He paid the professor another visit a few days later, and afterwards another, and another.
"What," said the professor, at the end of his second visit, "is it ten o'clock? I assure you it is usually much later than this when it strikes ten."
"Thank you," said Arbuthnot. "I never heard that civility accomplished so dexterously before. It is perfectly easy to explain the preternatural adroitness of speech on which Mrs. Amory prides herself. But don't be too kind to me, professor, and weaken my resolution not to present myself unless I have just appropriated an idea from somewhere. If I should appear some dayau naturel, not having taken the precaution to attire myself in the mature reflections of my acquaintance, I shouldn't pay you for the wear and tear of seeing me, I'll confess beforehand."
"I once told you," said the professor to Tredennis, after the fourth visit, "that I was not fond of him, but there had been times when I had been threatened with it. This is one of the times. Ah!" with a sigh of fatigue, "I understand the attraction—I understand it."
The following week Tredennis arrived at the house one evening to find it in some confusion. Thecoupéof a prominent medical man stood before the pavement, and the servant who opened the door looked agitated.
"The professor, sir," he said, "has had a fall. We hope he aint much hurt, and Mr. Arbuthnot and the doctor are with him."
"Ask if I may go upstairs," said Tredennis; and, as he asked it, Arbuthnot appeared on the landing above, and, seeing who was below, came down at once.
"There is no real cause for alarm," he said, "thoughhe has had a shock. He had been out, and the heat must have been too much for him. As he was coming up the steps he felt giddy and lost his footing, and fell. Doctor Malcolm is with him, and says he needs nothing but entire quiet. I am glad you have come. Did you receive my message?"
"No," answered Tredennis. "I have not been to my room."
"Come into the library," said Arbuthnot. "I have something to say to you."
He led the way into the room, and Tredennis followed him, wondering. When they got inside Arbuthnot turned and closed the door.
"I suppose," he said, "you know no more certainly than I do where Mr. Amory is to be found." And as he spoke he took a telegram from his pocket.
"What is the matter?" demanded Tredennis. "What has"—
"This came almost immediately after the professor's accident," said Arbuthnot. "It is from Mrs. Amory, asking him to come to her. Janey is very ill."
"What!" exclaimed Tredennis. "And she alone, and probably without any physician she relies on!"
"Some one must go to her," said Arbuthnot, "and the professor must know nothing of it. If we knew of any woman friend of hers we might appeal to her; but everybody is out of town."
He paused a second, his eyes fixed on Tredennis's changing face.
"If you will remain with the professor," he said, "I will go myself, and take Doctor Wentworth with me."
"You!" said Tredennis.
"I shall be better than nothing," replied Arbuthnot, quietly. "I can do what I am told to do, and she mustn't be left alone. If her mother had been alive, she would have gone; if her father had been well, he would have gone; if her husband had been here"—
"But he is not here," said Tredennis, with abitterness not strictly just. "Heaven only knows where he is."
"It would be rather hazardous to trust to a telegram reaching him at Merrittsville," said Arbuthnot. "We are not going to leave her alone even until we have tried Merrittsville. What must be done must be done now. I will go and see Doctor Wentworth at once, and we can leave in an hour if I find him. You can tell the professor I was called away."
He made a step toward the door, and as he did so Tredennis turned suddenly.
"Wait a moment," he said.
Arbuthnot came back.
"What is it?" he asked.
There was a curious pause, which, though it lasted scarcely longer than a second, was still a pause.
"IfIgo," said Tredennis, "it will be easier to explain my absence to the professor." And then there was a pause again, and each man looked at the other, and each was a trifle pale.
It was Arbuthnot who spoke first.
"I think," he said, without moving a muscle, "that you had better let me go."
"Why?" said Tredennis, and the unnatural quality of his voice startled himself.
"Because," said Arbuthnot, as calmly as before, "you will be conferring a favor on me, if you do. I want an excuse for getting out of town, and—I want an opportunity to be of some slight service to Mrs. Amory."
Before the dignity of the stalwart figure towering above his slighter proportions he knew he appeared to no advantage as he said the words; but to have made the best of himself he must have relinquished his point at the outset, and this he had no intention of doing, though he was not enjoying himself. A certain cold-blooded pertinacity which he had acquired after many battles with himself was very useful to him at the moment.
"The worst thing that could happen to her just now," he had said to himself, ten minutes before, "would be that he should go to her in her trouble." And upon this conviction he took his stand.
In placing himself in the breach he knew that he had no means of defence whatever; that any reasons for his course he might offer must appear, by their flimsiness, to betray in him entire inadequacy to the situation in which he seemed to stand, and that he must present himself in the character of a victim to his own bold but shallow devices, and simply brazen the matter out; and when one reflects upon human weakness it is certainly not to his discredit that he had calmly resigned himself to this before entering the room. There was no triviality in Tredennis's mood, and he made no pretence of any. The half darkness of the room, which had been shaded from the sun during the day, added to the significance of every line in his face. As he stood, with folded arms, the shadows seemed to make him look larger, to mark his pallor, and deepen the intensity of his expression.
"Give me a better reason," he said.
Arbuthnot paused. What he saw in the man moved him strongly. In the light of that past of his, which was a mystery to his friends, he often saw with terrible clearness much he was not suspected of seeing at all, and here he recognized what awakened in him both pity and respect.
"I have no better one," he answered. "I tell you I miss the exhilaration of Mrs. Amory's society and want to see her, and hope she will not be sorry to see me." And, having said it, he paused again before making hiscoup d'état. Then he spoke deliberately, looking Tredennis in the eyes. "That you should think anything detrimental to Mrs. Amory, even in the most shadowy way, is out of the question," he said. "Think of me what you please."
"I shall think nothing that is detrimental to any manwho is her friend," said Tredennis, and there was passion in the words, though he had tried to repress it.
"Her friendship would be a good defence for a man against any wrong that was in him," said Arbuthnot, and this time the sudden stir of feeling in him was not altogether concealed. "Let me have my way," he ended. "It will do no harm."
"It will do no good," said Tredennis.
"No," answered Arbuthnot, recovering his impervious air, "it will do no good, but one has to be sanguine to expect good. Perhaps I need pity," he added. "Suppose you are generous and show it me."
