“Why?” she echoed with a look of alarm, and signs of that inward trepidation which every woman must feel at such a moment. “Oh,” she added, with a weak effort to jest fate aside, “I suppose that I thought you ought to hate me.”
“No,” said Easton, with a passionate force that nothing could have stayed, “you know I love you!”
Her dark bloom went, but in an instant came again, with what swiftly blended emotions no man may guess and possibly no woman could tell, and “How can you say such a thing to me?” she demanded with the imperiousness of fear. “You—you hardly know me—it’s hardly a week since we met.”
“A week? What does it matter? I have never loved any other woman; I know that you are free to love me, if you can; I don’t care for any other knowledge of you. Oh, don’t answer me yet! Listen: I don’t ask you to love me now; whatright have I to do that? But only let me love you! I can wait. I can be silent, if you say so. You are my whole life, and my whole life is yours, if you choose to make me wait so long. How could it be better spent?”
She sank down upon a shelf of rock beside that she had leaned upon, and he fell at her feet, and then with the unsparingness of love which claims nothing and takes all, “Oh, my darling!” he murmured, and stretched his arms toward her.
She stayed him with a little electric touch. “Don’t!” she whispered, and after a look at him she hid her face.
He did not move; his attitude did change, but still expressed his headlong hope, as if a sculptor had caught it in immutable stone; but when she drew out his handkerchief and, pressing it to her eyes, handed it to him and said, with trembling lips, “Take it; give me my book,” a terrible despair blanched his face.
“Oh!” he moaned.
“Yes,” she said, “I must be free. I can’t think if I’m not free;” and she put the book, which he mechanically surrendered, into her pocket.
“You shall be as free of me as you will,” he answered. “I ask nothing of you—only leave to love you. I will go away, if you say it. I must be to blame for speaking, if it gives you so much pain. I would rather have died than hurt you.”
An imploring humility, an ineffable tenderness evoked by her trouble, shook his voice. She did not answer at once, but, “You are not to blame;I should be very ungrateful and very cruel to suffer it,” she said, after a while, “but, oh, I’m afraid thatImust have been behaving very badly, very boldly, to make you talk so to me, so soon. I’m afraid,” she said, bowing her head, “that you don’t respect me—that you think I was trying to make you care for me.”
“Respect you!” he echoed. “Iloveyou.”
“Yes, yes, I know that. But it isn’t the same thing!”
He stood bewildered, where he had risen from her feet, and looked down into her face, which she now lifted toward him. “If I had been another kind of woman, you wouldn’t have said it to me!”
“No; if you had been other than you are, I should not have loved you,” said the young man, gravely.
“Oh, I don’t mean that. I mean— Oh, Mr. Easton, what is it you find to love in me? What did I ever do or say that you ought to love me? Whydoyou love me?”
“I don’t know. Because—you are—you are my love.”
“Is it my looks you care for?”
“Your looks? Yes, you are beautiful. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“But if I wasn’t, you would never have cared for me.”
“How can I tell? I have no reasons. You are the one human creature in all the world whose being or doing I can’t question. You are what I love, whatever you are.”
“Is it true? How strange!” said Mrs. Farrell. “And if I had always been very cold and reserved and stiff with you, and not come back after that book, and not let you take a hairpin out of my chignon, and not made mischief between you and your friend, and not been so ready to walk and ride with you in season and out of season, and not rather—well!—cut upwith you to-day about that handkerchief, would you have loved me all the same?”
She was still looking very seriously into his face, so very seriously that he could not help the smile that the contrast of her words and mien brought to his lips.
“Don’t! Don’t laugh!” she pleaded piteously. “I’m trying to get at something.”
“But there is nothing, nothing for you to get at!” he cried out. “If I tried forever, I could only say at last that I love you.”
“Yes, but you oughtn’t to,” said Mrs. Farrell, with a sigh. “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know who or what I am.” She restrained a movement of impatience on his part. “I’m not at all like other people. My father was nothing but a ship’s captain, and he had been a common sailor; and he ran off with my mother, I’ve heard, and they were married against her parents’ will. I can remember how handsome he was, with blue eyes and a yellow beard, and how he used to swear at the men—I went a voyage with him once after my mother died. I was brought up at a convent school in Canada, along with the half sisters of Mr.Farrell, who owned my father’s ship; and when I came out he married me. I didn’t love him; no, I never pretended to; he was too old. But I married him, and I would have been a good enough wife, I believe, but he died; he died very soon after we were married. I never said so, but I was sorry that he should die, for he was very good to me; and yet I was glad to be free again. There, Mr. Easton, that’s all about me.”
Apparently this history had not given his passion the pause of a single pulse. She was all that she had been to him, or more; his face showed that.
“Well?” she asked, triumphantly.
“Then you don’t forbid me to love you?” he questioned in turn.
“Oh, I ought to! You are too generous and too good for me! No, no, you mustn’t love me. I should be sure to bring harm upon you. It was all true about Mr. Farrell, but it wasn’t about my father. In his last years he joined the church, and he used to pray in the cabin to be forgiven for swearing on deck. So I’m not so bad as I said, but I’m not good enough for you to love.”
“Won’t you let me judge of that?” asked Easton, with a smile, too happy to do else, whatever name she had given herself. He crouched again at her feet, near the base of the flat rock on which she had sunk, and while he spoke she looked beamingly upon him. “I could parade a few defects of my own,” he said, “but just now I am anxious to have you think all the good of me that you can; I shall be infinitely far from good enough.”
“No, no; don’t do that. I want you to tell me something very disgraceful of yourself. If you don’t make yourself out the blackest kind of character, I shall not let you care for me.”
“Another time; not now.”
“Yes, now. Come.”
Easton laughed. “I can’t think of anything heinous enough for your purpose on such short notice.”
“Oh, Mr. Easton! Do you mean to say that you have never done anything to be ashamed of? Have you nothing on your conscience? What was that thing you said you oughtn’t to have done to Mr. Gilbert?”
The shadow of his lurking remorse fell over the bliss of the lover’s face, and he gave a sigh like those we heave when we wake from the forgetfulness of care to the remembrance of it. “Do you really want to know?”
“Yes, I do,” answered Mrs. Farrell. “If you’d been guilty of something really shabby, I should have felt more at home with you; but no matter, even if it isn’t strictly disgraceful. Go on.”
Easton did not laugh. “Yes, I will tell you,” he said; nevertheless, he did not tell her at once; he fell into a moody, unhappy silence, from which he suddenly started.
“I told you once before,” he began, “when I didn’t mean to tell you anything, that Gilbert and I were in the army together. I knew nothing of the business, and I chose to enter the ranks, where I should at least do no harm to the cause I wantedto serve. Gilbert was my captain; we had not known each other before; but he had known of me, and he made a point of finding me out among those poor fellows, and in spite of the gulf fixed between officers and men, he made himself my friend at once; we were younger than we are now—”
“How interesting!” said Mrs. Farrell; “it’s quite like a love-affair.”
