Simon approached; then, with a glance at Emily, he kissed his wife's little, white, blue-veined hand which dropped so supplely from its wrist.
"Take me down the path," she commanded. "Oh, how heavenly this air is!—and the sea! Do you know, Simon, illness gives one a new pair of eyes?"
Emily Short looked after the couple uneasily. She had said what she could to Simon to prevent his carrying out his absurd scheme relative to St. Ives; she had objected as strongly as she dared on various pretexts. But Simon, bent on making clear to Rachel how completely he renounced his former attitude toward the inventor, had turned a deaf ear. Now Emily imagined that he was announcing the step he had taken, for from where she stood, she saw Rachel lift her head with a swift, frightened air. Then it slowly sank as though a weight had forced it to her breast.
Standing in the keen sunlight, a little, lean, homely figure with a worn face, Emily sighed. She herself had never known love, yet she sighed and knotted her fingers tightly together beneath her apron.
It was evident that Rachel did not wish to go in the direction of the gardener's cottage, for they turned into another path. Half an hour later when she knew Simon had left his wife in order to catch his train for the city, Emily went in search of the invalid. She found her drawn up in the shelter of a small, half-ruinous summer-house overrun with vines which stood at one corner of the grounds. As Emily approached, she saw Rachel crane forward, with her hands gripping the arms of the wheeled chair. A wonderful unrestrained tenderness beamed in her face.
Passing not twenty feet away and visible through the intricacies of the wall of leaves was Emil St. Ives. The stuff of his shirt rippled in the breeze and the material clung to his muscular shoulders; his hair was in a tousle, his lips, surrounded by their curling beard, emitted a gay shrillness of sound; he was whistling as a bird sings. Abruptly Rachel dropped back in the chair. Without looking at Emily, she signified a desire to return to the house.
Emily pushed the chair into the sunlight and the little group crept up the path; while, all unconscious, Emil went leaping down the sands to bathe in the sea.
During her illness, Rachel had been besieged by feverish thoughts. Not a phase of the situation but she had gone over innumerable times. Finally her resolution was taken: she would see Emil no more. The decision was an arduous one and she raged to make it. Love for one man, overmastering love, as Nature wills it, was in conflict with unswerving loyalty to another; and this latter feeling likewise had its roots in the very foundation of her character, so that her woman's heart had been for a season a disputed field, and the conflict had protracted her illness.
But when she rose at last, pitiful tender, heroic,—all woman in that she dreamed she had immolated the feeling that threatened the peace of her husband—lo, the situation awaiting her put her plans to confusion. Her husband's unexpected move had made her course a difficult if not an impossible one.
For more than three weeks by employing every stratagem, she succeeded in avoiding the inventor, and when the housemaid brought word, as she did on several occasions, that both Emil and Annie had come over to call on her, she pleaded weariness and refused to see them. But as her strength returned, this excuse failed, and she spent many hours with Emily, who had been persuaded to remain and carry on her trade of toy-making in an unused room of the house. Had Simon permitted it, Rachel would have returned to the city, but both her husband and the doctor opposed the move on the ground of her recent illness.
It was a state of things which could not endure.
One morning Emil came upon Rachel sitting on the sand. Worn out by her efforts to avoid him, beyond turning her face obstinately in the other direction, she made no attempt to escape.
As he advanced he examined her with his laughing eyes. "So I've found you at last!" he cried joyously.
After a moment, because there was nothing else to do, she turned her face to his.
"But you're not much of an invalid, are you?" he cried an surprise, and seated himself not far off. "You look," he said, indicating the sea, "as strong as those waves."
Hot blushes were uncommon with her, but now the unreasoning colour mounted full tide beneath her tanned skin. "Yes," she assented coldly, "I'm quite myself now;" and she began taking the sand into her hands and letting it trickle between her fingers.
"Well, why haven't you been over to see my new workroom?" he demanded in a different tone, as he followed these movements. "You don't take much interest in your neighbours, it strikes me."
She steadily regarded the sea. "So far I haven't done anything," she said in a low voice, and then added, as if the words were forced from her, "I shall go back to the city when the doctor will allow it."
"What would be the sense of that?" he demanded in amazement. "Why it's fine here! Just the place for you. Is it possible you don't like it?"
Rachel's lip curled slightly. "Where's Annie?" she asked after a moment's pause.
Emil turned his head. "Why she's somewhere about; she came down on the beach a little while ago."
"Won't you find her? I should like to see her."
Nonplussed, he lifted himself from the sand. After staring about, he struck off in search of his wife. But when Annie appeared by his side, wrinkling up her face in the sunlight and holding out her hand, Rachel had little to say. Immediately afterward she left them.
A few days later as she was crossing the lawn, Rachel met Emil and he accosted her. This time there was umbrage in his tone.
"I say," he cried, and he placed himself directly in her path, "why don't you ever come over and let me show you that organ attachment? I can play for you now, in a sort of way; in fact I'm quite a musician."
Again she avoided his look and attempted to put him off. "I have promised to drive over to the station this afternoon and meet Mr. Hart," she said, "but I will come—sometime."
"But when?" he demanded, scowling at her, and his countenance was no longer good natured but fierce and aggressive. "You used to show some interest in my work, but now you withdraw it all of a sudden—just like a woman. And I tell you, I can't finish the thing without it," he concluded angrily. "I can't go on alone—you've accustomed me to something else."
A shiver ran through her like that which takes a young bird that feels the air for the first time beneath its tentatively fluttering wings. Her impulse was to sail away in the atmosphere of love his crude unconscious confession breathed about her. She dared not raise her eyes because of the involuntary joy that filled them.
"I'll come over this evening with Simon," she said, softly. And everything about himself and about herself she loved passionately.
Life, by all of us, is felt vaguely to be a tapestry of which we see the under side. But now in a flash Rachel saw the pattern that Fate was weaving imperturbably; a pattern premeditated from the beginning; and well she knew that nothing she could do or he could do, could stay that weaving hand. Though no word of love was ever spoken, the design in all its beauty was complete, for words and acts are human lumber, unessential to the accomplishment of the spiritual miracle; present, they follow the design inaccurately; absent, the design is seen the clearer because of no gross accompaniment. And Rachel wondered if Emil saw at last what she saw; if he did not now, he would see,—he would! And neither was any more responsible for the fact that filled the world with new meaning than he was responsible for the fact of life. From these meditations she roused herself, emerging as from an enchanted mist.
"I'll come over this evening with Simon," she repeated, and Emil, who had been staring at her, drew himself up and reluctantly accepted the promise.
When he moved away from her, his face wore an expression of astonishment.
As Ding Dong had gone to the city on an errand for Emil and did not return on the usual train in the evening, there was no one at the cottage to pump the organ, for Simon evidently considered it beneath his dignity to perform so menial a service. He sat in a rocking-chair near a window, and from time to time with a meditative eye, he scanned the walls of the room which were decorated with mottoes and lithographs in colours. He was estimating the probable cost of replacing the partition when Emil should have finished with the cottage.
