When she was thirty-five her father died. Now she was free to go where she pleased. But she did not go anywhere.
Ever since, as a child, she had first tasted salt water, she had longed to travel and see other lands. What held her now? Was it that her longing had been satisfied? that she had a host of memories of great mountains and golden shores, of jungles and strange cities of the coast, of islands lost in seas of sapphire and emerald? of caravans and towers of ivory? of haunted caverns and deserted temples? where, a child always, with her darling boy, she had had such adventures as would have filled a hundred earthly lives. They had built huts in uninhabited places, or made a twisted bower of strong green creepers, and lived their primitive paradisal life wanting nothing but each other; sometimes, through accidents and illness, they had nursed each other, with such unwearied tenderness that death himself had to withdraw, defeated by love. Once on a ship there had been mutiny, and she alone stood by him against a throng; once savages had captured her, and he, outwitting them, had rescued her, riding through leagues of prairie-land and forest, holding her before him on the saddle. In nearly all these adventures it was as though they had met for the first time, and were struck anew with the dumb wonder of first love, and the strange shy sweetness of wooing and confession. Yet they were but playing above truth. For the knowledge was always between them that they were bound immortally by a love which, having no end, seemed also to have had no beginning. They quarreled sometimes—this was playing too. She put, now herself, now him, in the wrong. And either reconciliation was sweet. But it was she who was oftenest at fault, his forgiveness was so dear to her. And still, this was but playing at it. When all these adventures and pretenses were done, they stood heart to heart, and out of their only meeting in life built up eternal truth and told each other. They told it inexhaustibly.
And so, when her father left her free to go, Helen lived on still in the mill of dreams, and kept her millstones grinding. Two years went by. And her hard gray lonely life laid its hand on her hair and her countenance. Her father had worn her out before her time.
It was only invisible grain in the mill now. The peasants came no longer with their corn. She had enough to live on, and her long seclusion unfitted her for strange men in the mill, and people she must talk to. And so long was the habit of the recluse on her, that though her soul flew leagues her body never wandered more than a few hundred yards from her home. Some who had heard of her, and had glimpses of her, spoke to her when they met; but they could make no headway with this sweet, shy, silent woman. Yet children and boys and girls felt drawn to her. It was the dream in her eyes that stirred the love in their hearts; though they knew it no more than the soup in the pipkin knows why it bubbles and boils. For it cannot see the fire. But to them she did not seem old; her strength and eagerness were still upon her, and that silver needlework with which time broiders all men had in her its special beauty, setting her aloof in the unabandoned dream which the young so often desert as their youth deserts them. Those of her age, seeing that unyouthful gleam of her hair combined with the still-youthful dream of her eyes, felt as though they could not touch her; for no man can break another's web, he can only break his own, and these had torn their films to tatters long ago, and shouldered their way through the smudgy rents, and no more walked where she walked. But very young people knew the places she walked in, and saw her clearly, for they walked there too, though they were growing up and she was growing old.
At the end of the second year there was a storm. It lasted three days without stopping. Such fury of rain and thunder she had never heard. The gaunt rooms of the mill were steeped in gloom, except when lightning stared through the flat windows or split into fierce cracks on the dingy glass. Those three days she spent by candle-light. Outside the world seemed to lie under a dark doom.
On the third morning she woke early. She had had restless nights, but now and then slept heavily; and out of one dull slumber she awakened to the certainty that something strange had happened. The storm had lulled at last. Through her window, set high in the wall, she could see the dead light of a blank gray dawn. She had seen other eyeless mornings on her windowpane; but this was different, the air in her room was different. Something unknown had been taken from or added to it. As she lay there wondering, but not yet willing to discover, the flat light at the window was blocked out. A seagull beat against it with its wings and settled on the sill.
The flutter and the settling of the bird overcame her. It was as though reality were more than she could bear. The birds of memory and pain flew through her heart.
She got up and went to the window. The gull did not move. It was broken and exhausted by the storm. And beyond it she looked down upon the sea.
Yes, it was true. The sea itself washed at the walls of the mill.
