PART FIVETHE STONE HOUSE: I
1
Thewoman awed him quite as much as in the open boat. The turning of her profile to the sea had for Bellair a significance not to be interpreted exactly, but it had to do with firmness and aspiration and the future. Fleury was in their minds more than in speech. She could speak of him steadily, and this during the sensitiveness of convalescence which is so close to tears. Perhaps they found their deepest joy in the child’s fresh blooming. The ship’s people were an excellent company.
Bellair’s mind adjusted slowly, and by a rather intense process, to the fact of the Stackhouse wallet. It was all that the great wanderer had said. The woman accepted the lifted condition, but it seemed hard for her faculties to establish a relation with temporal plenty. Fleury had given them each a greater thing. They were one inthat—keen and comprehensive; indeed their minds attacked with vigour and ardour this one thought: somehow to help in drawing off the brimming sorrows of the world.
It came all at once to Bellair that this was no new conception. He had heard and read ofhelpingall his life. A touch, queerly electric, had come over him as a boy, when a certain old man passed, and some one whispered in the most commonplace way, “His whole thought is for others.”... He had read it in many books; especially of late, the note had been sounded. It was getting into the press—some days on every page. All the cultic and social ports, into which he had sailed (like a dingy whaler, he thought) had spoken of brotherhood, first and last.
Did a thing like this have to be talked by the few for several thousand years before it broke its way into the conception of the many, and finally began to draw the materials of action together? It had not been new in certain parts of the world two thousand years ago when Jesus brought the perfect story of it, and administered it through life and death. Had there been too much speech and too little action since; or did all this speech help; the result being slow but cumulative, toward the end of the clearly-chiselled thought on the part of the majority that would compel the atoms of matter into action, making good all thoughts and dreams?... He knewmen who sat every Sunday listening courteously to more or less inspired voices that called upon them toLove One Another; yet these men, during the next six days, moved as usual about their work of rivalry and burning personal desire. Why was this?
The answer was in his own breast. He had made a mental conception of the good of turning the force of one’s life out to others, but he had not lived it; had never thought seriously of living it, until now that the results had been shown him, as mortal eyes were never given before to see. That was it; men required more than words. Would something happen to bring to all men at last the transfiguring facts as they had been brought to him in the open boat—squarely, leisurely, one by one? He was not different from many men. Given the spectacle of the fruits of desire and the fruits of compassion side by side, as he had been forced to regard them—any one would understand.
The woman was one of those who had got it all long ago. She had ceased to speak of it much, but had put it into action. The child was a part of her action, and his own love for her—that new emotion, deeper than life to him. She had mainly ceased to speak.... Action and not speech had been the way of Fleury, his main life-theme, his first and last words. Formerly Fleury had spoken, and then emerged into the world of action. Ithad been tremendous action—for them. These things never die.
“That’s the beauty of them,” he said aloud. “These things never die.”
“You were thinking ofhim?” the Faraway Woman said.
TheFomalhautleft them at Auckland—insular, high and breezy between its harbours and warm to the heart, from the southern summer. They took the train to Hamilton, near where she had lived....
“It seems so long since I was a part of the life here,” she told him, as they climbed a hill by the long road—the same upon which Olga’s Guest had come, “and yet it really isn’t. You can see—how little the Gleam is. He was born here.... There was so much to learn. It has been like a quick review of all life. When I think of it—and feel the child alive, unhurt—oh, do you know what it makes me want to do?”
Bellair was thinking of Fleury. He sensed her emotion, as he shook his head.
“It makes me want to work for you.”
Bellair placed her saying to the account of her fine zeal for the good of the nearest. He was very far from seeing anything heroic in his part of the ten days.... They had paused on the little hill back of the settlement where she had lived. With all her coming home, she met noacquaintance while he was with her. It was as if she had come to look, not to enter.... But there were two days in which she went forward alone, and Bellair got a foretaste of what it would mean to be separated. It called to him all the strength that he had earned.... The Faraway Woman came back to Hamilton where he waited—as one who had hastened. The child was asleep, and they walked out into the streets together....
They were alone again as in that first night on board theFomalhautwhen Fleury left them.
“Do you want to stay to make your house near the Hamilton road?” he asked.
She regarded him quietly, her eyes fixed upon his face with an incommunicable yearning.
“No.”
“Do you mean to stay in New Zealand?”
Again she held him with her eyes, before answering:
“It may be well for me here, as anywhere. I could not stay in America.”
The sun was setting. It was she who broke the silence:
“Youmust go away?”
“Yes. You knew that fromhim?”
“From what he said—yes.”
“He told me not to stay too long.”
“Perhaps he saw it all. Perhaps he saw something that would keep you.”
“He saw a very great deal.”
They had been gone two hours. Her steps quickened, when she thought of the child.... “Yes, I may as well stay in Auckland,” she said. “Do you know, I should like to stay by the sea—to be near it, for remembering——”
That seemed to come very close to Bellair’s conviction—that her whole life was turned to the saint who had passed.
“A little house by the sea,” he said, his mind picturing it eagerly to relieve the greater matter.
“Just what I was thinking—a little place out of Auckland on the bluffs—overlooking Waitemata—where one could see the ships coming in——”
“Will you let me help you find it, and arrange your affairs?”
“Nothing could be happier for me—if you would.”
“We’ll go back to Auckland to-night, and start out looking from there.”