The inventor, restless and keenly disappointed, went again and again to the outer door, where he remained straining his eyes through the salty darkness, though there was no chance now that Ding Dong would appear until morning. Rachel sat by a little table turning over the leaves of a current magazine with her long fingers; she was impatient with her husband and whenever Emil entered the room, she looked at him, and her face between the loopings of her hair, had a faint, remote, mysterious smile.
Annie issued from the kitchen and going up to Emil leaned against his shoulder, and he nonchalantly encircled her little figure. Instantly, Rachel grew hot all over with a violent jealousy such as she had never before experienced.
All the way home while she walked by Simon's side and felt beneath her elbow his thin fingers supporting her, her hands beneath her cloak were pressed against her heart. Oh, the intensity of her love and the paleness of his! She had a picture of Life irrevocably linked to Death. With the vision came such a sense of desolation that, turning her face aside, she sobbed under her breath.
The miracle was rapidly accomplishing; she was passing out of herself,—out of her scruples, her pity, her fears.
She was wandering on the sands and knew not where she went, save that the need for movement was imperative. She had left Gray Arches far behind. What matter that from the dun-coloured clouds a slant of rain descended, straight and fine as the locks a princess engaged in combing her hair? Secretly, noiselessly, the rain touched the sands, save at intervals when a land breeze seized it; then these liquid tresses were torn and tangled into drifting masses as by the hand of a rude lover who violently seizes the locks of his mistress. And the rain hissed as it met the sands and ran away in little curling, twisting rivulets like serpents.
Enjoying the caress of the moisture on her face, Rachel walked on. The vigour of her childhood was in her limbs, the spirit of it in her heart, and she remembered her old turbulent longing for freedom. But love was the supreme liberator. And in an ecstasy, she drew herself together and her craving for this supposed liberation of the spirit was so intense and penetrating, that she wavered uncertainly as if about to fall.
At that instant, a voice, muffled by the falling of the rain and the soft plash of the waves on the beach, reached her. It came to her out of the distance; but the space that separated her from him who called was so great and the curtain of rain that divided them, at the moment, so dense, that she could not see him. Yet that voice in which no words were distinguishable, quickened and reanimated her. For an instant with her arms curved fearfully above her head, she looked back.
A spot on that barren coast was growing larger, it was moving toward her; and all at once the breeze brought her the message above the wash of the waves.
"W-a-i-t! W-a-i-t!"
Emil was hallooing, he was calling to her with his hand to his lips. Suddenly he broke into a run, and the impulse of flight was communicated to her.
With bated breath she sped before him, and she was conscious that he took up the chase after a momentary pause of amazement.
Across those sands pitted by rain, once more the old race was run, the exciting elemental pursuit of woman by man. And as if in joy the waves lapped the beach with a sound of applause, and the rain, as if delighted at this return of happy antique life, now baffled and pelted and blinded the pair, and now, in a lull, revealed them each to the other.
Rachel's hair, escaping its bonds, streamed behind her; her skirts impeded her movements; yet wildly, excitedly, across that expanse of sand, she ran. And the blood beat exultantly in her veins and she felt that the goal toward which she was making was that fugitive band of colour that persisted, despite the drifting mist, at the end of the beach. Through this uncertain band of colour, the sky, elsewhere dull and scattered with clouds, appeared to be smiling with huge, mobile, kindly lips. Ah, if she could but bathe in the light of that understanding smile which the sky cast over the beach! A piece of driftwood brought her precipitately to a halt, but instantly she was up and away like a sea-bird.
He who followed with long strides was gaining on her, plainly he was gaining on her. With her skirts and her shorter stature, she was no match for him. Finally, with both hands clasped beneath her bosom, she sank to her knees. Her sight swam, she gasped for breath. They had traversed in this way a distance of a quarter of a mile. The only object in sight was an old fishing-boat, drawn up on the sands. On this boat her glance rested. The next moment she saw Emil. As he ran, something emanated from him.
Instantly she was up; and straight and slim and fleet, she darted across his path and was into the old fishing boat. There was but one oar, and, as she pushed off, a burst of fresh laughter gurgled in her throat and illuminated her face. The tide, in tantalizing fashion, carried her beyond his reach and she saw him stop. Then his eyes, imperative and gleaming, like two fierce lights, sought hers. After that look he waded into the water; then swam.
Two or three strokes and he was beside the skiff. When he grasped its edge with his dripping fingers, that shone out white and strong in the steadily increasing light, Rachel laid hold of his clothing.
Their heads were on a level—they exchanged a look.
Wild, flashing, dominating, it leapt from his face, all pale and streaming with water, to hers; and all the secret of her woman's heart mounted to her eyes; they were no longer mysterious, but frank as daylight, revealing.
The sun which, like a curious watcher, had cleared the cloud-bank, beat upon the sea in joyous fashion, and the waves beat upon the sand; and all along the beach and in the air and in the waters under the boat, there was a murmur as if Nature, the great mother, sighed in the fulness of her content.
As in death there takes place a loosening, a lifting, a withdrawing of the spiritual part, so, too, in love. The soul, made daring through love, seeks to support a separate existence; but the attempt is pitiful, doomed to frustration; for clamorous and insistent, the ordinary conditions of life make themselves felt. The descent in Rachel's case to the normal state, wherein duties and scruples play their part, was realized at the moment Emil climbed into the boat.
Before starting for the beach she had put on her head a travelling cap that belonged to Simon. It had been almost made way with by the wind; but, still held by its long pin, it had slipped to her shoulders with the mass of her hair. Now, with the oscillation of the skiff caused by Emil's movements as he drew himself from the water, the cap dropped to the seat beside her, and thence was carried by a puff of wind to the floor of the boat. Not a garment of Simon's but closely resembled him; this cap of hunter's green with a tiny stripe of red in the flannel, was instinct with his personality. As it lay before her, Rachel shuddered and the expression that filled her eyes kept Emil from any indiscretion into which the situation might otherwise have betrayed him. Before the mute appeal of her look he was powerless.
She crouched in the end of the boat and with a motion of the hand indicated that he was to put back to the land. Before obeying, he wrung the water from the sleeves of his coat. He was trembling and as she perceived the power of his love, perceived the amazing and terrifying force leaping out upon her from under his scowling brows,—a sudden pity took her; and she dared not look upon him because of that tenderness which is more disarming to a woman than her fear.
"Well, that was a race!" he remarked unsteadily. "Are you tired?"
"Not very—a little."
"I'll row you home."
"With one oar?"
"There's another on the beach that you didn't see."
"I didn't take the time to look."
As the boat had drifted with the tide, the return to the shore was accomplished with difficulty. When he was once more seated opposite her, rowing with even strokes, he noticed that she shivered and a gentleness softened his face.
"You are very cold, aren't you?"
"The air has changed."
"Here, take my coat; it's soaking, but your dress is soaking too."
"It's—very heavy. I don't see how you ever swam in it; it's weighted down,—" and from the pockets she drew forth first a coil of wire, then a wrench, then several drills.