She did not understand these gray-green waters. She knew them in vision, not in reality. She cried out sharply and threw the window up. The draggled bird fluttered in and sank on the floor. A sea-wind blew in with it. The bird's wings shivered on her feet, and the wind on her bosom. She stared over the land, swallowed up in the sea. Wreckage of all sorts tossed and floated on it. Fences and broken gates and branches of trees; and fragments of boats and nets and bits of cork; and grass and flowers and seaweed—She thought—what did she think? She thought she must be dreaming.
She felt like one drowning. Where could she find a shore?
She hurried to the bed and got her shell; its touch on her heart was her first safety. In her nightgown as she was she ran with her naked feet through the dim passages until she stood beside the grinding stones....
"Child! child! child!"
"Where are you, my boy, where are you?"
"Aren't you coming? Must I lose you after all this?—Oh, come!"
"But tell me where you are!"
"In a few hours I should have been with you—a few hours after many years."
"Oh, boy, for pity, tell me where to find you!"
"You are there waiting for me, aren't you, child? I know you are—I've always known you were. What would you have said to me when you opened the door in your blue gown?—"
"Oh, but say only where you are, my boy!"
"Do you know what I should have said? I shouldn't have said anything. I should have kissed you—"
"Oh, let me come to you and you shall kiss me...."
But she listened in vain.
She went back to her room. The gull was still on the floor. Its wing was broken. Her actions from this moment were mechanical; she did what she did without will. First she bound the broken wing, and fetched bread and water for the wounded bird. Then she dressed herself and went out of the mill. She had a rope in her hands.
The water was not all around the mill. Strips and stretches of land were still unflooded, or only thinly covered. But the face of the earth had been altered by one of those great inland swoops of the sea that have for centuries changed and re-changed the point of Sussex, advancing, receding, shifting the coast-line, making new shores, restoring old fields, wedding the soil with the sand.
Helen walked where she could. She had no choice of ways. She kept by the edge of the water and went into no-man's land. A bank of rotting grasses and dry reeds, which the waves had left uncovered, rose from the marshes. She mounted it, and beheld the unnatural sea on either hand. Here and there in the desolate water mounds of gray-green grass lifted themselves like drifting islands. Trees stricken or still in leaf reared from the unfamiliar element. Many of those which were leafless had put on a strange greenness, for their boughs dripped with seaweed. Over the floods, which were littered with such flotsam as she had seen from her window, flew sea-birds and land-birds, crying and cheeping. There was no other presence in that desolation except her own.
And then at last her commanded feet stood still, and her will came back to her. For she saw what she had come to find.
He was hanging, as though it had caught him in a snare, in a tree standing solitary in the middle of a wide waste of water. He was hanging there like a dead man. She could distinguish his dark red hair and his blue jersey.
She paused to think what to do. She couldn't swim. She would not have hesitated to try; but she wanted to save him. She looked about, and saw among the bits of stuff washing against the foot of the bank a large dismembered tree-trunk. It bobbed back and forth among the hollow reeds. She thought it would serve her if she had an oar. She went in search of one, and found a broken plank cast up among the tangled growth of the bank. When she had secured it she fastened one end of her rope around the stump of an old pollard squatting on the bank like a sturdy gnome, and the other end she knotted around herself. Then, gathering all the middle of the rope into a coil, and using her plank as a prop, she let herself down the bank and slid shuddering into the water. But she had her tree-trunk now; with some difficulty she scrambled on to it, and paddled her way into the open water.
It was not really a great distance to his tree, but to her it seemed immeasurable. She was unskillful, and her awkwardness often put her into danger. But her will made her do what she otherwise might not have done; presently she was under the branches of the tree.
She pulled herself up to a limb beside him and looked at him. And it was not he.
It was not her boy. It was a man, middle-aged, rough and weatherbeaten, but pallid under his red-and-tan. His hair was grizzled. And his face was rough with a growth of grizzled hair. His whole body lurched heavily and helplessly in a fork of the tree, and one arm hung limp. His eyes were half-shut.