“And after our first engagement he urgently recommended me and I got a lieutenant’s commission in another company of our regiment. The next battle vacated the captaincy above me.”
“Do you mean that the officer above you was killed?”
“That’s the way most promotions are got.”
“Well, it’s shocking! I don’t see how you could accept it. To profit by the death of others!”
Easton winced. “Oh,” he said, bitterly, “I did worse than that. Our general was killed, and the colonel who took his place as brigade commandant had an old feud with Gilbert—something that had begun before the war. I don’t know whether he planned to strike him with my hand, when he saw what friends we were, or whether it was a sudden, infernal inspiration. But just as we were going into action he detached Gilbert for staff duty; we were fighting on toward the end of the war by that time, and there had been many changes and losses, so that I now stood next to him in seniority, and took his place in the regiment. The colonel and the lieutenant-colonel were killed, and I brought the remnant of the regiment out as well as I could.The colonel commanding had been a truckling politician at home, and he never took his hands off the wires that work officeholders.”
Easton stopped, and it seemed as if he did not mean to go on, the absence which he fell into was so long. He stared at her with a look of pain, when recalled by an eager “Well?” from Mrs. Farrell.
“It all fell out with such malignant fatality that I don’t think that part of it could have been planned. But one day Gilbert and I sat talking before his tent, and an orderly came up with an official letter for me. Gilbert made a joke of pretending to open it; I told him to go on, and then he opened it and looked at what was in it. He handed me the inclosure without a word: it was my commission as colonel; I had been advanced two steps over his head.”
Mrs. Farrell broke out, with a pitiless frankness that seemed to strike Easton like a blow, “I don’t see how he could forgive you!”
Easton passed his hand over his face. “It was a great deal to forgive; if it hadn’t seemed to make us closer friends, I should say it was too much to forgive; that such a thing ought to have separated us at once and forever.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Farrell, “I don’t understand how you got over it. What did you do? What did you say?”
“I hardly know,” answered Easton, gloomily, “what I did or said. I wanted to tear the commission to pieces and leave the service. But Gilbertsaid I hadn’t any right to refuse the promotion, I hadn’t any right to leave the army; and he added things about my fitness for the place, and my duty. If I declined this commission, he should not get it; but if he could get it, what sort of face could he carry it off with? What we must do was not to let it make bad blood between us. There was a great deal more talk, but it all came to that in the end. He might often have had promotion after that in many ways—in other regiments recruiting or reorganizing—but he refused everything; he even refused the brevet that was offered him after the war; he said he had some doubts about this, for he knew what I had done to have his case made known and justice done him. But if I didn’t mind, he said, he would rather stay what he was. He didn’t go into the army for glory.”
“How grand!” said Mrs. Farrell.
“Yes,” returned Easton, sadly, “it was grand enough.”
“But, after all,” she said, “I don’t know why you shouldn’t be at peace about it now. It’s all over and done with, long ago. Besides, you thought you did right, didn’t you?”
“Yes. But in such a case, one ought to do wrong,” said Easton, sadly.
Mrs. Farrell laughed. “Oh, well,” said she, “you did wrong to let me surprise the weak place in your friendship, and that makes it just right. Why, Mr. Easton!” she exclaimed, “are you actually worried about that silly business?”
Easton did not answer.
“You’re rather too sensitive, I think.”
“Excuse me,” said Easton. “A man needn’t be very sensitive to dislike to exploit himself at the expense of a friend who has already forgiven him too much.”
“But why don’t youtellhim you didn’t?” demanded Mrs. Farrell, in amazement. “Why don’t you tell him that I got it out of you—what little you said—before you knew what you were talking about?”
“Why? How could I do that?” asked Easton, in as great amaze.
“Easily!” retorted Mrs. Farrell, with enthusiasm. “Don’t mind me! Why, if such a man as that had liked me, and I had offended him, there isn’t anyone I wouldn’t sacrifice, there isn’t anything so shabby I wouldn’t do, to get into his good graces again. Why, he’s sublime, don’t you know. Who would ever have thought he was that sort of man?”
Easton fell into a somber reverie from which even her presence could not save him; for the wretched moment he forgot her presence, and her voice seemed to be coming from a long way off as she bent down her face and peered into his with a sidelong, mock-serious glance.
“Don’t let me intrude upon your thoughts, Mr. Easton. I can wait till you’re quite at leisure for my answer.”
“Your answer?”
“Yes. Or no, it wasyouwho wanted an answer—about something, wasn’t it? Oh, Mr. Easton!
‘Was ever woman in such humor wooed?Was ever woman in such humor won?’
‘Was ever woman in such humor wooed?Was ever woman in such humor won?’
‘Was ever woman in such humor wooed?Was ever woman in such humor won?’
It’s a good thing I’m not proud. Come, begin over again. I’m quite ready to be persuaded that you’re still perishing of unrequited affection for me.”
Easton gave a sigh of torment. She dropped her mocking manner and said with an earnest air, “You are thinking of the matter too morbidly. It isn’t any such hopeless affair. You must speak to Mr. Gilbert and show him that no wrong was meant, and if you sacrifice yourself from any foolish idea of sparing me, I shall never forgive you. He won’t care for what I’ve done to make trouble; he hates me, anyway; and then you can both go away as good as new—and forget me.”
“I shall never go away,” said Easton, “till you send me, and I shall never forget you while I live.”
“No? I thought you had forgotten me just now. Well, you had better go away; I don’t send you, but you had better go; and you had better forget me. Your fortnight is just up to-day: better go to-day. Come, here are both my hands for good-by. When you’ve put two hundred miles between us, perhaps you can think more clearly about it all.”
He took her hands, which she held out to him, smiling, and bowed his lips upon them in the utter surrender of his love.
“Why, you are really in my hands,” she murmured. A light of triumph burned in her dark eyes, but one could not have said that as a woman she had not a right to the few and fleeting triumphs that love gives her sex, on which it lays so manyheavy burdens. “Then,” she said, “you must do as I bid you. Come, let me go, now;” and she withdrew her hands and rose to her feet, and flung her shawl over her arm. “You must not talk of liking me, any more, till you are friends with Gilbert again. You may make up with him how and when you will, but you must not speak to me till you tell me you are reconciled. I can’t forgive myself till I know that you’ve made up at my expense. Tell him that it piqued and irritated me to see you such friends, and that I could not rest till I had got a clew to your secret; that I didn’t really mean any harm; but that I was altogether to blame. Will you obey?”
“No!” said Easton, so fiercely that Mrs. Farrell started with a sudden shock of panic that left no trace of persiflage in her tone, while she walked humbly before him with downcast head. How could he be angry with her? His whole heart yearned upon her as they moved on through the hollow, and came from its gloom at last upon the open meadow. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” she added, then. “I was only trying to show you how much in earnest I was about having you and Gilbert friends again; I couldn’t be happy if I thought I had hurt your feelings.”
“I will obey you,” said Easton, sadly.
“You will make up with him?” she asked.
“If he will let me. God knows I want to do it.”
“Then you may spare me all you like. You’re not angry now?”
“Only with myself.”