He could not help seeing the dramatic side of the situation, and with half-conscious irony abandoning himself to it. All at once he seemed to have deserted the well-regulated and decently arranged commonplaces of his ordinary life, and to be taking part in a theatrical performance of rather fine and subtle quality, and he waited with intense interest to see what Tredennis would do.
What he did was characteristic of him. He had unconsciously taken two or three hurried steps across the room, and he turned and stood still.
"It is I who must go," he said.
"You are sure of that?" said Arbuthnot.
"We have never found it easy to understand each other," Tredennis answered, "though perhaps you have understood me better than I have understood you. You are quicker and more subtle than I am. I only seem able to see one thing at a time, and do one thing. I only see one thing now. It is better that I should go."
"You mean," said Arbuthnot, "better for me?"
Tredennis looked down at the floor.
"Yes," he answered.
A second or so of silence followed, in which Arbuthnot simply stood and looked at him. The utter uselessness of the effort he had made was borne in upon him in a manner which overpowered him.
"Then," he remarked at length, "if you are considering me, there seems nothing more to be said. Will you go and tell the professor that you are called away, or shall I?"
"I will go myself," replied Tredennis.
He turned to leave the room, and Arbuthnot walked slowly toward the window. The next moment Tredennis turned from the door and followed him.
"If I have ever done you injustice," he said, "the time is past for it, and I ask your pardon."
"Perhaps it is not justice I need," said Arbuthnot, "but mercy—and I don't think you have ever been unjust to me. It wouldn't have been easy."
"In my place," said Tredennis, with a visible effort, "you would find it easier than I do to say what you wished. I"—
"You mean that you pity me," Arbuthnot interposed. "As I said before, perhaps I need pity. Sometimes I think I do;" and the slight touch of dreariness in his tone echoed in Tredennis's ear long after he had left him and gone on his way.
It was ten o'clock and bright moonlight when Tredennis reached his destination, the train having brought him to a way-side station two miles distant, where he had hired a horse, and struck out into the county road. In those good old days when the dwelling of every Virginia gentleman was his "mansion," the substantial pile of red brick before whose gate-way he dismounted had been a mansion too, and had not been disposed to trifle with its title, but had insisted upon it with a dignified squareness which scorned all architectural devices to attract attention. Its first owner had chosen its site with a view to the young "shade-trees" upon it, and while he had lived upon his property had been almost as proud of his trees as of his "mansion"; and when, long afterward, changes had taken place, and the objects of his pride fell into degenerate hands, as the glories of the mansion faded, its old friends, the trees, grew and flourished, and seemed to close kindly in about it, as if to soften and shadow its decay.
On each side of the drive which led down to the gateway grew an irregular line of these trees, here and there shading the way from side to side, and again leaving a space for the moonlight to stream upon. As he tied his horse Tredennis glanced up this drive-way toward the house.
"There is a light burning in one of the rooms," he said. "It must be there that"—He broke off in the midst of a sentence, his attention suddenly attracted by a figure which flitted across one of the patches of moonlight.
He knew it at once, though he had had no thought of seeing it before entering the house. It was Bertha, ina white dress, and with two large dogs following her, leaping and panting, when she spoke in a hushed voice, as if to quiet them.
She came down toward the gate with a light, hurried tread, and, when she was within a few feet of it, spoke.
"Doctor," she said, "oh, how glad I am—how glad!" and, as she said it, came out into the broad moonlight again, and found herself face to face with Tredennis.
She fell back from him as if a blow had been struck her,—fell back trembling, and as white as the moonlight itself.
"What!" she cried, "is ityou—you?"
He looked at her, bewildered by the shock his presence seemed to her.
"I did not think I should frighten you," he said. "I came to-night because the professor was not well enough to make the journey. Doctor Wentworth will be here in the morning. He would have come with me, but he had an important case to attend."
"I did not thinkyouwould come," she said, breathlessly, and put out her hand, groping for the support of the swinging gate, which she caught and held.
"There was no one else," he answered.
He felt as if he were part of some strange dream. The stillness, the moonlight, the heavy shadows of the great trees, all added to the unreality of the moment; but most unreal of all was Bertha herself, clinging with one trembling hand to the gate, and looking up at him with dilated eyes.
"I did not thinkyouwould come," she said again, "and it startled me—and"—She paused with a poor little effort at a smile, which the next instant died away. "Don't—don't look at me!" she said, and, turning away from him, laid her face on the hand clinging to the gate.
He looked down at her slight white figure and bent head, and a great tremor passed over him. The next instant she felt him standing close at her side.
"You must not—do that," he said, and put out his hand and touched her shoulder.
His voice was almost a whisper; he was scarcely conscious of what his words were; he had scarcely any consciousness of his touch. The feeling which swept over him needed no sense of touch or sound; the one thing which overpowered him was his sudden sense of a nearness to her which was not physical nearness at all.
"Perhaps I was wrong to come," he went on; "but I could not leave you alone—I could not leave you alone. I knew that you were suffering, and I could not bear that."
She did not speak or lift her head.
"Has it been desolate?" he asked.
"Yes," she answered, in a hushed voice.
"I was afraid so," he said. "You have been alone so long—I thought of it almost every hour of the day; you are not used to being alone. Perhaps it was a mistake. Why do you tremble so?"
"I don't know," she answered.
"My poor child!" he said. "My poor child!" And then there was a pause which seemed to hold a lifetime of utter silence.
It was Bertha who ended it. She stirred a little, and then lifted her face. She looked as he remembered her looking when he had first known her, only that she was paler, and there was a wearied softness in her eyes. She made no attempt at hiding the traces of tears in them, and she spoke as simply as a child.
"I thought it was the doctor, when I heard the horse's feet," she said; "and I was afraid the dogs would bark and waken Janey. She has just fallen asleep, and she has slept so little. She has been very ill."
"Youhave not slept," he said.
"No," she replied. "This is the first time I have left her."
He took her hand and drew it gently through his arm.
"I will take you up to the house," he said, "so that you can hear every sound; but you must stay outside for a little while. The fresh air will do you good, and we can walk up and down while I tell you the reason the professor did not come."