He watched her and delight shone in his face.
"I could have swum the Atlantic in armour to reach you. Do you know, you look like a mermaid with your hair hanging down that way." He was laughing now and the old lazy fondness sounded in his voice. Leaning toward her he rested on the oars. "Rachel, why did you run away from me like that?" he asked, smiling confidentially, and suddenly one of his hands went out to hers.
She drew back and for a moment enveloped herself in taciturnity, but all at once, as if compelled, she brought a defiant glance around to meet his.
"Why because you started to run—and I ran, too."
"Well, it's useless; you can never elude me again. Do you know," he continued, "it seems to me that this crazy race has been going on ever since the first time I saw you in the mist? Do you remember the day? You were perched on a rock, I recollect, and the cow—you were leading a cow—pushed up behind you in such a way that her horns curved up about your feet for all the world like a little crescent moon. I swear it had that look. Lord, but you made a picture! Do you remember the day?"
"Yes, I remember the time, but I didn't know I looked like that."
She opened her eyes very wide and her lips parted with the movement of an expanding flower. Vanity kindled in her face as light kindles in a jewel. There is in a woman's inner nature a sensitive something that constitutes the very essence of her charm, that informs her physical features with vivacity, with seduction. The craving to have this secret attribute recognized, causes her to discover in every compliment a spiritual significance; causes her to wrap herself in its fancied meaning, as in a shawl; causes her to live in it, breathe it in—in short to discover in it an atmosphere of inspiration in which she manages to exist for the briefest fraction of time. Indeed, the longing for the caress of words addressed to her very soul, is as natural to an imaginative and ardent woman, as the longing for the caress of light is to a flower. And with Rachel, as with many another young girl of New England traditions, the craving had never been gratified. Now Emil's praise of her was so alluring that she was trapped into listening; had he paused for a word, involuntarily she would have supplied it.
But he required no urging to finish his speech which dropped from his lips with all the precipitancy of fruit from an overladen branch.
"You were just like a figure from some church altar," he told her fervently. "Your dress was blue, and the fog rolled about you in clouds. All the same, you know, your expression wasn't exactly saintly; it was too—"
"Too what?" she whispered.
"Well, just what it is now," and with that he looked at her until she was obliged to avert her eyes.
"I mean that your face is very innocent," he explained, "and at the same time, it is all alive with—well, with a sort of curiosity. But to-day you were Diana of the Chase with your skirts all ruffling around your feet and blowing to the side in folds. However I'm not up in mythology; all I know is, my own, you'll never succeed in fencing yourself off from me again. But don't look at me like that!" And with an indefinable glance at her as she sat, suddenly converted to sternness, he took up the oars.
She observed complete silence, and for some moments all that was heard about them was the ripple of the water as it met the sides of the boat. The waves like a lover approached the boat, touching it lightly, tentatively and timidly caressing it with eager lips. But occasionally waves larger than the rest seized the skiff and upbore it as in the powerful embrace of arms, dipped and sank with it; while a sound of multiplied kisses ran over the surface of the glancing ocean, which was tremulous as a breast heaving with love. And the influence of that universal caress mounted to the air, which was like a stinging breath crossed with tears of spray; even reached the low-stooping western heavens where sailed largely great cloud masses, like huge embarrassed lovers, that never the less, with a sudden darting of colour along their edges, strange and fiery smiles, approached—melted softly and completely into one.
The sea was a theatre and the play enacted on that broad expanse, in the swiftly falling twilight, for the bewilderment of that pair of human mites,—the play was Love. For Nature, the great scene shifter, who causes the mists to rise above swamps that she may bring about the love and mating of midges, is the artist incomparable when she sets out to glamour and bend to her will the least significant of these struggling, valiant creatures called men, these creatures that dare, with a law opposed to hers, to defy her.
Rachel had crept to the extreme end of the skiff and when the water rose to the edge it often dashed across her knees. Her head was flung back, but for all that, she saw nothing. She was holding her emotions well in leash and the effort drew from her now and then a sigh. Where the fingers of one hand met the back of the other, for she had them tight clasped, there were white marks on the flesh. She sat before him with the impassive countenance of an image, though internally she was consumed with flames.
Time passed imperceptibly, but all at once she pointed to the shore.
"Emil," she said, in a muffled voice, "there's Gray Arches among the trees. The lamps are lighted. Make haste."
He had been doubling on his course, and, unnoticed by her, even striking out to sea, with the object of delaying the moment of landing. Now the dusk, which had descended insidiously, was close about them.
At her words, he headed the boat for the shore. But after an instant he leaned forward. "Before I take you in, I want you to tell me when I'm to see you again."
She drew herself up: "I don't know when you'll see me—never, I think." She spoke in a throbbing, suppressed way, exactly as if she were forcing back from the edge of her lips and to the depths of her heart, some secret. "There is the pier; don't you see it?"
The young man nodded. "Yes, I see it all right. Rachel, I'm going to Barbieri Brothers to-morrow to see how that marble-cutting device of mine works. Come there in the afternoon and see the machine with me, won't you?"
She shook her head.
"Very well then," and he began paddling out to sea.
"You think you'll frighten me or annoy me," she cried, moved to scorn, "but you won't succeed. I can swim as well as you."
He laughed and the boat, quivering in a bewildered sort of way, once more approached the land, noisily cleaving the water.
"Rachel, you'll come and see that machine, won't you? I'll never ask you again. But it's an interesting thing, really it is, and they're cutting the figures for the Century Library with it. Can't you understand that I'd like to have you see my work? It isn't much that I ask, and you can get the five o'clock train out here if you like. Promise me you'll come."
Through the gloom on the pier she saw a lonely figure intent on the antics of the boat. She looked at Emil and the impulse of her tenderness carried her beyond the barrier imposed by her will. In one instant she had passed beyond the outworks of her usual self. When she answered him in low, vibrant tones, it was a message, if he had but understood, from the very depths of her heart:
"Yes, I'll come—you've no business to ask me, and I've no business to promise; I'll come, but there must be no more of this; it's ended." These words were at once an appeal and a command.
But Emil, ignoring the nervous shrinking that came over her, caught her hand under cover of the gloom and held it to his cheek—his lips. Then cleverly, easily, he brought the boat to the pier.
The next instant Rachel was confronted by her husband. Giving Emil his coat, she stepped from the boat, refusing assistance. As she swayed on gaining the pier, Simon took hold of her arm; then passed his hand over her shoulders.
"Why you're wet—you're wet through," he exclaimed, and as he turned to Emil she noticed that he spoke in a manner unusually cordial and spontaneous. "So you were caught in the rain? If you'll just step to the house, St. Ives, I'll give you something to ward off a chill; a nip of whiskey wouldn't come amiss."
But Emil, muttering something about returning the fisherman's boat, disappeared in the twilight and Rachel, stumbling like one who walks in a dream, accompanied Simon to the house.
"The rain won't harm you, my love," he was saying as they gained the porch, "if you change your clothing at once. It's remaining in damp garments that's the imprudent thing."