“And you’re going to be real patient with me, about—that little answer?”
“As patient as you can ask.”
“Because,” she explained, “we have scarcely the advantage of each other’s acquaintance as yet”; and added, “I would rather you wouldn’t go back to the farm with me, to-day. I’m afraid,” she said, glancing at him, “that you’ll look as if you had been saying something. Those women have got such sharp eyes! Should you care if you left me at the corner of the lane and let me walk to the house alone? Shouldn’t you, really? And you don’t think it’s asking too much?”
“It would be too much if anyone else asked me to leave you sooner than I must. But it’s for you to command.”
“I don’t command,” said Mrs. Farrell. Just then they came upon a rise in the meadow, which showed the road and Rachel Woodward walking down toward the red schoolhouse. “Oh, how lucky!” cried Mrs. Farrell. “Rachel, Rachel!” she called, “wait!” and Rachel stopped till they joined her. “I want to go with you to the schoolhouse. May Mr. Easton come, too?” she asked, with a glance at him.
“I won’t put Miss Woodward to the pain of refusing. I think I shall find my friend Gilbert at the hotel, about this time, and I want to see him.”
Mrs. Farrell rewarded his surprising duplicity with a brave, strong clasp of the hand, said heartily, “Good-by,” and turned away with Rachel, while he walked slowly, with his head down, in the otherdirection. She had not gone far when she stopped and looked back at him over her shoulder, holding her dress out of the dust with one hand; but he did not turn to look at her, and presently a downward slope of the road hid him.
“He’s handsome enough, I should hope,” said Mrs. Farrell, only half to Rachel, who made no comment, and Mrs. Farrell asked, “What have you been doing, all the week? I’ve scarcely had a chance to speak to you.”
“No,” said Rachel. “I don’t like walking in the woods so much as you do, and I haven’t time for it.”
“Rachel!” cried Mrs. Farrell, with affected sternness, “do you mean anything personal? I won’t have it, ma’am. Withdraw those vile insinuations. Do you wish to imply that I have gone walking in the woods with Mr. Easton? How very unkind of you, Rachel! But I forgive you; this sarcastic habit of yours is one of the eccentricities of genius. Here we are at the little sanctuary itself. How nicely it will read in the newspapers when you exhibit your first cattle-piece in Boston:
“During the summer, the fair artist, having dismissed her little flock of pupils, consecrated the red schoolhouse at the corner of the road to the labors of her genius, devoting to them such moments as she could steal from household cares and the demands of her mother’s boarders, who little dreamt with what visions of beauty and fame she glorified the dim old farmhouse kitchen, albeit she was familiarly known among them as the Rosa Bonheur of West Pekin, and they duly reverenced her God-given talent.
“During the summer, the fair artist, having dismissed her little flock of pupils, consecrated the red schoolhouse at the corner of the road to the labors of her genius, devoting to them such moments as she could steal from household cares and the demands of her mother’s boarders, who little dreamt with what visions of beauty and fame she glorified the dim old farmhouse kitchen, albeit she was familiarly known among them as the Rosa Bonheur of West Pekin, and they duly reverenced her God-given talent.
There!” triumphed Mrs. Farrell, falling into her natural tone from that in which she had seemed toread these sentences aloud, “that’s from ‘a lady correspondent,’ and anybody could tell that Mrs. Stevenson wrote it.Now, will you say anything about my walking with Mr. Easton? Rachel!” she exclaimed, as the girl answered nothing, “have I trodden on some of your outlying sensibilities? Oh, I’m ever so sorry!” and she fell upon her like a remorseful wolf and devoured her with kisses. “There, I forgive you again. I’ve got my hand in—been forgiving Mr. Easton the whole afternoon.”
Rachel made no response, but when Mrs. Farrell had sufficiently wreaked her regret upon her she felt in her pocket for the schoolhouse key. “Why, I’ve come without it!” she exclaimed, in dismay.
“Splendid!” returned Mrs. Farrell; “that will oblige us to break in, and I’ve always had an ungratified taste for burglary. It won’t do for us to be seen getting in at thefrontwindow; it wouldn’t be professional; we must go round to the back,” she said, leading the way, while Rachel followed.
“It’s fastened with a stick from the frame to the top of the lower sash, and it’s no use trying to get in,” said the girl.
“Oh, isn’t it!” retorted Mrs. Farrell. “Have you brought your knife?”
She took the knife, and half opened the blade, when it snapped to again, and she flung it away with a shriek and looked to see if it had cut her finger. “I’m still in one piece, I’m thankful to say,” she said, presently; “but you open the knife, Rachel.” She took it again, and, sliding the blade vertically between the upper and lower sash, sentthe fastening flying out upon the floor. “That’s a little trick I read of, once,” she said, handing the open knife back to Rachel, and throwing up the sash.
The next moment she gave her two strong arms to Rachel and helped her in; and then she went straight to the teacher’s desk, took out a portfolio, and pinned about the walls the sketches that she found in it, Rachel making no resistance.
“Why itis—quite like a studio, Rachel,” she said, and made a show of conscientiously examining each of the sketches in turn.
At last she came to one from which she abruptly turned with the tragic appeal of “Rachel!” It was the first of a series of three, and it represented Mrs. Farrell seated at the foot of a rock and turning an anxious face to confront Blossom’s visage thrust through the birch-trees, with a mildly humorous gleam in her great calm eyes, as if she relished the notion of having been mistaken for a man. The next represented Blossom driven from her shelter, and at a few paces distant indignantly regarding Gilbert and Easton, who had just appeared, while Mrs. Farrell and Rachel were shown sailing down the meadow with extravagant swiftness. The third was Mrs. Farrell confronting Easton, to whom she had returned to claim her book; Blossom looked on with grave surprise. The cow’s supposed thoughts, and feelings were alone suggested; the figures of the men were caricatures, and the fashionableness and characteristic beauty of Mrs. Farrell were extremely burlesqued.
“Oh, this is how you spend your time, is it?” she asked.
“I thought I would have something ready to exhibit if I went to Boston this winter,” said Rachel, very demurely. “Do you like the subjects?”
“This circumscribes me fearfully,” said Mrs. Farrell, not heeding the question. “I can never snub you any more, Rachel. From this moment I’m afraid of you. I’m not hurt or angry; I’m frightened. Aren’t they splendid?” she asked, joyously, of Rachel, as if they were two indifferent connoisseurs of the work. “You’ve got me exactly; and Blossom, why, she looks perfectly shocked. Anybody can see what an unsophisticated cowsheis; you’re a country cow, Blossom, or you wouldn’t be astonished at such an innocent little maneuver as that. Your men are not so good as your cows and women, Rachel. Mr. Easton isn’t such a stick as that; you know he isn’t. Oh, Rachel,” said Mrs. Farrell, sinking upon a seat behind a school desk and leaning her elbow on it, chin in hand, while she brooded on the last sketch with effective eyes, “how awfully embarrassing men are! Here is Mr. Easton, for example, who has known me a week—a week but barely two—and guess what he’s been saying to me this afternoon!” She changed her posture and sat with her hands in her lap, regarding Rachel as one does the person whom one has posed with a conundrum.