All the ordinary conventional barriers had fallen away from between them. He did not know why or how, and he did not ask. Suddenly he found himself once again side by side with the Bertha he had fancied lost forever. All that had bewildered him was gone. The brilliant little figure, with its tinkling ornaments, the unemotional little smile, the light laugh, were only parts of a feverish dream. It was Bertha whose hand rested on his arm—whose fair, young face was pale with watching over her child—whose soft voice was tremulous and tender with innocent, natural tears. She spoke very little. When they had walked to and fro before the house for a short time, she said:
"Let us go and sit down on the steps of the porch," and they went and sat there together,—he upon a lower step, and she a few steps above, her hands clasped on her knee, her face turned half away from him. She rarely looked at him, he noticed, even when he spoke to her or she spoke to him; her eyes rested oftener than not upon some far-away point under the trees.
"You are no better than you were when you went away," he said, looking at her cheek where the moonlight whitened it.
"No," she answered.
"I did not think to find you looking like this," he said.
"Perhaps," she said, still with her eyes fixed on the far-away shadows, "perhaps I have not had time enough. You must give me time."
"You have had two months," he returned.
"Two months," she said, "is not so long as it seems." And between the words there came a curious little catch of the breath.
"It has seemed long to you?" he asked.
"Yes."
She turned her face slowly and looked at him.
"Has it seemed long to you?" she said.
"Yes," he replied, "long and dreary."
She swayed a little toward him with a sort of unconscious movement; her eyes were fixed upon his face with a wistful questioning; he had seen her look at her children so.
"Was it very hot?" she said. "Were you tired? Why did you not go away?"
"I did not want to go away," he answered.
"But you ought to have gone away," she said. "You were not used to the heat, and—Let the light fall on your face so that I can see it!"
He came a little nearer to her, and as she looked at him the wistfulness in her eyes changed to something else.
"Oh," she cried, "it has done you harm. Your face is quite changed. Why didn't I see it before? What have you been doing?"
"Nothing," he answered.
He did not stir, or want to stir, but sat almost breathlessly still, watching her, the sudden soft anxiousness in her eyes setting every pulse in his body throbbing.
"Oh," she said, "you are ill—you are ill! How could you be so careless? Why did not papa"—
She faltered—her voice fell and broke. She even drew back a little, though her eyes still rested upon his.
"You were angry with me when you thought I did not take care of myself," she said; "and you have been as bad as I was, and worse. You had not so many temptations. And she turned away, and he found himself looking only at her cheek again, and the soft side-curve of her mouth.
"There is less reason why I should take care of myself," he said.
"You mean"—she asked, without moving—"that there are fewer people who would miss you?"
"I do not know of any one who would miss me."
Her hands stirred slightly, as they lay in her lap.
"That is underrating your friends," she said, slowly. "But"—altering her tone—"it is true, I have the children and Richard."
"Where is Richard?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"When you heard from him last," he began.
"He is a bad correspondent," she said.
"He always finds so much to fill his time when he is away. There is an understanding between us that he shall write very few letters. I am responsible for it myself, because I know it spoils everything for him when he has an unwritten letter on his conscience. I haven't heard from him first yet since he went West."
She arose from her seat on the step.
"I will go in now," she said. "I must speak to Mrs. Lucas about giving you a room, and then I will go to Janey. She is sleeping very well."
He arose, too, and stood below her, looking up.
"You must promise not to think of me," he said. "I did not come here to be considered. Do you think an old soldier, who has slept under the open sky many a night, cannot provide for himself?"
"Have you slept so often?" she asked, the very triviality of the question giving it a strange sweetness to his ears.
"Yes," he answered. "And often with no surety of wakening with my scalp on."
"Oh!" she exclaimed, and made an involuntary movement toward him.
He barely restrained his impulse to put out his hands, but hers fell at her sides the next instant.
"I am a great coward," she said. "It fills me withterror to hear of things like that. Is it at all likely that you will be ordered back?"
"I don't know," he replied, his uplifted eyes devouring all the sweetness of her face. "Would that"—
The very madness of the question forming itself on his lips was his own check.
"I don't want to think of it," he said. Then he added, "As I stand here I look up at you. I never looked up at you before."
"Nor I down at you," she returned. "You are always so high above me. It seems strange to look down at you."
It was all so simple and inconsequent, but every word seemed full of the mystery and emotion of the hour. When he tried afterward to recall what they had said he was bewildered by the slightness of what had been uttered, even though the thrill of it had not yet passed away.
He went up the steps and stood beside her.
"Yes," he said, speaking as gently as he might have spoken to a child. "You make me feel what a heavy-limbed, clumsy fellow I am. All women make me feel it, but you more than all the rest. You look almost like a child."
"But I am not very little," she said; "it is only because I am standing near you."
"I always think of you as a small creature," he said. "I used to think, long ago, that some one should care for you."
"You were very good, long ago," she answered softly. "And you are very good now to have come to try to help me. Will you come in?"
"No," he said, "not now. It might only excite the child to-night if she saw me, and so long as she is quiet I will not run the risk of disturbing her. I will tell you what I am going to do. I am not going to leave you alone. I shall walk up and down beneath your window, and if you need me you will know I am there, and you have only to speak in your lowest voice. Ifshe should be worse, my horse is at the gate, and I can go for the doctor at once."
She looked up at him with a kind of wonder.
"Do you mean that you intend to stand sentinel all night?" she said.
"I have stood sentinel before," was his reply. "I came to stand sentinel. All that I can do is to be ready if I am wanted."
"But I cannot let you stay up all night," she began.
"You said it had been desolate," he answered. "Won't it be less desolate to know that—that some one is near you?"
"Oh, yes! Oh, yes!" she said. "But"—
"Go upstairs," he said, "and promise me that, if she still sleeps, you will lie down and let your nurse watch her."
The gentle authority of his manner seemed to impress her curiously. She hesitated as if she scarcely understood it.
"I—don't—know," she faltered.
"You will be better for it to-morrow," he persisted, "and so will she."
"I never did such a thing before," she said, slowly.
"I shall be beneath the open window," he said, "and I have the ears of an Indian. I shall know if she stirs."
She drew a soft, troubled breath.
"Well," she said, "I will—go."
And, without another word, she turned away. He stood and watched her as she moved slowly across the wide porch. At the door she stopped and turned toward him.
"But," she said, faint lines showing themselves on her forehead, "I shall be remembering that you—are not asleep."
"You must not remember me at all," he answered.