Mainly they followed the shore during their days of search; but sometimes they found woods and little towns. There was no coming to the end of her; she put on fresh perfections every day, and there were moments in which he was meshed in his own stupidity for not seeing the splendour of her at the first moment. He became possessed of a healthful wonder about women—how men like himself wait for years for some companion-soul,finally believing her to be in the sky, only to find thatthe nearestwas waiting all the time. The world is so full of illusions, and a man’s mind is darkest when it seems most clear.
The days were like entering one walled garden after another, always her spirit vanishing at the far gate. Beside him was a strong frail comrade, loving the water and air and sky and wood, as only a natural woman can love them—her eyes shining softly, her lips parted and red as the sleeping child’s. He was struck with the miracle of her mouth’s freshness. It was like the mouth of a city-bred woman, a woman who had forced her way for years through the difficult passages of a man’s world, who had met the fighting of the open, and the heavier-line fighting of solitude.... Here Bellair’s diffidence intervened. Moreover, it was a mouth that could say unerring things.
“She is a fine weave,” he would say, after the partings at night.
She held through every test. The enthralling advance guard never failed—that winged immortal something ahead. Often in some little inn or in the hotel at Auckland during the nights, he found himself in rebellion because he could not go to her. Always in the open boat he had awakened to find her there, and on the night that Fleury passed, she had asked to have him within call—but those times were gone. The world hadintervened that little bit.... There was one summer day and a bit of forest to enter, a moment surpassing all. Her arms and fingers, her eyes and breast were all fused with emotions. She gave him back his boyhood that afternoon in a solemn wordless ceremony, but all his diffidence of boyhood came with it.
The woods were full of fairies to her; there were meanings for her eyes in the drift of the wind over the brown pools. She caught the woodland whispers, was a part of sweet, low vibrations of the air.... Her eyes had come up to his, fearless and tender; yet for the life of him, he could not have been sure that they wanted anything he could give. For the first time he marvelled now at the genius of self-protection which women have put on, instinct by instinct, throughout all this age of man, this age of muscle and brain, in which the driving spirit of it all has no voice.... There was one branch above her that was like hawthorn, and full of buds. The little Inverness cape that she wore was tossed back, and her arms were held up to the branches.... Strangely that instant he thought of her story—the coming of The Guest—the thought she had held all the years, the strange restless beauty of its ideal—the mothering beauty of it that seemed to him now endless in power. Such a mystery came to him from her arms—as if she were holding them up to receive perfection, some great spiritualgift.... It was startlingly native to her, this expectancy—the pure receptivity of it, and the thought of beauty in her mind. A woman could command heaven with that gesture, he thought, and call to earth an archangel—if her ideal were pure enough.
A sudden gust of love came over him for her child. He thought he had loved it before, but it was startling now, filling him, turning his steps back toward the place where it lay....
2
And all the time that they were searching widely from Auckland for their house, a little Englishwoman, growing old, sat waiting for them within an hour’s ride from the city. They found her at last and her stone cottage, rarely attractive in its neglect; and from the door-yard, an Odessian vista of sky and harbour and lifted shore-line.... They had even passed it before, their eyes turned farther afield. Bellair couldn’t ignore the analogy of the nearest woman, nor the stories of all the great spiritual quests—how the fleeces on a man’s doorstep turn golden, if he can only see.
“I knew some one would come,” the little woman said. She had a mole on her nose and eyes that twinkled brightly. “In fact, I prayed.”
Bellair smiled and thought of Fleury’s saying—that those who turn back two thousand yearswould find Him.... She had kept a boarding-house, and now the work was too much. Besides, the children of a younger sister back in the home in Essex were calling to her.
“They need me in England,” she repeated. “And here, I have been unable to keep up the little house. I am too old now. My young men were so dear about it, but I was not making them comfortable. One’s heart turns home at the close——” She thought they did not understand; and explained all the meanings carefully—how in age, the temporal needs are not so keen, and the mind wanders back to the elder places.... Bellair stood apart, knowing that the two women could manage better alone.... The cottage faced the east a little to northward, and had been built of the broken rocks of the bluff and shore, its walls twenty inches thick and plastered on the stone within. The interior surprised them with its size, two bedrooms facing the sea and two behind, beside the living room (for dining, too, according to the early design) and the kitchen. They took it as it was, furniture and all, and loved the purchase.
For several days she remained with them, helped and explained and amplified—suggesting much paint. Each day for an hour or so, there were tears. She had found her going not so easy, and the process was slow to accustom herself to the long voyage; the sense of detachment couldnot be hurried. She wanted them to see her whole plan of the place. Her dream had been to have evergreens cut in patterns and flower-beds in stars and crescents. Meanwhile with her years had grown up about her the wildest and most natural garniture of the stone cottage; vines and shrubs, the pines putting on a sumptuousness of low foliage altogether unapproved.
Gradually it was all forgotten but the long voyage, and Bellair could help in making the details of that as simple and desirable as possible. In fact, he went with her to the ship....
“She was dear to us, and we shall miss her always,” the Faraway Woman said that night.... She would never come back. It was a parting, but the very lightness of it moved them. They wondered if they had done all they could.
“I’m so glad the means were not at hand for her to paint the stone-work,” Bellair said firmly.
“I’m afraid she would think we lack interest,” the woman added, as she glanced at the smoky beams of the ceiling. The years had softened them perfectly.
“She wanted them washed the very first thing,” said Bellair, “and varnished. If she had stayed much longer we would have been forced to paint something.”
