"Perhaps you'd better leave the shades after all, Miss Beckett," he began, "this gentleman—"
"I will give the young lady the order," the other said. And he held the door open for Rachel.
Once in the street, she looked at her companion in surprise. She thought she detected in his face covert satisfaction.
"I beg your pardon, but you called to see my father several weeks ago—Miss Beckett? Thank you. The maid wasn't certain of the name. Well, Miss Beckett," he continued in an embarrassed voice, enunciating his words with distinctness, "it happens that I have just been requested by a relative to get her some candle shades," and in a few words he explained the commission, even producing from his pocket a sample of the silk from which the shades were to be made. It was essential that they should be finished in three days.
"And when you deliver them to Miss Burgdorf," he said, scribbling an address on a card which he took from his pocket, "you might speak to her in a general way of your work, if you care to do so. For my part," he concluded, "I'm very glad to know of someone who does this kind of thing."
Before he left Rachel, he inquired where she and her grandfather were living and the odd look of gratification deepened on his face.
"I needn't have told him, I suppose," she thought regretfully as she walked home; "he may come there."
A pompous-looking butler escorted Rachel through a vestibule, and pointed her to a seat in the dining room. It was evident from his manner that she should have applied at the basement entrance.
A group of workmen were busy setting up an immense table. They kept pushing the sections together and drawing them apart. The polished surfaces of the wood filled the room with reflected light. A maid who stood by looked appealingly at the butler.
"It isn't the table that was ordered," she moaned. She glanced at a clock which seemed, with its fluted columns and Gothic spires, a sardonic spirit in that rich and disordered room. Its monotonous tick-tock, tick-lock, scattered confusion, bewilderment, madness.
"Eleven!" she cried in tones of deepest tragedy, "and not a flower!"
Other servants entered bearing silver and glass. A footman came in with a great palm, and bending, with shoulders on the strain, placed it directly in the path of a hurrying maid. Some one dropped a goblet; that showered into a million minute particles like shining tears. Every movable object was shifted countless times and remained, according to its nature, glittering, wavering, quivering for some instants thereafter. A bronze Narcissus exhibited his grace at an unusual angle. In such a time of rearrangement who has not observed how art objects gain in beauty?
"Miss Burgdorf will see you now. Please step this way."
Rachel followed the servant up the staircase. The woman lifted long strings of motley-hued beads strung in such a manner as to form a semi-transparent curtain, passed through a sitting room and tapped on a door. Julia Burgdorf was seated before her dressing-table in a robe of flowing silk. She was having her face manipulated by a slim masseuse in a long apron. The faces of the two women, as they rolled their eyes inquiringly toward the door, were exceedingly feminine. Woman is ever most natural when engaged in making herself artificial.
Julia Burgdorf extended her hand with an imperious gesture. "Let me see the shades," she cried.
She was a powerful, dark-skinned, handsome woman, with her mind in her eyes. Forty years of life had polished and embellished her until now she resembled a jewel of many facets. Her throat suggested a singing bird's, her shoulders were beautifully curved, her hands and arms perfect. She scarcely glanced at Rachel but examined the shades intently. Then once more she yielded her face to the masseuse.
"Thank goodness, child!" she sighed, "they're lovely! and I'd just given you up. All these lights will be very hot, but they'll look like a forest of tropical blossoms; that's what I wanted. Here, give me that purse."
She counted out thirty dollars in bills, and handed them to Rachel and then rang for the butler.
"Has the sherbet come?—Bring this young lady some. Here, sit down," she added, "you look tired."
Rachel seated herself on a brocaded divan, still holding in her fingers a shade which had been slightly crushed and which she had repaired. She held the shade like a flower, and her face above it was severe and pale.
"Heavens, child! someone ought to catch your pose just as you sit now. She doesn't need any of your cream, does she, Henley?"
The masseuse looked at Rachel and her face quaked into an hundred little wrinkles. These played round her eyes like forked lightning, then instantly and miraculously disappeared, leaving the skin like an infant's.
"It wouldn't do her any harm, Miss Burgdorf," she said, bridling. "Our cream is such a preservative. Sister and I think ladies can't begin too early."
Her voice and manner suggested lotions; and this persistent artificial youthfulness, superadded to the tiny creature's evident acumen, was not without charm. In her long apron, tied behind with strings like a pinafore, she would have passed very well for a child had it not been for the lightning.
Julia Burgdorf rose and stretched her arms above her head, then let them drop heavily while she stood for an instant in a listening attitude. Though no word was brought to her of the perturbed state of affairs below stairs, there was knowledge of it in the very air.
"The butler has broken the last cup," she declared with conviction, "and the cook has gone off in a rage. I can see everything. Oh, what a fool I was to leave the cool country and bother with that club of cackling women at this season of the year! But charity before comfort. Leave your address, please. My cousin, Mr. Hart," she went on, with a droll screwing of the lips "wrote me about you. I may be able to get you more orders." And with these words she passed on to her bath.
Now that the work which had engaged her for three days and a night was finished, Rachel felt disinclined to move. She lingered over the sherbet the butler had brought her and watched the masseuse putting away the little delicate instruments of coquetry. All at once it seemed to her that through the cool silence she heard the malicious ticking of the great clock in the dining-room, and she recognized the timepiece as a remorseless tyrant dominating not only the servants, but the beautiful mistress of the house. Though instinctively conscious of Julia Burgdorf's fear of age, Rachel was too young to experience any real sympathy for her. Instead, what she did feel was a keen sense of her own triumphant youth. A miniature of a young man stood on a dressing-table. "He looks like Emil," she thought; and, to quiet her agitation she fixed her attention on the masseuse, who, with a little silver pencil, was marking the date on an illuminated calendar. Rachel stared at this calendar, and the blood slowly left her cheek.
Nothing so conclusively proves the existence of an intelligent, if somewhat perverse Fate, acting in the affairs of human beings, as these potent stirrings of the memory, which she causes by the simplest means. Does a woman require a bit of information? Incidentally Fate enlightens her at the most opportune moment. Rachel attempted to avert her eyes from the bit of cardboard, but the two names which were almost lost in the design of the border and which certainly would have escaped the casual glance of another, in a moment had evoked all the sweet and irritating scenes of her past:
"Benjamin Just & Richard Lawless, Art Lithographers, Lafayette Street."
Symbolizing all the events of her meagre romance, these names, with all the accompanying address of which she had hitherto been ignorant, had the effect of maturing in Rachel all that is most imperious in human love. How little is required to move a woman's heart. The longing to see Emil took possession of Rachel like a fever.
The one o'clock whistle sounded a last melancholy note, and she inspected eagerly every figure that entered the factory. Why had she assumed that Emil was still employed there? As the stream of men grew less and presently ceased, the curve of her mouth became scornful. "How idiotic!" she whispered. She was turning away when a young girl emerged from a side door over which appeared the word "Office." She came out impetuously. The fact that she was weeping arrested Rachel's attention. Her slight frame shook with sobs. She took a few steps, then paused to extract a handkerchief from a bag she wore at her belt. She pulled out the handkerchief and a letter fell from the reticule, but in the excess of her grief she went on without perceiving her loss.
