The Bird in the Box

CHAPTER VII
CONCERNING ALEXANDER EMIL ST. IVES

In the make-up of this Alexander Emil St. Ives, who carried his name like a flaunting feather, his father played small part. During the life of the elder St. Ives, the family had lived on a farm in Rhode Island and the father, a dour, narrow man, had laid his commands upon the soil and had tilled it with his will as with an agricultural implement; in bad seasons often he had been the one farmer in the neighbourhood who harvested crops.

There were two sons. The elder boy, Edgar, resembled the father, though built on smaller, neater lines, with a face shaped like an egg. He had much of the father's obstinate force united to a faculty for grasping and retaining what seemed to him worth while. The younger son resembled the mother.

Mrs. St. Ives, timid, valiant creature, was incapable of not loving. For her first-born she entertained an affection purely maternal; for Emil, however, she harboured a feeling almost worshipful. The fact that she had borne him was to her a miracle ever new. He woke heaven in her heart and his love opened her soul as the sun's ray opens the flower. Neither husband nor elder son ever suspected the exquisite quality of her nature.

Edgar was a lad of fifteen when Emil was born. From the first he turned a cold face on the mite, and as time went on grew jealous of him up to the eyes. There was something august about Emil even in his ugly, defenceless childhood. He was of a singularly inquiring turn of mind and years afterward his mother delighted to relate how, when he was two years old, he had crawled a mile and a half from home, lured forward by the curiosity that later became his salient characteristic. His energies spent, he had rested on a flat rock. While his tiny body grew warm in the sun, his infant mind had lost itself in inarticulate reverie. If he could go on quite to the end of everything, even to that hazy, far-away point where blue met green, what should he find? It was this speculative tendency that gave his hair its wild aspect; that kindled in his eyes their roving, searching glance; that already, young as he was, made him look at life with an air of keen astonishment.

When he was eleven years old, his father died and the reins of management fell into Edgar's hands. That young man, being in no sense a typical farmer, immediately exchanged the farm, which the elder St. Ives had bequeathed him, for a large country store. By dint of shrewd management, he soon became a successful merchant. So rapidly did he rise that by the end of the second year, he had built himself a house and installed in it a shrewish wife who lost no time in presenting him with a swarm of children. He also placed in the house his mother, and the poor lady dwelt there under the lash of the wife's tongue, like a servant in constant fear of dismissal. In righteous mood, Edgar even went so far as to extend the protection of his roof to his young brother. In a tiny chamber over the kitchen the lad's first tentative inventions saw the light.

But between these two natures a gulf was fixed. If truth were told, they had not a trait in common. Edgar was provident and saving, Emil the reverse. Long ere he had obtained his majority, he had wheedled from his mother the little money she held in trust for him from his grudging and disapproving father. To be sure, the sum was very meagre and could not be stretched, by any calculation, to cover the technical training the lad coveted; therefore he had expended a part of it for scientific books and the rest had gone little by little into materials for his constant experimenting.

For the precious little inventions which cluttered Emil's chamber and sometimes found their unwelcome way into other parts of the house, Edgar had a withering contempt. He never missed an opportunity to have a fling at them and his scornful words entered the mother's heart like barbed arrows. However, in his nineteenth year Emil produced an apparatus for freshening sea water which it seemed must prove of inestimable value to all sea-faring folk. The mother in a flutter of excitement and even with tears, besought him to take his brother into his confidence. In fact this was necessary, if he wished to secure the use of an abandoned and much coveted granary for a shop. But the lad held back. The apparatus, despite its undoubted usefulness, seemed to him of trifling importance. The mother, however, foreseeing fortune ahead of him, urged the step and at length the boy consented. True to her prediction, after his first scornful inspection of the contrivance, Edgar admitted that it might have possibilities. Like most of the boy's experiments, this device was beyond his comprehension, but he could grasp the fact that sailors and fishermen, with the chance of shipwreck forever staring them in the face, might have use for it. He therefore offered to get it patented, then took steps to secure the patent—in his own name. As it chanced, the papers, bearing his signature but otherwise carefully copied from those which Emil had submitted for his inspection fell under the boy's eye.