But they were not quite shut. He was not unconscious. And under the drooping lids he was watching her.
For a few minutes they sat gazing at each other in silence. She had her breath to get. She thought it would never come back.
The man spoke first.
"Well, you made a job of it," he said.
She didn't answer.
"But you don't know much about the water, do you?"
"I've never seen the sea till to-day," said Helen slowly.
He laughed a little. "I expect you've seen enough of it to-day. But where do you live, then, that you've never seen the sea? In the middle of the earth?"
"No," said Helen, "I live in a mill."
His eyelids flickered. "Do you? Yes, of course you do. I might have guessed it."
"How should you guess it?"
"By your blue dress," said the man. Then he fainted.
She sat there miserably, waiting, ready to prop him if he fell. She did not know what else to do. Before very long he opened his eyes.
"Did I go off again?" he asked.
She nodded.
"Yes. Well, it's time to be making a move. I dare say I can now you're here. What's your name?"
"Helen."
"Well, Helen, we'd better put that rope to some use. Will that tree at the other end hold?"
"Yes."
"Then just you untie yourself and we'll get aboard and haul ourselves home."
She unfastened the rope from her body, and helped him down to her makeshift boat.
"You take the paddle," he said. "My arm's damaged. But I can pull on the rope with the other."
"Are you sure? Are you all right? What's your name?"
"Yes, I can manage. My name's Peter. This would have been a lark thirty years ago, wouldn't it? It's rather a lark now."
She nodded vaguely, wondering what she would do if he fell off the log in mid-water.
"Suppose you faint again?"
"Don't look for trouble," said the man. "Push off, now."
Pulling and paddling they got to the bank. He took her helping-hand up it, and she saw by his movements that he was very feeble. He leaned on her as they went back to the mill; they walked without speaking.
When they reached the door Peter said, "It's twenty years since I was here, but I expect you don't remember."
"Oh, yes," said Helen, "I remember."
"Do you now?" said Peter. "It's funny you should remember."
And with that he did faint again. And this time when he recovered he was in a fever. His staying-power was gone.
She put him to bed and nursed him. She sat day and night in his room, doing by instinct what was right and needful. At first he lay either unconscious or delirious. She listened to his incoherent speech in a sort of agony, as though it might contain some clue to a riddle; and sat with her passionate eyes brooding on his countenance, as though in that too might lie the answer. But if there was one, neither his words nor his face revealed it. "When he wakes," she whispered to herself, "he'll tell me. How can there be barriers between us any more?"
After three days he came to himself. She was sitting by the window preparing sheep's-wool for her spindle. She bent over her task, using the last of the light, which fell upon her head. She did not know that he was conscious, or had been watching her, until he spoke.
"Your hair used to be quite brown, didn't it?" he said. "Nut-brown."
She started and turned to him, and a faint flush stained her cheeks.
"Ah, you're not pleased," said Peter with a slight grin. "None of us like getting old, do we?"
Helen put by the question. "You're yourself again."
"Doing my best," said he. "How long is it?"
"Three days."
"As much as that? I could have sworn it was only yesterday. Well, time passes."
He said no more, and fell into a doze. Helen was as grateful for this as she could have been for anything just then. She couldn't have gone on talking. She was stunned with misgivings. How could he ever have thought her hair was brown? Couldn't he see even now that it had once been as black as jet? She put her hand up to her head, and unpinned a coil of her heavy hair, and spread it over her breast and looked at it. Yes, the silver was there, too much and too soon. But there was less silver than black. It was still time's stitchery, not his fabric. The man who was not her boy need never have seen her before to know that once her hair had been black. This was worse than forgetfulness in him; it was misremembrance. She pulled at the silver hairs passionately as though she would pluck them out and make him see her as she had been. But soon she stopped her futile effort to uncount the years. "I am foolish," she whispered to herself, and coiled her lock again and bound it in its place. "There are other ways of making him remember. Presently when he wakes again I will talk to him. I will remind him of everything, yes, and I'll tell him everything. I WON'T be afraid." She waited with longing his next consciousness.