Rachel crossed the street and as she picked up the letter, she involuntarily noticed its superscription. Written carelessly on the blue envelope was the name "Mrs. E. A. St. Ives." She faltered—staring at it. She stood still and something seemed to strike her in the breast. Yet she was conscious that surprise had no part in her feeling. After a few seconds, she forced herself to walk on. At the next corner she overtook the girl.
"Is this yours?" she asked. And her voice sounded strange in her ears.
The girl wheeled, showing a face disfigured with tears. "Oh, yes," she said, "it's mine! Did I drop it?"
Rachel continued to look at her without stirring. She passed her hand once or twice across her forehead. "You are Mrs. Emil St. Ives?"
"Why yes, I'm Mrs. St. Ives." The other was now gazing at her with curiosity.
So this was the girl who had helped Emil in the past, who helped him now,—the girl he preferred to her. Disdainful, she swept round. As she moved, she lifted her shoulders as if she would rid herself of something, but the action spoke forlornness.
"Why do you ask?" questioned the other, pursuing.
Rachel paused. "Nothing made me ask," she said, "only the name was familiar."
She was walking on when the girl caught her arm.
"Perhaps you know my husband?" she persisted. "Do you?"
Once more Rachel stood still. "Yes I know him—slightly."
"I knew you did," and a note of incipient jealousy sounded in the other's voice. "When did you know him?" she asked, and she fixed sharp eyes on Rachel's face.
"It was last summer in Maine," Rachel answered. "I took him out a few times in a boat to make some experiments. When I saw the name I recognized it." Her indifference, the sudden cold and remote expression of her eye, which was like a thrust of the arm, deceived her questioner.
"Oh, I see," she said, meekly. "Was it thedepth indicator! Oh I know it was," and at the mention of this instrument, she returned to her original grievance. "It's thatdepth indicatorthat's been at the bottom of all our troubles," she explained; "if it hadn't been for that, Alexander would have finished the lithographing press and then everything would have come out different. But now Father—Oh, I can talk to you, can't I?" she interpolated. "I must talk to someone. I've been treated so—you don't know!" and she began to sob again in a helpless, childish fashion, with the unrestrained grief of a nature, hysterical, feverish.
But one thought burned in Rachel: Emil's marriage. Her pain, however, was not new; she felt that she had lived through it before, for it is a characteristic of suffering that it never comes as a novel experience and herein it differs from joy. The disconnected explanations of her companion, mingled with the repeated request to be allowed to confide in her, gradually roused Rachel. Her eyes travelled over Annie. She noticed the once tasteful dress, which was now badly worn, the little pear-shaped face with its peaked nose and babyish eyes.
She was about to reply haughtily, then, moved by Annie's beseeching look, altered her intention.
"Yes, you can tell me if you want to," she answered softly and dully.
Involuntarily the two girls turned their steps in the direction of a square, a triangular breathing place in this densely populated section. They seated themselves on one of the benches and Annie poured out her story. But her words scarcely penetrated Rachel's brain. She stared at some clothing drying on a fire-escape, and it struck her that the antics of the clothing fastened to a line were no more grotesque and absurd than the antics of human creatures fastened to life. Inwardly she rocked on the wide sea of misery.
The dramatic features of her situation were not lost on Emil's wife. As she described her life in her parent's home, contrasting it with her present mode of existence, it was clear that Annie viewed herself in a romantic light. Never the less her misery was real, and more than once she had recourse to her small damp handkerchief.
"When once we were married I felt sure Father would forgive us," she concluded, "but he says I shall never, never come home until I leave Alexander. Father's terrible when he's angry. All the same, this isn't the first time I've been to him," she explained. "At first he wouldn't see me, and when he did, he wouldn't listen to a word. He said Alexander was utterly irresponsible and the lithographing press and the rest of it had been as good as made over on an entirely different principle. But finally when I teased and teased he said if Alexander wanted to accept the position of expert examiner with the firm, they'd take him back at a salary. Not a very big salary, but still something regular. And I was so pleased," she added, "I felt there was a chance for him if he worked hard and didn't make trouble; I thought he'd soon rise to something better. But what do you think? Alexander refused! He roared like a madman when I told him. He said he wanted to do independent work, and never again would he sell his brain, his soul, his very life-blood to my father. And I went to the factory this afternoon to tell Father, and though I toned down Alexander's words and explained just how he felt as tactfully as I could, Father not only refused to make him another offer, but he threw open the door and pointed for me to go." And at the memory of the indignity, she covered her face with her hands. "Oh, whatever is going to become of us?" she wailed.
Rachel said nothing, and this continued silence quieted the other. Presently with an air of finality she lifted her head.
Opening her bag she returned the handkerchief to its depths.
"But I promised to stand by Alexander and I'm going to," she said in a low voice. "Somehow, he makes you feel that you want to stand by him."
Still Rachel said nothing.
"I must go now," Annie cried, tipping her face back, "see, it's going to storm, and I'm so afraid of lightning."
And indeed black, threatening clouds were coming up rapidly.
"I'd ask you to come and see us," she added as they fled from the square, "only the place is so horrid. You see, Alexander not only works there, but we live there, too," she continued, while they stood waiting for a car with the wind whipping their dresses about them. "Alexander has a workshop, that's all he cares for, and I have a room about three feet square; and then he has a horrid deaf and dumb creature who helps him. Oh, if I'd known he was going to havehimlive with us!" and her voice broke. "You've been so good to let me go on in this way," she cried, as the car stopped. "I'll tell my husband I met you. What name shall I say?"
But Rachel did not answer. She merely nodded as the other, in a tremour of fright, stepped on the car.
"You'll get caught in the rain!" Annie called after her.
Rachel smiled grimly.
The rain descended at first thin and fine as if poured through a sieve; then it increased in volume till the gutters ran yellow torrents, till the sordid brick buildings looked like drenched, warty frogs of a giant growth, till the slender trees in the squares fairly bent to the ground. But Rachel was caught in the vortex of a storm even wilder.
It was two hours later when she slowly climbed the steps of the tenement house. Emily Short's voice reached her from an upper landing:
"There, don't you go looking him up again, will you, Betty? There ain't a man in the world worth running after."
Rachel halted and a fierce denunciatory light flamed in her eyes. Then she pulled herself together.
When she opened the door of the outer room Simon Hart rose to greet her. He felt that he had taken her by surprise and, in embarrassment, smoothed his hair.
"It's going to clear," he said and glanced toward the window which let into the tiny room the slowly increasing light.
Rachel swept a look in the same direction. "Yes," she repeated, "it's—clearing."
In the sky, visible beyond the clutter of wet roofs, appeared a strange arrangement of gold bars, and above the bars huddled the thunder clouds like a herd of newly-tamed animals.