In the days that followed, a softness and summery bloom came continually to the Faraway Woman’s eyes. His heart quickened when sheturned to him. They moved in and out from the cottage to grounds, again and again.
“It’s unreal to me,” she would say. “I wonder if it will ever seem ours? I know it won’t, while you are away. I could live here fifty years until I seemed a part of the cottage and grass and trees, and I would feel a pilgrim resting——”
“It is part of you now, and always has been,” he said. “You are at home on high ground and you must have the sea-distance. They belong to you. I think that is what made you so hard for me to understand.”
“Was I hard for you?”
“I was so fresh from the little distances and the short-sight of things—from looking down——”
“I wonder if any one ever was so willing to be seen on his worst side?” she asked. “I really believe you know very little about yourself.... He saw—the real side.”
“He saw good everywhere,” said Bellair.
“... I wonder why I was strange to you at first?” she repeated, after a moment. “You were not strange to me.”
“Not when I spent so much time at the great cane chair?”
“No. You seemed to be studying. I could see that you didn’t belong there. You appeared to be interested in it all—as if he were a part of the ship——”
“And you didn’t seem to belong at all to my eyes,” he told her. “You belonged out in the distances of ocean. You came closer and closer during the days in the open boat—but here you belong. It seems to me that you have come home—and how I wish I could stay, too.”
“I wish you could stay—but I know that there is unfinished work in New York.”
“I wonder howheknew?” Bellair questioned.
“He saw very clearly. He was not flesh at all—that last day——”
“After the night—when he prayed.... You saw him that night?”
“Yes.”
Her innate sense of beauty startled him afresh every day. All that he idealised was an open book to her. Bellair had planned his house in the New York room. The greatest houses are planned so, by those who suffer and are confined. It had not come to him in the form of this stone cottage by the sea. This was not his dream that had come true here, although in many ways it was fairer than his dream. Very plainly, this little rock-bound eyrie was of her fashioning—the very atoms of it, drawing together to conform with the picture in her mind. He loved the place better so. Perhaps her thought of a home had been the stronger.
“It is almost perfect now,” she would say. “The neglect has made it right. A few roses, somebee-hives, vines and perennials—the rest is just clearing and cleansing. I could go over all the leaves and branches with a soapy sponge. The rest is to prune and thin and cleanse—so the sunlight is not shut from anywhere altogether—so it all can breathe——”
He caught the picture in her mind—foliage cut away for the play of sun and wind everywhere—the chaste and enduring beauty of leaf and stone and moving water. And now appeared a bit of her nature quite as real:
“And then those extra two rooms, I could rent them and give board——”
“Oh, but you don’t have to.”
“I have always had much to do. I must have work now.”
She had no realisation of property; material poverty was a part of her temperament. She was superbly well, and could only remain so by the expenditure of ample energy. Bellair saw the Martha soul, the mother of men, a breadgiver. He thought of the passion of men for the vine-women, and of the clinging sons they bear.... He lingered over a ship, and another. They toiled together like two peasants in the open, the baby sitting in the sun, the house ashine within. She would have only the simple things. She loved fine textures, but only of the lasting fabrics in woods and wares. She was content to carry water and trim lamps. She loved the stonesand the low open fires. Often she turned away seaward, as he had seen her from theJade’srail, and from the bow seat of the open boat. Once in the garden, he made the child laugh, to bring back her eyes, and she said:
“I love it so here, but I don’t want to love it, so that it would hurt terribly, if it were taken away.”
This was but one side. There were other moments, in which Bessie and New York and all that he and the Faraway Woman had been, seemed fused into a ball of mist whirling away, and they stood together, man and woman, touching sanity at last in a world of power and glory. It was not then a time for words.... Once their hands went out together, and holding for a moment, Bellair had the strange sense of the self sinking from him. He could not feel his hand or any part of his being—as if it were a part of her, two creatures blent into one, and an indescribable rush of something different than physical vitality.
And once sitting with her under the lamp in the evening, he drew again that sense of peace that had come in the queer darkness on the deck of theJade. It had to do with the mountains—as if they had finished with the valleys, and were ascending together in the strong light of the mountains.
And then there was passion—that plain,straight earth drive. Bellair was strange about this with the Faraway Woman. This passion was like the return of an old hunting companion, so natural in the wilds, but strange and out of place in his newly-ordered life. It had come from the Unknowable, and he had supposed it lost in that wilderness. It dismayed him thatsheshould call it forth, but she called from him everything day by day, and no day the same. He had lost much of the old, but not that passion. And the nature of it which she called had a bewildering beauty.... But there was much to keep the old native of the wilds from really entering. The world would have called Bellair’s idealismnaïve; and there was something of Fleury in the very solution of their lives—not a finger-print of passion in all that relation. There was the Unfinished Story of Ogla’s Guest. Finally there was the Gleam.
Life was very full and rare to Bellair, but there seemed always a new ship in the harbour flying Blue Peter for California.... In the main, they forgot themselves, as unwatched man and woman, slept under the same roof and had their food together; at least, Bellair forgot it for hours at a time. It seemed the very nature of life; the purity of it all so obvious.... One afternoon he came up from the city in a cool south wind; a grey afternoon, the sunset watery and lemon-hued. He was thinking of the shipthat would float Blue Peter to-morrow. The homely scent of damp bark burning quickened his senses, as he crossed the yard, and he heard her singing to the child. Somehow the woodsmoke had brought back to him a Spring day in the northern woods—grey light and dark pools, all foliage baby-new, a song-sparrow pair trilling back and forth from edge to open....
