A greater freedom followed this confession, as was natural. It became the basis for lighter confidences and bits of autobiography that came to the surface easily after this tremendous effort at sincerity. Paul found that he could speak even of the family past, into which by degrees he began to fit the real man in place of that bucolic abstraction which had walked the fields of fancy. He had never dared to actuate the “hired man,” his father, on a basis of fact. He knew the speech and manners of the class from which he came,—knew men of that class, and talked with them every summer at Stone Ridge; but he had brooded so deeply over the tragic and sentimental side of his father's fate as to have lost sight of the fact that he was a man.
Reality has its own convincing charm, not inconsistent with plainness or even with commonness. To know it is to lose one's taste for toys of the imagination. Paul, at last, could look back almost with, a sense of humor at the doll-like progenitor he had played with so long. But when it came to placing the real man, Adam Bogardus, beside that real woman, once his wife, their son could but own with awe that there is mercy in extinction, after all; in the chance, however it may come to us, for slipping off those cruel disguises that life weaves around us.
In the strange, wakeful nights, full of starvation dreams, he saw his mother as she would look on state occasions in the hostess's place at her luxurious table; the odor of flowers, the smell of meats and wines, tantalized and sickened him. Christine would come in her dancing frocks, always laughing, greedy in her mirth; but Moya, face to face, he could never see. It was torture to feel her near him, a disembodied embrace. Passionate panegyrics and hopeless adjurations he would pour out to that hovering loveliness just beyond his reach. The agony of frustration would waken him, if indeed it were sleep that dissolved his consciousness, and he would be irritable if spoken to.
The packer broke in, one morning, on these unnerving dreams. “You wouldn't happen to have a picture of her along with you?”
Paul stared at him.
“No, of course you wouldn't! And I'd be 'most afeard to look at it, if you had. She must have changed considerable. Time hasn't stood still with her any more than the rest of us.”
“I have no picture of my mother,” Paul replied.
The packer saw that his question had jarred; he had waited weeks to ask it. He passed it off now with one of his homely similes. “If you was to break a cup clean in two, and put the halves together again while the break was fresh, they'd knit so you wouldn't hardly see a crack. But you take one half and set it in the chainy closet and chuck the other half out on the ash-heap,—them halves won't look much like pieces of the same cup, come a year or two. The edges won't jine no more than the lips of an old cut that's healed without stitches. No; married folks they grow together or they grow apart, and they're a-doing of the one or the other every minute of the time, breaks or no breaks. Does she go up to the old place summers?”
“Not lately, except on business,” said Paul. “A company was formed to open slate quarries on the upper farm, a good many years ago. They are worth more than all the land forty times over.”
“I always said so; always told the old man he had a gold mine in that ridge. Was this before he died?”
“Long after. It was my mother's scheme mainly. She controls it now. She is a very strong business woman.”
“She got her training, likely, from that uncle in New York. He had the business head. The old man had no more contrivance than one of the bulls in his pastures. He could lock horns and stay there, but it wa'nt no trouble to outflank him. More than once his brother Jacob got to the windward of him in a bargain. He was made a good deal like his own land. Winters of frost it took to break up that ground, and sun and rain to meller it, and then't was a hatful of soil to a cartful of stone. The plough would jump the furrows if you drew it deep. My arms used to ache as if they'd been pounded, with the jar of them stones. They used to tell us children a story how Satan, he flew over the earth a-sowing it with rocks and stones, and as he was passing over our county a hole bu'st through his leather apron and he lost his whole load right slam there. I could 'a' p'inted out the very spot where the heft on it fell. Ten Stone meadow, so-called. Ten million stone! I was pickin' stone in that field all of one summer when I was fifteen year old. We built a mile of fence with it.