To cast a glance backward,—it was with a mixture of surprise, chagrin and growing indignation, that Emil St. Ives took his way from the Maine coast to tumultuous, brain-inspiring New York. In the hotel at Old Harbour he lingered over his packing, confident until the last moment, that some word would arrive from Rachel. She surely would not allow him to go without seeking to effect a reconciliation. No word came and, once seated in the train, he stared out at the landscape with sullen fierceness. But there, in scraggy rocks, stumps of trees, water, meadows, salt marshes, wind with a tang in it, gold beams poured from rifted clouds, mist, storm, rolling fog—there was Rachel, the girl herself. She was dancing, scudding on ahead of the train, wrapped in a veil. Now he saw the gleam of her eyes; now her serious mouth! now the curve of a wrist; now a fleeing ankle! Remaining behind, she yet went with him! Deuce take it, he felt her breath on his face!
He was conscious of an immense weight of sadness in his breast, but it lessened neither his pique nor his astonishment. Full of mastership, his ideas of womankind were based chiefly on the devotion accorded him by his mother, by Annie Lawless, and, until then, by Rachel herself. Such whole-souled devotion he accepted as his rightful due. Therefore Rachel's downright and uncompromising attitude astounded him. Her anger, when she learned that another young lady was interested in his affairs, was justified, he admitted. He had not been open with her. What he could not overlook, however, was her allusion to his mother's disappointment if his plans with the lithographers failed to materialize. If she had cared for him, she would have spared him that barbed thrust which even in memory caused his nerves to tingle. If she had cared for him she would have prevented his going. But she had allowed him to go without a hope of ever seeing him again.
He began to laugh bitterly; presently lifting his long frame out of the car seat, he went for a drink of water. He stood with the cup in his hand, forgetting to drink. He could not endure that a woman should scorn and repudiate him. The quarrel with Rachel shook him all the more violently, as, with his habits of mind, he was unaccustomed to such tempests. He returned to his seat and fixed his eyes once more on the flying landscape.
She had shone upon him like sunlight, and passion had awakened—passion and interest and something besides. She had stormed at him like a tempest and finally had mystified him with a fog, best proof of all that hers was the womanhood for his manhood. But did he understand? The pebble rolling down a hill has as much comprehension of the force that summons it—indeed it has more, for the pebble obeys the force and Emil St. Ives did not obey. Instead he set himself squarely about and took his way back to New York with a smouldering eye; but a fierce, surprised bird whose pinions had been clipped might have worn just such a look, and he kept ruffling the feathers of his vanity, for the wings of his egotism drooped.
Presently he produced paper and pencil, but still boiling, it was sometime before he could control his thoughts. Finally, he began to sketch roughly a plan for an instrument; the next day his humiliation had so far abated as to permit of his working steadily on the scheme; and when he reached New York his complacency was practically restored. On alighting from the train he found awaiting him a little eager, flushing, paling being in the shape of a woman.
When Emil saw Annie Lawless peering at him from the midst of the crowd on the platform, a certain new sensation, strong, sweet, but somehow malign, sprang to life within him. At least Annie was not indifferent to him. His chagrin disappeared and a desperate hardihood took its place. It is soothing, as most people will agree, when a golden apple has been denied us, to have offered for our acceptance a little rosy plum. Is it amazing then, that Emil stood ready hand and mouth for the plum, all the more as he reckoned its flavour, on the whole, rather pleasant? With his worn suit-case in one hand and his preciousdepth-indicatorin the other, he swung down the platform, and Annie, followed by the ungainly figure of Ding Dong, advanced to meet him. Then Emil set down the suit-case and thedepth-indicatorand received Annie's timid anxious glance in his own dark orbs. In it plunged, that little maiden look, and the earth for Annie rocked, though for Emil it merely oscillated very slightly,—no more than when one has taken a sip of wine, piquant and a little heady.
Ding Dong gathered up the traps and fell submissively behind the young couple, and Annie pressed against Emil and clung to him. What more natural than that, finding himself unencumbered, he should bend down and encircle her little figure with his arm? A rosy plum, a sip of wine, a little bit of a woman with no wits at all and her heart in her face, such was Annie.
As for that puzzling mid-region between mind and heart, which was the region affected in Emil, one might as well attempt to mark out paths in a wilderness as to set up guideposts there. Every thought is tinged with feeling, every feeling is sullied with thought, and the ways are hopelessly mixed. But it is a region which stands in no need of description, for in the range of emotional experience, few people ken anything beyond this vast temperate zone. And yet they declare, at the last, that they have lived! Pathetic misapprehension! Nothing is more uncommon, more unspeakably rare, than a life actually lived. Only a person who is at once an intrepid explorer and an inexhaustible artist, appreciating ever the value of extremes and of contrasts, in short a genius on every side, is capable of life.
Though Emil had a measure of this capacity, he was hopelessly adrift in a maze of stupidity; for men, save at exceptional moments, are such a very small part of themselves. So he encircled Annie with his arm and, bringing his face close to hers, kissed her. And Annie did not utter a reproach. She forgot the words that would have formed it. She forgot every word in her vocabulary, except one little word that all but escaped from the hot panting region of her heart.
But she had formed a plan which she remembered. Dragging Emil into the waiting room, she indicated two chairs in a quiet corner. When they were seated, she put one little gloved hand for a moment over his and pressed it down hard in order to hold his attention, though this manoeuvre was not in the least necessary, for she was far from unpleasing to look upon. The colour kept chasing the white on her cheek, for she was frightened by what she had to say and at a loss how to say it; the sweet peas, pinned in a bunch on the breast of her jacket, threatened to fly away like a bevy of butterflies with her tumultuous breathing, and a fascinating little pulse fluttered in her neck just above the lace of her collar, and Emil, watching it, knew that it indicated the wild movements of her heart.
What wonder that he almost recovered his wonted spirits in the air of adoration that breathed from these two humble people? For Ding Dong, with his ears like huge excrescences and his legs that seemed to bend under the weight of his squat body so that he resembled nothing so much as a grotesque from a cathedral niche,—Ding Dong hung on his look with exactly as much attention as Annie. Despite the feeling of sadness that lurked far down in the depths of his being, Emil perceived afresh that it was a very good sort of world and that New York was a marvellous city. And his egotism began to spread its wings and his eyes to flash good humouredly. Being now well beyond the larva stage, admiration was necessary to him,—it was an air without which he was unable to exist.
"But how did you know that I would come on this train?" he asked gently; and, clasping his hands about his knees, he stared at Annie with a peculiar concentrated interest.
She looked up at him with a faint suggestion of reproach. "I didn't know; though I was prepared to wait until you did come," she said. "The fact is, Alexander," she continued, "what Father has done is shameful. It isn't right, and as he's my father, it's only just—well, I hope you won't take it wrong—but I have a little money which was left me by an aunt to do with just as I choose. I've got it all here, see, in this bag," and she opened the drawstrings. "It isn't much, only a thousand dollars, but I thought perhaps—perhaps you would take it until you could invent something."
To save his life Emil could not prevent the joy that flashed in his eyes. To be free to invent, even for a brief space! It was an unexpected glimpse straight into Paradise. He peeped in—just one peep; then greatly to his credit, considering how little of an ordinary man he was and how much of a genius,—who resembles a bird of heaven in his freedom from a sense of obligations,—he shut the door on the Paradise forcibly.
He bent forward and took both of Annie's hands in his. Slowly, very slowly, he shook his head.