But to her woe she found herself defeated. While he slept she was able, as when he had been delirious or absent, to create the occasion and the talk between them. She dropped all fears, and in frank tenderness brought him her twenty years of dreams. And in her thought he accepted and answered them. But when he woke and spoke to her from the bed, she knew at once that the man who lay there was not the man with whom she had been speaking. His personality fenced with hers; it had barriers she could not pass. She dared not try, for dread of his indifference or his smiles.
"What made you stick on in this place?" he asked her.
"I don't know," said Helen. "Places hold one, don't they?"
"None ever held me. I couldn't have been content to stay the best half of my life in one spot. But I suppose women are different."
"You speak as though all women were the same."
"Aren't they? I thought they might be. I don't know much about them," said Peter, rubbing his chin. "Rough as a porcupine, aren't I? You must have thought me a savage when you found me stuck upside-down in that tree like a sloth. What DID you think?"
She looked at him, longing to tell him what she had thought. She longed to tell him of the boy she had expected to find in the tree. She longed to tell him how the finding had shocked her by bringing home to her her loss—not of the boy, but of something in that moment still more precious to her. Because (she longed to tell him) she had so swiftly rediscovered the lost boy, not in his face but in his glance, not in his words but in the tones of his voice.
But when she looked at him and saw him leaning on his elbow waiting for her answer with his half-shut lids and the half-smile on his lips, she answered only, "I was thinking how to get you back to the bank."
"Was that it? Well, you managed it. I've never thanked you, have I?"
"Don't!" said Helen with a quick breath, and looked out of the window.
He waited for a few moments and then said, "I'm a bad hand at thanking. I can't help being a savage, you know. I'm not fit for women's company. I don't look so rough when I'm trimmed."
"I don't want to be thanked," said Helen controlling her voice; and added with a faint smile, "No one looks his best when he's ill."
"Wait till I'm well," grinned Peter, "and see if I'm not fit to walk you out o' Sundays." He lay back on his pillow and whistled a snatch of tune. Her heart almost stopped beating, because it was the tune he had whistled at the door twenty years ago. For a moment she thought she could speak to him as she wished. But desire choked her power to choose her words; so many rushed through her brain that she had to pause, seeking which of them to utter; and that long pause, in which she really seemed to have uttered them all aloud, checked the impulse. But surely he had heard her? No; for she had not spoken yet. And before she could make the effort he had stopped whistling, and when she looked at him to speak, he was fumbling restlessly about his pillow.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Something I had—where's my clothes?"
She brought them to him, and he searched them till he had found among them a small metal box which he thrust under the pillow; and then he lay back, as though too tired to notice her. So her impulse died in her, unacted on.
And during the next four days it was always so. A dozen times in their talks she tried to come near him, and could not. Was it because he would not let her? or because the thing she wished to find in him was not really there? Sometimes by his manner only, and sometimes by his words, he baffled her when she attempted to approach him—and the attempt had been so painful to conceive, and its still-birth was such agony to her. He would talk frequently of the time when he would be making tracks again.
"Where to?" asked Helen.
"I leave it to chance. I always have. I've never made plans. Or very seldom. And I'm not often twice in the same place. You look tired. I'm sorry to be a bother to you. But it'll be for the last time, most likely. Go and lie down."
"I don't want to," said Helen under her breath. And in her thoughts she was crying, "The last time? Then it must be soon, soon! I'll make you listen to me now!"
"I want to sleep," said Peter.
She left the room. Tears of helplessness and misery filled her eyes. She was almost angry with him, but more angry with herself; but her self-anger was mixed with shame. She was ashamed that he made her feel so much, while he felt nothing. Did he feel nothing?
"It's my stupidity that keeps us apart," she whispered. "I will break through it!" As quickly as she had left him she returned, and stood by the bed. He was lying with his hand pressed over his eyes. When he was conscious of her being there, his hand fell, and his keen eyes shot into hers. His brows contracted.