As they crossed the threshold Rachel caught his hand. "Simon, I—I want to speak to you." And half dragging, half pushing him, she urged him into the front room.
This room was large and shadowy, with a row of French windows commanding a view of the sea. The shades were drawn and the light from a small fire on the hearth sparkled on a glass dome beneath which were placed specimens of sea moss and shells. The dome stood at one end of a long table and a candelabrum hung with glass prisms at the other end; above one candle hung a red spark,—the wick needed snuffing. The room was damp. As she spoke Rachel, passing her arm behind her, clasped the glass knob of the door.
"Simon—I don't want to stay here any longer."
He confronted her in surprise: "Not stay here any longer? Why, Rachel, you astonish me; I thought you loved the sea."
"So I do—but this coast—it oppresses me. Simon, I want to go back to the city at once, do you understand,—at once; can't we move to-morrow?"
"But you're irrational, my dear. In fact the doctor whom I saw only yesterday, counselled just the opposite course. He said to me, speaking of you, 'the sea air is what she needs; she grew up in such a climate. You keep her on the shore until late fall!"
For a moment Rachel dropped her head against the panels of the door and closed her eyes; then raising her head, she looked intently at her husband:
"Simon, you asked Mr. St. Ives to come here; you asked him without consulting me and now—I want to go away."
For an instant he studied her, then he crossed to her side and took her hand.
"My dear Rachel," he said, "I thought perhaps you understood without anything being said. Rachel, believe me, I have not the feeling now about your friendship with St. Ives that I once had. That feeling of jealousy,—for it was jealousy—I do not deny it—was degrading to us both, but particularly it was insulting to you. And during your illness it left me; thank Heaven, it left me," he repeated. "And now be generous—don't take from me the happiness I feel. You think I objected to your being out with him, but when I saw you in the boat, I was conscious only of a serene friendship for St. Ives."
A flash of firelight illumined his face and she saw to her surprise that his usually enigmatic eyes held a look that completely transformed him. The explanation she had intended to make died on her lips. With a bewildered gesture she turned as if to leave the room; and at that moment they were interrupted. There was a knock, and the caretaker questioningly opened the door.
"If you please, Mrs. Hart," she began, "there's a strange young man down in the kitchen who is asking to see you."
"A young man?"
"Yes, a lad. My husband thinks he ain't just right, he's so sort of wild looking; but the boy says he's from your old home and nothing for it but he must see you."
"Why it's André!" Rachel cried in amazement, and, before the woman had finished speaking, she darted from the room.
Simon's voice pursued her: "Your clothing, change it first, I beg of you."
Rachel had vanished.
The next moment she was standing before André. Catching him by the arms, she shook him; then pressed her head to his shoulder. "Oh, André," she whispered, "Is it you—is it really?" And passing her arms about him, she clung to him.
The young fellow suffered the embrace and his hands hung motionless at his sides, though in his great eyes a spark kindled as he looked down at her.
"Tell me," she asked breathlessly, "how did you ever manage to find me—and what brings you, André dear? Explain—tell me everything, but not here," catching sight of the caretaker who had reëntered the kitchen. "Come to the front room where there is a fire.—Simon, this is André," she cried as they encountered her husband on his way through the hall. And taking the young fellow's hand, she placed it in Simon's.
"Yes, I'm going now," she added. "I'm dying of curiosity, but I'll change my dress first. And do you make André comfortable. I'll be back in a minute," she cried.
Rachel's welcome of her childhood's friend was all the more eager because she looked to him to save her from the difficulties of her situation and from herself. While she dressed, she thought only of André and as she drew on a pair of dry shoes and tightened the crossed lacings with excited jerks, she said his name over and over like a child bubbling with joy.
"Now for the news?" she cried, entering the front room; and seating herself beside André, she took his hand. "Something special brought you, I know it. Now tell me."
The story at any other time would have held her spellbound, but in her present mood she had difficulty in grasping it. Constantly her thoughts wandered, now to Emil, now to André. She drew such profound comfort from the touch of André's strong young fingers.
The facts as he related them were as follows: A man in the last stage of consumption and calling himself, "John Smith" had made his appearance in Old Harbour a few days before. Desiring news of Lavina Beckett's daughter, he had asked to be directed to André. When he learned from André that Rachel was living in New York city, he had burst into tears. He had declared he must see her before he died. He had persuaded André to accompany him to the city as he feared to travel farther alone. But before leaving Old Harbour he had deposited a sum of money in the bank and had written a long letter which he addressed to Rachel. On the journey he had read and reread this epistle. He was very weak and when they reached their destination, collapsed in the great bustling station. After much parley over the telephone, a station attendant had arranged for his reception at a hospital. Thither he had been taken. The physician who attended him assured him he would be much stronger after a few hours' rest, and on hearing this, John Smith had begged André to find Rachel and bring her to the hospital the following day. "Afternoon's always my best time, bring her then," he had implored.
"I understand; it's poor Father's friend," Rachel whispered dreamily, when André concluded; "he didn't send all the money Father gave him that time, and now he wants to give me the rest. That's the whole sad story. But André, I can't seem to think about it," she murmured after a moment. "I'll go to the hospital without fail, but now let's talk about you. Do you know, I think you managed splendidly to ferret me out in this way. You went to the house, first, of course, and Theresa told you where I was."
While André's voice ran on detailing the news: how his mother and he now performed every duty about the lighthouse as the Captain was in his cups most of the time (Oh, but the Captain, he was a clever one at concealing the state of things!) how Nora Gage had gone into the shop with Katherine Fry, how Zarah Patch had increased the size of his vegetable garden, and Lottie Loveburg had taken up with Jim Wright after all—Rachel scarcely listened to him. A danger confronted her, and, try as she would, she could think of nothing but the decisive interview of the morrow,—that battle that must be waged in spite of her own deadly weakness and overwhelming love.
She asked herself a question. Why at this time, rather than any other, were the facts relating to her father's life to be revealed to her? And, as she sat by André's side, she was conscious of a mysterious influence, like a warning, reaching her from the insistent past.
Rachel's mouth was now perfectly formed to express her emotions, as it had not been in early youth. There had come a little added fulness in the curves of the upper lip, a little added sensitiveness in the line of the lower. With its well-defined corners, melting, when she smiled, into a pair of will-o'-the-wisp dimples, this mouth of hers was worthy to form the lure for many an exciting escapade on the part of her lovers. In her intelligent, sometimes perfervid, often gloomy face, it suggested a series of grace-notes introduced wilfully into a bit of serious music. It destroyed the general harmony of her face and increased its fascination. On the morning following the primitive race across the sands, the grace-notes dominated the more serious expression of her personality.
In the depths of her there was plenty of sadness, but the joy which is inseparable from any confession of love, even the love which battles against insurmountable barriers, glowed through her and informed every fibre of her with sparkling animation. She laughed frequently for no apparent cause.