"Oh, please!" she supplicated, and her face puckered. As she looked straight into his eyes with her own, he saw them suffuse with tears. The sight of these tears perturbed him so that he was no longer master of himself.
"But see here, I can't!" he said, and the blood darkened his cheek, "I can't take money from you; you're mad!"
"Oh, if that's the way you consider me—just like a stranger!" And Annie turned sharply aside and buried her face in a scrap of a handkerchief from which ascended an odour of subtle feminine appeal.
In their excitement both had risen and Emil spread his massive bulk to screen her distress from the few people who were seated in the waiting-room. Never had he been driven into such a net by his own emotions.
"See here," he cried, bending over her and breathing the words into her ear, "I consider you my only friend"; and his ardour was augmented by his remembrance of Rachel.
This was devotion, this!
"Friend?" she repeated, lifting her head and gazing at him through her tears. "I'm more than that. There isn't anything I wouldn't do for you, and I thought—I thought—"
For an instant Emil saw her judicially. "So that's it?" he reflected, but the next instant the male in him was completely glamoured.
For the last time some positive seduction in Annie overcame him. Love will polish even a plain woman to something approaching brilliancy, and Annie was by no means plain. Her hair gave out a delicate odour; the pupils of her eyes, usually small, spilled their black over the blue of the irises; her little mouth emitted a whole troop of sighs; the stuff of her waist crackled, as if, though it fitted her body, it compressed her heart. In truth, that which was the heart in her, the soul in her, was striving mightily to come to him, and being a man he did not refuse it.
"Do—do you mean that you would marry me?" he hazarded unsteadily, "without prospects—nothing? You can see for yourself, everything I put my hand to turns out wrong," he added argumentatively.
She nodded. A look of ecstasy overspread her face.
What he experienced chiefly was a profound astonishment.
He moved back a step in order to study her. That she felt in this way toward him was no news, but that she was ready to take the decisive step now, when his whole outlook was altered.... In his gaze there grew a peculiar gentleness and simplicity.
"Yes, but what about your father, what will he say?" he inquired, dallying dreamily with the consideration.
"Father, oh, he'll bluster at first, but he'll forgive us. I know him. Besides, hasn't he stolen your invention?"
"So it's only fair I should steal his daughter; is that it?" This question, like the other, was an idle playing with the subject, as though, for the moment, his will went in leash to hers.
Annie lifted her face with a laugh which stirred him strangely. Her eyes rested questioningly upon him and he was conscious of an ambiguous emotion of pleasure and confusion. He had a desire to say tender words to her, to touch her hair; none the less he sighed heavily.
And Annie all at once took his attitude for granted. Timid, yet with that potency of appeal which belongs often to the weakest women, she clasped his hand, glancing up at him in such a way that he felt all resistance expiring within him.
"That poor fellow over there," she went on happily after a moment, during which she pressed his fingers once or twice, "every time I'd go to the factory, he'd make the strangest signs, and at first I couldn't understand what he wanted. But after a little, I made out that he was asking about you. And when Father got in that new man to work on your machine, Ding Dong, as they call him, just went wild and raged. He tried to stand guard over the machine and he locked the door of your shop. But finally they got in and he acted so, they had to get rid of him."
Emil, who had been admiring the vivacity of her face, caught only the last words of this speech.
"Ding Dong you say! Yes, a fine fellow," he agreed with a sparkling smile.
"Well, between us we've got everything planned," Annie continued. "We've found a little apartment—"
He started.
"Where you can work and invent," she added in a voice scarcely above a whisper.
"Invent," he murmured, for she sidled and slunk closer to him so that with difficulty he resisted an impulse to seize her to his breast.
Explain it who can: in one short hour all the judgments of this man were reversed. Though he was influenced by selfish motives, he did not recognize them. Annie was his friend, the one most necessary to him and to whom he was necessary. It was really downright amazing how much she cared for him, and seeing her through a mist of gratitude which he mistook for love, he compared her to the cold Rachel to the latter's disadvantage. In love consciously with neither the one nor the other of these two women and only obscurely aware that his feeling for Rachel was capable of assuming the character of a dominating passion, he was really concerned in but one object, his work. He therefore yielded himself readily to gratified vanity, egotism, enthralled senses, those potent agents for the smothering of the masculine will.
They were on their way to the office of the Mayor when abruptly Emil ordered the driver of the cab to halt, while he questioned Annie anxiously. Did she think it wise—what they were doing? Had she sufficiently considered?
For answer she put her hands on his shoulders and drew his head to her breast so vehemently that he had difficulty in breathing.
After that he spoke no more until their destination was reached, but stared out intently at the people, who passed in carriages and on foot, with a smile in which there was an uneasy melancholy.
A week later any scales he might have had over his eyes had vanished. Memories of Rachel obtruded themselves and he turned from them with stifled sighs. He was ill at ease and his conscience troubled him. He was penitent before Annie and redoubled his caresses. But she was not essential to him, and as time went on he buried himself in his work.
In the choice of the apartment the young girl betrayed the fundamental practicality of her nature. The rooms were inexpensive and at the same time attractive and homelike; but at the end of a month, Emil discovered a sky-lighted loft in the lower part of the city into which he wished to move. The place would be a more convenient one for his work. Thither Ding Dong, in the capacity of assistant to the inventor, accompanied the pair. With him he brought the monkey Lulu.
Largely because of his affection for her, though partly because of his hatred of his former employers on whom he thought absurdly to revenge himself, Ding Dong had stolen the little creature from the factory. He made her a cage, which she seldom occupied, her favourite station being the sill of the window where Emil had his work-bench. There she crouched among the tools with her little, worried, half-human face turned to the inventor, and now and then she reached out a black hand and laid it questioningly on his sleeve. Seeing his pet thus safely cared for, Ding Dong was free to spend himself in the service of his new master. He ran errands, bustled about in a flurry of often useless activity, and even fitted up the tiny room set apart for Annie. At first the young wife agreed to everything.
Crushed by a stormy interview with her father in which he had forbidden her to cross his threshold, in the early days of her marriage Annie accepted the privations of her new mode of life without a word. She thought to endear herself to her husband. But Emil, far from sympathizing with her position, was honestly unconscious of it. Carried away by the interest of his work, he forgot her. When made aware of her, bitterness filled his soul. He felt himself guilty toward her. Never the less, her tears, her letters to her mother, which he was forced to read and approve, her constant efforts on his behalf with her father, above all, her insistence that he go back and accept the situation of expert examiner, which was finally grudgingly offered him,—all this irked him in the extreme.
"Go back there—after the way he's treated me?" he cried,—"you ask it?"
"I thought—I thought—" murmured Annie, "we are very miserable."
"Well?" His significant tone seemed to imply, "Who's to blame?"
He now perceived clearly that she hampered him, that he could have got on very much better without her.
"You are not interested in my work," he cried, blaming her; "a woman is always like that. No detachment with them is possible. I ought to have understood this."
Then Annie broke down, and contrition overcame him. He took her in his arms where she cuddled like a little kitten.
"I'm no one for you," he whispered, while a fierce sigh rent him.