"You nuisance," he muttered, and hid his eyes again. She turned and left him. When she got outside the door she leaned against it and shook from head to foot. She hovered on the brink of her delusions and felt as though she would soon crash into a precipice. She longed for him to go before she fell. Yes, she began to long for the time when he should go, and end this pain, and leave her to the old strange life that had been so sweet. His living presence killed it.
After that third day she had had no more fears for his safety, and he was strong and rallied quickly. The gull too was saved. He saved it. It had drooped and sickened with her. She did not know what to do with it. On the fourth day as he was so much better, she brought it to him. He reset its wing and kept it by him, making it his patient and his playfellow. It thrived at once and grew tame to his hand. He fondled and talked to it like a lover. She would watch him silently with her smoldering eyes as he fed and caressed the bird, and jabbered to it in scraps of a dozen foreign tongues. His tenderness smote her heart.
"You're not very fond of birds," he said to her once, when she had been sitting in one of her silences while he played with his pet.
The words, question or statement, filled her with anger. She would not trust herself to protest or deny. "I don't know much about them," she said.
"That's a pity," said Peter coolly. "The more you know em the more you have to love em. Yet you could love them for all sorts of things without knowing them, I'd have thought."
She said nothing.
"For their beauty, now. That's worth loving. Look at this one—you're a beauty all right, aren't you, my pretty? Not many girls to match you." He paused, and ran his finger down the bird's throat and breast. "Perhaps you don't think she's beautiful," he said to Helen.
"Yes, she's beautiful," said Helen, with a difficulty that sounded like reluctance.
"Ah, you don't think so. You ought to see her flying. You shall some day. When her hurt's mended she'll fly—I'll let her go."
"Perhaps she won't go," said Helen.
"Oh, yes, she will. How can she stop in a place like this? This is no air for her—she must fly in her own."
"You'll be sorry to see her go," said Helen.
"To see her free? No, not a bit. I want her to fly. Why should I keep her? I'd not let her keep me. I'd hate her for it. Why should I make her hate me?"
"Perhaps she wouldn't," said Helen, in a low voice.
"Oh, I expect she would. Ungrateful little beggar. I've saved her life, and she ought to know she belongs to me. So she might stay out of gratitude. But she'd come to hate me for it, all the same. Not at first; after a bit. Because we change. Bound to, aren't we?"
"Perhaps."
"I know I do. We can none of us stay what we were. You haven't either."
"You haven't much to go by," said Helen.
"Seven minutes at the door, wasn't it? This time it's been seven days."
"Yes."
"It's a long time for me," said Peter.
"It's not much out of a lifetime."
"No. But suppose it were more than seven days?"
Helen looked at him and said slowly, "It will be, won't it? You won't be able to go to-morrow."
"No," said Peter, "not to-morrow, or next day perhaps. Perhaps I won't be able to go for the rest of my life."
This time Helen looked at him and said nothing.
Peter stroked his bird and whistled his tune and stopped abruptly and said, "Will you marry me, Helen?"
"I'd rather die," said Helen.
And she got up and went out of the room.
("Oh, the green grass!" chuckled Martin like a bird.
"Nobody asked her you to begin a song, Master Pippin," quavered Jennifer.
"It was not the beginning of a song, Mistress Jennifer. It was the epilogue of a story."
"But the epilogue comes at the end of a story," said Jennifer.
"And hasn't my story come to its end?" said Martin.
Joscelyn: Ridiculous! oh, dear! there's no bearing with you. How CAN this be the end? How can it be, with him on one side of the door and her on the other?
Joyce: And her heart's breaking—you must make an end of that.
Jennifer: And you must tell us the end of the shell.
Jessica: And of the millstones.
Jane: What did he have in his box?
"Please," said little Joan, "tell us whether she ever found her boy again—oh, please tell us the end of her dreams."
"Do these things matter?" said Martin. "Hasn't he asked her to marry him?"
"But she said no," said Jennifer with tears in her eyes.
"Did she?" said Martin. "Who said so?"
"Master Pippin," said Joscelyn, and her voice shook with the agitation of her anger, "tell us immediately the things we want to know!"
