"I tried to keep them from sending for you, Christopher," the young man explained. "It is no business of yours—that is what I said."
"Well, it seems that every thriftless nigger in the county thinks he's got a claim upon you, sho' enough," put in Tom Spade. "It warn't mo'n last week that I had a letter from the grandson of yo' pa's old blacksmith Buck, sayin' he was to hang in Philadelphia for somebody's murder, an' that I must tell Marse Christopher to come an' git him off. Thar's a good six hunnard of 'em, black an' yaller an' it's God A'mighty or Marse Christopher to 'em every one."
"What is it now?" asked Christopher a little wearily, taking off his hat and running his hand through his thick, fair hair. "If anybody's been stealing chickens they've got to take the consequences."
"Oh, it's not chicken stealin' this time; it's a blamed sight worse. They want you to send somebody over to Uncle Isam's—you remember his little cabin, five miles off in Alorse's woods—to help him bury his children who have died of smallpox. There are four of 'em dead, it seems, an' the rest are all down with the disease. Thar's not a morsel of food in the house, an' not a livin' nigger will go nigh 'em."
"Uncle Isam!" repeated Christopher, as if trying to recall the name. "Why, I haven't laid eyes upon the man for years."
"Very likely; but he's sent you a message by a boy who was gathering pine knots at the foot of his hill. He was to tell Marse Christopher that he had had nothing to eat for two whole days an' his children were unburied. Then the boy got scared an' scampered off, an' that was all."
Christopher's laugh sounded rather brutal.
"So he used to belong to us, did he?" he inquired.
"He was yo' pa's own coachman. I recollect him plain as day," answered Tom. "I warn't 'mo'n a child then, an' he used to flick his whip at my bare legs whenever he passed me in the road."
"Well, what is to be done?" asked Christopher, turning suddenly upon him.
"The Lord He knows, suh. Thar's not a nigger as will go nigh him, an' I'm not blamin' 'em; not I. Jim's filled his cart with food, an' he's goin' to dump the things out at the foot of the hill; then maybe Uncle Isam can crawl down an' drag 'em back. His wife's down with it, too, they say. She was workin' here not mo'n six months ago, but she left her place of a sudden an' went back again."
Christopher glanced carelessly at the little cart waiting in the road, and then throwing off his coat tossed it on the seat.
"I'll trouble you to lend me your overalls, Tom," he said, "and you can send a boy up to the house and get mine in exchange. Put what medicines you have in the cart; I'll take them over to the old fool."
"Good Lord!" said Tom, and mechanically got out of his blue jean clothes.
"Now don't be a downright ass, Christopher," put in Jim Weatherby. "You've got your mother on your hands, you know, and what under heaven have you to do with Uncle Isam? I knew some foolishness would most likely come of it if they sent up for you."
"Oh, he used to belong to us, you see," explained Christopher carelessly.
"And he's been an ungrateful, thriftless free Negro for nearly thirty years—"
"That's just it—for not quite thirty years. Look here, if you'll drive me over in the cart and leave the things at the foot of the hill I'll be obliged to you. I'll probably have to stay out a couple of weeks—until there's no danger of my bringing back the disease—so I'll wear Tom's overalls and leave my clothes somewhere in the woods. Oh, I'll take care, of course; I'm no fool."
"You're surer of that than I am," returned Jim, thinking of Lila."I can't help feeling that there's some truth in father's sayingthat a man can't be a hero without being a bit of a fool as well.For God's sake, don't, Christopher. You have no right—"
"No, I have no right," repeated Christopher, as he got into the cart and took up the hanging reins. A sudden animation had leaped into his face and his eyes were shining. It was the old love of a "risk for the sake of the risk" which to Tucker had always seemed to lack the moral elements of true courage, and the careless gaiety with which he spoke robbed the situation of its underlying somber horror.
Jim swung himself angrily upon the seat and touched the horse lightly with the whip. "And there's your mother sitting at home—and Cynthia—and Lila," he said.
Christopher turned on him a face in whose expression he found a mystery that he could not solve.
"I can't help it, Jim, to save my life I can't," he answered. "It isn't anything heroic; you know that as well as I. I don't care a straw for Uncle Isam and his children, but if I didn't go up there and bury those dead darkies I'd never have a moment's peace. I've been everything but a skulking coward, and I can't turn out to be that at the end. It's the way I'm made."
"Well, I dare say we're made different," responded Jim rather dryly, for it was his wedding day and he was going farther from his bride. "But for my part, I can't help thinking of that poor blind old lady, and how helpless they all are. Yes, we're made different. I reckon that's what it means."
The cart jogged on slowly through the fading sunshine, and when at last it came to the foot of the hill where Uncle Isam lived Christopher got out and shouldered a bag of meal.
"You'll run the place, I know, and look after mother while I'm away," he said.
"Oh, I suppose I'll have to," returned Jim; and then his ill- humour vanished and he smiled and held out his hand. "Good-by, old man. God bless you," he said heartily.
Sitting there in the road, he watched Christopher pass out of sight under the green leaves, stooping slightly beneath the bag of meal and whistling a merry scrap of an old song. At the instant it came to Jim with the force of a blow that this was the first cheerful sound he had heard from him for weeks; and, still pondering, he turned the horse's head and drove slowly home to his own happiness.
When, two weeks later, Christopher reached home again, he was met by Tucker's gentle banter and Lila's look of passionate reproach.
"Oh, dear, you might have died!" breathed the girl with a shudder.
Christopher laughed.
"So might Uncle Tucker when he went into the war," was his retort. He was a little thinner, a little graver, and the sunburn upon his face had faded to a paler shade. After the short absence his powerful figure struck them as almost gigantic; physically, he had never appeared more impressive than he did standing there in the sunlight that filled the kitchen doorway.
"But that was different," protested Lila, flushing, "and this- this—why, you hardly knew Uncle Isam when you passed him in the road."
"And half the time forgot to speak to him," added Tucker, laughing. His eyes were on the young man's figure, and they grew a little wistful, as they always did in the presence of perfect masculine strength. "Well, I'm glad your search for adventures didn't end in disaster," he added pleasantly.
To Christopher's surprise, Cynthia was the single member of the family who showed a sympathy with his reckless knight errantry. "There was nothing else for you to do, of course," she said in a resolute voice, lifting her worn face where the lines had deepened in his absence; "he used to be father's coachman before the war."
She had gone from the kitchen as she spoke, and Christopher, following her, threw an anxious glance along the little platform to the closed door of the house.
"And mother, Cynthia?" he asked quickly.
"Her mind still wanders, but at times she seems to come back to herself for a little while, and only this morning she awoke from a nap and asked for you quite clearly. We told her you had gone hunting."