But convinced that he suffered by the arrangement more than she did, he cherished a grudge against her because she interfered with him. Fearing to disquiet his mother, he allowed several months to pass before he wrote to her of his marriage. Viewing it coldly, he felt much cause for shame in the situation.
Quarrels were constant, and as the sight of Annie disquieted him, he shut himself off from her more and more. He worked, slept and ate in his shop, and Annie inhabited her lonely little room, weeping and staring out over the house-tops in acute disgust. As Emil had said, devotion to an abstract ideal was impossible to her and she was jealous now of his work as of a rival, so that they had no topic about which they could talk when together. Everything furnished a subject for dispute, even Ding Dong and his pet. Ding Dong disgusted her by his outlandish appearance, and the monkey, she declared, made her nervous.
The day following her meeting with Rachel, Annie spoke of the encounter.
"I met someone you know yesterday," she said; "a girl from Maine."
Wrinkling up his brow, Emil paused in his work.
Something in his expression excited and angered his wife.
"Well," she cried sharply, "do you remember her? What's her name?"
But Emil, despite his desire to know more, resumed his work without answering, and the eyes he cast down held the look of a child that dimly perceives in its suffering the result of its own act.
As she stood in the attic room with its sloping roof and dormer windows, her little dark head almost touched the ceiling. Old David surveyed her with pride; then cast a glance at Simon Hart. The driving rain had modelled the stuff of her dress to her arms and shoulders in winding folds. As she lifted her hands to remove her hat, from which drooped the straight lines of a veil, she resembled a Tanagra figurine. But there was no antique serenity in her expression.
Convinced that she was disconcerted by his presence, Simon Hart began to explain that he had brought her another order for candle shades. Then, as her lack of sophistication grew upon him, he ended by inviting her and her grandfather to dine with him.
But Rachel looked at him with vague, unseeing eyes, until David nudged her elbow.
"We'll like to go very much, won't we, Rachel?" he said in a voice which quavered with delight.
Then she understood and forced a smile to her lips.
"But don't ye forgit to say something to Miss Short, will ye?" the old man reminded her. "You see," he added, turning to the visitor, "Miss Short expected to go somewhere with us to-night for a little celebration, because of that order—the first one you got, Rachel—and it's most kind of you, too, to take such an interest."
The other waved these last words aside. "Now about this celebration," he said, "what do you say to asking Miss Short to go with us?"
Again Rachel forced herself to express pleasure.
When Simon Hart went out to call a carriage, she entered the inner room.
After ridding herself of her wet dress, she sat down before the cracked looking-glass and began arranging her hair. But almost immediately she folded her arms on the bureau, bowed her head upon them and fell to weeping. In the depths of her soul she felt that nothing could alter her despair. Henceforth the knowledge of Emil's marriage would lodge there like a rock heaved into the midst of a stream, and the current of her life would eddy around it. The approach of Nora Gage caused her to lift her face and continue coiling her hair.
Simon Hart was not a worldly man. He confined himself closely to the supervision of his business—the manufacture and sale of jewellery. At night he returned to his austere house in Washington Square. Of a painfully reticent disposition, he made few friends, his fastidious and slightly ironical manner effectually cutting him off from companionship.
The only beings who played any sustained part in his life were the gaunt mysterious female who served his meals and arranged his drawing-room as she chose, his old father who moved optical instruments over the floor of the attic; and, at the shop, Victor Mudge, who designed special settings for gems. For Victor Mudge, Simon entertained a particular regard, though he felt sensitively that the goldsmith disapproved of him. The truth was, these two friendless men,—the one living in his well-nigh empty house, the other in his hall bedroom,—criticized each the other's lonely condition.
The diversion created in the jeweller's life by the persons just named was no more than the gnawing of a bevy of mice in an otherwise quiet cellar. Painfully aware of this, he attempted to enrich his existence by extending the scope of his intellectual pursuits. He took up the study of social economics and pursued it diligently. In the same way, during the season, he forced himself to attend the opera with conscientious regularity, although he had no real musical taste and much that he saw and heard was in reality distasteful to him. He felt a constant need to check in himself a tendency to indulge feelings that were deeper than those apparently experienced by other men.
Only once had a person penetrated his reserve. Several years before he had made the acquaintance of a scholarly lady who brought to his shop for suitable setting an Egyptian scarab. In the course of filling this simple order Simon had called upon her several times. Subsequent developments, however, had revealed the fact that the scholarly lady had a husband, and the acquaintance had languished; though for some time after the incident he had kept her photograph on his pianola where he had been in the habit of studying it while he had pedalled evenly. This photograph had fallen behind a stationary bookcase, and at present the one brightness in his life was the gleam of the gold and the jewels in his shop.
Now he stood helpless at the corner of the street. Trusting to her unique charm to atone for any discrepancy in her dress, he would have risked Rachel's appearance in one of the more fashionable restaurants. But the others? He shook his head.
More keenly sensitive to observation than a man of wider social experience, he shrank from the attention the group would be likely to attract. Presently he came to a decision. He would take his guests to a restaurant in the vicinity of his house, where he made a practice of dining when the weather was particularly oppressive.
As they quitted the tenement rooms, Nora Gage padded softly out on the landing in her heelless slippers. Her enormous bust undulated more than usual and her hands at her waist disappeared beneath overhanging folds of fat. "Well, I hope you'll have something good to eat," she remarked meaningly. Rachel, her head high, ignored these words; but old David nodded with smiles and gestures toward his pocket.
Like a child he expressed his delight openly. His white locks moved in the air, fine as cobwebs, and his face was wreathed in continual smiles which prolonged the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and deepened the lines about his mouth to quivering crescents of laughter defining the rosy hillocks of his cheeks. With a shaking finger he pointed out the sights in the streets to Emily, who nodded decorously the plumes of her elaborately-trimmed hat. The hat was destined for one of Mrs. Stedenthal's customers, but Emily had borrowed it for the evening. The very novelty of the situation diverted Rachel; she became aware of a dual consciousness—a self that suffered and a self that was vaguely amused.
In the restaurant the waiter uncorked a bottle of champagne and Simon begged the young girl to taste it. She lifted it to her lips, then played with the glass.
Simon watched the slim thumb and finger that encircled the fragile stem of crystal. With unostentatious movements he repeatedly filled his own glass. Occasionally he ventured to lift a glance to Rachel's face.
She wore a skirt of dark silk, and a little flowered scarf over a waist of sheer muslin. The brim of her drooping hat, whenever she leaned forward, cast its shadow over her shoulders and her scarcely-indicated breast. When she straightened up, however, it was as if a cloud lifted and revealed the glow of her cheeks, the line of her lips, the depths of her eyes where some gloomy thought constantly hovered; for, strive as she would, summoning to her aid all her furious pride, she could not conceal the misery and despair that were consuming her heart. From her round wrists her sleeves fell back in ample folds and the pale yellow of her scarf repeated the colour of the champagne.