He saw her in one of the rare flashes of life. She was sitting by the fireplace, the nearest window across the room. Her figure was softened in the deep grey light to the pure sensousness of motherhood—except her face, hands and boots, and that which she held. These were mellowed in the faintest orange glow from the firelight. Her back was curved forward, her face bent to the baby’s head, held high in the hollow of her arms. The dress was caught tightly about her ankles—a covering pliant almost as a night-robe, but that was a mystery of the shadows. She was like the figure of some woman he had seen somewhere—some woman of the river-banks, but this a Madonna of the firelight. He passed on, and waited before speaking.
3
They went a last time to the city.... There was a place for a chair, and they had seen an old urn in a by-street which belonged near the Spring. They felt that these products of[Pg 214]men had to be just so, and that they had earned a great boon in being given a part at stone cottage. The things that were brought there must endure; must reason together in long leisure concord, putting on the same inner hue at the last and mellowing together as old friends, or old mates. This time, Bellair’s eyes did not meet the city quite as before; it was not as a stranger exactly, who rambles through a port while his ship lies in the offing. His real berth was an hour’s ride back from the city and made of stone. Perhaps later he would find work to do here.... A child passed them in the store, and brought the change after their purchase—a boy of twelve or fourteen, his face old with care. It made Bellair think of Davy Acton at Lot & Company’s. They bought a bit of glass, a bit of silver, some linen and a rug, and rode home with their arms full.
Another letter had come from one of the Island headquarters of Stackhouse, in answer to Bellair’s inquiry concerning affairs. The papers in the wallet had given him clues to the various insular interests; and the replies, without exception, represented the attitudes of agents ready and open to authority from without. Stackhouse had left no centre of force that appeared to have vitality enough to rise in its own responsibility. Bellair saw that sooner or later he must make a visit to these different interests, and that the place ofthe wallet for the time being, at least, amounted to headquarters. He wrote as explicitly as possible in reply to the letters, promised to call in due course, established a freedom where his judgment permitted, but felt the whole vast business very loosely in hand. New York was first, and it became very clear to him, especially on this night, that New York must be entered upon without further delay. There was a thrill of dismay in the thought of the weeks that had passed, and the dreaming. Dreams were good. He had needed these days; great adjustments and healings had taken place. It had been the pleasant lull between the old and new, the only rest his life had known, in fact. All its beauty was massed into the period—but the dreams must be turned into action now.
A man may stay just so long in joy. There are moments in every life when the hour strikes for parting. The lover does well to leave his lady then quickly. There is an understanding in the world that the woman invariably whispers,Stay, but very often an organisation of force that makes austerity possible, does not come from the man alone. If the moment of parting passes, the two still lingering together, a shadow enters between them, blurring their faces for each other’s eyes, dimming the dream.
It does not come from without. The train missed, the passage paid for and not connected,the column that marches away, one set broken, the sentry post to which a strange figure is called—these are but matters to laugh at afterward. The shadow comes between them from their own failure. It is slow to lift. In the final elevation of romance, there shows one sunken length.... There is the moment of meeting and the moment of parting; that which lies between, whether an hour or generation, forms but the equal third, for the great love intervals of human kind are not measured by time, but by the opening of the doors of the heart. By the very laws of our being, the doors draw together against rapture prolonged. The man who crosses the world to live one day with his sweetheart, sees her at last in the doorway or the trysting-place as he cannot see her again; and in the tear of parting, something different of her, something that has been occulted, clears magically for his eyes. It must not blind him to remain, for it is her gift to abide with him over the divide. It passes, not to come again if he remains; rapture falls into indulgence; the fibre of integrity weakens and lets them down into mere mortals. Man is not ready for the real revelation of romance in whom a master does not arise at the stroke.
That night there was amewat the door. They had finished tea and were sitting by the fire. The woman opened the door and a young tabby-pusswalked leisurely in, moved in a circle about the room, tail held high. Chair and table and lounge, she brushed against, standing upon her toes, eyes blinking at the fire. The woman brought a saucer of milk. The visitor drank, as if that were all very well, but that she could have done well enough until breakfast. Apparently it was not her way to land upon friends in a starving condition. Before the fire, she now sat, adding a point to her toilet from time to time, inspecting it carefully and long. Finally she turned to the woman, hopped upon her knee and settled to doze. She had accepted them, and they called herElsie.
“Little-Else-to-do,” said the woman.
They stood beside the child’s bed later that night.
It rained, and the home closed in upon them with its cheer and humble beauty. He saw her hand now in everything—even the rungs of the chairs shone in the firelight. The hearth was swept. Her face—it was a place of power, and such a fusion of tenderness was there, the eyes pure and merciful. All that he had known before her coming was unfinished, explanatory. She had shown him what a human adult woman should be in this year of our Lord. His soul yearned to her; his whole life nestling to this place of hers—as her stone cot nestled to the cliff.... She was always very quiet about her love for the child when he was near. That was because heloved the Gleam so well.... Yet he had seen the Firelight Madonna.
“You have made it all I can do—to go away,” he said.