"When, I wonder," said Martin, "will women cease to want to know little things more than big ones? However, I suppose they must be indulged in little things, lest—"
"Lest?" said little Joan.
"There is such a thing," said Martin, "as playing for safety.")
Well, then, my dear maids, when Helen ran out of his room she went to her own, and she threw herself on the bed and sobbed without weeping. Because everything in her life seemed to have been taken away from her. She lay there for a long time, and when she moved at last her head was so heavy that she took the pins from her hair to relieve herself of its weight. But still the pain weighed on her forehead, which burned on her cold fingers when she pressed them over her eyes, trying to think and find some gleam of hope among her despairing thoughts. And then she remembered that one thing at least was left her—her shell. During his illness she had never carried it to the millstones. It was as though his being there had been the only answer to her daily dreams, an answer that had failed them all the time. But now in spite of him she would try to find the old answers again. So she went once more to the millstones with her shell. And when she got there she held it so tightly to her heart that it marked her skin.
And the millstones had nothing to say. For the first time they refused to grind her corn.
Then Helen knew that she really had nothing left, and that the home-coming of the man had robbed her of her boy and of the child she had been. Nothing was left but the man and woman who had lost their youth. And the man had nothing to give the woman. Nothing but gratitude and disillusion. And now a still bitterer thought came to her—the thought that the boy had had nothing to give the girl. For twenty years it had been the girl's illusion. The storms in her heart broke out. She put her face in her hands and wept like wild rain on the sea. She wept so violently that between her passion and the speechless grinding of the stones she did not hear him coming. She only knew he was there when he put his arm round her.
"What is it, you silly thing?" said Peter.
She looked up at him through her hair that fell like a girl's in soft masses on either side of her face. There was a change in him, but she didn't know then what it was. He had got into his clothes and made himself kempt. His beard was no longer rough, though his hair was still unruly across his forehead, and under it his gray-green eyes looked, half-anxious, half-smiling, into hers. His face was rather pale, and he was a little unsteady in his weakness. But the look in his eyes was the only thing she saw. It unlocked her speech at last.
"Oh, why did you come back?" she cried. "Why did you come back? If you had never come I should have kept my dream to the end of my life. But now even when you go I shall never get it again. You have destroyed what was not there."
He was silent for a moment, still keeping his arm round her. Then he said, "Look what's here." And he opened his hand and showed her his metal box without its lid; in it were the mummies of seven ears of corn. Some were only husks, but some had grain in them still.
She stared at them through her tears, and drew from her breast her hand with the shell in it. Suddenly her mouth quivered and she cried passionately, "What's the use?" And she snatched the old corn from him and flung it to the millstones with her shell. And the millstones ground them to eternal atoms....
"My boy! my boy! it was you over there in the tree!"
"Oh, child, you came at last in your blue gown!"
"Why didn't you call to me?"
"I'd no breath. I was spent. And I knew you'd seen me and would do your best."
"I'll never forget that sight of you in the tree, with your old jersey and your hair as red as ever."
"I shall always see your free young figure standing on the high bank against the sky."
"Oh, I was desperate."
"I wondered what you'd do. I knew you'd do something."
"I thought I'd never get across the water."
"Do you know what I thought as I saw you coming so bravely and so badly? I thought, I'll teach her to swim one day. Shall I, child?"
"I can't swim without you, my boy," she whispered.
"But you pretended not to know me!"
"I couldn't help it, it was such fun."
"How COULD you make fun of me then?"
"I always shall, you know."
"Oh, yes," she said, "do, always."
"What DID you think when you saw me in the tree? What did you see when you got there? Not what you expected."
"No. I saw twenty years come flying upon me, twenty years I'd forgotten all about. Because for me it has always been twenty years ago."
"And you expected to see a boy, and you saw a grizzled man."
"No," said Helen, her eyes shining with tears, "I expected to see a boy, and I saw a gray-haired woman. I've seen her ever since."
"I've only seen her once," said Peter. "I saw her rise up from the water and sit in my tree. And when she spoke and looked at me, it was a child." He put his hand over her wet eyes. "You must stop seeing her, child," he said.