As the dinner progressed Simon refrained more and more from looking at her. He did not ask himself what was troubling this young girl, he did not wish to know; perhaps he shrank from anything so absolutely youthful as her despair. On the other hand, the costume she wore, in that it was probably of her own fashioning, filled him with a kind of tenderness. Many trifling peculiarities of people, scarcely noticeable movements, awakened in him this feeling. It was a kind of pitifulness in his nature, though he had rarely been moved to the same degree by so slight a detail.
Life takes on to most men, who by middle age have attained any measure of success, the character of a long meal of many courses. But to Simon Hart it seemed like the meal which the traveller takes in a gloomy way station. Now Rachel appealed to him like the unexpected nuts of a dessert, the unlooked for "riddle in ribbons," for he was keen enough to suspect the riddle hidden in this little smooth-skinned girl.
The thoughts engendered in Emily Short, as she quietly observed the pair, were as foreign to her mind as the food was to her palate. In the pauses between the courses she wove a shining romance about Rachel and her companion and finally installed them in a castle similar in architecture to that which decorated the china of the service. Old David, remembering Nora, occupied the moments while the waiter's back was turned, in secreting various tidbits in the pocket of his coat. So slyly did he do this that no one observed his manoeuvres, and he tucked away crackers, olives and finally a portion of ice-cream which was served in a little box.
Meanwhile the waiters, bearing steaming viands, hurried to and fro. They lifted silver dish covers, which reflected the light, and revealed the red claws of lobsters surrounded by green garnishings, and fowls steaming in gravy. Leaning between the shoulders of the diners, they poured out water and wine; and every moment, as they skilfully avoided trampling the dresses of the ladies, which flowed in rippling folds around their chairs, or cleared with heavy platters balanced on their hands the black shoulders of the men,—they cried, "Your pardon, madam!—In just a moment, sir!" and nothing could equal their dexterity or the softness of their cat-like tread. Through the restaurant swelled the penetrating, complicated music of the orchestra. At one moment a shower of gay notes seemed to be falling, falling everywhere, and the people broke in upon it with the loud clapping of hands. At another moment waves of melody, unnoticed, mounted insidiously like a tide and finally bore with them, like spume and tangled seaweed, something of the emotion from each overcharged heart.
Turning her head aside, Rachel felt on her cheek the cool freshness of the night which entered over some plants in a window-box. For moments together as she listened, it seemed to her that her misery was expressed poignantly by the music. Then as themotifaltered, insensibly her mood changed. She thought of André from whom she had received a letter the week before. Captain Daniels, whose animosity toward the lad increased with the years, in a fit of drunken temper had broken André's fiddle. She resolved, as soon as she could, to send him another. Then Zarah Patch sent word that Buttercup, the cow he had purchased from David, mistaking the moaning of the fog bell for the crying of her calf, had floundered into the bay and been drowned. "Poor Buttercup!" she thought; then—"Poor André!" And, across the miles of space that separated them, she seemed to hear again the breathless words in which the boy had told her of his love.
The orchestra was now executing a fantasy composed entirely of runs with the repetition of one bass note, and suddenly, without warning, her agony was once more upon her. Once more, distraught, breathless, she held that horrible envelope in her hand;—she read its superscription. The men in the orchestra, puffing at their horns, fingering their flutes, drawing their fiddle bows, were executing that final wild movement, not on their instruments, but on her heart.
She looked up and encountered Simon Hart's eyes. Instantly averting his gaze, he proposed that they leave the restaurant; when they were outside, he suggested that they walk through the square which perfumed the air with the odour of its great trees. But no sooner had they entered the square, than old David evinced a distaste for locomotion.
"I don't feel jest like myself somehow," he confided in a whisper to Emily Short. "Let's jest sit down here a minute." And the little toy-maker, who had her own reasons for wishing to leave the couple to themselves, readily complied.
Simon and Rachel walked on. At last, they also seated themselves on one of the benches. It was after ten o'clock and the square was deserted. The moon, in its first quarter, caused Washington arch to throw a black shadow athwart the path; and now and again the swaying branches of the trees brought out traceries of leaves on Rachel's white shoulders and on her sleeves. With his arms folded across his knees so that his head was on a level with hers, Simon began telling her about a recently published history of jewels that partly covered the field of a work he had long been engaged upon. As he spoke she noticed that since dinner his eyes had lost something of then weary look and that his nervousness had abated. He spoke with the masculine deliberation which women ordinarily find so irritating, but which, owing to the state of her nerves, calmed Rachel.
"However, my book," he explained, "deals almost exclusively with the legends connected with jewels. My aim is first and foremost, to restore to them their lost poetical significance. Plato, for instance, and the Egyptians, for that matter, believed that they were veritable beings produced by a sort of fermentation which was the result of a vivifying spirit descending from the stars. Look up there," he exclaimed, pointing to the sky, "then look at this, and tell me if it doesn't resemble star-gold condensed into a transparent mass;" and from his finger he drew a ring and placed it in her palm.
She was more and more comforted. As he enlarged on the theme, which was evidently a favourite one with him, she watched the gyrations of the fountain. Outlined to her vision, she beheld a life which seemed to her infinitely more tranquil than her own.
On their return to the Street of Masts, Emily assisted old David up the stairs and Rachel remained in the doorway waiting for Simon Hart to finish an interminable sentence. Weighty, carefully worded, laborious, his peroration, for the most part, fell on deaf ears. Never the less she was conscious of an involuntary attraction to him. When at last he extended his hand, she felt that he was stirred by some emotion he wished to conceal.
"Now that we have celebrated our newly-formed friendship," he said with an attempt at gallantry, "I shall expect you to call upon me should any matter come up in which I can serve you. Will you promise?"
The kindness was unexpected, her state forlorn. Her lips worked sensitively. "Yes," she said.
He lifted her hand to his lips; at once something penetrating and tender enveloped them.
At that moment the voice of Emily Short reached them from the upper landing. "Miss Beckett—Rachel!" she called, "come—come right up here! Your grandfather—something's wrong!"
In the room under the roof the flaring gas showed old David half sitting, half lying upon the couch.
Rachel darted to him. "Grandfather—what is it?" she shrieked; and winding her arms about him, she tried to centre his wild and wandering glances on herself.
But moaning incessantly, incoherently, he pushed her away with one hand while clutching her tightly with the other. Constantly his eyes questioned her—only to reject all help that she or any other could give him.
To her tortured sense it seemed an eternity before those half-human cries of his were silenced. In reality scarcely ten minutes elapsed before Simon Hart returned with a doctor.
Without hesitation the physician pronounced old David's attack a paralytic shock affecting both the lower limbs, though the disease, he said, might shift at anytime.
When they removed the old man's clothing, from the pocket of his coat rolled a few nuts and a little box of half-melted ice-cream.
Old David was going to die. The sunshine knew it and danced over him caressingly, touching his hands, his face, his hair each day, as if for the last time. It spilled pretty pools of gold on the floor and painted the walls with golden patches. And the plants at the window ledge knew it, two primroses and a pot of yellow jonquils, and for that reason they bloomed constantly, perfuming the air with a delicate freshness.
Old David was going to die, but because those who watched him practised an art of cheerful concealment, it was a very happy time for him, quite the happiest time he had known since boyhood.