“Them quarries must have brought a mint of money into the country. Different sort of labor, too. Well, the world grows richer and poorer every year. More difference every year between the way rich folks and poor folks live. I wouldn't know where I belonged, 't ain't likely, if I was to go back there. I'd be way off! One while I used to think a good deal about going back, just to take a look around. It comes over me lately like hunger and thirst. I think about the most curious things when I'm asleep—foolish, like a child! I can smell all the good home smells of a frosty morning: apple pomace, steaming in the barnyard; sausage frying; Becky scouring the brass furnace-kittle with salt and vinegar. Killin' time, you know—makes you think of boiling souse and head-cheese. You ever eat souse?” The packer sucked in his breath with a lean smile. “It ain't best to dwell on it. But you can't help yourself, at night. I can smell Becky's fresh bread, in my dreams, just out of the brick oven. Never eat bread cooked in a stove till I came out here. I never drunk any water like that spring on the ridge. Last night I was back there, and the maples were all yellow like sunshine. Once it was spring, and apple-blooms up in the hill orchard. And little Emmy, a-setting on the fence, with her bunnit throwed back on her neck. 'Addy!' she called, way across the lot; 'Addy, come, help me down!' She was a master hand for venturin' up on places, but she didn't like the gettin' down.
“Well, she 'a learned the ups and downs by this time. She don't need Addy to help her. I'd have helped a big sight more if I had kep' my distance. It's a thing so con-demned foolish and unnecessary—I can't be reconciled to it noway!”
“You see only one side of it,” said Paul. Unspeakable thoughts had kept pace with his father's words. “Nothing that happens, happens through us—or to us—alone. There was a girl I knew, outside. She was as happy, when I knew her first, as you say my mother used to be. Then she met some one—a man—and the shadow of his life crossed hers. He would have wrapped her up in it and put out her sunshine if he had stayed in the same world. Now she can be herself again, after a while. It cannot take long to forget a person you have known only a little over a year.”
The packer rose on one elbow. He reached across and shook his son.
“Where is that girl? Answer me! Take your face out of your hands!”
“At Bisuka Barracks. She is the commandant's daughter. I came out to marry her.”
“What possessed ye not to tell me?”
“Why should I tell you? We buried the wedding-day months back, in the snow.”
“Boy, boy!” the packer groaned.
“What difference can it make now?”
“Allthe difference—all the difference there is! I thought you were out here touring it with them fool boys and they were all the chance you had for help outside. You suppose her father is going to see her git left?They'll get in here, if they have to crawl on their bellies or climb through the tree-limbs. They know how! And we've wasted the grub and talked like a couple of women!”
“Oh, don't—don't torment me!” Paul groaned. “It was all over. Can't you leave the dead in peace!”
“We are not the dead! I 'most wish we were. Boy, I've got a big word to say to you about that. Come closer!” The packer's speech hoarsened and failed. They could only hear each other breathe. Then it seemed to the packer that his was the only breath in the darkness. He listened. A faint cheer arose in the forest and a crashing of the dead underlimbs of the pines.
He turned frantically upon his son, but no pledge could be extorted now. Paul's lips were closed. He had lost consciousness.
The colonel's drawing-room was as hot as usual the first hour after dinner, and as usual it was full of kindly participant neighbors who had dropped in to repeat their congratulations on the good news, now almost a week old. Mrs. Bogardus had not come down, and, though asked after by all, the talk was noticeably freer for her absence.
Mrs. Creve, in response to a telegram from her brother, had arrived from Fort Sherman on the day before, prepared for anything, from frozen feet to a wedding. She had spent the afternoon in town doing errands for Moya, and being late for dinner had not changed her dress. There never was such a “natural” person as aunt Annie. At present she was addressing the company at large, as if they were all her promising children.
“Nobody talks about their star in these days. I used to have a star. I forget which it was. I know it was a pretty lucky one. Now I trust in Providence and the major and wear thick shoes.” She exhibited the shoes, a particularly large and sensible kind which she imported from the East. Everybody laughed and longed to embrace her. “Has Moya got a star?” she asked seriously.
“The whole galaxy!” a male voice replied. “Doesn't the luck prove it?”
“Moya has got a 'temperament,'” said Doctor Fleming, the Post surgeon. “That's as good as having a star. You know there are persons who attract misfortune just as sickly children catch all the diseases that are going. I knew that boy was sure to be found. Anything of Moya's would be.”
“So you think it was Moya's 'temperament' that pulled him out of the snow?” said the colonel, wheeling his chair into the discussion.
“How about Mr. Winslow's temperament? I prefer to leave a little of the credit to him,” said Moya sweetly.
A young officer, who had been suffering in the corner by the fire, jumped to his feet and bowed, then blushed and sat down again, regretting his rashness. Moya continued to look at him with steadfast friendliness. Winslow had led the rescue that brought her lover home. A glow of sympathy united these friends and neighbors; the air was electrical and full of emotion.