"May I see her now? Who is with her?"
"Jim. He has been so good."
The admission was wrung shortly from her rigid honesty, and there was no visible softening of her grim reserve, when, entering the house with Christopher, she found herself presently beside Jim Weatherby, who was chatting merrily in Mrs. Blake's room.
The old lady, shrivelled and faded as the dried goldenrod which filled the great jars on the hearth, lay half hidden among the pillows in her high white bed, her vacant eyes fixed upon the sunshine which fell through the little window. At Christopher's step her memory flickered back for an instant, and the change showed in the sudden animation of her glance.
"I was dreaming of your father, my son, and you have his voice."
"I am like him in other ways, I hope, mother."
"If I could only see you, Christopher—it is so hard to remember. You had golden curls and wore a white pinafore. I trimmed it with the embroidery from my last set of petticoats. And your hands were dimpled all over; you would suck your thumb: there was no breaking you, though I wrapped it in a rag soaked in quinine—"
"That was almost thirty years ago, mother," broke in Cynthia, catching her breath sharply. "He is a man now, and big—oh, so big—and his hair has grown a little darker."
"I know, Cynthia; I know," returned Mrs. Blake, with a peevish movement of her thin hand, "but you won't let me remember. I am trying to remember." She fell to whimpering like a hurt child, and then growing suddenly quiet, reached out until she touched Christopher's head. "You're a man, I know," she said, "older than your father was when his first child was born. There have been two crosses in my life, Christopher—my blindness and my never having heard the voices of my grandchildren playing in the house. Such a roomy old house, too, with so much space for them to fill with cheerful noise. I always liked noise, you know; it tells of life, and never disturbs me so long as it is pleasant. What I hate is the empty silence that reminds one of the grave."
She was quite herself now, and, bending over, he kissed the hand upon the counterpane.
"Oh, mother, mother, if I could only have made you happy!"
"And you couldn't, Christopher?"
"I couldn't marry, dear; I couldn't."
"There was no one, you mean—no woman whom you could have loved and who would have given you children. Surely there are still good and gentle women left in the world."
"There was none for me."
She sighed hopelessly.
"You have never—never had a low fancy, Christopher?"
"Never, mother."
"Thank God; it is one thing I could not forgive. A gentleman may have his follies, your father used to say, but he must never stoop for them. Let him keep to his own level, even in his indiscretions. Ah, your father had his faults, my son, but he never forgot for one instant in his life that he was born a gentleman. He was a good husband, too, a good husband, and I was married to him for nearly forty years. The greatest trial of my marriage was that he would throw his cigar ashes on the floor. Women think so much of little things, you know, and I've always felt that I should have been a happier woman if he had learned to use an ash-tray. But he never would—he never would, though I gave him one every Christmas for almost forty years."
Falling silent, her hands played fitfully upon the counterpane, and when next she spoke the present had slipped from her and her thoughts had gone back to her early triumphs.
She wandered aimlessly and waveringly on in a feeble vacancy, and Christopher, after watching her for an agonised moment, left the room and went out into the fresh air of the yard. He could always escape by flight from the slow death-bed; it was Cynthia who faced hourly the final tragedy of a long and happy life.
The thought of Will had oppressed him like a nightmare for the last two weeks, and it was almost unconsciously that he tuned now in the direction of the store and passed presently into the shaded lane leading to Sol Peterkin's. His mood was heavy upon him, and so deep was the abstraction in which he walked that it was only when he heard his name called softly from a little distance that he looked up to find Maria Fletcher approaching him over the pale gray shadows in the road. Her eyes were luminous, and she stretched her hand toward him in a happy gesture.
"Oh, if you only knew how wonderful I think you!" she cried impulsively.
He held her hand an instant, and then letting it fall, withdrew his gaze slowly from her exalted look. The pure heights of her fervour were beyond the reach of his more earthly level, and as he turned from her some old words of her own were respoken in his ears: "Faith and doubt are mere empty forms until we pour out the heart's blood that vivifies them." It was her heart's blood that she had put into her dreams, and it was this, he told himself, that gave her mystic visions their illusive appearance of reality. Beauty enveloped her as an atmosphere; it softened her sternest sacrifice, it coloured her barest outlook, it transformed daily the common road in which she walked, and hourly it sustained and nourished her, as it nourished poor, crippled Tucker on his old pine bench. The eye of the spirit was theirs—this Christopher had learned at last; and he had learned, also, that for him there still remained only the weak, blurred vision of the flesh.
"You make me feel the veriest hypocrite," he said at the end of the long pause.
She shook her head. "And that you are surely not."
"So you still believe in me?"
"It's not belief—I KNOW in you."
"Well, don't praise me; don't admire me; don't pretend, for God's sake, that I'm anything better than the brute you see."
"I don't pretend anything better," she protested; "and when you talk like this it only makes me feel the more keenly your wonderful courage."
"I haven't any," he burst out almost angrily. "Not an atom, do you hear? Whatever I may appear on top, at bottom I am a great skulking coward, and nothing more. Why, I couldn't even stay and take my punishment the other day. I sneaked off like a hound."
"Your punishment?" she faltered, and he saw her lashes tremble.
"For the other day—for the afternoon by the poplar spring. I've been wanting to beg your pardon on my knees."
Her lashes were raised steadily, and she regarded him gravely while a slight frown gathered her dark brows. She was still humanly feminine enough to find the apology harder to forgive than the offense.
"Oh, I had forgotten," she said a little coldly. "So that was, after all, why you ran away?"
"It was not the only reason."
"And the other?"
He closed his eyes suddenly and drew back.
"I ran away because I knew if I stayed I should do it again within two seconds," he replied.
A little blue flower was growing in the red clay wheel-rut at her feet, and, stooping, she caressed it gently without plucking it.
"It was very foolish," she said in a quiet voice; "but I had forgotten it, and you should have let it rest. Afterward, you did such a brave, splendid thing."
"I did nothing but run from you," he persisted, losing his head. "If I hadn't gone to Uncle Isam I'd have done something equally reckless in a different way. I wanted to get away from you—to escape you, but I couldn't—I couldn't. You were with me always, night and day, in those God-forsaken woods. I never lost you for one instant, never. I tried to, but I couldn't."
"You couldn't," she repeated, and, rising, faced him calmly. Then before the look in his eyes her own wavered and fell slowly to the ground, and he saw her quiver and grow white as if a rough wind blew over her. With an effort he steadied himself and turned away.
"There is but one thing to do," he said, holding his breath in the pause; "it's a long story, but if you will listen patiently—and it is very long—I will tell you all." Following him, she crossed the carpet of pine needles and sat down upon the end of a fallen log.