The night following this discovery, a light appeared in the granary. Edgar, peering from his chamber window, perceived a demoniacal figure, smashing and demolishing everything the little shop contained. Even as he looked, it lifted a small instrument, which represented months of patient labour, and threw it with a crash to the floor. Instantly Edgar was out of the house. He scampered across the yard, his night gear fluttering in the light of the pale moon. Emil at that moment caught up the sea-water device and sent it crashing through the doorway. Being made largely of glass, the instrument shivered into a million minute fragments. Edgar and his wife and children, who had flocked to his side, covered their eyes. When they looked again, through the dust that still hung in the air, they beheld a bent figure, lit up by the gleam of the lantern, still moving in a whirl of rubbish.

Edgar in his scant raiment danced up and down.

"Thief!" he hissed.

For an instant the boy paused in his diabolical work:

"Thief!" He burst into terrifying laughter.

With one final wrench he brought down the work-bench and flung it across the pile; then kneeling, he applied a match to the mass. Crackling flames leaped upward. He got to his feet and stood with his figure silhouetted against the red glow. In that hour he had destroyed something more precious than his inventions, his books and all his little workmen's kit in which he had taken such pride. That which had gone down in flames hotter than those which raged around him, was the essential quality which is youth. Such searing emotions are the death of adolescence. He was visibly trembling. The hair was matted above the eyes which he lifted. Without a word he darted past them and disappeared into the night.

A quarter of a mile from the house he met his mother. She was waiting for him in the darkness. Quivering all over she took him in her long arms. But his anger had already subsided and he felt stealing over him a new and gratifying sense of release.

"Don't, Mother," he whispered hoarsely, "it was bound to come,—and you'll see—I'll soon send for you."

Her tears distressed him. For this cheated, baffled, frail and suffering mother who asked but one thing, that his ambition be gratified, Emil's feeling was fiercely paternal. It was the solitary oasis in a nature devoid of all other affections.

He caressed her with his hands, but presently he held them up before her. "With these," he whispered, "and with this," and he touched his forehead, "I'll do something. You'll see. The world needs me," he cried.

The world needed him! At that moment he felt that he could grasp the universe, instinct with unknown laws, and plunging his mind into it could drag forth some hitherto undiscovered force.

The world needed him! Poor, foolish, misguided, highly-gifted youth! Certainly he was more valuable to Society than its rickety children who would never grow up, its infirm old men, sick with alcoholism, its base and unworthy charges; yet for all these, he soon discovered, the great New York, glancing indifferently from her million windows, provided asylums; but for him, who had in his head that which should bring the world to his feet—for him nothing.

In turn he worked for a photographer, a printer, and an engraver, but as he failed to pay attention to his duties and urged upon his irate employers devices for improving the processes used in their work, he remained only a short time in each situation. By the third year, however, he drifted into a place that promised to be permanent.

The conservative lithographing establishment of Benjamin Just and Richard Lawless was in need of an apprentice. Being by this time much reduced in health and spirits, with all the fiery currents of his being at low ebb, Emil accepted this berth. For upwards of a year he worked with commendable sobriety; in fact, became no more than a pivot, a screw, a tiny whirling wheel in the life of the factory. But at the end of a twelvemonth his old fever broke out in aggravated form; the trivial bit of mechanism became a madman or a genius over night.

Waving some papers above his head, laughing naïvely and applauding himself, Emil approached the head draughtsman one day and exhibited a little model. But the draughtsman into whose hands all the choice work of the establishment fell, swore at him. 'The art of lithography,' he gave him to understand, 'was an old and honourable one; and as for cheapening the work, heaven knew, enough had been done in that line!' And he briefly consigned the young fool and his new-fangled process to hell.

Thereupon, Emil, nothing daunted, approached the two owners. Trembling all over with eagerness, he fixed them with his eyes in which a flame seemed to be leaping up and down.

"Just a thin flexible sheet, that is what I propose," he cried;—"a sheet which has all the qualities of the finest of your lithographic stones, but which is superior because cheaper and lighter and the possible supply unlimited. How's that? A sheet, which after one preparation for printing, will continue to yield clean proofs without dampening or resetting for a much longer time than the best of your lithographic stones," he continued.

"But how do you print from this precious sheet of yours?" inquired Mr. Lawless, a fat red man, who tried to look scornful and only succeeded in looking ridiculous. If truth were told, the partners, while appearing to have little faith in the scheme, felt in the pits of their stomachs an excited feeling similar to that produced by high swinging; indeed, their phlegmatic pulses beat to the same excited measure as the young inventor's.

"With a specially constructed cylinder press, that's now I'll print," answered Emil.