“I suppose no date has been fixed for the wedding?” Mrs. Dawson, on the divan, murmured to Mrs. Creve. The latter smiled a non-committal assent.
“I should think they would just put the doctor aside and be married anyhow. My husband says he ought to go to a warmer climate at once.”
“My dear, a young man can't be married in his dressing-gown and slippers!”
“No! It's not as bad as that?”
“Well, not quite. He's up and dressed and walks about, but he doesn't come down to his meals,—he can eat so very little at a time, and it tires him to sit through a dinner. It isn't one of those ravenous recoveries. It went too far with him for that.”
“His mother was perfectly magnificent through it all, they say.”
“Have you seen much of Mrs. Bogardus?”
“No; we left them alone, poor things, when the pinch came. But I used to see her walking the porch, up and down, up and down. Moya would go off on the hills. They couldn't walk together! That was after Miss Chrissy went home. Her mother took her back, you know, and then returned alone. Perfectly heroic! They say she dressed every evening for dinner as carefully as if she were in New York, and led the conversation. She used to make Moya read aloud to her—history, novels—anything to pretend they were not thinking. The strain must have begun before any of us knew. The colonel kept it so quiet. What is the dear man doing with your bonnet?”
The colonel had plucked his sister's walking-hat, a pert piece of millinery froward in feathers, from the trunk of the headless Victory, where she had reposed it in her haste before dinner.
“Mustn't be disrespectful to the household Lar,” he kindly reminded her.
“Where am I to put my hats, then? I shall wear them on my head and come down to breakfast in them. Moya, dear, will you please rescue my hat? Put it anywhere, dear,—under your chair. There is not really a place in this house to put a thing. A wedding that goes off on time is bad enough, but one that hangs on from month to month—and doesn't even take care of its clothes! Forgive me, dear! The clothes are very pretty. I open a bureau-drawer to put away my middle-aged bonnet—a puff of violets! A pile of something white, and, behold, a wedding veil! There isn't a hook in the closet that doesn't say, 'Standing-room only,' and the standing-room is all stood on by a regiment of new shoes.”
“My dear woman, go light on our sore spots. We are only just out of the woods.”
“Isn't it bad to coddle your sore spots, Doctor? Like a saddle-gall, ride them down!” Mrs. Creve and Dr. Fleming exchanged a friendly smile on the strength of this nonsense. On the doctor's side it covered a suspicion: “'The lady, methinks, protests too much'!” The colonel, too, was restless, and Moya's sweet color came and went. She appeared to be listening for steps or sounds from some other part of the house.
The men all rose now as Mrs. Bogardus entered; one or two of the ladies rose also, compelled by something in her look certainly not intended. She was careful to greet everybody; she even crossed the room and gave her hand to Lieutenant Winslow, whom she had not seen since the night of his return. The doctor she casually passed over with a bow; they had met before that day. It was in the mind of each person present not of the family, and excepting the doctor, to ask her: 'How is your son this evening?' But for some reason the inquiry did not come off.
The company began suddenly to feel itselfde trop. Mrs. Dawson, who had come under the doctor's escort, glanced at him, awaiting the moment when it would do to make the first move.
“I hear you lost a patient from the hospital yesterday?” said Lieutenant Winslow, at the doctor's side.
“From, did you say? That's right! He was to have been operated on to-day.” The doctor shrugged his shoulders.
“What!”
“Two broken ribs. One grown fast to the lung.”
“Wh-ew!”
“He just walked out. Said I had ordered him to have fresh air. There was a new hall-boy, a greenhorn.”
“He can't go far in that shape, can he?”
“Oh, there's no telling. The constitution of those men is beyond anything. You can't kill him. He'll suffer of course, suffer like an animal, and die like one—away from the herd. Maybe not this time, though.”
“Was he afraid of the operation?”
“I can't say. He did not seem to be either afraid or anxious for help. Not used to being helped. He would be taken to the Sisters' Hospital. Wouldn't come up here as the guest of the Post, not a bit! I believe from the first he meant to give us the slip, and take his chance in his own way.”
“Did you hear,”—Mrs. Creve spoke up from the opposite side of the room under that hypnotic influence by which a dangerous topic spreads,—“did you hear about the poor guide who ran away from the hospital to escape from our wicked doctor here? What a reputation you must have, Doctor!”