"Tell me nothing that you do not care to," she answered, and sat waiting.
"It began long ago, when we were both little children," he went on, and then going back from her into the lane he stood staring down upon the little blue flower blooming in the wheel-rut. She saw his shadow, stretching across the road, blurred into the pale dusk of the wood, uncertain, somber, gigantic in its outline. His hat was lying on the ground at her feet, and, lifting it, she ran her fingers idly along the brim.
For a time the silence lasted; then coming back to her, he sat down on the log and dropped his clasped hands between his knees. She heard his heavy breathing, and something in the sound drew her toward him with a sympathetic movement.
"Ah, don't tell me, don't tell me," she entreated.
"You must listen patiently," he returned, without looking at her, "and not interrupt—above all, not interrupt."
She bent her head. "I will not speak a word nor move a finger until the end," she promised; and leaning a little forward, with his eyes on the ground and his hands hanging listlessly between his knees, he began his story.
The air was so still that his voice sounded strangely harsh in the silence, but presently she heard the soughing of the pine trees far up above, and while it lasted it deadened the jarring discord of the human tones. She sat quite motionless upon the log, not lifting a finger nor speaking a word, as she had promised, and her gaze was fixed steadily upon a bit of dried fern growing between the roots of a dead tree.
"It went on so for five years," he slowly finished, "and it was from beginning to end deliberate, devilish revenge. I meant from the first to make him what he is to-day. I meant to make him hate his grandfather as he does—I meant to make him the hopeless drunkard that he is. It is all my work—every bit of it—as you see it now."
He paused, but her eyes clung to the withered fern, and so quiet was her figure that it seemed as if she had not drawn breath since he began. Her faint smile was still sketched about the corners of her mouth, and her fingers were closed upon the brim of his harvest hat.
"For five years I was like that," he went on again. "I did not know, I did not care—I wanted to be a beast. Then you came and it was different."
For the first time she turned and looked at him.
"And it was different?" she repeated beneath her breath.
"Oh, there's nothing to say that will make things better; I know that. If you had not come I should never have known myself nor what I had been. It was like a thunderclap—the whole thing; it shook me off my feet before I saw what it meant—before I would acknowledge even to myself that—"
"That?" she questioned in a whisper, for he had bitten back the words.
"That I love you."
As he spoke she slipped suddenly to her knees and lay with her face hidden on the old log, while her smothered sobs ran in long shudders through her body. A murmur reached him presently, and it seemed to him that she was praying softly in her clasped hands; but when in a new horror of himself he made a movement to rise and slip away, she looked up and gently touched him detainingly on the arm.
"Oh, how unhappy—how unhappy you have been!" she said.
"It is not that I mind," he answered. "If I could take all the misery of it I shouldn't care, but I have made you suffer, and for the sin that is mine alone."
For a moment she was silent, breathing quickly between parted lips; then turning with an impulsive gesture, she laid her cheek upon the hand hanging at his side.
"Not yours alone," she said softly, "for it has become mine, too."
Before the wonder of her words he stared at her with dazed eyes, while their meaning shook him slowly to his senses.
"Maria!" he called out sharply in the voice of one who speaks from a distance.
She met his appeal with a swift outward movement of her arms, and, bending over, laid her hands gently upon his head.
"Mine, too, Christopher—mine, too," she repeated, "for I take the blame of it, and I will share in the atonement. My dear, my dear, is love so slight a thing that it would share the joy and leave the sorrow—that it would take the good and reject the evil? Why, it is all mine! All! All! What you have been I was also; what I am to-day you will be. I have been yours since the first instant you looked upon me."
With a sob he caught her hands and crushed them in his own.
"Then this is love, Maria?"
"It has been love—always."
"From the first—as with me?"
"As with you. Beloved, there is not a wrong on this earth that could come between us now, for there is no room in my heart where it might enter. There can be no sin against love which love does not acknowledge."
Falling apart, their hands dropped before them, and they stood looking at each other in a silence that went deeper than words. She felt his gaze enveloping her in warmth from head to foot, but he still made no movement to draw nearer, for there are moments when the touch of the flesh grows meaningless before the mute appeal of the spirit. In that one speechless instant there passed between them the pledges and the explanations of years.
Suddenly the light flamed in his face, and opening his arms, he made a single step toward her; but melting into tears, she turned from him and ran out into the road.
Blinded by tears, she went swiftly back along the road into the shadows which thickened beyond the first short bend. Will must be saved at any cost, by any sacrifice, she told herself with passionate insistence. He must be saved though she gave up her whole life to the work of his redemption, though she must stand daily and hourly guard against his weakness. He must be saved, not for his own sake alone, but because it was the one way in which she might work out Christopher's salvation. As she went on, scheme after scheme beckoned and repelled her; plan after plan was caught at only to be rejected, and it was at last with a sinking heart, though still full of high resolves, that she turned from the lane into a strip of "corduroy road," and so came quickly to the barren little farm adjoining Sol Peterkin's.
Will was sitting idly on an overturned wheelbarrow beside the woodpile, and as she approached him she assumed with an effort a face of cheerful courage.
"Oh, Will, I thought you'd gone to work. You promised me!"
"Well, I haven't, and there's an end of it," he returned irritably, chewing hard on a chip he had picked up from the ground; "and what's more, I shan't go till I see the use. It's killing me by inches. I tell you I'm not strong enough to stand a life like this. Drudge, drudge, drudge; there's nothing else except the little spirit I get from drink."
"And that ruins you. Oh, don't, don't. I'll go on my knees to you; I'll work for you like a servant day and night; I'll sell my very clothes to help you, if you'll only promise me never to drink again."
"You a servant!" said Will, and laughed shortly while he looked her over with raised eyebrows. "Why, your stockings would keep me in cigarettes for a week."
A flush crossed Maria's face, and she glanced down guiltily, letting her black skirt fall above the lace upon her petticoat. "I have bought nothing since coming home," she responded presently with quiet dignity; "these belong, with my old luxuries, to a past life. There were a great many of them, and it will fortunately take me a long time to wear them out."
"Oh, I don't begrudge them," returned Will; a little ashamed of his show of temper; "fine clothes suit you, and I hope you will squeeze them out of grandpa all you can. It's as good a way for him to spend his money as any other, and it doesn't hurt me so long as he'll never let me see the colour of a cent."
"But your promise, dear? Will you promise me?"
He lifted his sullen face toward her kind eyes, then turning away, kicked listlessly at the rotting chips.