“I have thought of that—I might have made it easier. I have thought of that,” she repeated. “And yet—we were so tired. We seemed to need to be ourselves. It has been beautiful—to be ourselves——”
It seemed to him that she came nearer, but that was impossible for the child was between.... Just then his mind finished the other picture—of her arms held up to the hawthorn buds—a babe of his own in those arms! He would have fought to prevent its coming, but it visualised of itself. Had it been that which enchanted the woodland?... He was silent. She had become even more to him for this instant. He would not call it other than beautiful, now that it had come. She was more than ever the heart of mystery—the Quest. She knew all these things—love and maternity she knew; even the passionate fluting of Pan had quickened her eyes; and where she abode, there was the genius of Home.
So slowly had it come—perhaps this was not all. For weeks he had stood by—day after day, the heart of her becoming more spacious and eloquent; one miracle of the woman after another—finally, to-night the mystery of all life about her, for his eyes. Yet to her it was nomystery; she wasof it, rhythmically so. She knew the dream—and the life that comes at last to quicken it. She could love; she could live; she could wait. She loved God—but loved Nature, too. She was spirit, but flesh, too. She was powerful in two worlds....
So Bellair stood with bowed head, and though Bessie was forgotten, Fleury was not. It was still with him that Fleury and the Faraway Woman were fashioned for each other.... “She may be so wonderful to me, because she trusts me to understand——” such was the essence of his fear. It kept his heart dumb.... That night she brought a pitcher of water and placed it upon the hearth, looked up and found him watching.
“For the fairies,” she said.
That changed him a little, brought her nearer to words of his; though the effort to speak was like lifting a bridge. She was leaving for her room when he managed:
“Day after to-morrow—the steamer. May we not talk to-night?”
He saw her stop. Then she was coming toward him so gladly.
“Yes—you want the rest of the story?”
“Yes.... I have been sorry thathecouldn’t hear it——”
She stood before him, tall and white.
“I think you are like me,” she said in a moment. “I think you have something behind you that you do not tell—something that made you what you are—yet greater than you seem to yourself.... I would have told you whilehewas with us, but you know how the days passed and we could not hold our thoughts together. Then there were times when we could not even use our voices.... Do you know that the world is wonderful—that the thousands about us do not even dream how wonderful it is—how tremendous even miseries are? Sometimes I think that the tragedies we meet are our greatest hours.”
“You have met them,” he said, a part of her spirit almost. “I have seen them in your eyes. It gave me the sense of shelter with you and limitless understanding—-”
“I am thankful for that,” she whispered. “When we have understanding, we have everything. Those who in their childhood are made to suffer horribly are often the ones who reach understanding. Sometimes they suffer too much and become dulled and dumb. Sometimes in the very ache of their story, which can be so rarely told, they risk the telling to some one not ready. It aches so, as its stays and stays untold. Oh, the whole world craves understanding, and yet if we tell our story to one who is not ready—we hurt them and ourselves, and add unto our misery. There are moments set apart in life in which onefinds understanding, but the world presses in the next day, and the story does not look so well. The spirit of it fades and the actions do not seem pure when the spirit is out—so one loses a loved friend. Oh, I am talking vaguely. It is not my way to talk vaguely—but to-night—it is like a division of roads, and a story is to be told—-”
“Do you think the story will diminish in my mind to-morrow?” he asked.
“No—not you. I have seen you through the sunlight and the dark looking into my eyes for it. If I thought it would diminish in your mind—yes, I would tell it just the same. It must be told—but life would not be the same. Even this, our little stone cot, would not be the same. I should have to become harder and harder to hold—to follow the Gleam——
“... I shall be Olga in the rest of the story,” she was saying. “For I am Olga.... The truth is, I have no other name. There is one that I used, and another that I formerly used—but they are not mine. You shall see.... My father prospered with the sheep-raising, and slowly on the long road that you have seen, houses came one by one, until at last there was a village about us. My father was like the village father, and my mother the source of its wisdom in doctoring and maternal affairs—she had learned by bringing forth. But I was not of them—they all saw that. The coming of plenty, the coming ofthe people, the coming of men to woo my sisters, and the maidens my brothers brought for us to see, before they took them quite away—none of these things were so real to me as the coming of my Guest when I was such a little girl. And none remembered that—not even my mother. Until I ceased to speak of it, they tried to make me think it was a dream. But I knew that rapture. It had changed me. I was always to search for it again. I was always looking for another such night—for that afterglow again. I was the last child and the silent one.
“But all that had to do with children was intimate and wonderful to me.... I remember once when we were all girls at home together, and they were talking—each of what she should have for her treasure from the household—one walnut, one silver, one an inlaid desk—and they turned to me laughingly, for I was not consulted as a rule, I said I wanted the little hickory cradle in an upper closet. It was one of those household days which girls remember.... All was happier then. The little cradle seemed like a casket in which jewels had come to my mother—seven times. We had all smiled at her first from that hickory cradle.... I went up stairs to look at it—a dim place full of life and messages to me. I was weak; my arms ached; and it was so dear that I dare not say that it was mine.... My father said the cradle must belong to the eldest girl.
“... I began to sense the terrible actuality of life through the mating of Lois, ten years older, with a countryman who came for her. For sisters, Lois and I had always been far apart, and this stranger who wished to marry her, had nothing to do with life as I dreamed it—a child of twelve. To many, Lois was the loveliest of us—large, calm, dark and quiet, very well, slow of speech, but quick to smile. Had you visited our house then, you would have remembered my father’s patriarchal air, the smile of Lois, and the maternity that brooded over us all. The rest you would get afterward—a variety of young people with different faults and attractions—I the grey one, last to be noted. Lois was given credit for more than she was. I do not love brain or power, but I seem to love courage. Lois had something to take the place of these—not courage—and no, not power nor brain. She had sensuousness and appetite.