“All talk, my dear; town gossip,” said the colonel. “You gave him his discharge, didn't you, Doctor?” The colonel looked hard at the medical officer; he had prepared the way for a statement suited to a mixed company, including ladies. But Doctor Fleming stated things usually to suit himself.
“There was a man who left the Sisters' Hospital rather informally yesterday. I won't say he is not just as well off to-day as if he had stayed.”
“Who was it? Was it our man, father?”
“The doctor has more than one patient at the hospital.” Colonel Middleton looked reproachfully at the doctor, who continued to put aside as childish these clumsy subterfuges. “I think you ladies frightened him away with your attentions. He knew he was under heavy liabilities for all your flowers and fancy cookery.”
“Attentions! Are we going to let him die on the road somewhere?” cried Moya.
“Miss Moya?” Lieutenant Winslow spoke up with a mixture of embarrassment and resolution to be heard, though every voice in the room conspired against him. “Those men are a big fraternity. They have their outfitting places where they put in for repairs. Packer John had his blankets sent to the Green Meadow corral. They know him there. They say he had money at one of the stores. They all have a little money cached here and there. And theycan'tget lost, you know!”
Moya's eyes shone with a suspicious brightness.
“'When the forest shall mislead me;When the night and morning lie.'”
She turned her swimming eyes upon Paul's mother, who would be sure to remember the quotation.
Mrs. Bogardus remained perfectly still, her lips slightly parted. She grew very pale. Then she rose and walked quickly to the door.
“Just a breath of cold air!” she panted. The doctor, Moya, and Mrs. Creve had followed her into the hall. Moya placed herself on the settle beside her and leaned to support her, but she sat back rigidly with her eyes closed. Mrs. Creve looked on in quiet concern. “Let me take you into the study, Mrs. Bogardus!” the doctor commanded. “A glass of water, Moya, please.”
“How is she? What is it? Can we do anything?” The company crowded around Mrs. Creve on her return to the drawing-room. She glanced at her brother. There was no clue there. He stood looking embarrassed and mystified. “It is only the warm welcome we give our friends,” she said aloud, smiling calmly. “Mrs. Bogardus found the room too hot. I think I should have succumbed myself but for that little recess in the hall.”
The colonel attacked his fire. He thought he was being played with. Things were not right in the house, and no one, not the doctor, or even Annie, was frank with him. His kind face flushed as he straightened up to bid his guests good-night.
“Well, if it's not anything serious, you think. But you'll be sure to let us know?” said Mrs. Dawson. “Well, good-night, Mrs. Creve.Good-night, Colonel! You'll say good-night to Moya? Do let us know if there is anything we can do.”
Dr. Fleming was in the hall looking for his cape. The colonel touched him on the shoulder. “Don't be in a hurry, Doctor. Mrs. Dawson will excuse you.”
“I don't think you need me any more to-night. Moya is with Mrs. Bogardus. She is not ill. The room was a little close.”
“Never mind theroom! Come in here. I want a word with you.”
The doctor laughed oddly, and obeyed.
“Annie, you needn't leave us.”
“Why, thank you, dear boy! It's awfully good of you,” Annie mocked him. “But I must go and relieve Moya.”
“I don't believe you are wanted in there,” said Doctor Fleming.
“It's more than obvious that I'm not in here.”
“Oh, do sit down,” said the teased colonel.
The fire sulked and smoked a trifle with its brands apart. Doctor Fleming leaned forward upon his knees and regarded it thoughtfully. The colonel sat fondling the tongs. In a deep chair Mrs. Creve lay back and shaded her face with the end of her lace scarf. By her manner she might have been alone in the room, yet she was keenly observant of the men, for she felt that developments were taking place.
“What is the matter with your patient upstairs, Doctor?” the colonel began his cross-examination. Doctor Fleming raised his eyebrows.
“He's had nothing to eat to speak of for six weeks, at an altitude”—
“Yes; we know all that. But he's twenty-four years old. They made an easy trip back, and he has been here a week, nearly. He's not as strong as he was when they brought him in, is he?”
“That was excitement. You have to allow for the reaction. He has had a shock to the entire system,—nerves, digestion,—must give him time. Very nervous temperament too much controlled.”