The wide lawns about Gray Arches still glistened with dew and birds sang in the branches of the trees. The notes mingled with the plash of the waves on the distant beach, and with that infinite murmur of sounds that came out of the sunshine, out of the grass, out of the shimmering distances of that smiling country, checkered in light open fields and in dark variegated woods. All around, everywhere, was vivid palpitating life.
Rachel with a huge pair of shears that flashed in the sun, was snipping dead roses from a bush of the late-blooming variety. Brown and withered, they fell on the gravel path—mere ghosts of flowers; and, at every onslaught, all the green leaves of the bush shook and all its fresh blossoms trembled and poured forth an intoxicating perfume as if to thank her for the service. Beside her, seated on the grass, André was making the flowers they had gathered into a bouquet. He held in his brown hands nasturtiums, gladioli and dahlias. Occasionally, unable to resist an unusually perfect one, Rachel flung him still another rose.
"There," she said, "that's enough; if I cut any more, I shan't be able to carry them, and the hospital nurse may not let John Smith have them anyway."
A thorn had scratched her wrist, and she lifted the hand to her lips.
André regarded her with a vigorous gaze. "Do you know," he said at last, "you look like a rose yourself."
She threw him the shadow of a glance from between half-closed lids. In her morning dress of delicate pink muslin, beneath a shade hat with a flapping brim, she did look like a rose; and a wide collar, turned up over her throat to protect it from the sun, heightened the illusion. Against its colour her cheeks had taken a richer tinge and her eyes, between their curling lashes, were unusually deep and liquid. She was amazingly beautiful with a superadded beauty, with that fleeting and ethereal grace, which, independent of features or contours, touches any woman when she realizes that she is loved where she herself loves. Now, as if anxious to divert André's too curious gaze, she began speaking rapidly and almost at random. The air and the sunlight appeared to intoxicate her.
"Have you ever noticed, André," she cried, "the boastfulness of Nature when she has anything worth displaying? She is for all the world like a woman who takes particular pride in showing off her children, like that Mrs. Polestacker we both knew who was always calling attention to her Katie's teeth and curls. Take that rose bush," she continued, "it fairly swaggers with pride now that it is covered so finely with roses, but once the flowering season is over, and see how meekly it will obliterate itself; it will retire into the background like an old maid at a dance. For who notices the larkspur when its time is past, or the raspberry bush when it is no longer hung with its little crimson lamps? It is the energy that a growing, living thing puts forth that it would flaunt before us, saying, 'See here,Iproduced these flowers—these berries!' and it is that energy which attracts us—the immense energy of being." And throwing back her head, her neck on the strain, her arms falling at her sides, with the shears in one hand, she gazed into the deep blue of the sky which, bending down over the earth, was like an inverted sea.
Unconsciously, as in the old days, she spoke her thoughts aloud to André. He did not reply; if truth were told, he was in the dark as to her meaning, but that only increased the enchantment.
André was Rachel's senior by six years, but owing to his mind in which the impressions were deep but few, he still looked a youth, almost a child. His beauty, agile, simple, unsettled, with admirable disposition of colouring, was that of a child. High on the cheek bones, under the eyes, the blood came and went with his emotions, and his arched lips under his tiny moustache stood a little open, which gave him an innocent expression. He was difficult to resist, just as a child is difficult to resist. Rachel's feeling for him was almost maternal; but for all that, her comprehension of him failed at one point.
When he had first received word of her marriage, André had cast himself on the ground, and the earth had seemed to respond with deep tremours to his grief. He had told himself that he would never see her again. As for her husband, he felt that it would be impossible for him to ever meet Simon Hart without yielding to the desire to fly straight at his throat. Yet, he had met him and experienced no emotion of the sort. Something told him that Rachel was not in love with her husband. Still there was that in her eyes which bewildered him. Now with his hands clasped behind his head and his back against a tree, he regarded her with a devotion, a tenderness, a desperation of which none but a pure and youthful soul is capable, and the old agony began to stir again in the depths of his breast.
Ceasing from her ecstatic contemplation of the sky, Rachel looked over at the gardener's cottage. As she did so, all her outlines went to deeper softness. André, sensitively, felt the thrill through her of some ineffable emotion.
"What are you thinking about, Rachel?" he demanded.
She started and the colour mounted.
"Thinking?"
"Yes; just now, when you turned and looked over yonder?"
"Oh! ... I was thinking of Mr. St. Ives's improvement of the organ. It's really extraordinary what he has accomplished, André; and by such simple means. You must see it. He's carrying on his work over there in the gardener's cottage. And I was comparing his invention and his natural pride in it, to the rose bush and its roses, I suppose."
"St. Ives?" André was sitting upright and rigid. "Is he—is he the one who came to Pemoquod that time?"
"Yes. My husband formed a company to represent his inventions. I always felt Mr. St. Ives had great promise," she went on as frankly as she could, "and I persuaded Simon to get up a company. Now he's glad he did."
André was wretched. "And he's here?
"Yes; for a few weeks. Mr. Hart was anxious that the work shouldn't be delayed, so he came here while the shop is being altered."
André said no more. And Rachel exerted herself to dispel his gloom. So contagious was the vitality of her mood that he apparently forgot the incident.
Presently, bidding him gather up the withered roses that littered the path, and taking into her own hands the bunch of fresh blossoms, she led the way to the house and André followed. His old dream, in all its simplicity, once more possessed his heart.
When Rachel arrived at the hospital, John Smith was expecting her. In a clean shirt with his grey hair neatly brushed and his gaunt frame arranged under a spotless sheet, he was eagerly awaiting her. The floor nurse warned her that the interview must be a brief one; the patient could not live more than a day or two.
John Smith's story was substantially what Rachel had surmised it would be, and as he told it with frequent interruptions when the cough racked him, she had difficulty in fixing her thoughts upon him. The vital moment of her own life called her, and try as she would, she could give but a divided attention.
"The fact is, I ain't done just the straight thing by you," he rambled on, "and I'm glad you're as well fixed as you are. It ain't quite the same as if I'd found you in want. However, I've suffered for putting this time off; I've been hectored in ways you wouldn't dream of. Needn't tell me the dead don't take their revenge if you pass over their wishes! I don't mean that they come back or anything of that sort," he interrupted himself, in response to a questioning glance, "but they stick in your mind somehow—you can't forgit how they looked when they told you to do such and such a thing, and you don't do it. But I'll say this much for myself, I meant as much as could be to give you that money when I reached America seventeen years ago, a month or two after your father's death; but I had a hard run of luck, and I used some of it, and then I used more, until it was about all gone. And it was only when I got this cough about three years and a half ago, that I began to think a good bit about Thomas Beckett. Funny too, so long after his death; but I'd see him when I was droppin' off to sleep, and he'd look at me so! But your father didn't do the straight thing either," he broke off with sudden resentment, "for he left your mother, as far as I could gather, to shift for herself.