"What's the use in promising? I wouldn't keep it," he replied. "Why, there are times when but for whisky I'd go mad. It's the life, I tell you, that's killing me, not drink. If things were different I shouldn't crave it—I shouldn't miss it, even. Why, for three months after I married Molly I didn't touch a single drop, and I'd have kept it up, too, except for grandpa's devilment. It's his fault; he drove me back to it as clear as day."
His weak mouth quivered, and he sucked in his breath in the way he had inherited from Fletcher. The deep flush across his face faded slowly, and dropping his restless, bloodshot eyes, he dug his foot into the mould with spasmodic twitches of his body. His clothes appeared to have been flung upon him, and his cravat and loosened collar betrayed the lack of neatness which had always repelled Maria so strongly in her grandfather. As she watched him she wondered with a pang that she had never noticed until to-day the resemblance he bore to the old man at the Hall.
"But one must be patient, Will," she said helplessly after a moment's thought; "there's always hope of a mending—and as far as that goes, grandfather may relent tomorrow."
"Relent? Pshaw! I'd like to see him do it this side of hell. Let him die; that's all I ask of him. His room is a long sight better than his company, and you may tell him I said so."
"What good would come of that?"
"I don't want any good to come of it. Why should I? He's brought me to this pass with his own hand."
"But surely it was partly your fault. He loved you once."
"Nonsense. He wanted a dog to badger, that was all. ChristopherBlake said so."
"Christopher Blake! Oh, Will, Will, if you could only understand!"
She turned hopelessly away from him and looked with despairing eyes over the ploughed fields which blushed faintly in the sunshine.
"So your spring ploughing is all done," she said at last, desisting from her attempt to soften his sullen obduracy, "and you have been working harder than I knew."
"Oh, it's not I," returned Will promptly, his face clearing for the first time. "It's all Christopher's work; he ploughed that field just before he went away. Do you see that new cover over the well? He knocked that up the last morning he was here, and made those steps before the front door at the same time. Now, he's the kind of friend worth having, and no mistake. But for him I'd have landed in the poorhouse long ago."
Maria's gaze left the field and returned to Will's face, where it lingered wistfully.
"Have you ever heard what it was all about, Will?" she asked, "the old trouble between him and grandfather?"
"Some silly property right, I believe; I can't remember. Did you ever see anybody yet with whom grandpa was on decent terms?"
"He used to be with you, Will."
"Only so long as I wore short breeches and he could whack me over the head whenever he had a mind to. I tell you I'd rather try to get along with Beelzebub himself."
"Have you ever tried peace-making in earnest, I wonder?"
Twirling a chip between his thumb and forefinger, he flirted it angrily at a solitary hen scratching in the mould.
"Why, shortly after my marriage I went over there and positively wiped up the floor with myself. I offered him everything under heaven in the shape of good behaviour, and, by Jove! I meant it, too. I'd have stopped drinking then; I'd even have given up Christopher Blake—"
"Did you tell him that?"
"Did I ever tell a thunderstorm I'd run indoors? It was enough to get away with a whole skin—he left me little more. And the day afterward, by the way, he sent me the deeds to this rotten farm, and warned me that he'd shoot me down if I ever set foot at the Hall."
"And there has been no softening—no wavering since?"
Will shook his head with a brutal laugh. "Oh, you heard of our meeting in the road and what came of it. I told him I was starving: he answered that he wasn't responsible for all the worthless paupers in the county. Then I cursed him, and he broke his stick on my shoulders. I say, Maria," he wound up desperately, "do you think he'll live forever?"
She kept her eyes upon him without answering, fearing to tell him that by the terms of the new will he could never come into his share of Fletcher's wealth.
"Has he ever seen Molly?" she asked suddenly, while an unreasonable hope shot through her heart. "Does he know about the child?"
"He may have seen her—I don't know; but she's not so much to look at now: she's gone all to pieces under this awful worry. It isn't my fault, God knows, but she expected different things when she married me. She thought we'd live somewhere in the city and that she'd have pretty clothes to wear."
"I was thinking that when the child came he might forgive you," broke in Maria almost cheerfully.
"And in the meantime we're to die like rats. Oh, there's no use talking, it's got to end one way or another. There's not a cent in the house nor a decent scrap of food, and Molly is having to see the doctor every day. I declare, it's enough to drive me clean to desperation!"
"And what good would that do Molly or yourself? Be a man, Will, and don't let a woman hear you whine. Now I'm going in to see her, and I'll stay to help her about supper."
She nodded brightly, and, opening the little door of the house, passed into the single lower room which served as kitchen and dining-room in one. Beyond the disorderly table, from which the remains of dinner had not yet been cleared away, Molly was lying on a hard wooden lounge covered with strips of faded calico. Her abundant flaxen hair hung in lusterless masses upon her shoulders, and the soiled cotton wrapper she wore was torn open at the throat as if she had clutched it in a passion of childish petulance. At Maria's entrance she started and looked up angrily from her dejected attitude.
"I can't see any visitors—I'm not fit!" she cried.
Marie drew forward a broken split—bottomed chair and sat down beside the lounge.
"I'm not a visitor, Molly," she answered; "and I've come to see if I can't make you a little easier. Won't you let me fix you comfortably? Why, you poor child, your hands are as hot as fire!"
"I'm hot all over," returned Molly peevishly; "and I'm sick—I'm as sick as I can be. Will won't believe it, but the doctor says so."
"Will does believe it, and it worries him terribly. Here, sit up and let me bathe your face and hands in cold water. Doesn't that feel better?"
"A little," admitted Molly, when Maria had found a towel and dried her hands.
"And now I'm going to comb the tangles out of your hair. What lovely hair! It is the colour of ripe corn."
A pleased flush brightened Molly's face, and she resigned herself easily to Maria's willing services. "There's a comb over there on that shelf under the mirror," she said. "Will broke half the teeth out of it the other day, and it pulls my hair out when I use it."
"Then I'll bring you one of mine. You must be careful of these curls. They're too pretty to treat roughly. Do I hurt you?"
As she spoke, a bright strand of the girl's hair twisted about one of her rings, and after hesitating an instant she drew the circle from her finger and laid it in Molly's lap.
"There. I haven't any money, so that's to buy you medicine and food," she said. "It cost a good deal once, I fancy."
"Diamonds!" gasped Molly, with a cry of rapture.
Her hand closed over the ring with a frantic clutch; then slipping it on, she lay watching the stone sparkle in the last sunbeams. A colour had bloomed suddenly in her face, and her eyes shone with a light as brilliant as that of the jewel at which she gazed.
"And you had—others?" she asked in a kind of sacred awe.