“Make it as you like. But I'm disappointed in his rallying powers, unless you are keeping something back. A boy with the grit to do what he did, and stand it as he did—why isn't he standing it better now?”
“We are all suffering from reaction, I think,” said Mrs. Creve diplomatically; “and we show it by making too much of little things. Tom, we oughtn't to keep the doctor up here talking nonsense. He wants to go to bed.”
“I'm not talking nonsense,” said the doctor. “I should be if I pretended there was anything mysterious about that boy's case upstairs. He has had a tremendous experience, say what you will; and it's pulled him down nervously, and every other way. He isn't ready or able to talk of it yet. And he knows as soon as he comes down there'll be forty people waiting to congratulate him and ask him how it was. I don't wonder he fights shy. If he could take his bride by the hand and walk out of the house with her I believe he could start to-morrow; but if there must be a wedding and a lot of fuss”—
Mrs. Creve nodded her head approvingly. The three had risen and stood around the hearth, while the colonel put the brands delicately together with the skill of an old campaigner. The flames breathed again.
“I don't offer this as a professional opinion,” said the doctor. “But a case like his is not a disease, it's a condition”—
“Of the mind, perhaps?” the colonel added significantly. He glanced at Mrs. Creve. “You've thought about that, Doctor? The letter his mother consulted you about?”
“Have you been worrying about that, Colonel? Why didn't you say so? There is nothing in it whatever. Why, it's so plain a case the other way—any one can see where the animus comes from!”
“Now youaregetting mysterious, and I'm going to bed!” said Mrs. Creve.
“No; we're coming to the point now,” said the colonel.
“What is it you want Bogardus to do?” asked Doctor Fleming. “Want him to get up and walk out of the house as my patient did at the hospital? Dare say he could do it, but what then? Will you let me speak out, Colonel? No regard to anybody's feelings? Now, this may be gossip, but I think it has a bearing on the case upstairs. I'm going to have it off my mind anyhow! When Mrs. Bogardus came to see the guide,—Packer John,—day before yesterday, was it?—he asked to see her alone. Said he had something particular to say to her about her son. We thought it a queer start, but she was willing to humor him. Well, she wasn't in there above ten minutes, but in that time something passed between them that hit her very hard, no doubt of that! Now, Bogardus holds his tongue like a gentleman as to what happened in the woods. He doesn't mention his comrades' names. And the packer has disappeared; so he can't be questioned. Seems to me a little bird told me there was an attachment between one of those Bowen boys and Miss Christine?
“Now we, who know what brutes brute fear will make of men, are not going to deny that those boys behaved badly. There are some things that can't be acknowledged among men, you know, if there is a hole to crawl out of. Cowardice is one of them. Well then, they lied, that's the whole of it. The little boys lied. They wrote Mrs. Bogardus a long letter from Lemhi,”—the doctor was reviewing now for Mrs. Creve's benefit,—“when they first got out. They probably judged, by the time they had had, that Paul and the packer would never tell their own story. Very well: it couldn't hurt Paul, it might be the saving of them, if they could show that something had queered him in the woods. They asked his mother if she had heard of the effects of altitude upon highly sensitive organizations. They recounted some instances—I will mention them later. One of the boys is a lawyer, isn't he? They are a pair of ingenious youths. Bogardus, they claim, avoided them almost from the time they entered the woods,—almost lived with the packer, behaved like a crank about the shooting. Whereas they had gone there to kill things, he made it a personal matter whenever they pursued this intention in a natural and undisguised manner. He had pangs, like a girl, when the creatures expired. He hated the carcases, the blood—forgive me, Mrs. Creve. In short, he called the whole business butchery.”
“Do you makethata sign of lunacy?” Mrs. Creve flung in.
“I am quoting, you know.” The doctor smiled indulgently. “They declare that they offered—even begged—to stay behind with him, one of them, at least, but he rejected their company in a manner so unpleasant that they saw it would only be courting a quarrel to remain. And so, treating him perforce like a childora lunaticpro tem., and having but little time to decide in, they cut loose and hurried back for help. This is the tale, composed on reflection. They said nothing of this to Winslow—to save publicity, of course! Mrs. Bogardus's lips are doubly sealed, for her son's sake and for the sake of the young scamp who is to be her son, by and by! I saw she winced at my opinion, which I gave her plainly—brutally, perhaps. And she asked me particularly to say nothing, which I am particularly not doing.