"As I was saying, perhaps it was my low state of health, but he gave me no rest; seemed as if he was tryin' to say that you needed that money. And finally the thought come to me that perhaps I ought to give your mother at least part of what was owin' her; so I wrote to Old Harbour and you know the rest. You see," he concluded, "when I learned that your mother had been dead more'n twenty years, I was afraid to make myself known. I was fearful some relative or friend'd get after me on your part. So I sent seven hundred dollars along, it was all I'd saved, to that friend of yours whose name the postmaster gave me, and then I left. I went away from the town in Massachusetts where I'd been workin' and I found a job as foreman in a mill in another town. And I thought everything'd be all right then; but do you know, I still dreamed of your father, and the upshot was, that I went to a priest and made a clean breast of the story; and as he told me to do, I worked hard and paid it all up. Yes, I've paid it all up," he finished, "for the balance, the eight hundred dollars that was comin' to you, I deposited in your name in the bank at Old Harbour;" and fumbling in the pocket of his shirt, he handed her a sealed envelope. "There's the deposit slip, and the whole story written out ready to be mailed to you in case I didn't manage to see you," he explained.
His face had grown brighter, had regained a faint expression of health, as the load that had long oppressed his conscience was lifted.
Rachel left the invalid holding admiringly in his bony fingers her bunch of flowers. She reached the door of the ward; then, with a sudden eagerness, she retraced her steps.
"Was my Father a happy man?" she asked, "or did he seem to regret all along what he had done in leaving my Mother?" She waited his answer with bated breath.
But relief was manifest all over John Smith. Had he not triumphantly passed through the ordeal of his confession? At her question his eyes glistened; he laughed a weak, irresponsible laugh.
"No, I don't think he worried much about it till he come to die. It was far-away questions that touched your father more; he was always reading and sometimes he'd argue and git angry. But barring those times, he was pretty jolly as far as I can recollect. It was only when he seen the last port just ahead, that same as me, he seemed to think things over. But, I've done the right thing, and I'm going to git well," he proclaimed.
The same nurse she had seen on coming, met her in the corridor. Rachel directed her to have John Smith moved to a private room with special attendant; then she left the hospital.
For some reason she was relieved that her father had not regretted his course sooner, that he had remained, almost to the last, a true vagabond. As to her one-time hot defence of him on the score of his loyalty to her mother, the point had lost significance.
All that was mettlesome in her character was aroused. Having promised Emil to go to the marble works, she was going there, in the face of fancied influences from the past; in the face, too, of the vigorous warning of her own conscience. The coming interview was absolutely necessary that she might, once and for all, make clear to him her position. In this juggling with conscience most women are adept. Rachel played the game so well as to be almost self-deceived. However, as the moment of the meeting drew near, she grew faint and a tide of irrepressible joy mingled with and almost dominated her misery. When she quitted the hospital she was pale with determination, like a soldier before battle, but her eyes, overflowing with light, were the eyes of a woman in love. Her mind was too full of its own matter to allow her to care about anything else. Does not the surge of passion in one's own breast drown the echo of death and despair from another's heart?
She stopped at one of the large shops where delicacies were for sale, and ordered a basket of fruits and jellies sent to John Smith; then, hailing a cab, she drove to the marble works, which lay in the direction of the Bronx on the outskirts of the city.
"Is Mr. St. Ives here?"
The question fell into the silence of an office where Barbieri, the proprietor, was writing at a desk.
"Mr. St. Ives? I will send for him. Julian,"—to a boy, who in the doorway was burying his naked feet in the fine white marble dust like snow,—"Mr. St. Ives,—a lady."
"I have come to see the new machine."
"Ah, the new machine? It is very wonderful; it not only points the marble, but cuts it, following the model; and no man touches it. Never anything like it in this country; in France, yes, there is something of the sort, but not perfect like this one."
"As wonderful as that?"
"Si, si,—yes, madam, wonderful."
"And will you show me how it works? I want to see it in operation."
"In operation? Ah, I regret, but to-day, madam, to-day is Saturday; there is no power, no electricity, you understand, no men."
"Then why did he have me come?" she murmured, and caught her lip between her teeth, a trick with her when angry or perplexed.
"Why did you have me come?" she said, addressing the inventor, who with impetuous strides was advancing to meet her.
He paused in his tracks: "I had forgotten that they closed down."
She scanned him with a swift glance.
"Forgive me," he said in an undertone, "really, I had forgotten, Rachel, if I ever knew it. But you must see the place now you are here.—Mr. Barbieri," he added, "I am going to show Mrs. Hart over the works," and he led the way across a narrow court to an adjoining structure.
The marble shop covered an extensive area, and the white light that fell through its glass roof inundated its farthest corner. In this bath of light, in this silence, unbroken by a single sound; in the midst of casts, dust, artistic litter of all sorts, were the statues. Some scarcely blocked from the rough stone, they rose on all sides. They overtopped the miniature plaster models, like giants overtopping pygmies; they elbowed the grotesque machines that are used for enlarging purposes; they crowded the walls; they occupied every foot of space not reserved for the workmen; some even, with their Titan tread, had passed through the lofty doorway and stood among barrels and rubbish in the garish sunlight of the yard. On every side monoliths of stone were being cut into human shape. There was a torso with the girth of a Colossus; over yonder a hand chiseled from a boulder; beyond that, a monumental figure frowning like a tortured Atlas. All in sections—painful, writhing, some of the statues lacked a head, others an arm or a foot, and others had their limbs still entangled in uncut blocks of stone.
It was like a workshop of surgeons of stone men; like a manufactory of the gods where were created marble monsters that suffered with the age and immobility of stone, in which petty human qualities of Fortitude, Justice, Fidelity were being stamped. Hewn out of the womb of the earth, the marble was tortured here to wear man's face, his form; finally it would be set up under the sun to testify with the might of marble limbs to the ideals that govern his heart.
As she viewed the stone population, no one could have told what was passing in Rachel's stormy little breast, for if there was a spark in her eyes that seemed to indicate subterranean depths of passion, the rest of her features were astonishingly passive. Her gloves hampered her, and with nervous gestures she began taking them off. Tense and silent and acutely vital, she stood beside Emil, an expression of all that is baffling and mysterious in woman.
Conscious of a dryness in his throat, he kept his eyes to the statues.
"They are said to be the largest figures ever cut," he murmured. "They are for the pediment of the new Century Library."
"How still they are!"
"Yes, and one rather expects them to speak and move." Suddenly swinging round, he looked her in the eyes. "Oh, my own!" he cried. With uncertain steps he moved toward her.
And swift and strong between them, Fate drew her thread of love; in that electric net of hers, she caught their souls and drew them close together. She took the pair of them, as a fowler takes a bird.
His savage heart dominated by emotion, Emil trembled with a desire to fall at her feet. But she would not own her capture.
"Stop, Emil!" she cried in a suppressed voice; "stop right where you are! I'll not listen to your words! I came here to tell you—"
He looked upon her intently: "You came because you had to come!"
The speech thrilled with the inspiration of conquest.
"Oh, my love," he cried, "haven't the years we've been separated been dreary enough? Haven't they been empty enough for us both?—For you, on your side, you love me; I know it!"
Instead of answering she drew herself up. But he ignored these signs of rebellion.