And then he stood still and watched her again until she had entered the house and noiselessly ascended the staircase, which was a few yards from the open door,and then, when he could see her white figure in the darkness no more, he went out to his place beneath the window, and strode silently to and fro, keeping watch and listening until after the moon had gone down and the birds were beginning to stir in the trees.
At six o'clock in the morning Bertha came down the stairs again. Her simple white gown was a fresh one, and there was a tinge of color in her cheeks.
"She slept nearly all night," she said to Tredennis, when he joined her, "and so did I. I am sure she is better." Then she put out her hand for him to take. "It is all because you are here," she said. "When I wakened for a moment, once or twice, and heard your footsteps, it seemed to give me courage and make everything quieter. Are you very tired?"
"No," he answered, "I am not tired at all."
"I am afraid you would not tell me if you were," she said. "You must come with me now and let me give you some breakfast."
She led him into a room at the side of the hall. When the house had been a "mansion" it had been considered a very imposing apartment, and, with the assistance of a few Washingtonian luxuries, which she had dexterously grafted upon its bareness, it was by no means unpicturesque even now.
"I think I should know that you had lived here," he said, as he glanced around.
"Have I made it so personal?" she replied. "I did not mean to do that. It was so bare at first, and, as I had nothing to do, it amused me to arrange it. Richard sent me the rugs, and odds and ends, and I found the spindle-legged furniture in the neighborhood. I am afraid it won't be safe for you to sit down too suddenly in the chairs, or to lean heavily on the table. I think you had better choose that leathern arm-chair and abide by it. It is quite substantial."
He took the seat, and gave himself up to the pleasureof watching her as she moved to and fro between the table and an antique sideboard, from whose recesses she produced some pretty cups and saucers.
"What are you going to do?" he asked.
"I am going to set the table for your breakfast," she said, "because Maria is busy with the children, and the other nurse is with Janey, and the woman of the house is making your coffee and rolls."
"You are going to set the table!" he exclaimed.
"It doesn't require preternatural intelligence," she answered. "It is rather a simple thing, on the whole."
It seemed a very simple thing as she did it, and a very pretty thing. As he leaned against the leathern back of his chair, beginning vaguely to realize by a dawning sense of weariness that he had been up all night, he felt that he had not awakened from his dream yet, or that the visions of the past months were too far away and too unreal to move him.
The early morning sunlight made its way through the vines embowering the window, and cast lace-like shadows of their swaying leaves upon the floor, and upon Bertha's dress when she passed near. The softness of the light mellowed everything, and intensified the touches of color in the fans and ornaments on the walls and mantel, and in the bits of drapery thrown here and there as if by accident; and in the midst of this color and mellowed light Bertha moved before him, a slender, quiet figure, making the picture complete.
It was her quietness which impressed itself upon him more than all else. After the first moments, when she had uttered her cry on seeing him, and had given way in her momentary agitation, he had noticed that a curious change fell upon her. When she lifted her face from the gate all emotion seemed to have died out of it; her voice was quiet. One of the things he remembered of their talk was that they had both spoken in voices so low as to be scarcely above a whisper.
When the breakfast was brought in she took a seat atthe table to pour out his coffee and attend to his wants. She ate very little herself, but he rarely looked up without finding her eyes resting upon him with wistful interest.
"At least," she said once, "I must see that you have a good breakfast. The kindest thing you can do this morning is to be hungry. Please be hungry if you can."
The consciousness that she was caring for him was a wonderful and touching thing to him. The little housewifely acts with which most men are familiar were bewilderingly new to him. He had never been on sufficiently intimate social terms with women to receive many of these pretty services at their hands. His unsophisticated reverence for everything feminine had worked against him, with the reserve which was one of its results. It had been his habit to feel that there was no reason why he should be singled out for the bestowal of favors, and he had perhaps ignored many through the sheer ignorance of simple and somewhat exaggerated humility.
To find himself sitting at the table alone with Bertha, in her new mood,—Bertha quiet and beautiful,—was a moving experience to him. It was as if they two must have sat there every day for years, and had the prospect of sitting so together indefinitely. It was the very simplicity and naturalness of it all which stirred him most. Her old vivid gayety was missing; she did not laugh once, but her smile was very sweet. They talked principally of the children, and of the common things about them, but there was never a word which did not seem a thing to be cherished and remembered. After a while the children were brought down, and she took Meg upon her knee, and Jack leaned against her while she told Tredennis what they had been doing, and the sun creeping through the vines touched her hair and the child's and made a picture of them. When she went upstairs she took Meg with her, holding her little handand talking to her in pretty maternal fashion; and, after the two had vanished, Tredennis found it necessary to pull himself together with a strong effort, that he might prove himself equal to the conversational demands made upon him by Master Jack, who had remained behind.
"I will go and see Janey again," she had said. "And then, perhaps, you will pay her a visit."
When he went up, a quarter of an hour later, he found his small favorite touchingly glad to see him. The fever from which she had been suffering for several days had left her languid and perishable-looking, but she roused wonderfully at the sight of him, and when he seated himself at her bedside regarded him with adoring admiration, finally expressing her innocent conviction that he had grown very much since their last meeting.
"But it doesn't matter," she hastened to assure him, "because I don't mind it, and mamma doesn't, either."
When, in the course of the morning, Doctor Wentworth arrived, he discovered him still sitting by the bedside, only Janey had crept close to him and fallen asleep, clasping both her small hands about his large one, and laying her face upon his palm.
"What!" said the doctor. "Can you do that sort of thing?"
"I don't know," answered Tredennis, slowly. "I never did it before."
He looked down at the small, frail creature, and the color showed itself under his bronzed skin.
"I think she's rather fond of me—or something," he added withnaïveté, "and I like it."
"She likes it, that's evident," said the doctor.
He turned away to have an interview with Bertha, whom he took to the window at the opposite end of the room, and after it was over they came back together.
"She is not so ill as she was yesterday," he said; "and she was not so ill then as you thought her." He turned and looked at Bertha herself. "She doesn't needas much care now as you do," he said, "that's my impression. What have you been doing with yourself?"
"Taking care of her," she answered, "since she began to complain of not feeling well."
He was a bluff, kindly fellow, with a bluff, kindly way, and he shook a big forefinger at her.
"You have been carrying her up and down in your arms," he said. "Don't deny it."
"No," she answered, "I won't deny it."