“One night I seemed to see what the whole house was straining for—a kind of process of marriage continually afoot. Just now it was Lois. I remember my father being called into the front room where Lois and Collinge had been for an evening—his face beaming when he came forth, and my mother’s quiet sanction. There were conferences after that, dressmaking, the arrangement of money affairs. And I was suddenly ill with it. To me, there could be no trade orpublic business. To me, it had to do with a child and that was consecrated ground. Oh, you must see it had to be different. I wanted it like a stroke of lightning. I did not understand but I wanted it like that—like a flight of swans—and not talk and property transactions. To me it had to do with rain and frost and the tides and the pulses of plants—the silent things. I did not understand—but knew that children came to those who took each other.
“I remember one supper; the countryman talked—talked of the marriage day—the breakfast, the ceremony—the end and the dusk, and turned to Lois with sleepy half-folded eyes. She was smiling and flushed—and I looked from face to face at the table, at my sisters—and I rushed away because I could find nothing pure.... Some one said my mother never looked prettier.... I remember the flood of honeysuckle perfume that came to me in the torture of hatred, as I passed through the distant hall.... And then later from the top of the stairs, Lois and my mother were talking, and Lois said:
“‘You know, Mother, we will not have children for the first three years, at least——’”
“I was somehow below by her in the lower hall. She seemed a rosy pig upstanding, marked red and flaming.... And that night long afterward, my mother found me and said, ‘You are getting beyond me, Olga.’ ... But I could onlythink of men and women copying the squirrels, filling their bins, dressing their door-yards, reaching for outer things—and it was back of my very being—back of the mother and the patriarch—back of the shepherding and the folding—back ofme. I hated life with destroying hatred—Lois wanting the seasons, but unwilling to bring forth fruit, accepting the countryman’s idea of life.... Can you see that it had the look of death to me?”
Bellair could only bow his head. To him the woman was revealing the grim days through which she had won her poise and power.... She was telling another incident with the same inclination—for the thought of being a mother had been the one master of her days. He seemed to see the child, the girl, the younger woman about her—a grey-eyed, red-lipped girl, with a waist that was smaller and smaller as she gained in inches from fifteen to eighteen—madness for mothering, passionate in that, but not passionate for sensation—her face sometimes so white, that they would ask her mother, “Is Olga quite well?”... Yet teeming with that intensive health that goes with small bones and perfect assimilation—that finds all to sustain life in fruit and leaves ... books, light sleeping, impassioned with the lives of great women and the saints—one of those who come to the world for devotion and austerity and instant sacrifice; yet for none of these apart; rather afruitful vine, her prevailing and perennial passion for motherhood.
“And yet I almost ceased to breathe,” she was saying, “when I came to understand man’s part in these things. I feltmyselfdifferently after that—even children—but from this early crisis which so many men and women have met with untellable suffering, emerged a calm that could not have come without it. The travail brought me deep into the truth. For all great things the price must be paid—how wonderfully we learned that in the open boat. There are sordid processes in the production of all fine things—even in the bringing forth of a Messiah.”
She paused, as if she saw something enter the eyes that had listened so fervently. Bellair cleared his voice. “I remember somethinghesaid,” he told her. “That matter is the slate—spirit the message that is written. The slate is broken, the message erased, buteyeshave seen it, and the transaction is complete. For the spirit has integrated itself in expression——”
“I think he said it, for you to tell me now,” the Faraway Woman whispered.
“Onlyhecould have halted your story,” Bellair added.
“... I told you when my Guest came in the afterglow, of the house of our nearest but distant neighbour; now I am telling you of years afterward, when there were many houses betweenon the long road, and my playmate Paul had gone away to Sidney. Lois had long been married. I was seventeen—and so strangely and subtly hungering—for expression, for something that I did not know, which meant reality to me, but which was foreign and of no import to all about me. Often at evening I stared up the long road.... I remember late one night in the nearest house, the soft wind brought me the cry of a child. It was so newly come and it was not well. I went to it just as I was, though the people had just moved in and were strange to us. It was thirst—as we know. I went to it, as we would have gone to a waterfall. The door of their house was locked, but I knocked. The father came down at last. The lower rooms were filled with unpacked boxes. I told him why I had come. He talked to me strangely. He went upstairs and sent the mother down to me. It did not seem as if I could live through that night—and not have my way. She put her arms about me, led me upstairs to a room that was not occupied—save a chair by the window. I stood there waiting until she returned with the child.... I saw lights back in our house when they missed me—voices, but I could not go. In the early light I heard the woman saying to my mother: ‘... We really needed her so. Baby was restless, but he is much better and quiet with her. They are very happy together.... Yes, she is safe and well.’”
The Faraway Woman left him now to go to the child.
4
Returning, she put the kettle on, and made tea in the earthen pot. To Bellair her coming into the room again was a replenishment—as if she had been gone for hours; and this started a pang deep in his heart, which presently suffused everything when he realised that his ship had come for him. It was past midnight.... In reality it was to-morrow that his ship would sail.
“You listen wonderfully,” she said.