"A great many once—a necklace, and rings, and brooches, and a silly tiara that made me look a fright. I never cared for them after the novelty of owning them wore off. They are evil things, it seems to me, and should never be the gifts of love, for each one of those foolish stones stands for greed, and pride, and selfishness, and maybe crime. That was my way of looking at them, of course, and whenever I wore my necklace I used to feel like asking pardon of every beggar that I passed. 'One link in this chain might make a man of you,' was what I wanted to say—but I never did. Well, they are almost all gone now; some I sold and some I gave away. This one will buy you medicine, I hope, and then it will give me more happiness than it has ever done before."
"Oh, it is beautiful, beautiful," sighed Molly beneath her breath, and then went to the little cracked mirror in the corner and held the diamond first to her ear and then against her hair. "They suit me," she said at last, opening the bosom of her wrapper and trying it on her pretty throat; "they would make me look so splendid. Oh, if I'd only had a lover who could give me things like this!"
Maria, watching her, felt her heart contract suddenly with a pang of remembrance. Jewels had been the one thing which Jack Wyndham had given her, for of the finer gifts of the spirit he had been beggared long before she knew him. In the first months of his infatuation he had showered her with diamonds, and she had grown presently to see a winking mockery in each bauble that he tossed her. Before the first year was ended she had felt her pride broken by the oppressiveness of the jewels that bedecked her body, like the mystic princess who was killed at last by the material weight of the golden crown upon her brow.
"They could never make you happy, Molly. How could they? Come back and lie down, and let me put the ring away. Perhaps I'd better take it to town myself." But Molly would not open her closed hand on which the diamond shone; and long after Maria had cooked supper and gone back to the Hall the girl lay motionless, holding the ring against the light. When Will came in from milking she showed it to him with a burst of joy.
"Look! Oh, look! Isn't it like the sun?"
He eyed it critically.
"By Jove! It must have cost cool hundreds! I'll take it to town to-morrow and bring back the things you need. It will get the baby clothes, too, so you won't have to bother about the sewing."
"You shan't! You shan't!" cried Molly in a passion of sobs. "It's mine. She gave it to me, and you shan't take it away. I don't want the medicine: it never does me any good; and I can make the baby clothes out of my old things. I'll never, never give it up!"
For an instant Will stared at her as if she had lost her senses.
"Well, she was a fool to let you get it," he said, as he flung himself out of the room.
Before the beauty of Maria's high magnanimity Christopher had felt himself thrust further into the abasement of his self-contempt. Had she met his confession with reproach, with righteous aversion, with the horror he had half expected, it is possible that his heart might have recoiled into a last expression of defiance. But there had been none of these things. In his memory her face shone moonlike from its cloud of dark hair, and he saw upon it only the look of a great and sorrowful passion. His wretchedness had drawn her closer, not put her further away, and he had felt the quiet of her tolerance not less gratefully than he had felt the fervour of her love. Her forgiveness had been of the grandeur of her own nature, and its height and breadth had appealed, even apart from her emotion, to a mind that was accustomed to dwell daily on long reaches of unbroken space. He had been bred on large things from his birth—large horizons, large stretches of field and sky, large impulses, and large powers of hating, and he found now that a woman's presence filled to overflowing the empty vastness of his moods.
Reaching the yard, he saw Tucker sitting placidly on his bench, and, crossing the long grass, he flung himself down beside him with a sigh of pleasure in the beauty of the scene.
"You're right, Uncle Tucker; it's all wonderful. I never saw such a sunset in my life."
"Ah, but you haven't seen it yet," said Tucker. "I've been looking at it since it first caught that pile of clouds, and it grows more splendid every instant. I'm not an overreligious body, I reckon, and I've always held that the best compliment you can pay God Almighty is to let Him go His own gait and quit advising Him; but, I declare, as I sat here just now I couldn't help being impertinent enough to pray that I might live to see another."
"Well, it's a first-rate one; that's so. It seems to shake a body out of the muck, somehow."
"I shouldn't wonder if it did; and that's what I told two young fools who were up here just now asking me to patch up their first married quarrel. 'For heaven's sake, stop playing with mud and sit down and watch that sunset,' I said to 'em, and if you'll believe it, the girl actually dropped her jaws and replied she had to hurry back to shell her beans while the light lasted. Beans! Why, they'll make beans enough of their marriage, and so I told 'em."
Tapping his crutch gently on the ground, he paused and sat smiling broadly at the sunset.
For a time Christopher watched with him while the gold- and-crimson glory flamed beyond the twisted boughs of the old pine; then, turning his troubled face on Tucker's cheerful one, he asked deliberately:
"Do you sometimes regret that you never married, Uncle Tucker?"
"Regret?" repeated Tucker softly. "Why, no. I haven't time for it—there's too much else to think about. Regret is a dangerous thing, my boy; you let a little one no bigger than a mustard seed into your heart, and before you know it you've hatched out a whole brood. Why, if I began to regret that, heaven knows where I should stop. I'd regret my leg and arm next, the pictures I might have painted, and the four years' war which we might have won. No, no. I'd change nothing, I tell you—not a day; not an hour; not a single sin nor a single virtue. They're all woven into the pattern of the whole, and I reckon the Lord knew the figure He had in mind."
"Well, I'd like to pull a thread or two out of it," returned Christopher moodily, squinting his eyes at the approaching form of Susan Spade, who came from the afterglow through the whitewashed gate. "Why, what's bringing her, I wonder?" he asked with evident displeasure.
To this inquiry Susan herself presently made answer as she walked with her determined tread across the little yard.
"I've a bit of news for you, Mr. Christopher, an' I reckon you'd ruther have it from my mouth than from Bill Fletcher's. His back's up agin, the Lord knows why, an' he's gone an' moved his pasture fence so as to take in yo' old field that lies beside it. He swars it's his, too, but Tom's ready to match him with a bigger oath that it's yours an' always has been."
"Of course it's mine," said Christopher coolly. "The meadow brook marks the boundary, and the field is on this side. I can prove it by Tom or Jacob Weatherby tomorrow."
"Well, he's took it " rejoined Mrs. Spade flatly.
"He won't keep it long, I reckon, ma'am," said Tucker, in his pleasant manner; "and I must say it seems to me that Bill Fletcher is straining at a gnat. Why, he has near two thousand acres, hasn't he? And what under heaven does he want with that old field the sheep have nibbled bare? There's no sense in it."
"It ain't sense, it's nature," returned Mrs. Spade, sitting squarely down on the bench from which Christopher had risen; "an' that's what I've had ag'in men folks from the start—thar's too much natur in 'em. You kin skeer it out of a woman, an' you kin beat it out of a dog, an' thar're times when you kin even spank it out of a baby, but if you oust it from a man thar ain't nothin' but skin an' bones left behind. An' natur's a ticklish thing to handle without gloves, bless yo' soul, suh. It's like a hive of bees: you give it a little poke to start it, an' the first thing you know it's swarmin' all over both yo' hands. It's a skeery thing, suh, an' Bill Fletcher's got his share of it, sho's you're born."