"Of course," he said. "I know you—carrying her up and down in your arms, and singing to her and telling her stories, and holding her on your knee when you weren't doing anything worse. You'd do it if she were three times the size."
She blushed guiltily, and looked at Janey.
"Good Heaven!" he said. "You women will drive me mad! Don't let me hear any more about fashionable mothers who kill their children! I find my difficulty in fashionable children who kill their mothers, and in little simpletons who break down under the sheer weight of their maternal nonsense. Who was it who nearly died of the measles?"
"But—but," she faltered, deprecatingly, "I don't think I ever had the measles."
"They weren't your measles," he said, with amiable sternness. "They were Jack's, and Janey's, and Meg's, and so much the worse."
"But," she interposed, with a very pretty eagerness, "they got through them beautifully, and there wasn't a cold among them."
"There wouldn't have been a cold among them if you'd let a couple of sensible nurses take care of them. Do you suppose I'm not equal to bringing three children through the measles? It's all nonsense, and sentiment, and self-indulgence. You like to do it, and you do it, and, as a natural consequence, you die of somebody else's measles—or come as near it as possible."
She blushed as guiltily as before, and looked at Janey again.
"I think she is very much better," she said.
"Yes," he answered, "she is better, and I want to see you better. Who is going to help you to take care of her?"
"I came to try to do that," said Tredennis.
Bertha turned to look at him.
"You?" she exclaimed. "Oh, no! You are very good; but now the worst is over, I couldn't"—
"Should I be in the way?" he asked.
She drew back a little. For a moment she had changed again, and returned to the ordinary conventional atmosphere.
"No," she said, "you know that you would not be in the way, but I should scarcely be likely to encroach upon your time in such a manner."
The doctor laughed.
"He is exactly what you need," he said. "And he would be of more use to you than a dozen nurses. He won't stand any of your maternal weakness, and he will see that my orders are carried out. He'll domineer over you, and you'll be afraid of him. You had better let him stay. But you must settle it between you after I am gone."
Bertha went downstairs with him to receive a few final directions, and when she returned Tredennis had gently released himself from Janey, and had gone to the window, where he stood evidently awaiting her.
"Do you know," he said, with his disproportionately stern air, when she joined him,—"do you know why I came here?"
"You came," she answered, "because I alarmed you unnecessarily, and it seemed that some one must come, and you were kind enough to assume the responsibility."
"I came because there was no one else," he began.
She stopped him with a question she had not asked before, and he felt that she asked it inadvertently.
"Where was Laurence Arbuthnot?" she said.
"That is true," he replied, grimly. "Laurence Arbuthnot would have been better."
"No," she said, "he would not have been better."
She looked up at him with a curious mixture of questioning and defiance in her eyes.
"I don't know why it is that I always manage to make you angry," she said; "I must be very stupid. I always know you will be angry before you have done with me. When we were downstairs"—
"When we were downstairs," he put in, hotly, "we were two honest human beings, without any barriers of conventional pretence between us, and you allowed me to think you meant to take what I had to offer, and then, suddenly, all is changed, and the barrier is between us again, because you choose to place it there, and profess that you must regard me, in your pretty, civil way, as a creature to be considered and treated with form and ceremony."
"Thank you for calling it a pretty way," she said.
And yet there was a tone in her low voice which softened his wrath somehow,—a rather helpless tone, which suggested that she had said the words only because she had no other resource, and still must utter her faint protest.
"It is forme," he went on, "to come to you with a civil pretence instead of an honest intention? I am not sufficiently used to conventionalities to make myself bearable. I am always blundering and stumbling. No one can feel that more bitterly than I do; but you have no right to ignore my claim to do what I can when I might be of use. I might be of use, because the child is fond of me, and in my awkward fashion I can quiet and amuse her as you say no one but yourself can."
"Will you tell me?" she asked, frigidly, "what right I have to permit you to make of yourself a—a nursemaid to my child?"
"Call it what you like," he answered. "Speak of it as you like. What right does it need? I came because"—
His recollection of her desolateness checked him. It was not for him to remind her again by his recklessness of speech that her husband had not felt it necessary to provide against contingencies. But she filled up the sentence.
"Yes, you are right," she said. "As you said before, there was no one else—no one."
"It chanced to be so," he said; "and why should I not be allowed to fill up the breach for the time being?"
"Because it is almost absurd," she said, inconsequently. "Don't you see that?"
"No," he answered, obstinately.
Their eyes met, and rested upon each other.
"You don't care?" she said.
"No."
"I knew you wouldn't," she said. "You never care for anything. That is what I like in you—and dread."
"Dread?" he said; and in the instant he saw that she had changed again. Her cheeks had flushed, and there was upon her lips a smile, half-bitter, half-sweet.
"I knew you would not go," she said, "as well as I knew that it was only civil in me to suggest that you should. You are generous enough to care for me in a way I am not quite used to—and you always have your own way. Have it now; have it as long as you are here. Until you go away I shall do everything you tell me to do, and never once oppose you again; and—perhaps I shall enjoy the novelty."
There was a chair near her, and she put her hand against it as if to steady herself, and the color in her face died out as quickly as it had risen.
"I did not want you to go," she said.
"You did not want me to go?"
"No," she answered, in a manner more baffling than all the rest. "More than anything in the world I wanted you to stay. There, Janey is awakening!"
And she went to the bed and kneeled down beside it, and drew the child into her arms against her bosom.
From that day until they separated there was no change in her. It was scarcely two weeks before their paths diverged again; but, in looking back upon it afterward, it always seemed to Tredennis that some vaguely extending length of time must have elapsed between the night when he dismounted at the gate in the moonlight, and the morning when he turned to look his last at Bertha, standing in the sun. Each morning when she gave him his breakfast in the old-fashioned room, and he watched her as she moved about, or poured out his coffee, or talked to Meg or Jack, who breakfasted with them; each afternoon when Janey was brought down to lie on the sofa, and she sat beside her singing pretty, foolish songs to her, and telling her stories; each evening when the child fell asleep in her arms, as she sang; each brief hour, later on, when the air had cooled, and she went out to sit on the porch, or walk under the trees,—seemed an experience of indefinite length, not to be marked by hours, nor by sunrise and sunset, but by emotions. Her gentle interest in his comfort continued just what it had been the first day he had been so moved by it, and his care for her she accepted with a gratitude which might have been sweet to any man. Having long since established his rank in Janey's affections it was easy for him to make himself useful, in his masculine fashion. During her convalescence his strong arms became the child's favorite resting-place; when she was tired of her couch he could carry her up and down the room without wearying; she liked his long, steady strides, and the sound of his deep voice, and his unconscious air of command disposed of many a difficulty. When Bertha herself was the nurse hewatched her faithfully, and when he saw in her any signs of fatigue he took her place at once, and from the first she made no protest against his quietly persistent determination to lighten her burdens. Perhaps, through the fact that they were so lightened, or through her relief from her previous anxiety, she seemed to grow stronger as the child did. Her color became brighter and steadier, and her look of lassitude and weariness left her. One morning, having been beguiled out of doors by Jack and Meg, Tredennis heard her laugh in a tone that made him rise from his chair by Janey, and go to the open window.