“This, I think, you will find is the bitter drop in the cup of rejoicing upstairs. And they are swallowing it in silence, those two, for the sake of the little girl and the old friends in New York. Of course she has kept from Paul that last shot in the back from those sweet boys! The packer had some unruly testimony he was bursting with, which he had sense enough to keep for her alone, and she doesn't want the case to spread. It is singular how a man in his condition could get out of the way as suddenly as he did. You might think he'd been taken up in a cloud.”
“Doctor, what do you mean by such an insinuation as that?”
“Colonel, have I insinuated anything? Did I say she had oiled the wheels of his departure?”
“Come, come! You go too far!”
“Not at all. That's your own construction. I merely say that I am not concerned about that man's disappearance. I think he'll be looked after, as a valuable witness should be.”
“Well,” the colonel grumbled uneasily, “I don't like mysteries myself, and I don't like family quarrels nor skeletons at the feasts of old friends. But I suppose there must be a drop in every cup. What were your altitude cases, Doctor?”
“The same old ones; poor Addison, you know. All those stories they tell an Easterner. As I pointed out to Mrs. Bogardus, in every case there was some predisposing cause. Addison had been too long in the mountains, and he was frightfully overworked; short of company officers. He came to me about an insect he said had got into his ear; buzzed, and bothered him day and night. The story got to the men's quarters. They joked about the colonel's 'bug.' I knew it was no joke. I condemned him for duty, but the Sioux were out. They thought at Washington no one but Addison could handle an Indian campaign. He was on the ground, too. So they sent him up higher where it was dry, with a thousand men in his hands. I knew he'd be a madman or a dead man in a month! There were a good many of the dead! By Jove! The boys who took his orders and loved the old fellow and knew he was sending them to their death! Well for him that he'll never know.”
“The 'altitude of heartbreak,'” sighed Mrs. Creve. The phrase was her own, for many a reason deeply known unto herself, but she gave it the effect of a quotation before the men.
“Then you think there is no 'altitude' in ours?”
“No; nor 'heartbreak' either,” said the doctor, helping himself to one of the colonel's cigars. “But I don't say there isn't enough to keep a woman awake nights, and to make those young men avoid the sight of each other for a time. Thanks, I won't smoke now. I'm going to take a look at Mrs. Bogardus as I go out.”
The doctor had taken his look, feeling a trifle guilty under his patient's counter gaze, yet glad to have relieved the good colonel's anxiety. If he loved to gossip, at least he was particular as to whom he gossiped with.
Moya closed the door after him and silently resumed her seat. Mrs. Bogardus helped herself to a sip of water. She was struggling with a dry constriction of the throat, and Moya protested a little, seeing the effort that it cost her to speak, even in the hoarse, unnatural tone which was all the voice she had left.
“I want to finish now,” she said, “and never speak of this again. It was I who accused them first—and then I asked him:—if there was anything he could say in their defense, to say it, for Chrissy's sake! 'I will never break bread with them again,' said he,—'either Banks or Horace. I will not eat with them, or drink with them, or speak with them again!' Think of it! How are we to live? How are they to inhabit the same city? He thinks I have been weak. I am weak! The only power I have is through—the property. Banks will never marry a poor girl. But that would be a dear-bought victory. Let her keep what faith in him she can. No; in families, the ones who can control themselves have to give in—to those who can't. If you argue with Christine she simply gives way, and then she gets hysterical, and then she is ill. It's a disease. Mothers know how their children—Christine was marked—marked with trouble! I am thankful she has any mind at all. She needs me more than Paul does. I cannot be parted from my power to help her—such as it is.”
“When she is Banks Bowen's wife she will need you more than ever!” said Moya.
“She will. I could prevent the marriage, but I am afraid to. I am afraid! So, as the family is cut in two—in three, for I—” Mrs. Bogardus stopped and moistened her lips again. “So—I think you and Paul had better make your arrangements and go as soon as you can wherever it suits you, without minding about the rest of us.”
Moya gave a little sobbing laugh. “You don't expect me to make the first move!”
“Doesn't he say anything to you—anything at all?”
“He is too ill.”