"It has its way with him pretty thoroughly, I think," responded Tucker, chuckling; "but if I were you, Christopher, I'd stick up for my rights in that old field. Bill Fletcher may need exercise, but there's no reason he should get it by trampling over you."
"Oh, I'll throw his fence down, never fear," answered Christopher indifferently. "He knew it, I dare say, when he put it up."
"It's a fuss he wants, suh, an' nothing else," declared Mrs. Spade, smoothing down the starched fold of her gingham apron; "an' if he doesn't git it, po' creetur, he's goin' to be laid up in bed befo' the week is out. He's bilin' hot inside, I can see that in his face, an' if the steam don't work out one way it will another. When a man ain't got a wife or child to nag at he's mighty sho' to turn right round an' begin naggin' at his neighbours, an' that's why it's the bounden duty of every decent woman to marry an' save the peace. Why, if Tom hadn't had me to worry on, I reckon he'd be the biggest blusterer in this county or the next."
Leaving her still talking, Christopher went from her into the house, where he lingered an instant with drawn breath before his mother's door. The old lady was sleeping tranquilly, and, treading softly in his heavy boots, he passed out to the friendly faces of the horses and the cool dusk of the stable.
As the days went on, drawing gradually toward summer, Mrs. Blake's life began peacefully to flicker out, like a candle that has burned into the socket. There were hours when her mind was quite clear, and at such times she would talk unceasingly in her old sprightly fashion, with her animated gestures and her arch and fascinating smile. But following these sanguine periods there would come whole days when she lay unconscious and barely taking breath, while her features grew sharp and wan under the pallid skin.
It was when she had just passed through one of these states that Lila came out on a Sunday afternoon to find Christopher at the woodpile, and told him, with a burst of tears, that she thought the end had come.
"She's quite herself and wants us all," she said, sobbing. "And she's even asked for the house servants, every one—for Phyllis, and Tobias, and so many of them who have been away for years. It's just as if she knew that she was dying and wanted to say good-by."
Throwing the axe hurriedly aside, Christopher followed her into the house, and then entering the old lady's room, stopped short beside the threshold in a grief that was not unmixed with wonder.
The sunshine fell straight through the window on the high white pillows, and among them Mrs. Blake was sitting rigidly, her blind eyes sparkling with the last fitful return of her intelligence. She was speaking, as he entered, in a natural and lively tone, which brought back to him his earliest memories of her engaging brightness.
"Are the servants all there, Cynthia? Then let them come and stand inside the door—a few at a time."
"They are here, mother," replied Cynthia, choking; and Christopher, glancing round, saw several decrepit Negroes leaning against the wall—Uncle Boaz, Docia (pressing her weak heart), and blear-eyed Aunt Polly, already in her dotage.
"I wish to tell you good-by while my mind is clear," pursued the old lady in her high, sweet voice. "You have been good servants to me for a long time, and I hope you will live many years to serve my children as faithfully. Always remember, Christopher—is Christopher there?"
"I am here, dear mother."
"Always remember that a man's first duty is to his wife and children, and his second to his slaves. The Lord has placed them in your hands, and you must answer to Him how you fulfill the trust. And now, Boaz—where is Boaz?"
"I'm yer, ole miss; I'm right yer."
"You may shake my hand, Boaz, for it is a long good-by. I've always promised you your freedom, and I haven't forgotten it, though you asked for it almost fifty years ago. You did something that I praised you for—I can't quite remember what it was—and when I asked you what you would like as a reward, you answered: 'Don't give me nothin' now, ole miss, but let the gift grow and set me free when you come to die.' It is a long time, Boaz, fifty years, but I give you your freedom now, as I promised, though it is very foolish of you to want it, and I'm sure you'll find it nothing but a burden and a trouble. Christopher, will you remember that Boaz is free?"
Christopher crossed the room, and, catching her hands in his own, sought to force her back upon the pillows, but with an effort that showed in every tense line of her face she pushed him from her and sat erect and unsupported.
"Let me dismiss them first," she said with her stately manner. "Good-by, Phyllis and Polly—and—and—all the rest of you. You may go now. I am a little tired, and I will lie down."
Cynthia put the weeping servants from the room, and, filling a glass with brandy, held it with a shaking hand to her mother's lips.
"Take this, dear, and lie down," she said.
Mrs. Blake sipped the brandy obediently, but as she felt her strength revive from the strong spirit the animation reawoke in her face, and, turning toward Christopher, she stretched out her hand with an appealing gesture.
"There is so much to say and I haven't the space to say it in, my son. There is so much advice I want to give you, but the time is short."
"I understand, mother; I understand. Don't let it trouble you."
"I have had a fortunate life, my child," resumed the old lady, waving him to silence with a gesture in which there was still a feeble sprightliness, "and when one has lived happily far into the seventies one learns a great deal of wisdom, and there is much good advice that one ought to leave behind. You have been an affectionate son to me, Christopher, and I have not yet given up the hope that you may live to be a worthy husband to another woman. If you do marry—and God grant that you may—remember that the chief consideration should be family connection, and the next personal attractiveness. Wealth counts for very little beside good birth, and after this I regard a small foot and hand as most essential. They have always been a mark of our breeding, Christopher, and I should not like the family to lose through you one of its most distinguished characteristics."
"It is not likely I shall marry, mother. I was cut out for different ends."
"One never knows, my son, and at least I am only doing my duty in speaking to you thus. I am a very old woman, and I am not afraid to die, for I have never to my knowledge done anything that was unbecoming in a lady. Remember to be a gentleman, and you will find that that embraces all morality and a good deal of religion."
He kissed her hand, watching anxiously the mounting excitement in her face.
"And if you do marry, Christopher," she went on, harping fitfully on her favourite string, "remember that keeping in love is as much the profession for a man as it is the art for a woman, and that love feeds on little delicacies rather than on meat and drink. Don't forget the little things, dear, and the big ones will take care of themselves. I have seen much of men and manners in my life, and they have taught me that it is the small failings, not the big faults, which are deadliest to love. Why, I've seen a romantic passion survive shame, and treachery, and even blows, and another wither out of existence before the first touch of bad breeding. 'A man's table manners are a part of his morality,' your Great-grandfather Bolivar used to say."
She laughed softly while her hand played with the white fringe on the counterpane.