He reached it just in time to see her run like a deer across the sun-dappled grass, after a bright ball Meg had thrown to her, with an infantile aimlessness which precluded all possibility of its being caught. She made a graceful dart at it, picked it up, and came back under the trees, tossing it in the air, and catching it again with a deft turn of hand and wrist. She was flushed with the exercise, and, for the moment, almost radiant; she held her dress closely about her figure, her face was upturned and her eyes were uplifted, and she was as unconscious as Meg herself.
When she saw him she threw the ball to the children, and came forward to the window.
"Does Janey want me?" she asked.
"No. She is asleep."
"Do you want me?"
"I want to see you go on with your game."
"It is not my game," she answered, smiling. "It is Jack's and Meg's. Suppose you come and join them. It will fill them with rapture, and I shall like to look on."
When he came out she sat down under a tree leaning against the trunk, and watched him, her eyes following the swift flight of the ball high into the blue above them, as he flung it upward among the delighted clamor of the children. He had always excelled in sports andfeats of strength, and in this simple feat of throwing the ball his physical force and grace displayed themselves to decided advantage. The ball went up, as an arrow flies from the bow, hurtling through the air, until it was little more than a black speck to the eye. When it came back to earth he picked it up and threw it again, and each time it seemed to reach a greater height than the last.
"That is very fine," she said. "I like to see you do it."
"Why?" he asked, pausing.
"I like the force you put into it," she answered. "It scarcely seems like play."
"I did not know that," he said; "but I am afraid I am always in earnest. That is my misfortune."
"It is a great misfortune," she said. "Don't be in earnest," with a gesture as if she would sweep the suggestion away with her hand. "Go on with your game. Let us be like children, and play. Our holiday will be over soon enough, and we shall have to return to Washington and effete civilization."
"Is it a holiday?" he asked her.
"Yes," she answered. "Now that Janey is getting better I am deliberately taking a holiday. Nothing rests me so much as forgetting things."
"Are you forgetting things?" he asked.
"Yes," she replied, looking away; "everything."
Then the children demanded his attention, and he returned to his ball-throwing.
If she was taking a holiday with deliberate intention she did it well. In a few days Janey was well enough to be carried out and laid on one of the two hammocks swung beneath the trees, and then far the greater part of the day was spent in the open air. To Tredennis it seemed that Bertha made the most of every hour, whether she swung in her hammock with her face upturned to the trees, or sat reading, or talking as she worked with the decorous little basket, at which she had jeered, upon her knee.
He was often reminded in these days of what the professor had said of her tenderness for her children. It revealed itself in a hundred trifling ways, in her touch, in her voice, in her almost unconscious habit of caring for them, and, more than all, in a certain pretty, inconvenient fashion they had of getting close to her, and clinging about her, at all sorts of inopportune moments. Once when she had run to comfort Meg who had fallen down, and had come back to the hammock, carrying her in her arms, he was betrayed into speaking.
"I did not think,"—he began, and then he checked himself guiltily.
"You did not think?" she repeated.
He began to recognize his indiscretion.
"I beg your pardon," he said, "I was going to make a blunder."
She sat down in the hammock, with the child in her arms.
"You were going to say that you did not think I cared so much for my children," she said, gently. "Do you suppose I did not know that? Well, perhaps it was not a blunder. Perhaps it is only one of my pretences."
"Don't speak like that," he implored.
The next instant he saw that tears had risen in her eyes.
"No," she said. "I will not. Why should I? It is not true. I love them very much. However bad you are, I think you must love your children. Of course, my saying that I loved them might go for nothing; but don't you see," she went on with a pathetic thrill in her voice, "that they loveme? They would not love me, if I did not care for them."
"I know that," he returned remorsefully. "It was only one of my blunders, as I said. But you have so bewildered me sometimes. When I first returned I could not understand you. It was as if I found myself face to face with a creature I had never seen before."
"You did," she said. "That was it. Perhaps I never was the creature you fancied me."
"Don't say that," he replied. "Since I have been here I have seen you as I used to dream of you, when I sat by the fire in my quarters in the long winter nights."
"Did you ever think of me like that?" she said slowly, and with surprise in her face.
He had not thought of what he was revealing, and he did not think of it now.
"I never forgot you," he said. "Never."
"It seems very strange—to hear that now," she said. "I never dreamed of your thinking of me—afterwards. You seemed to take so little notice of me."
"It is my good fortune," he said, with a touch of bitterness, "that I neverseemto take notice of anything."
"I suppose," she went on, "that you remembered me because you were lonely at first, and there was no one else to think of."
"Perhaps that was it," he answered.
"After all," she said, "it was natural—only I never thought"—
"It was as natural that you should forget as that I should remember," he said.
Her face had been slightly averted, and she turned it toward him.
"But I did not forget," she said.
"You did not?"
"No. At first, it is true, I scarcely seemed to have time for anything, but to be happy and enjoy the days, as they went by. Oh! what bright days they were, and how far away they seem! Perhaps, if I had known that they would come to an end really, I might have tried to make them pass more slowly."
"They went slowly for me," he said. "I was glad when they were over."
"Were you so very lonely!" she asked.
"Yes."
"Would it have pleased you, if I had written to you when papa did?"
"Did you ever think of doing it?" he asked.
The expression dawning in her eyes was a curious one—there was a suggestion of dread in it.
"Once," she replied. "I began a letter to you. It was on a dull day, when I was restless and unhappy for the first time in my life; and suddenly I thought of you, and I felt as if I should like to speak to you again,—and I began the letter."