“He is not ill!” Mrs. Bogardus denied it fiercely. “Who says he is ill? He is starved and frozen. He is just out of the grave. You must be good to him, Moya. Warm him, comfort him! You can give him the life he needs. Your hands are as soft as little birds. They comfort even me. Oh, don't you understand!”
“Of course I understand!” Moya answered, her face aflame. “But I cannot marry Paul. He has got to marry me.”
“What nonsense that is! People say to a girl: 'You can't be too cold before you are married or too kind after!' That does not mean you and Paul. If you are not kind to himnow, you will make a great mistake.”
“He is not thinking of marriage,” said Moya. “Something weighs on him all the time. I cannot ask him questions. If he wanted to tell me he would. That is why I come downstairs and leave him. But he won't come down! Is it not strange? If we could believe such things I would say a Presence came with, him out of that place. It is with him when I find him alone. It is in his eyes when he looks at me. It is not something past and done with, it is here—now—in this house!Whatis it? What doyoubelieve?”
The eyes she sought to question hardened under her gaze. Here, too, was a veil. Mrs. Bogardus sat with her hands clasped in her lap. She was motionless, but the creaking of her silks could be heard as her bosom rose and fell. After a moment she said: “Paul's tray is on the table in the dining-room. Will you take it when you go up?”
Moya altered her own manner instantly. “But you?” she hesitated. “I must not crowd you out of all your mother privileges. You have handed over everything to me.”
“A mother's privilege is to see herself no longer needed. I can do nothing more for my son”—her smile was hard—“except take care of his money.”
“Paul's mother!”
“My dear, do you suppose we mind? It is a very great privilege to be allowed to step aside when your work is done.”
“Paul'smother!” Moya insisted.
Mrs. Bogardus rose. “You don't remember your own mother, my dear. You have an exaggerated idea of the—the importance of mothers. They are only a temporary arrangement.” She put out her hands and the girl's cheek touched hers for an instant; then she straightened herself and walked calmly out of the room. Moya remained a little longer, afraid to follow her. “If she would not smile! If she would do anything but smile!”
Paul was walking about his room, half an hour later, when Moya stopped outside his door. She placed the tray on a table in the hall. The door was opened from within. Paul had heard his mother go up before, heard her pause at the stairs, and, after a silence, enter her own room.
“She knows that I know,” he said to himself. “That knowledge will be always between us; we can never look each other in the face again.” To Moya he endeavored to speak lightly.
“It sounded very gay downstairs to-night. You must have had a houseful.”
“I have been with your mother the last hour,” answered Moya, vaguely on the defensive. Since Paul's return there had been little of the old free intercourse in words between them, and without this outlet their mutual consciousness became acute. Often as they saw each other during the day, the keenest emotion attached to the first meeting of their eyes.
Paul was unnerved by his sudden recall from death to life. Its contrasts were overwhelming to his starved senses: from the dirt and dearth and grimy despair of his burial hutch in the snow to this softly lighted, close-curtained room, warm and sweet with flowers; from the gaunt, unshaven spectre of the packer and his ghostly revelations, to Moya, meekly beautiful, her bright eyes lowered as she trailed her soft skirts across the carpet; Moya seated opposite, silent, conscious of him in every look and movement. Her lovely hands lay in her lap, and the thought of holding them in his made him tremble; and when he recalled the last time he had kissed her he grew faint. He longed to throw off this exhausting self-restraint, but feared to betray his helpless passion which he deemed an insult to his soul's worship of her.
And she was thinking: “Is this all it is going to mean—his coming home—our being together? And I was almost his wife!”
“So it was my mother you were talking to in the study? I thought I heard a man's voice.”
“It was the doctor. Your mother was not quite herself this evening. He came in to see her, but he does not think she is ill. 'Rest and change,' he says she needs.”
Paul gave the words a certain depth of consideration. “Are you as well as usual, Moya?”
“Oh, I am always well,” she answered cheerlessly. “I seem to thrive on anything—everything,” she corrected herself, and blushed.
The blush made him gasp. “You are more beautiful than ever. I had forgotten that beauty is a physical fact. The sight of you confuses me.”
“I always told you you were morbid.” Moya's happy audacity returned. “Now, how long are you going to sit and think about that?”
“Do I sit and think about things?” His reluctant, boyish smile, which all women loved, captured his features for a moment. “It is very rude of me.”