Propped up in bed, he watched all that went on about him, and he looked at the flowers in the window. He knew who had sent the flowers and, when he appeared, Simon Hart had to bear the scrutiny of a pair of old eyes that surveyed him unwaveringly from the pillow. When Rachel brought the visitor around to the bedside, a look of sly satisfaction radiated from the old man's features. Interest and an eager zest for life still flourished in him; though Death held him hand and foot he was too true a poet to heed the approach of so material a guest. The last days of his life were enveloped in ineffable peace. Wrapped about in comforts, he had no knowledge of the tragedy of Rachel's existence, but rested in the serene belief that Heaven itself provided him with doctors, medicines, luxuries. His poor darkened brain worked with incredible slowness, and it was touching to behold him enjoying a dainty meal that Rachel had contrived to provide for him. Smiling and fresh, with a napkin tucked under his chin, he would point out such food on the tray as appealed to his fancy; then she would lift it to his lips, feeding him as one feeds a bird. And often the poor child's face was far paler than his and her hands trembled with hunger.
Only her absorbing, desperate love for him sustained her. For this grandfather, who in the enthusiasm of his heart was so like a little child, Rachel willingly would have laid down her life. No sacrifice was beyond her; and as the old man's soul was enveloped in that atmosphere of rare and delicate perceptions that heralds the final liberation, her soul, through its love, was permitted entrance into the same region of mysterious joys; so that up to the last moment they bore each other company.
Sometimes, troubled by the thickness of his speech, old David looked at his young companion with piteous eyes; but the condition was the result of weakness, she assured him; later the words would come. To amuse him she searched the papers for humorous anecdotes and even invented funny little stories of her own. Then how they laughed together! The room reëchoed with such merry peals it seemed Death took the hint and kept at a distance. Indeed, the old man entering that world of which we know nothing, and the young girl surrounded by the evils of this, by their very innocence and helplessness held at bay all the menacing powers of darkness, and under that attic roof, in the midst of a sordid city, they lived a life more profound and universal than its thousands of passionate men and women thronging the streets below.
When Simon Hart called, as he did every evening, it seemed to him that all the needs of the sick man were met. He sent flowers and fruit for old David, but a sense of delicacy kept him from offering Rachel financial assistance. Though he had disliked particularly asking a favour of his cousin, Julia Burgdorf, through her influence he was able to obtain for the young girl piece-work in an establishment that made a specialty of hand-painted trifles. This appealed to him as the most considerate way of helping her. Little did he realize that nursing left Rachel scant opportunity for the painting which required concentration. But by forcing herself to do without rest and almost without food, by employing every spare moment in doing all sorts of simple, ill-paid work that could be carried on at home, such as the directing of circulars and envelopes, mending and sewing for the neighbours, the impossible thing was accomplished. In quarters, half-dollars, dollars, the necessary money was swept together to cover the needs of the sick man. It was one of those prodigious, superhuman struggles constantly attempted by love. But of this struggle, though he came daily to the apartment, Simon Hart realized little. With the instinctive dread that characterizes persons of supersensitive nature, he had trained himself not to see to the bottom of things, not to investigate hearts too deeply. While watching Rachel with melancholy, ambiguous eyes, he was practically blind to the difficulty of her situation.
His sense of loneliness, always painful, was aggravated now, and in her presence he was tormented by an inexpressible need of intimate companionship. He could not bear to have her leave the room; he was jealous of the doctor and Emily Short, since they took something of her from him. And how little he received!—a word when he came and when he left and now and then a smile. When Rachel cast on him a smile from swiftly-parted tremulous lips, a smile that vanished ere it had scarce taken form, Simon's restlessness increased and his desire for affection became a feverish demand. Fortunate for her that it was himself rather than another who saw her placed as she was. And reflecting that many a man of the ravening-wolf type, in his place would have sought to take advantage of her poverty, of her unprotected state, he grew hot with anger. But she stood small chance of meeting such a one, and after all Emily Short was a defence. Then the idea of marrying the girl presented itself, looming mirage-like on the horizon of his mind, and he felt that he was becoming ridiculous. He saw himself with the eyes of that world in which Julia Burgdorf and his business associates were the chief figures. The victim of a little unknown waif—not merely her victim, her slave. In order to break the spell he forbade himself to go to see her, and, that he might keep to the resolution, he started without warning on a trip to Bermuda.
At first Nora Gage, influenced by shrewd calculations, acted in an unexpected fashion. During the fortnight that old David lay between life and death, Nora each day doled out a little money to Rachel. But later, as the invalid began to improve, she stole into his room a hundred times a day and noted the gathering life in his face with eyes as watchful as a snake's. Sometimes she even extended a hand and tested his pulse. Devotion to comfort was the ruling motive of Nora's life, and, foreseeing a future wherein comfort was threatened, fear seized upon her very vitals; and an agitation spread outward through the whole bulk of her flesh. Nor was her situation undeserving of sympathy. In vain Emily Short promised to reimburse her for all expenditures on old David's account when the fall trade in hats should open; Nora was sceptical of the security, as she was sceptical, finally, of Simon Hart's intentions.
"He don't mean a thing, I'm sure of it," she muttered. "The idea of thinking he'd marry her! I've been a fool." And Nora sighed heavily as the alluring vision of the permanent home she had intended to demand in Simon Hart's house, in return for the assistance she had rendered old David, vanished in thin air.
Her generosity came abruptly to an end. The doctor might order new medicines and old David, with the innocent egotism of the sick, demand the comforts to which he had become accustomed, Nora was unmoved. Gloating, she waited for Rachel to make an appeal. But the other, aware of the nature with which she had to deal, was silent.
"Proud—proud to the end! Well, let her starve," Nora soliloquized, and took herself to the public parks,—anywhere to escape the atmosphere of gloom and terror that for her pervaded the apartment.
Simon Hart's continued absence awoke in Rachel a troubled amazement, the more, as her grandfather constantly asked for him and she had to invent excuses for his non-appearance; but she had little time for reflection as the household in the Street of Masts was now put to sad shifts. Poor folk are ever separated from want by the meagrest of protections. They are like soldiers cowering behind a crumbling embankment. Time, bringing the ever recurrent needs, is their indefatigable enemy, and when these needs are multiplied, as in sickness, with small chance for patching the wall, they can ill withstand the siege. Finally there came an evening when Emily Short, with a look of shame on her open countenance, repaired to a certain shop around the corner, and thereafter no day passed when old David lacked for any comfort, as no day passed when some article was not missing from the bare little rooms.
"Let me go just this once," Rachel besought one evening early in February, confronting the toy-maker, who was preparing to go out. "If you wait to go around there—you know where I mean—you'll be late at Madame Stedenthal's. You know she said eight o'clock; and you wouldn't want to miss getting that order."
"But I don't like to have you," Emily protested.
Rachel motioned toward the room: "Run along. Grandfather's asleep; I'll slip out and be back before he 'wakes." ...
She quitted the shop, pressing a hand to her burning cheeks. Then, thrilled by the consciousness of the silver in her pocket, she hurried forward. She had gone only a few steps when someone touched her arm. She turned and saw Simon Hart.