“Why, I don’t know,” said Rachel, in a voice as faint as the blush on her cheek.
“Not,” resumed Mrs. Farrell, “that he seems toconsider it at all precipitate! I’ve had to fight it off ever since last Sunday; I’ve no doubt he thinks he’s waited a proper time, as they say of widowers. Why, Rachel, he’s been making love to me, that’s what.”
Rachel hung down her head a little, as if the confidence scared her, and played with a corner of some paper on the desk before her, but she did not say anything. She was not apparently surprised, but silenced.
“Well,” said Mrs. Farrell, after a while, “haven’t you any observations to offer, Rachel? What should you do to him if you were in my place? Come!”
“I should think you would know,” faltered the girl, “if you liked him.”
“Like him? Oh,don’tI like a blond, regular-featured young man of good mind and independent property, and no more pretense than—well, saypie, for instance! But that isn’t the question. The question is whether I ought to marry such a man. Yes, I really think I have a scruple or two, on this point. Idolove him—sort of. But, oh dear me! I don’t suppose I love him rightly, or enough of it. I could imagine myself doing it. I can see myself,” said Mrs. Farrell, half-closing her eyes as if to examine the scene critically, “in some moods that I could love him with unutterable devotion in. But I should have to have something tremendous to draw me out; a ten-horse-power calamity; and then perhaps I shouldn’tstaydrawn out. It brings the tears into my eyes to think how, if he had lost theuse of his limbs, say, and we were dreadfully poor, I would slave myself to the bone for his sake—for about ten minutes! But a saint, a hero in perfect repair, with plenty of money, it’s quite another thing.”
“If you were ever in earnest, Mrs. Farrell,” said Rachel, sternly, “you ought to be afraid to talk as you do.”
“Why, so I am, aunty—so I am,” retorted Mrs. Farrell, incorrigibly. “It sends the cold chills over me to talk as I do, but I can’t help it. Don’t you suppose I know how nice Mr. Easton is? I do. He is the very soul of truth and honor and all uprightness. He is the noblest and best man in the world. But what could I do with him, or he with me? No, ma’am, it isn’t such a simple affair as liking or not liking. This is a case of conscience, I’d have you to know, such as doesn’t often turn up in West Pekin.”
Mrs. Farrell rose and made some tragic paces across the schoolroom floor to where the girl sat, and fell on her knees before her, having with a great show of neatness arranged a bit of paper to kneel upon. She took Rachel’s hands in her own, and with uplifted face implored, “Advise me, my friend,” which rendered the girl helpless with laughter.
“Oh, for shame, for shame, Mrs. Farrell!” she said, when she could get breath; “you make fun of everything.”
“No, no, Rachel, I don’t! I never made fun of Mr. Easton. Would you like to know how he behaved when he made love to me? No? Well, youshall. Now, you are the fatally beautiful Mrs. Farrell, and you’re sitting on a rock in the hollow near the sugar house. Your head is slightly downcast, so—yes, very good—and you are twiddling the handle of your sun umbrella and poking the point of it into the dirt. Mr. Easton is standing before you with his arms folded thus—ahem!—waiting life or death at your hands.” She folded her arms, and gave that intensely feminine interpretation of a man’s port and style which is always so delicious. “‘Oh, Mr. Easton,’ you are faltering, ‘I am afraid that you have deceived yourself in me; I am indeed. I am not at all the party you think you love. I was—listen!—I was changed at nurse. She whom you love, the real Mrs. Farrell, is my twin sister, and the world knows her as—Rachel Woodward!’”
Rachel had been struggling to release herself from a position so scandalous; but Mrs. Farrell, who had never risen from her knees, had securely hemmed her in. At the climax of the burlesque the girl flung herself back and gave way to a rush of sobs and tears. Mrs. Farrell attempted to throw her arms about her and console her, but Rachel shrank resolutely aside. “Don’t touch me!” she cried, when she could speak. “It’s horrible! You have no pity; you have no heart! You have no peace of yourself, and you are never at rest unless you are tormenting some one else. I wish you would go away from our house and never come back again!”
Mrs. Farrell rose from her knees, all her jestingwashed away, for that moment, at least, by this torrent of feeling from a source habitually locked under an icy discipline.
“Rachel,” she said, “do you really hate me?”
“No,” said the girl, fiercely. “If I hated you I could bear it! Nothing is sacred to you. You only care for yourself and your own pleasure, and you don’t care how you make others suffer, so you please yourself.”
“Yes, I do, Rachel,” said Mrs. Farrell, humbly. “I know I’m selfish. But I do care for you, and I’m very, very sorry that I’ve wounded you. You needn’t forgive me; I don’t deserve it, but I’m sorry all the same.”
The afternoon was waning when they came into the schoolhouse, and now a level ray of the setting sun struck across Rachel’s head, fallen on the desk before her, and illumined Mrs. Farrell’s stricken beauty. They sat there till after the sunset had faded away. Then Mrs. Farrell went softly about the room, taking down the sketches, which she brought and laid before Rachel. The girl lifted her head and took out the three sketches in which Mrs. Farrell figured, and, tearing them in pieces, thrust them into the stove which stood, red with rust, in the middle of the room. She would not let Mrs. Farrell help her out of the window, and that lady followed her meekly homeward when they left the schoolhouse.
Before she slept she came and knocked at Mrs. Farrell’s door, and entered in response to her cheerful “Come in, come in!”
“I’m awfully glad to see you, Rachel,” said Mrs. Farrell, who was lying on her lounge, reading Shakespeare. “Do sit down and visit;” and she shut her book and rose upon her elbow.
“No,” said Rachel, stiffly, as she stood shading with one hand the kerosene lamp she held in the other, “I have come to say that I think I have treated you badly; for whatever you did, I had no right to say the things to you that I said. I—”
“Oh, never mind about that,” said Mrs. Farrell. “You’reall right. I dare say it was all true enough. But what I can’t understand is this, Rachel: when I’ve been doing anything wrong, I’m as sorry as can be, and I have no rest till I go off and make a glib apology. That’s as it should be, of course, but it isn’t like your repentance. You’ve been abusing me, frightfully, and you come here and fire your regrets into the air, so to speak; you don’t seem to care whether they hit me or not; you discharge ’em, and there you are all nicely, with a perfectly clean conscience. Well now, you know, when I apologize to any one, I like to see the apology hit them; I like to see them writhe and quiver under it, and go down before it, and I feel a good deal wickeder after I’ve repented than I did before. What do you suppose is the reason?”
Rachel made no reply, and Mrs. Farrell seemed not to have expected any. She went on: “Well, now, I’ll tell you whatIthink it is; I think it’s sense of duty. I’m sorry when I’m sorry because it’s so very uncomfortable to think of people suffering; it’s like stepping on something thatsquirms; but whenyou’resorry, it’s because you’ve done wrong. There! Now I’m going to keep that distinction clearly in mind, and go in for a sense of duty—at the earliest opportunity.”
