wonderingly, and then ran in and brought back a torn towel, and began mending it. "Why, it sews very well," she said; "who taught you that?"

"The mother of inventions generally," he answered. "If you ever had gone on the round-up, you might have had occasion for a needle and thread when there wasn't any nearer than a hundred miles. But you haven't answered my question."

"About inventions and so on? It seems to me you have to consider the _raison d'être_ of a people before you can tell the answer. What is the use of labor-saving inventions, if the time saved isn't of some great value? What is to be the chief end of man in a dispensation that has no catechism as a guide-post?"

"A very different end from the old one," answered Adam, half sternly. "Work should not come to him as a curse, nor as his greatest boon; at least, not hard, manual labor. There should be work enough to insure ease and comfort, and every one should work freely and gladly. I should educate the individual; he should be strong of body and keen of mind, and should feel that his talents were given him for use, not for concealment; he should use his hands, both of them, and find delight in their work. It is a beautiful world, it always was, but I don't know that the steam-engine brought men's souls closer together, or that the electric light let in any more radiance upon our minds, or that the great telescopes made heaven any nearer. It should be a happier and a healthier world, if it was no more."

"Adam," she said abruptly, "if we had children, in what religious faith would you bring them up?"

"I don't know; I never thought about it very much," he answered honestly. "I have an ideal in my mind, but I can't explain it. I believe in one source of life, and therefore a common divinity."

Robin laughed quietly. "That is like the Hindoo proverb, 'That which exists is one; sages call it variously.' That has been called pantheism, and for that belief the Jews expelled Baruch Benedict Spinoza from their synagogue. In our time there was a very learned magazine published in its behalf, and I heard David Starr Jordan say no man could tell whether it was a mere jargon of words, meaningless and empty, or whether monism was the profoundest philosophy the world has ever known."

"I don't care what you call it," said Adam, stoutly. "I am not afraid of names, and I don't know anything about any of those religions, pantheism, Spinozaism, or monism; but I do know I would rather a child of mine saw God in everything than that he saw God in nothing save his own narrow creed. I would rather he was a pantheist than a Calvinist. Spinoza never burned any one, did he, nor preached that hell was paved with infants' skulls?"