Manifestly he had been following her: on his face was stamped a look of commiseration and embarrassment.
At once her old imperious pride was alive. Shrinking fiercely from the observation and sympathy of this man, she spoke curtly:
"I'm very glad to have met you. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll say good-night; Grandfather is alone."
She swung round so that he could no longer see her deeply wounded face; he saw only her hat and part of her veil and her long shabby cloak.
"Miss Beckett—Rachel!" he exclaimed, in a note of despairing appeal. "May I not go up to see your grandfather? I have been away—I have just returned. I did not wait; I was so anxious," he concluded. And he looked anxious.
She paused. After all, her grandfather would be pleased to see him. Already her short-lived resentment that he had witnessed her humiliation was merged in bodily languor.
They mounted the stairs and as he saw how she clung to the railing with her hand, Simon Hart was seized afresh with surprise and horror. The pencilings of fatigue under her eyes accentuated her pallor and this morbid diminution in her beauty, lent her a poignant charm. She laid a hand on the door.
Amazed at the change in the dismantled room, which was no less than the change in her, he stood rooted to the threshold. Then he dropped his head in his hands.
Rachel, who suffered a faint return of embarrassment, refrained from looking at him.
"There," she said nervously, laying aside her wraps, "now I'll go and see if Grandfather's awake."
He was beside her: "Rachel, why—why didn't you let me know?"
"Let you know what?" and she stood back against the wall, striving to repell him with her eyes.
"That you were in want—in need. You could have written—" he floundered helplessly; then swept on almost in tears—"Didn't you know that I would help you gladly—thankfully? Oh where were my eyes! And you have been struggling!—Oh God, forgive me." He drew her bended wrist against his breast, and the shudders of his frame went to hers.
She tried to withdraw the hand. "I don't understand."
"So thin—" he continued, perusing her face, "so thin; almost starved. And no one to help you—not anyone. And I left you; I didn't even write—"
He did not finish the sentence. He was on his knees, kissing the hem of her dress.
She stared at him in a trance of amazement and at that moment a voice sounded from the room across the passage.
"Rachel, be that ye? Why don't ye come in here?"
Simon Hart rose to his feet. "Let me help you, Rachel."
She moved her lips, though no sound passed them. He threw his hands on her shoulders and his eyes into the depths of hers. "I ask nothing that you cannot give," he said with mournful softness. "I know that you do not—love me—but later, if you became my wife—"
She shook her head, trying to twist free.
"If you were my future wife," he amended, "I could give your grandfather every care."
He had struck the right note.
Perceiving it, desperately he followed up his advantage. Later he would feel shame, but not now with her frightened breath on his face and her lips so close. His gentleness was transformed into boldness. Love wrought madness in him who had never before known its mystery or its power.—"He should lack for nothing."
At that moment her grandfather's voice, high-pitched, querulous, sounded from the other room.
"I hear ye, Rachel—both of ye; why don't ye come in here?"
Slowly her frozen look gave place to one of tense questioning. "He shall lack for nothing? you promise it?"
Simon Hart bowed his head: "I promise."
"Very well, then;" and all the life and youth dropped from her voice.
"Shall I go in to him?" he asked, stunned by his victory.
She nodded.
He moved to the door. Then retracing his steps, he passed his arms about her and pressed her to him. "You shall never regret this, Rachel. Oh, how I love you!" he muttered, with his lips on her head.
Pushing the hair back from her temples as if its weight annoyed her, in the silent room she paced restlessly. Presently she paused and looked her problem in the face. She was alone, powerless, penniless. But for herself she was not afraid!—and she folded her arms on her breast,—but for him who was dying?
Her arms fell.
The doctor had said that he might linger months, even years. And oh the relief, the unspeakable happiness, of being able to give him every luxury! She smiled; then sickened. The very blood in her veins repudiated the sacrifice. It was long since she had thought of Emil St. Ives as she had been accustomed to think of him during the blissful time at Pemoquod Point. Now the memory of him suddenly beat all over her weakened frame. She belonged to her love as the wood belongs to the flame. Wringing her hands together, she cast herself on the couch. And over and over her in a flood waves of pain, of joy, of despair, of triumph, of agony, of gladness, of self-immolation, of selfishness rolled and rolled.
Out of her ordeal she emerged, brought to a sense of the immediate present by hearing her name called. She stood up. But even through her misery she was conscious of the amazing strength of her grandfather's voice.
She ran to him.
A magnetic current of happiness had penetrated his paralyzed frame, for when she leaned over him, he addressed her with a tongue no longer trammelled.
"I told ye he'd come back," he exulted. "I heared ye when ye both come in and I knew it was him. Now ain't ye got anything to tell me, Rachel?" And he smiled up at her slyly.
"I don't know what you mean, Grandfather," she said.
"I mean—What have ye two been talkin' about in t'other room?" he broke off. "I know it was about somethin' important; and he don't deny it," with a gesture toward Simon.
Simon Hart stood with one hand resting on the table. Rachel avoided his glance.
"He said perhaps you'd tell me," urged the old man. "Now, what is it?"
She was silent.
"What is it?" he repeated. "Did he ask you to marry him?" and he plucked at her hand.
"Yes, he did."
"I knew it—I knew it," he cried excitedly. "And you said you would, didn't you, Rachel?" he asked, peering at her anxiously. "Somehow I should like to feel as if it was settled," he added wistfully.
Then she understood. In spite of his cheerfulness, old David knew quite well that he was going to die; and so great was his love for her, it had triumphed over the barriers imposed by his disease. With his poor clouded faculties he was trying to make provision for her.
Unable to stand, she rested her forehead on the pillow. He touched her hair and suddenly her heart expanded. All her thought was for him now. The danger that had threatened him was averted. They could not take him away from her, they could not carry him away and place him in a spotless, terrible ward, on a little bed, to die among strangers. Instead, she would be able to care for him until the end came. It was enough. What more could she ask? And tightening her grip on his sleeve, she wept the tears which the constant, torturing thought of weeks, the unwearying, ceaseless attempts to earn money, had not wrung from her. In an ecstasy of tenderness, she received the old man back from the verge of a lonely, unattended death.
Simon Hart had dropped into a chair. His elbow was among the medicine vials; his hand over his face. Old David looked doubtfully from one to the other; after an instant, exerting himself, he caught at Simon's free hand and placed Rachel's in it. "There!" he sighed, and while they watched him, he settled back on the pillows, his lids drooping. Exhausted, he fell asleep, his parted lips giving to his face the aloof expression of death.
It was as if he had been waiting the consummation of this one hope, for after that he sank rapidly. During the anguished days that followed, Rachel never permitted herself to question the step she had taken. She expected to fulfil her promise, meanwhile she preferred not to calculate the price of her sacrifice. She thought only of her grandfather, and if she had been told to die in order to save him, she would have been dead.
Simon Hart had lost standing in his own eyes. He tried to view the situation complacently, to find in it cause for self-justification. Then came the conviction that he must release her. For the present, however, let the engagement stand. It quieted the old man's fears and left Rachel free to receive at his hands the assistance she otherwise would have hesitated to accept.