Mrs. Farrell fell back upon her lounge with an air of refreshment and relief, which nobody could resist, and Rachel laughed a reluctant, protesting laugh, while the other kept a serious face.
“Crimps, I suppose,” she mused, aloud, “would be very unbecoming to a person who was going in for a sense of duty, and I must give them up. I ought to have my hair brushed perfectly flat in front, and I shall come down with it so to breakfast. I wonder how I shall look?” She went to the bureau, took a brush, and smoothed down the loose hair above her forehead; then holding it on either side with her hands to keep it down she glanced into the mirror. “Oh, oh, oh!” she cried out with a great laugh, “I look slyer than anything in the world! No! A sense of duty will never do for me. I must chance it with unregenerate nature. But you can’t say after this that I didn’ttryto be good, can you, Rachel?” She put her hand on Rachel’s cheek and pressed the girl’s head against her breast, while she looked down into her clear eyes. “I do love you, Rachel, and I’m glad you felt sorry for having flown out at me.Ididn’t mean anything—I didn’t indeed;” and she tenderly kissed Rachel good night.
IT had been rather too warm on Saturday. On Sunday the breeze that draws across Woodward farm almost all summer long, from over the shoulder of Scatticong, had fallen, and the leaves of the maples along the roadside and in the grove beyond the meadow hung still as in a picture; the old Lombardy poplars at the gate shook with a faint, nervous agitation. Up the valley came the vast bath of the heat, which inundated the continent and made that day memorable for suffering and sudden death. In the cities there were sunstrokes at ten o’clock in the morning; some who kept withindoors perished from exhaustion when the sun’s fury was spent. The day was famous for the heat by the seashore, where the glare from the smooth levels of the salt seemed to turn the air to flame; at the great mountain resorts, the summer guests, sweltering among the breathless tops and valleys, longed for the sea.
Easton lay awake all night, and at dawn dressed and watched the morning gray turn to clear rose, and heard the multitude of the birds sing as if it were still June; then he lay down in his clothes again, and, meaning to wait till he could go out and sit in the freshness of the daybreak, fell asleep.When he woke, the sun was high in his window and the room was full of a sickly heat. He somehow thought Gilbert had come back, but he saw, by a glance through the door standing ajar, that his room was yet empty.
After breakfast, which could be only a formality on such a morning, even for a man not in love, he went out on the gallery of the hotel, and, as he had done the first Sunday, watched the people going to church. The village folk came as usual, but the bell brought few of the farmers and their wives. The meadows were veiled in a thin, quivering haze of heat; far off, the hilltops seemed to throb against the sky.
Easton saw the Woodwards drive up to the church; but Mrs. Farrell was not with them. He had not meant to go, even if she had come; yet it was a disappointment not to see her come. He went indoors and looked listlessly about the office, which had once been a barroom, and could not have been so dreary in its wicked days as now. Its manners had not improved with its morals. It was stained with volleys adventurously launched in the direction of a spittoon, it smelled of horse and hostler, and it was as dull as a water cooler, a hotel register, a fragment of circus bill, a time-table of the Pekin & Scatticong Railroad, can make a place. Easton went and sat upon the gallery till the people came out of church and dispersed; then he abruptly left the porch and struck out through the heat, across the graveyard and along the top of a bare ridge of pasture, toward the woods that lay between the village and Woodward farm. He could think of no other place to pass the time but that which had yesterday heard him say he loved her. The whole affair had taken a dozen different phases during the night, as he turned from side to side in his sleeplessness. Once he had even beheld her in that character of arch-flirt in which Gilbert had denounced her. He saw a reckless design in what she had done, a willful purpose to test her power upon them both. But for the instant that this doubt lasted he did not cease to love her, to feel her incomparable charm. However she had wronged them, he could not do otherwise than remain true to her against every consequence. His love, which had seemed to spring into full life at the first sight of her, had been poisoned from the very beginning by the suspicion of others, and every day since then she had said or done things that were capable of being taken in the sense of consciously insolent caprice; yet all her audacity might be innocent in the very measure of its excess; and there was mixed with that potential slight toward her in his heart such tenderness and sweet delight, such joy in her beauty, grace, and courage, that every attempt to analyze her acts or motives ended in a rapturous imagination of her consent to be loved by him. He could not help feeling that she had not discouraged him; he excused the delay which she had imposed; how, when he thought of the conditions which she had made, could he doubt her goodness or fail to know her regret? He went, thinking, on toward the spot he was seeking, andsometimes he walked very swiftly and sometimes he found he had stopped stock still, under the blazing sun, in attitudes of perplexity and musing. When at last he entered the dell, from the field on which they had yesterday emerged, drops of perspiration rolled down his forehead, and the shadow of the place had a sultriness of its own, in which his breath came almost as faintly as in the open sunshine of the meadows. He went toward the pool where the cattle drank, and bathed his face; then, seeking out that shelf of rock where she had sat, he laid himself down on the ledge below it and fondly strove to make her seem still there.
He fell into a deep reverie, in which he was at first sensible of a great fatigue, and then of a lightness and ease of heart such as he had not felt for the whole week past. While he lay in this tranquillity, he seemed to see Gilbert and Mrs. Farrell come laughing and talking up the glen together: Gilbert was dressed in his suit of white flannel, but she wore a gown of dark crimson silk, stiff with its rich texture, and trailing after her on the gray rocks and over the green ferns. Her head was bare, and in the dark folds of her hair was wound a string of what seemed red stones at first, like garnets in color, but proved, as she came nearer, to be the translucent berries of a poisonous vine. When she saw that they had caught his eye, she took Gilbert by the hand and called out to Easton, “Now you can’t escape. He’s going to make up with you whether you will or no. I’ve told him everything and he understands. Isn’t it so—Major?” They looked at each other, and, with a swift, significant glance at Easton, burst into a laugh, which afflicted him with inexpressible shame and pain. He shuddered as Gilbert took him in his arms in token of reconciliation, and then he found himself in a clutch from which he could not escape. Mrs. Farrell had vanished, but “Easton, Easton!” he heard the voice of Gilbert saying, “what’s the matter?” And opening his eyes, he found his friend kneeling over him and looking anxiously into his face.
“I’ve been asleep, haven’t I?” he asked, stupidly.
“Yes, and going it on rather a high-stepping nightmare,” answered Gilbert, with his old smile. “Better have a little dip at the brook;” and Easton mechanically obeyed. He drew out his handkerchief to dry his face, and knew by the perfume it shed that it was the handkerchief Mrs. Farrell had restored. His heart somehow ached as he inhaled its fragrance, and he felt the old barrier, which had not existed for the moment, re-established between himself and Gilbert. He came and sat down constrainedly where he had been lying.
“I hope you won’t be the worse, my dear fellow, for your little nap,” said Gilbert. “Fortunately, there isn’t a spot in the universe where a man could take cold to-day.”
“I think I’m all right,” said Easton, and he looked down, to avoid Gilbert’s eyes.