"It was a misty day when I first saw you," he pursued, "and yesterday also it was misty and wet, and all at once I understood that I had been carrying the thought of you in my heart from the start. Rachel, you are my heart!" he cried, borne on by the lyric power of his own utterance. "And as I raced after you across that beach, I knew to a certainty it was no one-sided thing. Rachel, that kiss,yourkiss—it was not a childish impulse; and I dare to tell you so. We took possession of each other, love, at the first glance! Can you deny it?Doyou deny it?" compressing her hands. "No, no, you cannot!" he concluded; "and that being true, it is beyond our own power or the power of any creature, to part us now! Oh, sweet!" and his tone changed quickly as he saw that she shook from head to foot, "look around you,—isn't the world beautiful? haven't we a right to happiness?"
Dropping on his knees, he carried her hand to his throbbing breast.
"Happiness?" she repeated, "no, no, not happiness! but peace perhaps, and that comes—it comes—"
He looked up into her face—up at the quivering bend of her lips, up until his eyes found hers, drowned in tears and almost covered by their fluttering lids—and into his glance flashed a subjugating power, an irresistible force.
She attempted to follow the line of her argument, a moment before so clear, but the word "renunciation" died away in a sigh.
She helplessly returned his look.
And the gigantic statues increased her bewilderment; for the one thought that seemed to leap behind the statues' staring eyes, between their huge and rigid lips, in the hollow of their stony breasts, was the naturalness of loving wildly.
Emil dropped his lips on her wrist.
Releasing the hand, she sought to repulse him, but instead, she clutched his hair with a tenderness almost convulsive.
"Oh, you are killing me!" she moaned.
Drawing himself up, he tried to take her in his arms; but with sudden violence, she forced his head downward.
"Oh, you torture me!" she panted.
He grasped her hands;—and once more, before her drowning sight, wavered the statues. In a delirious flash she realized the similarity of their fate. Like them, she was destined to stand forth under an open sky, testifying to a command contrary to nature, but which had been laid upon her kind from time immemorial.
She pushed Emil from her, and pressing her hands to her breast, fled head down from the place.
Instantly he was upon his feet:
"You are not going?" ......
Among the statues, quiet, watchful, the words trembled and died away; then in sympathy the statues seemed to shudder at that cry of agony and surprise.
Cabs were an infrequent phenomenon in that quarter and a crowd of small boys,—eager, dirty, volatile, with thin bare little legs and miserable little elbows, were gathered around the knock-kneed horse that dejectedly hung its head. They were feeding the animal with dusty grass plucked from between the cobblestones of the pavement. But at Rachel's approach they fell away as if pushed away. The driver in his tall hat bent to receive her order. She gave it without looking at him.
Mad, uncalculating love, too long repressed, struggled in her with a vague sense of shame. But at first the sense of shame was shadowy indeed. Carried out of every perception but the throbbing one of her loss of self in Emil, for a time she heard only his words "my own." "Yes, yours, yours always," the blood proclaimed, and the soul's contradiction sounded small and faint. Then, as the voice of conscience grew stronger, she turned her head from side to side in agony. Chaste and fiercely proud, she told herself she was a humiliated woman. But not his the blame. All that had happened she had invited. By her expression she seemed to be saying, "I will not think."
None the less she did think. She went over the scene from which she had just issued, not once, but countless times, and at each repetition she extracted from it the keenest misery, the most poignant bliss. All the mystery and domination of her passion were written on her face and at intervals sighs escaped her, mingled with breathless, half-articulated words:
"Oh,—he loves me—he loves me—and if it weren't for a certain thing we could be happy."
She paused, again borne out of herself by an animating memory. Once more Emil stood before her with his glance, laughing, kindling, melting. Once more he spoke. As she listened to all the mad, foolish, electrifying things that fell from his lips, life seemed to break forth in her in its plentitude. His words were to her panting heart what rain is to the parched earth. She experienced a feeling at once violent and divine.
And she had repulsed him.
The memory left her almost sobbing. She moved her hands; she lifted her face with its tremulous mouth breathing a caress. For uncounted instants she remained suspended in abysses of tenderness. Then she braced herself with resolution.
"No, no," she said aloud. "It's settled."
The dead, expressionless words voiced finality. Thus the will brought the heart temporarily into subjection.
After innumerable involuntary returns to the scene of the marble works she forced herself to give attention to her surroundings. Feverishly she stared about her with breath suspended and lips a little open like a child after a violent fit of weeping.
As the cab rolled forward, with bare tracts, isolated houses and clumps of trees revealing themselves on either side, to her superalert mind, the city appeared a million-eyed, million-footed monster. Excitedly she nourished the grotesque fancy, seeking in it escape from deeper realization. With its great legs of brick and stone, with its numberless eyes of glass, turbid and bleary, its voluminous, impure breath of smoke, its voice of inconceivable uproar, the city was encroaching on the innocent country. It was devouring it field by field; it was swallowing down the sweet cottages which disappeared from the landscape with miraculous swiftness; swallowing the brooks, the woods, glutting itself and growing big at the expense of the fresh country that never could be restored in all its natural beauty. "Yes, yes, God made the country but man makes the city," she whispered.
As the cab rolled on over more crowded pavements, her consciousness of the scene through which she had just passed was dulled briefly, as pain is dulled in a patient suffering with delirium.
"Ah, how useless is all this bustle and confusion!" she thought irritably. "Surely man could live more simply. But he is dedicated to vanity, he must make a splurge. What was that I said to André this morning? Oh yes—about the energy of being. Man must make a show, if not for his Creator's satisfaction at least for his own. The Creator!" she murmured bitterly, "He knows nothing of us! We pine constantly for a liberty fuller than any we have ever known, and that accounts for all our unwearying expenditure of force. Poor pygmies! Persisting deep in the soul of man, is a vague, undefined sense, 'I am the heritor of the infinite.' And so he works," she continued, "he produces marvels and he thinks his immediate achievement embraces his entire object. But it isn't so. And he opens his heart to passions; but his object is the same. For back of the least labour into which he throws himself, back of the most depraved emotion in which he loses himself, is a vast, mysterious, subconscious searching; and that," she declared, "accounts for everything."
She was soaring now above herself, above the terror of her problem. She was viewing the situation as the universal situation and her thoughts were transfigured, rendered impersonal by the clearness of her perception. She saw life no longer with the eyes of an inexperienced and impassioned woman, but with the eyes of one made wise through extremity of anguish.
"It accounts for all the good that we do and for all the evil that we do," she resumed. "Each chooses a road of escape, perhaps many roads, and follows them madly. But," she concluded, "we never find that larger freedom. We are tormented by the feeling of its imminence, but it retreats ever beyond us. And finally we come face to face with the eternal, basic fact of existence:I am a prisoner. That's what we discover. We learn the truth. I learned it that night after the opera.I am the bird in the box!"
For an instant she held her head erect, then shrank, a pained and huddled form, against the cushions of the cab.