“It seems all about the little Gleam,” he answered. “It makes everything significant about the open boat.... I forget to swallow——”
They laughed together.
“Do you know, I can hardly realise when we are here—that this is New Zealand?” she said presently, “that only a little way back is the long road and the river and the ravine—the neighbour’s house and ours and the other houses between.... I will tell you the rest very quickly—and oh, let me tell you first, I am not afraid. In spite of all I know, I am not——”
She was bending forward across the table.
“... I was a woman when Paul came back from the distant city—and came first of all to me. He was changed—something excellent about his face and carriage, and something I did notunderstand at all, his face deeper lined, his voice lower, his words ready. I did not think about him when he was away. In the first evenings we passed together, I had only an old-time laugh for him. I kissed him with something like affection. We were permitted to be alone together, and I saw the old look upon my father’s face—that I had hated so. That look—even before the playmate thing had departed from me. Then I began toseePaul—something I could not like nor understand, a readiness of words, and he was not wise enough to make them ring deeply. I seemed to be studying in him the novelty of a man—through the eyes of a girl.
“One night we were together in my father’s house. It was our Spring and raining softly on the steps. The grass seemed full of odours, and the vines trembling with life. He kissed me there. It seemed that I hardly knew. I was looking over his shoulder into the dark, and I saw a little white face. It was like a rain-washed flower ... and to me it was quite everything.
“... Everything that I had known and loved—compensation for all that I had missed and hungered for. Only the little face—but I knew the arms were held out to me.
“Paul knew nothing of this. He was not to blame. It was not he, who carried me away. He was merely being the man he fancied—playing the thing as the world had taught him—showinghimself fervent and a man. I could have laughed at his kisses.... I have nothing against him. It was his way.... But once he kissed me—and it came to me that he was the way—that he must join his call to mine.... I could do all but that—I need not love him. Can you understand—it seemed as if everything was done but that—that the little face had already chosen me.... I sent him away, and I remember long afterward I was standing on the porch alone. It rained.”
Bellair realised now that she was watching him with something like anguish. A different picture of her came to him from that moment—filed for the long days apart—the rapt look of her mouth, and the pearl in her hair that brought out the lustre of whiteness from her skin—full-bosomed, but slender—slender hands that trembled and moved toward him as she spoke.... It was something for him—as if he had always been partly asleep before—as if she had brought some final arousing component to his being.
“... My mother did not ask but once. When I told her—the horror came to me that she would die. I had not thought of it before. I had thought that it was mine—had seen very little of Paul. In fact, he had come several times, when I would not see him.... She called my father—and it was all to be enacted again. For a moment, I thought he would strike me. The most dreadfulthing to them all was that I was not ashamed. They felt that I was unnatural....
“There was one high day in that little upper room. It was all like a prayer, when they would suffer me to be alone and not wring me with their misery—but this one high day, I must tell you. I stood by the window in the watery light of the sun from the far north. That moment the Strange Courage came. I felt that I could lead a nation, not to war, but to enduring peace; as if I had a message for all my people, and a courage not of woman’s, to tell it, to tell it again and again—until all the people answered. It was then that I understood that a man’s soul had come to my baby, and that it was not to be a girl, as I had sometimes thought.
“And then the rest of the waiting—days of misery that I can hardly remember the changes of—yet something singing within me—I holding it high toward heaven as I could—singing with the song within. After weeks, it suddenly came to me what they wanted to do to hide their shame—to take the little child half-finished from me—to murder it—to hide their shame.
“Then I told them that it had not occurred to me to marry Paul—that I did not love him—that I had loved the little child. I told them that I did not believe in the world—that I did not believe I had done wrong—that I did not believeour old preacher who stayed so long at the table could make me more ready for the child. I told my father that I did not believe in marrying a man and saying that I would have no children for three years. I told him that I was mad for the child—that I was young and strong and ready to die for it ... that my baby wanted me, and no other. I would have gone away, but they would not let me do that. They kept me in an upper room. Paul had gone away ... and after months my father went to find him. It was sad to me—sadness that I cannot forget in that—my father taking his cane and his bag and setting out to find the father—heart-broken and full of the awfulness of being away from his home. He had not been away for years.... And my mother coming timidly to my room.... And then I went down like Pharaoh’s daughter to the very edge of the water—for, for the Gleam!”
Her eyes were shining and she laughed a little, looking upward as if she saw a vision of it, and had forgotten the room and the listening—her eyes as close to tears as laughter.
“... And when I came back—it was all so different. I could pity them—my heart breaking for my father and mother, who had not the wonder, and only the fears. They were passing out—after doing their best as they saw it, for many, many years together—and I had brought them the tragedy, the crumbling of their house—ashame upon the patriarch of the long road, a blackness upon her maternities.... It was my father’s thought to bring Paul to me. As if I would have taken him, but he came—my father having given him much money.... Oh, do not be hard upon him. There is wildness in him and looseness, but the world had showed him the way and he was young. I said to him (it was within ten days after the coming and my father and mother were gone from the room), ‘I would not think of marrying you, Paul, but do not tell them. As soon as I am ready, I shall go away with you, and they will not be so unhappy—and as soon as we are well away, you shall be free. And you may keep the money, Paul.’