"When I told you my name, were you disappointed?"
"No. It's the loveliest name in the world."
"You said it at once."
"I had to. I'd wanted to say it for twenty years. But I sha'n't say it often, Helen."
"Won't you?"
"No, child."
"Now and then, for a treat?" she looked up at him half-shy, half-merry.
"Oh, you CAN smile, can you?"
"You were to teach me that too."
"Yes, I've a lot to teach you, haven't I?—I've yet to teach you to say my name."
"Have you?"
"You've never said it once."
"I've said it a thousand times."
"You've never let me hear you."
"Haven't I?"
"Let me hear you!"
"Peter."
"Say it again!"
"Peter! Peter! Peter!"
"Again!"
"My boy!"...
"When we got back to the mill-door the last of the twenty years, that had been melting faster and faster, melted away for ever. And you and I were standing there as we'd stood then; and I wanted to kiss your mouth as I'd wanted to then."
"Oh, why didn't you?—both times!"
"Shall I now, for both times?"
"Oh!—oh, that's for a hundred times."
"Think of all the times I've wanted to, and been without you."
"You've never been without me."
"I know that. How often I came to the mill."
"Did you come to the mill?"
"As often as I ate your grain. Didn't you know?"
"I know how often your sea brought me to you."
"Did it?"
"And, oh, my boy! at last the sea brought you to me."
"And the mill," he said. "Where has that brought us?"
"I thought perhaps you'd die."
"I couldn't have died so close on finding you. I was fighting the demons all the time—fighting my way through to you. And at last I opened my eyes and saw you again, your black hair edged with light against the window."
"My black hair? you mean my brown hair, don't you?"
"Oh, weren't you cross! I loved you for being cross."
"I wasn't cross. Why will you keep on saying I'm things I'm not?"
"You were so cross that you pretended our twenty years were sixty."
"I never said anything about twenty years, OR sixty."
"You did, though. Sixty! why, in sixty years we'd have been very nearly old. So to punish you I pretended to go to sleep, and I saw you take your hair down. It was so beautiful. You've seen the threads spiders spin on blackened furze that gypsies have set fire to? Your hair was like that. You were angry with those lovely lines of silver, and you wanted to get rid of them. I nearly called to you to stop hurting what I loved so much, but you stopped of yourself, as though you had heard me before I called."
"I was ashamed of myself," whispered Helen. "I was ashamed of trying to be again what I was the only other time you saw me."
"You've never stopped being that, child," said Peter.
"You knew, didn't you, why it was I had stayed on at the mill? You knew what it was that held me, and why I could never leave it?"
"Yes, I knew. It held you because it held me too. I wondered if you'd tell me that."
"I longed to, but I couldn't. I've never been able to tell you things. And I never shall."
"Oh, child, don't look so troubled. You've always told me things and always will. Do you think it's with our tongues we tell each other things? What can words ever tell? They only circle round the truth like birds flying in the sun. The light bathes their flight, yet they are millions of miles away from the light they fly in. We listen to each other's words, but we watch each other's eyes."
"Some people half-shut their eyes, Peter."
"Some people, Helen, can't shut their eyes at all. Your eyes will never stop telling me things. And the strangest thing about them is that looking into them is like being able to see in the dark. They are darkness, not light. And in darkness dreams are born. When I look into your eyes I go into your dream."
"I shall never shut my eyes again," she whispered. "I will keep you in my dream for ever."
"Women aren't all the same, Peter."
"Aren't they?"
"And yet—they are."
"Well, I give it up."
"Didn't you know?"
"No. I told you the truth that time. I've not had very much to do with women."
"Then I've something to teach you, Peter."
"I don't know what you can prove," said Peter. "One woman by herself can't prove a difference."
"Can't she?" said Helen; and laughed and cried at once.
"But why did you call me a nuisance?"
"You were one—you are one. You leave a man no peace—you're like the sea. You're full of storms, aren't you?"
"Not only storms."