Gilbert continued to gaze at him with the amused smile of patronage which people wear at the sightof one not yet wholly emerged from the mist of dreams, and waited for a while before he spoke again. Then he said, “Easton, if you’re perfectly awake, I wish you’d hear me say what a very extraordinary kind of ass I think I’ve been for the past week or so.”
Easton looked up, and there was his friend holding out his hand to him and gazing at him with shining eyes. He could not say anything, but he took the hand and pressed it as he had that day when they had pledged each other not to let harm come between them.
“Confound it!” Gilbert went on, “I knew all the time that I was wrong, but I had to get away before I could face the thing and fairly look it out of countenance.”
“Did you have a good time?” asked Easton, his voice husky with the emotion to which he refused sentimental utterance.
“Glorious! But I missed you awfully, old fellow—after I’d made it all right with you—and I wish you had been with me. The trout bit like fish that had nothing on their consciences; and there was an old couple over there near the lake who supplied me with bread and milk; they could have gone into your Annals just as they are, without a change of clothing. They had three sons killed in the last fight before Petersburg; I’ll tell you all about them.”
“You’re back later than you expected,” said Easton.
“Yes; I wanted a few nights more on the pineboughs, and so we waited for an early start this morning. We broke camp about four o’clock, and started for West Pekin with the sun. But he beat us. I never knew heat like it; it was a good thing for me that I had been toughened by a few days outdoors. We stopped for a wash in a brook about three miles back on the road, and then we steamed along again. I reached the hotel pretty soon after you left, and put on the thinnest clothes I had; and then I started for the farm. They had spied you making in this direction, and their information was so accurate that I hadn’t any trouble in finding you.”
In spite of a visible effort to be at ease there was a note of constraint in Gilbert’s voluble talk, and he seemed eager to find some matter not personal to them. He recurred to those old people at the lake, and told about them; he described the place where he had camped; he gave characteristic stories of the man whom he had taken with him and whose whole philosophy of life he had got at in the last three days.
At the end of it all Easton said: “I’m glad you don’t think I meant you any harm, Gilbert, and I’ve wanted to tell you so. But for once in my life I didn’t seem to be able to do the thing I ought. I couldn’t understand my own action. It was mortifying to think that I could have been so little myself as to have talked of that matter, and I was ashamed to recur to it; I couldn’t. I don’t see now what I can say. Thereisnothing to say except that I was entirely guiltless in wounding you, and that I am altogether to blame for it.”
Gilbert smiled at the paradox. “Oh, never mind it, Easton; I tell you it’s all right. I really saw the thing in its true light at first; and if the devil hadn’t been in me, I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Nobody blamesyou.”
There was ever so slight an implication of superiority in the last words which stung Easton, however unmeant he knew it to be, and he rejoined anxiously, “Yes, but Iwasto blame; it’s unjustnotto blame me.”
Gilbert had thrown himself back on the flat rock, and was looking at the leaves above, with the back of his head resting in the hollow of his clasped hands. He turned his face a little toward Easton, and asked, with a smile: “Aren’t you making it a little difficult? Let it all go, my dear old fellow. There neverwasanything of it. Why should we make something of it now?”
“How can I let it go?” cried Easton. “I either wronged you and was to blame, or else was not to blame because I was simply the helpless means of wronging you. It leaves me in a very cruel position; I must refuse your forgiveness or accept it at the cost of one who was entirely innocent. If I let it go as it is, I skulk behind a woman, who, as far as you are concerned, was really the victim of my own folly and weakness.”
Gilbert rose to a sitting posture and looked coldly at his friend. “I want you to take notice,” he said, “that I have mentioned no one, that I have tried to pass the matterallover. You have no right to put it as you do.” His eyes began toflash, and he went on recklessly, “And if you come to talk of cruel positions, I leave you to say what you can for a man who will let his friend go as long as you have let me go, without saying the word that might have removed his sense of a cruelly injurious slight.”
Easton hung down his head. “I have nothing to say in my defense.”
“Oh!” groaned Gilbert. “I beg your pardon; I do indeed, Easton. I didn’t mean to say that.”
“It makes very little difference whether you say or think your contempt of me,” rejoined Easton, gloomily. “It can’t be greater than the contempt I feel for myself.”
He looked so piteously abased, so hopelessly humiliated, that Gilbert came and laid his arm across his shoulder—the nearest that an American can come to embracing his friend. “Look here, let’s stop this thing right here, or it will get the upper hand of us in another minute. Come, now, I won’t make another apology if you won’t! Is it quits?”
Easton caught Gilbert’s humor, and laughed the ghost of his odd, reluctant laugh. “It’s safest,” he said; “it seems to be the only way to keep from coming to blows. Besides, it’s superfluous on your part.”
“Oh, I can’t allow that,” retorted Gilbert, “if I may say so without offense,” he added, with mock anxiety.
“Gilbert,” Easton began, after a little silence, “I suppose you must know what I would like to tell you?”
Gilbert, who had resumed his former place, glanced at his friend from the corner of his eye. “Yes, I think I can guess it.”
“Well?”
“Why, my dear fellow, it’s so very completely and rightly your own affair, that I can have nothing to say if you tell it. A man doesn’t ask his friend for advice in such matters; he asks him for sympathy, for congratulation.”
Easton gave a little sigh. “And that you’re not prepared to offer,” he said, with a miserable smile.
“Why, Easton!” exclaimed the other. “Isn’t this rather a new line for you? Since when have you wantedmyapproval of any course you were to take? You used to make up your mind to a thing and do it, andthenask my approval.”
“Approval isn’t the question, quite,” said Easton, nettled. “There’s nothing to approve or to disapprove.”
“I admit the word’s clumsy,” answered Gilbert, shortly.
Easton said nothing for a little while, and then he spoke soberly: “I don’t want to force any confidence on you, Gilbert; and after what’s passed I know it’s natural for you to shrink from having anything to do with this affair of mine; it is completely my own, as you say. But I can’t have things remain as they are in your mind in regard to—to Mrs. Farrell. You know that I’m in love with her; it’s no secret; I wouldn’t mind shouting it from the housetop, even if she had refused me a hundred times. But she hasn’t. I have told her that I loveher; and she hasn’t forbidden me; I don’t know whether she has warranted me in hoping, or not; but she has imposed conditions on my speaking to her again, and that is something.”
He glanced appealingly at Gilbert, who sat up and confronted him. “Easton,” he said, with an indefinable air of uncandor, “we never spoke of Mrs. Farrell together but once, and then I said things which, if I could have supposed you were going to take her so seriously, I wouldn’t have said. You know that.”
“Yes, I know that, Gilbert,” answered Easton, affectionately.
“Well; and now what do you want me to say? You must let me hold my tongue. It’s the only way. I will respect you in whatever you do. As for the lady who may some day forbid you to bring me to dinner any more, the least said is the soonest mended.”
“Yes; but you are very unjust to her.” The words seemed to have escaped from Easton, who looked a trifle alarmed after speaking them.
“Unjust? Unjust! You’re right; I revise my opinion; I think I didn’t do her justice.”