“... And now it is like bringing you a reward for listening so well. I tell you now of a moment of beauty and wonder—such as I had known but once before, and was more real to me than all the rest. It made that which was sorrowful and sordid of the rest seem of little account.... It was early evening in the upper room and still light. An old servant who loved me was in the room, and the Gleam was sleeping—the fourteenth day after his coming. The woman helped me to a chair and drew it to the window, and all was hushed. Even before I looked out, an unspeakable happiness began to gush into my heart.
“The ravine was crowding with darkness, butthe long road was full of light. The houses between seemed to dwindle but the distance was full of radiance—that perfect afterglow again. Not for twenty years had there been such a sunset, and now the sky was massed with gold of the purple martin’s breast, and the roof of Paul’s house was like two open leaves of beaten gold—everywhere the air filled with strange brightenings. The fragrance from the fields arose to meet the heaven falling from the sky.
“I tried to make believe, but the road was empty. The Guest would never come again, and yet on such a night as this, he had come to me—like a saint that has finished his work, like a Master coming down a last time. All the room and the house was hushed behind me.... But the long road was empty.
“The old servant at last could bear it no longer. Perhaps she thought I did not breathe. Softly she crossed the room to the cradle, lifted the Gleam and placed him in my lap—as if to call me back. Breath came quickly at the touch of him, and she must have heard a low, joyous sound as I felt the child. With one hand I held him, patting his shoulder softly, slowly, with the other, until the ecstasy of long ago flowed into my being.
“There was a moment that I should have asked her to take the Gleam from me—had I been able to speak. It was such a moment that I had run out under the stars. But as I patted the tinyshoulder, the burden of the ecstasy passed, and a durable blessedness came—the calm of great understanding.
“The road—of course it was empty—for he had come.... I thought I had told the old servant, but a second time I seemed to see her anxious face bending so near in the dusk.
“‘Why, don’t you see?’ I whispered. ‘He was looking for his mother when I found him.’”
That was the end of the story—the rest just details that an outsider might ask: How she went away with Paul for the sake of her father; how he remained with her during the long voyage to America, but as nothing to her, more and more a stranger of different ways from hers—how he gave her but a little of the money her father had put in trust for her keeping—and rushed away to dig his grave in the city.... Then just a glimpse of her need and her labour and longing for the Island life—a dream, theJade....
5
The final morning, Bellair took the babe in his arms and let himself down the rocky way to the shore. The trail was empty behind him, and the cottage shut off by the group of little pines, pure to pass through as the room of a child. And here were rain-washed boulders warming in the morning sun, and before his eyes the blue[Pg 236]and deep-eyed sea. It rolled up to his feet, forever changing with its stories and its secrets, very cool about them all to-day, full of mastery and leisure.
Bellair sat upon a stone and looked at the child: “I wish you could tell me, little man ... but you are not telling. You know it all, like the sea—but you do not tell.... And I’ll see you so many times, when I’m away,—see you like this and wish many times I could hold you. For we were always friends, good friends. You didn’t ask much.... And you were fine in the pinch, my son.... That little cry I heard, that little cry.... He loved you, and promised great things for you. I’ve come to believe it, little man, for I know your mother. That’s good gambling, from where I stand.... He knew it first. He knew it all first. And you didn’t tell him.... Oh, be all to her, little Gleam—be all to her, and tell her I love her—when she looks away to the sea. Tell her, I’ll be coming, perhaps.... I didn’t know I’d ever be called to kiss a little boy—but it’s all the same to you ... and take care of her for me.”
They were standing together a last time before his journey. The carriage had been waiting many minutes. The child was propped upon the lawn, and Elsie was picking her steps and shaking her paws that met the dew under the grass. His eye was held over her shoulder to the weathered doorof the stone cottage. It was ajar and coppery brown, like the walls above the young vines. And over her other shoulder, too, was the brilliant etheric divide of the sea. He had to go back and stand a moment in the large room. The wind and the light came in; the vine tendrils came trailing in. He saw her books, her pictures, her chair, her door....
He stood beside her again, and tried to tell her how moving these weeks had been.
“Yes, we have seen both sides, and this was the perfect side. We saw the other, well——”
“And you are not caught in either—that’s what thrills me most,” said he. “I am always caught—in hunger and thirst and fear and pain—in beauty and possessions. But you have stood the same through it all—ready to come or go, ready for sun or storm——”
“After years of changes and uncertainty, one comes to rely only upon the true things.”
“I shall want to come back—before the first turn of the road,” he said. “I think I am hungry for the little house now——”
She put her arms about him. His heart was torn, but there was something immortal in the moment.
“This shall always be your home,” she said. “You may come back to-night—to-morrow—in twenty years—this is your house. I shall be here. I shall teachhimto know and welcome you....We are different. We are not strangers. We have gone down into the deep ways together. We shall always know each other, as no one else can, or as we can know no others. So we must be much to each other—and this is our home. You will never forget.... Oh, yes, you must come back—just as you must go away——”
Sentence by sentence, softly, easily spoken; not with a great beauty of saying, but with a bestowal of the heart that compelled his finest receptivity. And she had held him as a mother might, or as a sister, or as a woman who loved him. There was something in her tenure, of all the loves of earth. He looked deeply into her eyes, but hers was the love that did not betray itself then in the senses. He could not know, for he would not trust his own heart.... But this he knew, and was much to ponder afterward: This which she gave, could not have been given, nor have been received, before the days of the open boat. So strange was the ministry of that fasting.
They kissed, and hers so gladly given, failed of the secret; yet revealed to him a love that sustained, and sent him forth a man—such as Bellair had not been.