“Suppose I should ask you what you are thinking about?”
“Ah! I am afraid you would say 'morbid' again.”
“Try me! You ought to let me know at once if you are going to break out in any new form of morbidness.”
“I wish it might amuse you, but it wouldn't. Let me put you a case—seriously.”
Moya smiled. “Once we were serious—ages ago. Do you remember?”
“Do I remember!”
“Well? You are you, and I am I, still.”
“Yes; and as full of fateful surprises for each other.”
“I bar 'fateful'! That word has the true taint of morbidness.”
“But you can't 'bar' fate. Listen: this is a supposing, you know. Suppose that an accident had happened to our leader on the way home—to your Lieutenant Winslow, we'll say”—
“Mylieutenant!”
“Your father's—the regiment's—Lieutenant Winslow 'of ours.' Suppose we had brought him back in a state to need a surgeon's help; and without a word to any one he should get up and walk out of the hospital with his hurts not healed, and no one knew why, or where he had gone? There would be a stir about it, would there not? And if such a poor spectre of a bridegroom as I were allowed to join the search, no one would think it strange, or call it a slight to his bride if the fellow went?”
“I take your case,” said Moya with a beaming look. “You want to go after that poor man who suffered with you.”
“Who went with us to save us from our own headstrong folly, and would have died there alone”—
“Yes; oh, yes!—before you begin to think about yourself, or me. Because he is nobody 'of ours,' and no one seems to feel responsible, and we go on talking and laughing just the same!”
“Do they talk of this downstairs?”
“To-night they were talking—oh, with such philosophy! But how came you to know it?”
Paul did not answer this question. “Then”—he drew a long breath,—“then you could bear it, dear?—the comment, even if they called it a slight to you and a piece of quixotic lunacy? Others will not take my case, remember.”
“What others?”
“They will say: 'Why doesn't he send a better man? He is no trailer.' It is true. Money might find him and bring him back, but all the money in the world could not teach him to trust his friends. There is a misunderstanding here which is too bitter to be borne. It is hard to explain,—the intimacy that grows up between men placed as we were. But as soon as help reached us, the old lines were drawn. I belonged with the officers, he with the men. We could starve together, but we could not eat together. He accepted it—put himself on that basis at once. He would not come up here as the guest of the Post. He is done with us because he thinks we are done with him. And he knows that I must know his occupation is gone. He will never guide nor pack a mule again.”
“Your mother and my father, they will understand. What do the others matter?”
“I must tell you, dear, that I do not propose to tell them—especially them—why I go. For I am going. I must go! There are reasons I cannot explain.” He sighed, and looked wildly at Moya, whose smile was becoming mechanical. “I hate the excuse, but it will have to be said that I go for a change—for my health. My health! Great God! But it's 'orders,' dear.”
“Your orders are my orders. You are never going anywhere again without me,” said Moya slowly. Her smile was gone. She stood up and faced him, pale and beautiful. He rose, too, and stooped above her, taking her hands and gazing into her full blue eyes arched like the eyes of angels.
“I thought she was a girl! But she is a woman,” he said in a voice of caressing wonder. “A woman, and not afraid!”
“I am afraid. I will not be left—I will not be left again! Oh, you won't take me, even when I offer myself to you!”
“Don't—don't tempt me!” Paul caught her to him with a groan. “You don't know me well enough to be afraid ofme!”
“You! You will not let me know you.”
“Oh, hush, dear—hush, my darling! This isn't thinking. We must think for our lives. I must take care of you, precious. We don't know where this search may take us, or where it will end, or what the end will be.” He kissed the sleeve of her dress, and put her gently from him, so that he could look her in the eyes. She gave him her full pure gaze.
“It is the poor man again. You said he would spoil our lives.”
“He isourpoor man. You didn't go out of your way to find him. And your way is mine.”
“It is so heavenly to be convinced! Who taught you to see things at a glance,—things I have toiled and bungled over and don't know now if I am right!Whotaught you?”
“Do you think I stood still while you were away! Oh, my heart was sifted out by little pieces.”
“You shall sift mine. You shall tell me what to do. For I know nothing! Not even if I may dare to take this angel at her word!”
“I knew you would not take me!” the girl whispered wildly. “But I shall go.”