“What do you mean?” demanded Easton.
Gilbert gave a short laugh.
“You must know, Gilbert,” said Easton, breathing quickly, “that this is very insulting to me.”
“I beg your pardon. I don’t mean to insult you, Heaven knows. But I do ask your leave to be silent.”
“And I ask you to hear me patiently. Will you?”
“I will, indeed.”
Easton opened his lips as if to speak, but he did not speak at once; he did not seem to find the words or the thoughts so ready as he expected.
“I never blamed you,” he began, finally, “for any judgment you formed of her character, and I certainly invited the expression of it. I know that what she says and does sometimes can be harshly interpreted,” and again he hesitated, “but I’m sure anyone who will make a generous interpretation—”
“I’ll try,” interrupted Gilbert; “I’ll adopt any generous interpretation you offer of her experiment upon the strength of our regard. How does she explain it herself?”
“She explains it—” began Easton, “she made it a condition of my speaking to her again—she told me to say—”
He choked with the words, and Gilbert was silent. “Oh, my dear, dear old Easton,” he broke out at last, “do let it all go! What’s Mrs. Farrell to me or I to her? If you are in love with her, why, marry her and be done with it. I could imagine any woman’s turning constant by virtue of your loving her, and I’ve no doubt she’ll be the best wife in the world for you. I take back all I said of her.”
“It isn’t that; it’s what you haven’t said. It’s what you think,” said Easton, hotly.
“Oh, good Lord! And what is it I think?”
“You exonerate me from all blame in the cause of our disagreement.”
“Yes, Ido!”
“But if you exonerate me at her expense, youdisgrace and dishonor me; you offer me a reconciliation that no man can accept.”
Gilbert did not answer, and seemed to have made up his mind not to answer. Easton went on, “She feels so deeply the trouble between us that she charged me to make friends with you at any cost; not to spare her in the least—to—”
Easton hesitated, and Gilbert said, “Well?” but the other did not go on. Then Gilbert said: “I have no comment to make on all this. What do you wish me to do?”
“To do? What do I wish? Do you think you don’t owe it to her to say—”
Gilbert laughed aloud. “That she acted from the highest motives throughout? No, I certainly don’t think that,” he said, and then he began to grow pale, while Easton reddened angrily. “By Heaven!” Gilbert broke out, “it seems that I have misunderstood this case. I supposed that between you you had somehow used me ill, but it appears that I have done an injury to a meek and long-suffering angel. I supposed that she had cunningly turned the chance you gave her against me, and meant, if she couldn’t make me feel her power one way, to make me feel it another. I supposed she intended to break us apart, and to be certain ofyouat any cost. But I’ll interpret hergenerously, since you wish me to. I’ll say that I acquit her of any particular malevolence. I’ll say that she merely wanted to over-punish me, like a woman, for some offense in my words or manner; or I’ll say that she acted from an empty and reckless caprice; that it was curiosity droveher to follow up the clew which you had given her—for motives of your own; I won’t judge them. I’ll say that I believe she was frightened when she saw the mischief she had done, and would have undone it if she could; though I’m not so sure of that, either! You think she might be induced to forgive me, do you? Will you undertake to tell her what I say, and make my peace with her?” he asked offensively, his nostrils dilating. “I’ve had enough of this!” and he rose.
Easton had sat silent under this torrent of bitterness. He now sprang to his feet.
“Stop!” he shouted. “You have got to take back every word—”
“Don’t be a fool, Easton!”
Easton ground his teeth. “You take a base advantage of what has passed between us; you rely on my forbearance to—”
“Oh! Passed between us!” sneered Gilbert. “Your forbearance! What do you think of the forbearance of a man who could lend himself to an infamous scoundrel’s revenge; who could consent to rise at his friend’s expense, and then live to boast of it to a woman?”
Easton choked. “What do you think,” he cried with equal outrage, “of a man who could urge me to do what I did, and always refuse to do or be anything that could cancel my regret, holding my consent in reproach over me through years of fraud and hypocrisy, to fling it in my face at last?”
Their friendship, honored and dear so long, was in the dust between them, and they trampled itunder foot with the infernal hate that may have always lurked, a possible atrocity, in their hearts, silenced, darkened, put to shame by the perpetual kindness of their daily lives.
It remained for Gilbert, with all the insult he could wreak in the demand, to ask, “Is that Mrs. Farrell’s interpretation of my motives?” and then they were in the mood to kill, if they had been armed. But so much of the personal sanctity in which they had held each other remained instinctive with them that they could not inflict the final shame of blows.
They stood face to face in silence, and then Gilbert turned and walked slowly down toward the opening of the glen; Easton made a few mechanical paces after him. When Gilbert reached the border of the meadow he stopped and, with whatever motive, went swiftly back to the scene of their quarrel. He came in sight of the spot, but Easton was not to be seen there; he quickened his going almost to a run; and then he saw Easton lying at the brink of the pool. There was a slight cut along his temple, from which the blood ran curling into the clear basin, where it hung distinct, like a spire of smoke in crystal air.
GILBERT knelt at the side of the man who was his friend again, and caught up his head and dashed his face from the pool, while a groan broke from his own lips—the anguish of the sex which our race forbids to weep. He stanched the blood with his handkerchief, and then felt in Easton’s pocket for another to bind over the wound; and as he folded it in his hands it emitted a fragrance that pierced him with a certain puzzling suggestion, and added to his sorrow a keener sting of remorseful shame.
Easton unclosed his eyes at last, and looked up at him. “Did you strike me, Gilbert?” he asked.
“No, no—oh no! God knows I didn’t! How could I strike you, my dear old boy?”
“I thought you did; you would have done well to kill me. I had outraged you to the death.”
“Oh, Easton, I came here wanting to be friends with you, to make it all right again. And now—”
“I know that. Itisall right. Whose blood is this? Were you hurt? Oh—mine! Yes, I must have fainted, and cut myself in falling. I’ve felt queer all day. This heat has been too much for me. How long ago was it?”
“How long? I don’t know. Just now.”
“I thought it was longer. It seems a great while ago.”
He closed his eyes wearily, and Gilbert stood looking ruefully down upon him. After a little while he rose giddily to his feet. “Will you help me home, Gilbert?” he asked, as he leaned tremulously against a rock.
“You could never walk to the hotel, Easton,” said Gilbert. Easton sat down again, and Gilbert stared at him in perplexed silence. “By heavens!” he broke out, “I don’t know what to do, exactly. If you were over at the farm we could get that carryall and drive you to the hotel; but your room would be horribly close and hot after you got there.”
“I can’t go to the farmhouse,” said Easton, with languid impatience, “and run the chances of making a scene; I couldn’t standthat, you know.”
“No; you couldn’t stand that,” assented Gilbert, gloomily. “But it would be much the same thing at the hotel, with more women to assist. Faint?” he asked, looking anxiously at Easton’s face.
“A little. You’d better wet my head,” answered Easton, taking off the handkerchief that bound up his face. Gilbert did so, and then left the dripping handkerchief on Easton’s head. “Thanks. That’s good. We’ll stay here awhile. It’s the best place, after all. It’s cool as any,” he said, looking refreshed.