"I can recall now the sympathy I felt for Matty Gordon," she pursued, "a great belle and beauty who ran off and married that scamp, Aleck Douglas. He turned into a perfect rascal, they said, though I must admit that he made a very amiable husband, and never stinted her, even if he stole from other people. Well, she stuck to him through good and evil report, and was really from all appearances a most contented woman. When he died at last, people said that it was just in time to escape the penitentiary, but to see Matty you would have thought she had lost nothing short of pure perfection. Poor old Bishop Deane, who always would speak his mind, in the pulpit or out of it, went to call on her, he told me, and took occasion to reprove her for such excessive grief over so unworthy an object. 'He was not an upright man, Matty, and you know it,' he began quite boldly; 'he was a libertine, and a gambler, and an open scoffer at religion.' But Matty went on sobbing harder than ever, and at last, getting angry, he said sternly: 'And more than this, ma'am, he was, as you know, a faithless and disloyal husband!' Then the poor girl drew out a pocket handkerchief with a three-inch black border and mopped her pretty blue eyes. 'Ah, but, Bishop, I had so much to be thankful for!' she said. 'He never chewed tobacco!' Well, well, she may have been a fool, as the Bishop insisted, but he was a man, in spite of his cloth, and could never learn to understand a woman's sensibilities."
She finished, and, turning, touched him gently on the hand.
"It is the little things that count in marriage, Christopher," and after a moment she added thoughtfully: "Promise me that you will always use an ash-tray."
"Anything, dear mother; I promise anything."
With a contented sigh she closed her eyes, and, still holding his hand, fell into a broken and troubled sleep, from which she awoke presently in a gentle delirium. Her lost youth had returned to her, and with it something of her old gaiety of manner. Suddenly he felt a strange thrill pass through her, and raising herself with a last great endeavour, she sat erect, staring into the blue sky that showed through the window.
"I am engaged for this set, sir," she said in her winning voice, while a girlish smile transfigured her wan face, "but if it pleases you, you may put your name down for the next."
Rising, he bent quickly over her, but before he touched her she had fallen back upon the pillows and lay with her arch smile frozen upon her face.
At midnight they left him to watch alone in her chamber, and while he sat in the shadow beside the tester bed his thoughts encircled the still form on the white counterpane. On the mantel two candles burned dimly, and the melted tallow dripped slowly down into the tall brass candlesticks. The dimity curtains of the bed fluttered softly in the breeze that blew through the open window, and in his nostrils there was the scent of the single rose standing in a glass vase upon the table. Tucker had brought her the rose that morning and she had held it for a pleased moment in her trembling fingers. Everything in the room around him was ready for her use—her nightcap lay on the bureau, and in the china tray beside it he saw her brush and comb, in which a long strand of white hair was still twisted. On her hands, folded quietly upon her breast, he caught the flash of Docia's piece of purple glass, and he remembered with a throb of pain that she had asked that her betrothal ring might be buried with her.
"Well, she knows all now," he thought in bitterness. "She knows the theft of the diamond, and the deception that lasted nearly thirty years." In the midst of his sorrow a sudden shame possessed him, and he felt all at once that his heart was pierced by the unearthly keenness of the dead eyes. "She knows all now," he repeated, and there was a passionate defiance in his acknowledgment. "She knows all that I have hidden from her, as well as much that has been hidden from me. Her blind eyes are open, and she sees at last my failure and my sin, and the agony that I have known. For years I have shielded her, but she cannot shield me now, for all her wider vision. She can avert my fate no more than I could hold her back from hers. We are each alone—she, and I, and Maria, and the boy whom I have ruined—and there is no love that can keep a man from living and dying to himself."
It seemed to him, sitting there in the shadow, that he felt as he had felt before in grave moments—the revolutions of the wheel on which he was bound. And with that strange mystic insight which comes to those who lead brooding and isolated lives close to Nature, he asked himself if, after all, these things had not had their beginning in the dawn of his existence so many million years ago. "Has it not all happened before as it happens now—my shame and my degradation, the kiss I placed on Maria's lips, and the watch I keep by the deathbed of my mother? It is all familiar to me, and when the end comes, that will be familiar, too."
A night moth entered, wheeling in dizzy circles about the candle, but when it went so near as to scorch its wings he caught it gently in his hollowed palms and released it into the darkness of the yard. As he leaned out he saw the light shining clear in Maria's window, and while he gazed upon it he felt a curious kinship with the moth that had flown in from the night and hovered about the flame.
As the days went on, the emptiness in the house became to him like that of the grave, and he learned presently that the peevish and exacting old lady who had not stirred for years from her sick-bed had left a vacancy larger than all the rest of them could fill. Cynthia, who had borne most of the burden, began now to bear, in its place, the heavier share of the loss. Released from her daily sacrifice and her patient drudgery, she looked about her with dazed eyes, like one whose future has been suddenly swept away. There was nothing for her to do any longer —no risings in the gray dawn to prepare the day's stealthy work, no running on aching feet to answer unreasonable complaints, no numberless small lies to plan in secret, no stinting of herself that her mother might have her little luxuries. Her work was over, and she pined away in the first freedom of her life. The very fact that deception was no longer necessary seemed to sweep her accustomed moorings from beneath her feet. She had lied so long that lying had become at last a second nature to her, and to her surprise she found almost an indecency in the aspect of the naked truth.
"I don't know how it is, Uncle Tucker," she said one day toward the end of June, when the deadly drought which had kept back the transplanting of the tobacco had ended in three days of heavy rain—"I don't know how it is, but the thing I miss most—and I miss her every minute—is the lying I had to do. It gave me something to think about, somehow. I used to stay awake at night and plan all sorts of pleasant lies that I could tell about the house and the garden, and the way the war ended, and the Presidents of the Confederacy—I made up all their names—and the fuss with which each one was inaugurated, and the dresses their wives and daughters wore. It's all so dull when you have to stop pretending and begin to face things just as they are. I've lied for almost thirty years, and I reckon I've lost my taste for the truth."
"Well, it will come back, dear," responded Tucker reassuringly; "but I think you need a change if a woman ever did. What about that week you're to spend with the Weatherbys?"
"I'm going to-morrow," answered Cynthia shortly. "Lila is sick with a cold and wants me; but how you and Christopher will manage to get on is more than I can say."
"Oh, we'll worry along with Docia, never fear," replied Tucker, hobbling into his seat at the supper table, as Christopher came in from the woods with the heavy moisture dripping from his clothes.
"It's cleared off fine and there's to be a full moon tonight," said the young man, hanging up his hat. "If the rain had come a week later the tobacco would have been ruined. I've just been taking it up out of the plant-bed."
"You'll begin setting it out to-morrow, I reckon, then," observedTucker, watching Cynthia as she cut up his food.