"I know. But the sea wouldn't be the sea without her storms. They're one of her ways of holding us, too. And there are more storms in her than ever break. I see them in you, big ones and little ones, brooding. Then you're a—nuisance. You always will be, won't you?"
"Not to wreck you."
"You won't do that. Or if you do—I can survive shipwreck."
"I know."
"How do you know? I nearly gave up once, but the thought of you stopped me. I wanted to come back—I'd always meant to. So I held on."
"I know."
"How do you know? I never told you, did I?"
"Oh, Peter, the things we have to tell each other. The times you thought you were alone—the times I thought I was! You've had a life you never dreamed of—and I another life that was not in my dreams."
"You've saved me from death more than once," said Peter.
"You've done more than that," said Helen, "you've given me the only life I've had. But a thing doesn't belong to you because you've saved its life or given it life. It only belongs to you because you love it. I know you belong to me. But you only know if I belong to you."
"That's not true now. You do know. And I know."
"Yes; and we know that as that belonging has nothing to do with death, it can't have anything either to do with the saving or even the giving of life. So you must never thank me, or I you. There are no thanks in love. And that was why I couldn't bear your asking me to marry you to-day. I thought you were thanking me."
"When you played with the seagull..."
"Yes?"
"How you loved it!"
"Yes."
"I looked to see how you felt when you loved a thing. I wanted so much to be the seagull in your hands."
"When I touched it I was touching you."
She put his hand to her breast and whispered, "I love birds."
He smiled. "I knew you loved them; and best free. All birds must fly in their own air."
"Yes," she said. "But their freedom only means their power to choose what air they'll fly in. And every choice is a cage too."
"I shall leave the door open, child."
"I shall never fly out," said Helen.
"You talked of going away."
"Yes. But not from you."
"Am I to go with you always, following chance and making no plans?"
"Will you? You are the only plan I ever made. Will you leave everything else but me to chance? Perhaps it will lead us all over the earth; and perhaps after all we shall not go very far. But I never could see ahead, except one thing."
"What was it?"
"The mill-door and you in your old blue gown. And for seven days I've stopped seeing that. I haven't it to steer by. Will you chance it?"
"Must you be playing with meanings even in dreams? Don't you know—don't you know that for a woman who loves, and is not sure that she is loved, her days and nights are all chances, every minute she lives is a chance? It might be...it might not be...oh, those ghosts of joy and pain! they are almost too much to bear. For the joy isn't pure joy, or the pain pure pain, and she cannot come to rest in either of them. Sometimes the joy is nearly as great as though she knew; yet at the instant she tries to take it, it looks at her with the eyes of doubt, and she trembles, and dare not take it yet. And sometimes the pain is all but the death she foresees; yet even as she submits to it, it lays upon her heart the finger of hope. And then she trembles again, because she need not take it yet. Those are her chances, Peter. But when she knows that her beloved is her lover, life may do what it will with her; but she is beyond its chances for ever."
"Your corn! you kept my corn!"
"Till it should bear. And your shell there—you've kept my shell."
"Till it should speak. And now—oh, see these things that have held our dreams for twenty years! The life is threshed from them for ever—they are only husks. They can hold our dreams no more. Oh, I can't go on dreaming by myself, I can't, it's no use. I thought my heart had learned to bear its dream alone, but the time comes when love in its beauty is too near to pain. There is more love than the single heart can bear. Good-by, my boy—good-by!"
"Helen! don't suffer so! oh, child, what are you doing?—"
"Letting my dear dreams go...it's no use, Peter..."
The millstones took them and crushed them.
She uttered a sharp cry....
His arm tightened round her. "What is it, child?" she heard him say.
She looked at him bewildered, and saw that he too was dazed. She looked into the gray-green eyes of a boy of twenty. She said in a voice of wonder, "Oh, my boy!" as he felt her soft hair.
"Such a fuss about an empty shell and a bit of dead wheat."
She hid her face on his jersey.
"You are a silly, aren't you?" said Peter. "I wish you'd look up."
Helen looked up, and they kissed each other for the first time.
I defy you now, Mistress Jennifer, to prove that your grassblade is greener than mine.