Gilbert watched his face anxiously; but he was at his wits’ end, and they both sat silent. He looked at his watch; it was two o’clock. He grimly waited half an hour, exchanging a word with Easton now and then, and freshening the handkerchief at the pool from time to time. The opening of the glen darkened, and the steady glare on the meadow beyond ceased. Gilbert walked down to the edge of the pasture and looked out. A heavy cloud hid the sun. “Look here, Easton, this won’t do,” he said when he came back. “It’s going to rain, and you’ve got to get under shelter, somehow. We must run the gantlet to the back of the farmhouse, and try to find some conveyance to the hotel. Do you think you could manage to walk with my help across the meadow? The sun’s behind a cloud, now, and I don’t think it would hurt you.”
“Oh yes,” said Easton, “I can walk very well. Just give me your arm, a little way.”
They set out and toiled slowly up the long meadow slope, slanting their course in the direction of the orchard behind the house. Easton hung more heavily on his friend’s arm as they drew nearer. “Do you suppose we’ve been seen?” he panted, as they stepped through a gap in the orchard wall.
“No; there isn’t a woman on watch; not a solitary soul. They’re everyone asleep—confound ’em,” said Gilbert, in the fervent irrelevancy of his gratitude. “Now you sit here, Easton, and I’ll run up to the kitchen door and tell one of the boys to get out his team, and we’ll have you out of harm’s way in half a minute.”
Easton sank upon a stone, and Gilbert ran toward the house under cover of the orchard trees. He was not out of sight when Easton heard women’s voices behind a cluster of blackberry bramblesnear the wall on the left; then, without being able to stir, he heard the sweep of dresses over the grass toward him; he knew that in the next instant he was to be discovered; he rose with a desperate effort and confronted Mrs. Farrell and the two young girls, Miss Alden and Miss Jewett, who were lamenting the heat and wondering how soon it would rain.
He felt rather than heard them stop, and he made some weak paces toward them, essaying a ghastly smile as he lifted his eyes to Mrs. Farrell’s face. Then he saw her blanch at his pallor, and saw her see the cut on his temple. “I’ve had a fall, and a little scratch. It’s nothing. Don’t mind it. Gilbert—”
A killing chagrin, such as only a man can feel who finds himself unmanned in the presence of her he loves, was his last sensation as he sank in the grass before her. The young girls fled backward, but she rushed toward him with a wild cry, “Oh, he’s dead!” and in another moment the people came running out of the house and thronged round them with question, and injurious good will, and offers to have him taken to their rooms. Gilbert came with them and flung up his fists in despair. Mrs. Farrell had Easton’s head upon her knee, and was sprinkling his face from one of many proffered flagons of cologne. “No, he shall not go to your room,” she vehemently retorted upon the last hospitable zealot; “he shall go to mine; he ismine!” she said. “Here, Rachel, Ben, Mrs. Woodward—will you help me?”
The others fell back at her brave confession, and they all began to like her. They meekly suffered themselves to be dispersed, and they cowered together on the piazza while a messenger ran for the doctor. Then, while the ladies waited his report, they talked together in low tones, though they were separated from Mrs. Farrell’s room by the whole depth of the house. Not a voice dissented from the praises of the heroine of a love episode whose dramatic interest reflected luster upon them all. The ladies were even more enthusiastic than the men, and several rebuked their husbands, who had formerly been too forward in doing justice to Mrs. Farrell, for coldness in responding now to their own pleasure in her.
“George, howcanyou smoke?” asked the youngest of the married ladies, and reproachfully drew her husband’s newspaper away from him and sent him into the orchard with his cigar. Another made her husband take the children away for a walk, in order that the ladies might not be distracted by their play while attending the verdict of the physician. The common belief was that Easton would die, and in the meantime they excited themselves over the question as to how, when, and where he had fallen. The husband with the cigar was suffered to approach and say that he had known an old fellow once who had been out in the heat a good deal, and had gone into the woods to cool off, and had come home in the evening with a cut in his head and a story that he had been attacked and knocked down.
“Yes,” said one of the ladies, who had a logical mind, “but Mr. Easton doesn’t pretend to have been knocked down, and—and he isn’t an old fellow.”
“I was going to say,” retorted the smoker, taking a good long whiff, with half-closed eyes, insensible to the frantically gesticulated protest of his wife, “that this old fellow was supposed not to have been attacked at all; he had got giddy with the heat and tumbled over and barked his skull against a tree, and then fancied he’d been knocked down; they often do.”
The theory seemed to have reason in it, but the language in which it was clothed made it too repulsive for acceptance, and there was open resentment of it by the tribunal before which it was offered. At this moment the doctor was seen slanting down the grass toward the gate from the side door; the ladies called after him and captured him.
“The wound is a very slight matter,” said the doctor; “but Mr. Easton had something like a sunstroke this summer in New York, and is very sensitive to the heat.”
“Yes, yes,” said the spokeswoman, eager for all, “but what happened to him? How did he get hurt?”
“His friend thinks he was overcome by the heat and struck his face against a point of rock in falling, over there in the valley by the sugar orchard.”
“There!” said the young wife, who at heart had felt keenly injured by the indifference to her husband’s theory, “it’s just as George said. Oh,George!” She took him by the arm, joying in his wisdom, and looked fondly into his face, while he smoked imperturbably.
“Yes, but will he get well?” tremulously demanded the spokeswoman of the group, pursuing the doctor on his way to the gate.
“Oh, I think so,” said the doctor; “he’s got the temperature in his favor now”; for though the threatened storm had passed without rain, it had left the air much cooler.
The doctor mounted into his buggy and chirruped to his horse and drove off. He came again in the evening, and said they had better not move Easton to the hotel that night, left his prescriptions, and went away.
Mrs. Woodward and Rachel began to talk together about where they should put Easton.
“Put him!” cried Mrs. Farrell, emerging upon them where they stood in a dimly lighted group, with Gilbert and Mrs. Gilbert just outside the door. She had an armful of draperies of which she had been dismantling her closet. “He’s not to be putanywhere. I’m going to stay with Rachel, and he’s to stay where he is till he gets perfectly well. It would kill him to move him!” The women were impressed, and looked to see conviction in Gilbert’s face.
“It would kill him to keep him where he is, Mrs. Farrell,” said Gilbert, dryly. “A man can’t stand too much kindness in his sensitive state. You must have some regard for his helplessness. Hewould never let you turn out of your room for him in the world; and if you try to make him it will simply worry him to death. It’ll be gall and wormwood to him, anyway, to think of the trouble he’s given. You must have a little mercy on him.”
Gilbert had to make a long fight in behalf of his friend; he ended by painting Easton’s terrors of a scene when they were coming toward the farmhouse from the glen.
Opinion began to veer round to his side. “Well, well,” cried Mrs. Farrell, passionately, “take him away from me—take him where you will! You let me do nothing for him; you think him nothing to me!”