"Oh, I'm afraid to wait—the ground dries so quickly. Jacob Weatherby is going to set his out to-night, and I think I'll do the same. There's a fine moon, and I shouldn't wonder if every farmer in the county was in the fields till daybreak."
He ate his supper hurriedly, and then, taking down his hat, went out to resume his work. At the door he had left his big split basket of plants, and, slipping his arm through the handle, he crossed the yard in the direction of the field. As he turned into the little path which trailed in wet grass along the "worm" fence, Jacob Weatherby came stepping briskly through the mud in the road and stopped to ask him if he had got his ground ready for the setting out. "I've been lookin' for hands myself," added the old man in his cheery voice, "for I could find work for a dozen men to-night, but to save my life I can't scrape up more'n a nigger here an' thar. Bill Fletcher has been out ahead of me, it seems."
"Well, I'll be able to help you to-morrow, I think," answered Christopher. "I hope to get my own work done to-night." Then he asked. with a trifling hesitation: "How is Lila's cold?"
A sudden light broke over old Jacob's face, and he nodded in his genial fashion.
"Ah, bless her pretty eyes, I sometimes think she's too good to put her foot down on this here common earth," he said, "an' to think that only this mornin' she was wantin' to help Sarah wipe the dishes. Why, I reckon Sarah would ruther work her fingers to the bone than have that gal take a single dishcloth in her hand. Oh, we know how to value her, Mr. Christopher, never fear. Her word's law in our house, and always will be."
He passed on with his hearty chuckle, and Christopher followed the wet path and began planting his tobacco plants in the small holes he bored in the moist earth.
It was the most solemn hour of day, when the division between light and darkness seems less a gradation than a sudden blur. A faint yellow line still lingered across the western horizon, and against it the belt of pines rose like an advancing army. The wind, which blew toward him from the woods, filled his nostrils with a spicy tang.
Slowly the moon rose higher, flooding the hollows and the low green hills with light. In the outlying fields around the Hall he saw Fletcher's planters at work in the tobacco, each man so closely followed by his shadow that it was impossible at a little distance to distinguish the living labourer from his airy double. All the harsh irregularities of the landscape were submerged in a general softness of tone, and the shapes of hill and meadow, of road and tree, of shrub and rock, were dissolved in a magical and enchanting beauty.
Several hours had passed, and he had stopped to rest a moment from his planting, when Maria came in the moonlight along the road and paused breathlessly to lean upon the fence beneath the locust tree.
"It is the first time I've been out for two weeks," she said, panting softly. "I twisted my ankle, and the worst part was that I didn't even dare to send you word. What must you have thought?"
"No harm of you," he answered, and threw down the fence-rails that she might cross. "Come over to me, Maria."
Putting her hands in his, she passed over the lowered fence, and then stood at arm's length looking into his face, which the moonlight had softened to a beauty that brought to her mind a carving in old ivory.
"I still limp a little," she went on, smiling, "and I had to steal out like a thief and run through the shadows. To find me with you would be the death of grandfather, I believe. Something has occurred to put him in a fresh rage with you."
"It was the field by the pasture," he told her frankly. "You know it belongs to me, and pure justice made me throw down his fence; but if you wish it I will put it up again. I'll do anything you wish."
She thought for a moment with that complete detachment of judgment from emotion which is so rarely a part of a woman's intellect.
"No, no," she said; "it is right that you should take it down. I would not have you submit to any further injustice, not even a little one like that."
"And this will go on forever! Oh, Maria, how will it end?"
"We must wait and hope, dear; you see that."
"I see nothing but that I love you and am most miserable," he answered desperately.
A smile curved her lips. "Oh, blind and faithless, I see only you!"
He was still holding her hands, but, dropping them as she spoke, he threw his arms wide open and stood waiting.
"Then come to me, my dearest; come to me."
His voice rang out in command rather than entreaty, and he stood smiling gravely as, hesitating a breathless instant, she regarded him with eyes that struggled to be calm. Then slowly the radiance which was less the warmth of colour than of expression flooded her face, and she bent toward him as if impelled by some strong outside force. The next moment the storm swept her roughly from her feet and crushed back her pleading hands upon her bosom; bewildered, flushed, and trembling, she lay upon his breast while their lips clung together. "Oh, my friend, my lover," she murmured faintly.
He felt her resistance dissolve within his arms, and it was a part of the tragedy of their love that there should come to him no surprise when he found her mouth salt from her tears. The shadow of a great evil, of a secret anguish, still divided them, and it was this that gave to their embraces the sorrowful passion which he drew from her despairing kiss.
"You cannot love me, Maria. How can it be true?"
Releasing herself, she put her hand upon his lips to silence him.
"You have made your confession," she said earnestly, with the serene dignity which had impressed him in the first moment of their meeting, "and now I will make mine. You must not stop me; you must not look at me until I finish. Promise."
"I promise to keep silent," he answered, with his gaze upon her.
She drew away from him, keeping her eyes full on his, and holding him at arm's length with the tips of her fingers. He felt that she was still shaken by his embrace—that she was still in a quiver from his kisses; but to all outward seeming she had regained the noble composure of her bearing.
"No, no. Ah, listen, my friend, and do not touch me. What I must tell you is this, and you must hear me patiently to the end. I have loved you always—from the first day; since the beginning. There has never been any one else, and there has never been a moment in my life when I would not have followed you had you lifted a finger anywhere. At first I did not know—I did not believe it. It was but a passing fancy, I thought, that you had murdered. I taught myself to believe that I was cold, inhuman, because I did not warm to other men. Oh, I did not know then that I was not stone, but ice, which would melt at the first touch of the true flame ."
"Maria!" he burst out in a cry of anguish.
"Hush! Hush! Remember your promise. It was not until afterward," she went on in the same quiet voice; "it was not until my marriage—not until my soul shuddered back from his embraces and I dreamed of you, that I began to see—to understand."
"Oh, Maria, my beloved, if I had known!"
She still held him from her with her outstretched arm.
"It was the knowledge of this that made me feel that I had wronged him—that I had defrauded him of the soul of love and given him only the poor flesh. It was this that held me to him all those wretched years—that kept me with him till the end, even through his madness. At last I buried your memory, told myself that I had forgotten."
"We will let the world go, dearest," he said passionately. "Come to me."
But she shook her head, and, still smiling, held him at a distance.
"It will never go," she answered, "for it is not the world's way. But whatever comes to us, there is one thing you must remember—that you must never forget for one instant while you live. In good or evil, in life or death, there is no height so high nor any depth so low that I will not follow you."
Then waving him from her with a decisive gesture, she turned from him and went swiftly home across the moonlit fields.