"But you did not finish it."
"No. I only wrote a few lines, and then stopped. I said to myself that it was not likely that you had remembered me in the way I had remembered you, so I laid my letter aside. I saw it only a few days ago among some old papers in my trunk."
"You have it yet?"
"I did not know that I had it, until I saw it the other day. It seems strange that it should have lain hidden all these years, and then have come to light. I laid it away thinking I might find courage to finish it sometime. There are only a few lines, but they prove that my memory was not so bad as you thought."
He had been lying on the grass a few feet away from her. As she talked he had looked not at her, but at the bits of blue sky showing through the interlacing greenness of the trees above him. Now he suddenly half rose and leaned upon his elbow.
"Will you give it to me?" he said.
"Do you want it? It is only a yellow scrap of paper."
"I think it belongs to me," he said. "I have a right to it."
She got up without a word and went toward the house, leading Meg by the hand. Tredennis watched her retreating figure in silence until she went in at the door. His face set, and his lips pressed together, then he flung himself backward and lay at full length again, seeing only the bright green of the leaves and the bitsof intense blue between. It was well that he was alone. His sense of impotent anguish was more than he had strength to bear, and it wrung a cry from him.
"My God!" he said; "my God!" He was still lying so when Bertha returned. She had not been away many minutes, and she came back alone with the unfinished letter in her hand.
He took it from her without comment, and looked at it. The faint odor of heliotrope he knew so well floated up to him as he bent over the paper. As she had said, there were only a few lines, and she had evidently been dissatisfied with them, and irresolute about them, for several words were erased as if with girlish impatience. At the head of the page was written first:Dear Philip, and thenDear Captain Tredennis, and there were two or three different opening sentences. As he read each one through the erasures, he thought he understood the innocent, unconscious appeal in it, and he seemed to see the girl-face bending above it, changing from eagerness to uncertainty, and from uncertainty to the timidity which had made her despair.
"I wish you had finished it," he said.
"I wish I had," she answered, and then she added vaguely, "if it would have pleased you."
He folded it, and put it in his breast-pocket and laid down once more, and it was not referred to again.
It seemed to Tredennis, at least, that there never before had been such a day as the one which followed. After a night of rain the intense heat subsided, leaving freshness of verdure, skies of the deepest, clearest blue, and a balmy, luxurious sweetness in the air, deliciously pungent with the odors of cedar and pine.
When he came down in the morning, and entered the breakfast room, he found it empty. The sunlight streamed through the lattice-work of vines, and the cloth was laid, with the pretty blue cups and saucers in waiting; but Bertha was not there, and, fancying she had risen later than usual, he went out into the open air.
The next morning he was to return to Washington. There was no absolute need of his remaining longer. The child had so far recovered that, at the doctor's suggestion, in a few days she was to be removed to the sea-side. Nevertheless, it had cost him a struggle to arrive at his decision, and it had required resolution to announce it to Bertha. It would have been far easier to let the days slip by as they would, and when he told her of his intended departure, and she received the news with little more than a few words of regret at it, and gratitude for the services he had rendered, he felt it rather hard to bear.
"If it had been Arbuthnot," he thought, "she would not have borne it so calmly." And then he reproached himself bitterly for his inconsistency.
"Did I come here to make her regret me, when I left her?" he said. "What a fool a man can make of himself, if he gives way to his folly!"
As he descended the steps of the porch he saw her, and he had scarcely caught sight of her before she turned and came toward him. He recognized at once that she had made a change in her dress; that it was no longer such as she had worn while in attendance upon Janey, and that it had a delicate holiday air about it, notwithstanding its simplicity.
"Was there ever such a day before?" she said, as she came to him.
"I thought not, as I looked out of my window," he replied.
"It is your last," she said, "and I should like you to remember it as being pleasanter than all the rest; though," she added, thoughtfully, "the rest have been pleasant."
Then she looked up at him, with a smile.
"Do you see my gala attire?" she said. "It was Janey who suggested it. She thinks I have not been doing myself justice since you have been here."
"That," he said, regarding her seriously, "is a verybeautiful gown, but"—with an entirely respectful sense of inadequacy of expression—"you always wear beautiful gowns, I believe."
"Did Mr. Arbuthnot tell you so?" she said, "or was it Miss Jessup?"
They breakfasted together in the sunny room, and after breakfast they rambled out together. It was she who led, and he who followed, with a curious, dreamy pleasure in all he did, and in every beauty around him, even in the unreal passiveness of his very mood itself. He had never been so keenly conscious of things before; everything impressed itself upon him,—the blue of the sky, the indolent sway of the leaves, the warmth of the air, and the sweet odors in it, the broken song of the birds, the very sound of Bertha's light tread as they walked.
"I am going to give the day to you," she had said. "And you shall see the children's favorite camping-ground on the hill. Before Janey was ill we used to go there almost every day."
Behind the house was a wood-covered hill, and half-way up was the favored spot. It was a sort of bower formed by the clambering of a great vine from one tree to another, making a canopy, under which, through a break in the trees, could be seen the most perfect view of the country below, and the bend of the river. The ground was carpeted with moss, and there was a moss-covered rock to lean against, which was still ornamented with the acorn cups and saucers with which the children had entertained their family of dolls on their last visit.
"See," said Bertha, taking one of them up when she sat down. "When we were here last we had a tea-party, and it was poor Janey's headache which brought it to a close. At the height of the festivities she laid down her best doll, and came to me to cry, and we were obliged to carry her home."
"Poor child!" said Tredennis. He saw only her faceupturned under the shadow of the white hat,—a pretty hat, with small, soft, downy plumes upon it, and a general air of belonging to the great world.
"Sit down," said Bertha, "or you may lie down, if you like, and look at the river, and not speak to me at all." He lay down, stretching his great length upon the soft moss, and clasping his hands beneath his head. Bertha clasped her hands about her knee and leaned slightly forward, looking at the view as if she had never seen it before.
"Is this a dream?" Tredennis said, languidly, at last. "I think it must be."
"Yes," she answered, "that is why the air is so warm and fragrant, and the sky so blue, and the scent of the pines so delicious. It is all different when one is awake. That is why I am making the most of every second, and am determined to enjoy it to the very utmost."