"Yes, I have my dream like the others," she whimpered. "But it isn't a dream. Loveisa mode of escape. It is. It is. And it's my road. But do I follow it?"
The answer was a forlorn shake of the head.
"Emil, my Father, Simon, Emily Short, that girl Betty Holden, even Nora Gage; all—all wiser than I. They follow their instincts, creditable or discreditable, they follow them and they glean at least some satisfaction. While I—"
The full tide of her misery, that which she had tried to evade, inundated her.
"Fool, why am I like that?" she muttered, "for some scruple, which God, if he knows, probably laughs at me for respecting. As Emil said, wasn't it God made us capable of love?"
The tears had not come before. Now she checked them with her handkerchief, but constantly they fell, constantly she gave long deep sighs, heartrending, mournful. Presently a flaming, defiant thought stood out against the background of her misery. There was relief in action, even in the action that is called sin.
"Madam would like to have me get her ferry ticket?"
The greasy red face of the driver was peering down upon her; the cab had come to a standstill. She had entirely forgotten why she was there and it was only by an effort that she understood what he was asking.
Once on the ferry boat, she leaned her elbows on the railing and, as she listened to the talk of the water, she grew calmer. For it was strange, wise talk with a laugh under it. The little choppy waves seemed to be telling her that life was short and sweet. Grey and blue and dun colour, pink and rose red, the waves shouted and sang together. And above the roofs of the receding city, wrapped in the mists of evening and the ascending vapour of traffic, the dull and yet flaming disk of the sun hung suspended.
A passenger disturbed her and she shifted her position. Important little tugs towing huge rafts, and the arms of derricks being convoyed over the water, like helpless giants, came into view; and for a time the ferry boat passed into the sheltering shadow of a great bridge. Emerging from one confused and sparkling distance and disappearing into another, the bridge appeared like a tangible bow of promise between the two cities. The sight of the cable cars and the tiny moving mites that, like insects, slowly crawled over it, comforted her like a friendly omen.
But when they gained the other shore and she entered the station, the locomotives, emitting great volumes of smoke, recalled to her mind her grandfather's fanciful description; and she remembered with a pang how she used to behold the world in an innocent and beautiful fashion. But now she saw deeper, now she understood all.
The rest of the trip she ceased to think. She had entered that land known to every unhappy lover, that land in which the misery, longing and fierce passion that consume his heart, constitute the one reality in a universe otherwise cold and dead.
The sight of Annie, arrayed in a freshly-ironed white dress and sitting in the carriage behind Peter, gave Rachel a disagreeable shock.
"Mr. Hart thought very likely you'd come on the Express, and he sent me along for the drive," and Annie moved her starched flounces that Rachel might sit beside her. "Was it hot in the city?"
"Yes, very."
"And did you go to the marble works to see the new machine? Alexander said that he had asked you."
"Yes, I went there; but it was Saturday and they had closed down."
"Oh—then nothing came of your visit?"
Rachel shivered.
"All the same," the other continued, "it's very remarkable, that machine; and the best of it is, though I don't suppose you'll think so, Alexander is entitled to all he makes on it and he's going to make a good deal. You see, it's this way," she explained, "Mr. Watson, Mr. Hart—none of the Company, in fact, took a bit of stock in that marble-cutting scheme when Alexander outlined it for them. They said: 'There's nothing in it; you go ahead with the organ attachment, don't let anything come before that; and work out the marble-cutting machine on the side and you're welcome to all you make on it.' And Alexander worked out the whole thing and even made the big model on three Sundays and the Fourth of July, which came on Monday. Those four days were sufficient, and it's proved a triumph—really a great triumph. But I suppose he's told you. He said he was going to; and I thought it would be all right, for I knew you'd be on Alexander's side and would see that what he's done is perfectly fair."
Rachel nodded. "Perfectly fair," she murmured.
She had been asking herself while they had been driving along, what Annie's mode of escape was. Now she knew. "It's the accumulation of things," she told herself. "Annie thinks if Emil can earn enough money so that they can havethings, she'll be more than she is now."
"If they pay him as much as they promised to, those Italians up there," Annie continued, "I don't see why we shouldn't have a little cottage in the fall on the outskirts of the city somewhere, and Alexander could go in to his work."
"Didn't I say so?" Rachel thought; and she was delighted at her own astuteness.
The carriage lamps were lighted and by the aid of these and the shining of the full moon, she could see her companion distinctly even to the tiny freckles that covered the bridge of her nose. Freckles and all, however, Annie was looking undeniably pretty in a fresh and innocent, if somewhat meaningless, way. Annie's emotions were those of a child, Rachel told herself, trying to lighten her burden of self-reproach and shame.
They arrived at the gate of Gray Arches which was cut through an evergreen hedge and guarded by two large ornamental lamps, that, being rusty and out of order, were never lighted. The carriage rolled over the sand of the avenue, past some large bushes of rhododendron and arrived before the steps of the glass-enclosed porch. Simon hastened out of the house and helped them to alight.
"So you caught the Express all right?" he cried; then added, in an undertone as he took Rachel's arm, "I sent her to meet you, because I knew she'd enjoy the drive. St. Ives is in the city to-day and I asked her to dine with us."
A few moments later Rachel stood at the window of her room.
Below in the garden Annie was standing beside Simon. He had picked up a pebble from the path. "Do you know," she heard him say in the tone he always assumed when communicating information, "I've noticed that a great many of these pebbles are of the amethyst variety."
"It's curious," she thought, approaching the washstand, "what Simon sees in Annie. He can't do enough for her, apparently. She's over here all the time now."
She began drawing off her rings, but the wedding ring resisted and she was obliged to hold the finger under a faucet. Her face assumed a moody, desperate expression. The world had shrunk to the round of her wedding ring.
She plunged her face into the cold water. What should she put on? Emil had called her beautiful. Was it true that she was beautiful? She put on a light dress trimmed with insertions of real lace, a dress much too elaborate for the occasion, and went downstairs.
In the dining room the party was awaiting her, and Simon had lit the wax candles in the large candelabra in honour of Annie's presence. In the shifting radiance which is a peculiarity of candle light, Rachel's beauty shone forth triumphantly. Annie in her freshly-starched frock, with her smooth blond little head and her unimaginative glance, looked like a daisy of the kind that grows by the thousand in the fields, beside some rare flower that had opened its petals to their extreme limit. There was no mystery in Annie; but Rachel was all mystery, all passion, all fire. Something unusual escaped from the glances she lifted, and from those she half-concealed. Shadows teased the corners of her mouth and sank into the slight hollow at the base of her throat. Light bathed her brow. Something that was at once the "joy of her soul" and the grief of her soul trembled from between her parted lips.
André could not take his eyes from her; and, as he looked, an immeasurable anguish mingled with his delight.
"I must catch the train in the morning, Rachel," Simon remarked as they rose from the table, "a note from Theresa says Father is ailing. Nothing serious, I infer, but I shall spend the day in town to-morrow, lunch with him, and then I shall know all I wish. Watch a man when he's taking his food and you can judge fairly of his condition."