"That is what I am doing," he said.
"It is not a good plan, as a rule," she began, and then checked herself. "No," she said, "I won't say that. It is a worldly and Washingtonian sentiment. I will save it until next winter."
"Don't save it at all," he said; "it is an unnatural sentiment. It isn't true, and you do not really believe it."
"It is safer," she said.
He lay still a moment, looking down the hillside through the trees at the broad sweep of the river bend and the purple hills beyond.
"Bertha," he said, at last, "sometimes I hate the man who has taught you all this."
She plucked at the red-tipped moss at her side for a second or so before she replied; she showed no surprise or hurry when she spoke.
"Laurence Arbuthnot!" she said. "Sometimes I hate him, too; but it is only for a moment,—when he tells me the simple, deadly truth, and I know it is the truth, and wish I did not."
She threw the little handful of moss down the hill as if she threw something away with it.
"But this is not being happy," she said. "Let us be happy. Iwillbe happy. Janey is better, and all my anxiety is over, and it is such a lovely day, and I have put on my favorite gown to celebrate it in. Look at the color of the hills over there—listen to those doves in the pines. How warm and soft the wind is, and how the scent of my carnations fills the air! Ah, what a bright world it is, after all!"
She broke into singing softly, and half under breath, a snatch of a gay little song. Tredennis had never heard her sing it before, and thought it wonderfully sweet. But she sang no more than a line or two, and then turned to him, with a smile in her eyes.
"Now," she said, "it is your turn. Talk to me. Tell me about your life in the West; tell me all you did the first year, and begin—begin just where you left me the night you bade me good-by at the carriage-door."
"I am afraid it would not be a very interesting story," he said.
"It would interest me," she answered. "There are camp-fires in it, and scalps, and Indians, and probably war-paths." And her voice falling a little, "I want to discover why it was that you always seemed to be so much alone, and sat and thought in that dreary way by the fire in your quarters. It seems to me that you have been a great deal alone."
"I have been a great deal alone," he said; "that is true."
"It must have been so even when you were a child," she went on. "I heard you tell Janey once that when you were her age you belonged to no one. I don't like to think of that. It touches the maternal side of me. It makes me think of Jack. Suppose Jack belonged to no one; and you were not so old as Jack. I wonder if you were at all like him, and how you looked. I wish there was a picture of you I could see."
He had never regarded himself as an object likely to interest in any degree, and had lost many of the consolations and excitements of the more personal kind thereby; and to find that she had even given a sympathetic thought to the far-away childhood whose desolateness he himself had never quite analyzed, at once touched and bewildered him.
"I have not been without friends," he said, "but I am sure no one ever gave much special thought to me. Perhaps it is because men are scarcely likely to give such thoughts to men, and I have not known women. My parents died before I was a year old, and I don't think any one was ever particularly fond of me. People did not dislike me, but they passed me over. I never wondered at it, but I saw it. I knew there was something a little wrong with me; but I could not understand what it was. I know now: I was silent, and could not express what I thought and felt."
"Oh!" she cried; "and was there no one to help you?"
There was no thought of him as a full-grown person in the exclamation; it was a womanish outcry for the child, whose desolate childhood seemed for the moment to be an existence which had never ended.
"I know about children," she said, "and what suffering there is for them if they are left alone. They can say so little, and we can say so much. Haven't I seen them try to explain things when they were at a disadvantage and overpowered by the sheer strength of some full-grown creature? Haven't I seen them make their impotent little struggle for words and fail, and look up with their helpless eyes and see the uselessness of it, and break down into their poor little shrieks of wrath and grief? The happiest of them go through it sometimes, and those who are left alone—Why didn't some woman see and understand?—some woman ought to have seen and cared for you."
Tredennis found himself absorbed in contemplation ofher. He was not sure that there were not tears in her eyes, and yet he could hardly believe it possible.
"That is all true," he said; "you understand it better than I did. I understood the feeling no better than I understood the reason for it."
"I understand it because I have children," she answered. "And because I have watched them and loved them, and would give my heart's blood for them. To have children makes one like a tiger, at times. The passion one can feel through the wrongs of a child is somethingawful. One can feel it for any child—for all children. But for one's own"—
She ended with a sharply drawn breath. The sudden uncontrollable fierceness, which seemed to have made her in a second,—in her soft white gown and lace, and her pretty hat, with its air of good society,—a small, wild creature, whom no law of man could touch, affected him like an electric shock; perhaps the thrill it gave him revealed itself in his look, and she saw it, for she seemed to become conscious of herself and her mood, with a start. She made a quick, uneasy movement and effort to recover herself.
"I beg your pardon," she said, with a half laugh. "But I couldn't help it. It was"—and she paused a second for reflection,—"it was the primeval savage in me." And she turned and clasped her hands about her knee again, resuming her attitude of attention, even while the folds of lace on her bosom were still stirred by her quick breathing.
But, though she might resume her attitude, it was not so easy to resume the calmness of her mood. Having been stirred once, it was less difficult to be stirred again. When he began, at last, to tell the story of his life on the frontier, if his vanity had been concerned he would have felt that she made a good listener. But his vanity had nothing to do with his obedience to her wish. He made as plain a story as his material would allow, and also made persistent, though scarcelysuccessful, efforts to avoid figuring as a hero. He was, indeed, rather abashed to find, on recurring to facts, that he had done so much to bring himself to the front. He even found himself at last taking refuge in the subterfuge of speaking of himself in the third person as "one of the party," when recounting a specially thrilling adventure in which he discovered that he had unblushingly distinguished himself. It was an exciting story of the capture of some white women by the Indians at a critical juncture, when but few men could be spared from the fort, and the fact that the deadly determination of "one of the party" that no harm should befall them was not once referred to in words, and only expressed itself in daring and endurance, for which every one but himself was supposed to be responsible, did not detract from its force. This "one of the party," who seemed to have sworn a silent oath that he would neither eat, nor sleep, nor rest until he had accomplished his end of rescuing the captives, and who had been upon the track almost as soon as the news had reached the fort, and who had followed it night and day, with his hastily gathered and altogether insufficient little band, and at last had overtaken the captors, and through sheer courage and desperate valor had overpowered them, and brought back their prisoners unharmed,—this "one of the party," silent, and would-be insignificant, was, in spite of himself, a figure to stir the blood.