As a result of the conference, the owners, although professing scepticism, consented to give him a small room in which to perfect his invention and, in their generosity, even guaranteed to continue the payment of his former meagre salary.

From that day, Emil began to live a particular and intensely nervous life.

He was now one of a large army, consisting of press men, lithographers, zinc men, clerks, artists, stenographers, bookkeepers. The majority of these men did their work methodically and as a matter of duty. When they quitted the factory at night, they forgot the labour that had occupied them during the day. With Emil, however, it was otherwise.

In a tiny room, reeking with heat and dust and clamorous with the rumble of the presses, he worked, scarcely taking note of the passing of one day and the birth of another. Often he sought the factory at night. The general manager, a man with a forceful presence and a shrewd eye, scornfully shrugged his shoulders. He distrusted such enthusiasm; but the owners were more hopeful. At night they had a door left open for the erratic inventor.

Unconscious that he was observed, Emil hurried through the streets and bounded up the steps to his den. Then how he caressed his invention, how he stared straight before him with eyes that saw nothing, while his brain drew from the surrounding ether a crowd of images wonderful for their reality and vigour. Sometimes in these nights of limpid contemplation, he became as beautiful as an angel. At other times, inspiration was capricious and the particular idea that he sought must be pursued. At such times he would crack his fingers at the joints, wave backward and forward like a tree in a storm, rock like a ship on an angry sea. Somehow, he would wrest his idea from the vast Unknown. And when he had succeeded in fixing it, smiling peacefully, he would go to sleep like a child; go to sleep and dream of some far land where invention was not torture. Before his work-bench, exhausted, he was often discovered in the early dawn by Ding Dong when he came to sweep out.

Half-witted, deaf and dumb, with a face so hideous that caricature could not exaggerate it, Ding Dong had received his nick-name from some bookish artist or other. With a fat tongue useless in his wide mouth and ears like sails, though they served to convey no sound to his meagre brain, Ding Dong ate habitually of the food thrown away by saloons, drank the dregs left in whiskey glasses, and, with the agility of a little cat, accepted the stumps of cigarettes which the clerks good naturedly threw him.

Between him and Emil, existed a peculiar friendship, and many were the novel breakfast parties held in the little workroom at the hour when New York was just waking to life.

Ding Dong procured rolls and made coffee; then three partook of the meal, for there were always three, the inventor, Ding Dong and, to furnish the feminine element, Lulu, a tiny South American monkey. Pinched and sad Lulu seemingly was not devoid of coquetry, for she wrapped herself in a bit of bright flannel which she held together beneath her chin with one small black hand, while she peeped out from between the folds with her little mournful eyes.

Of all the prisoners in the great building, none was more miserable than this little monkey. A present to the wife of one of the partners, who detested her, she had been brought down to the factory where she led a truly miserable life. In order to be out of reach of the furnace man, who had once treated her cruelly, she ran up among the asbestos-covered pipes, and there remained, save when she suffered herself to be lured down by Ding Dong. It was as if these two touching creatures, the one so nearly bestial and the other so nearly human, strove to lessen each other's profound loneliness.

As Emil pulled at his long pipe, resting after his exertions of the night, something of his serenity stole over his companions and wrapped in the same mood of abstracted dreaminess, they watched the dawn together.

When the department overseer appeared, a shudder ran through the building. The presses rumbled and boys began to feed them with great sheets of paper. The band of pale, dispirited youths in the art department etched their designs. With dust, sweat, oaths, grinding muscles, shriek and thunder of machinery,—the day began. Hour after hour the passionate clamour increased to a poem, a hymn, a pæan to the God of Work.

At twelve o'clock the tension relaxed. Men from the different departments poured into the streets and sought the cafes and restaurants of the neighbourhood. A few, however, always remained in the building. For that hour they were no longer slaves. The head bookkeeper, an old man, stretched his legs, glad to get down from his high stool; one of the stenographers, with flying fingers resumed her work on a little red jacket for Lulu. Even Emil was affected by the sudden contagion of idleness that swept the building. Leaving the model of his press, he took time to stare from the windows at the roofs of New York. But despite his interest in his work these surroundings were beginning to tell upon him. One day in July, unable to bear the heat, he staggered out into the passage to get a drink from a pail of water that stood there. He was lifting the dripping dipper to his lips, when a pair of eyes met his with a sort of shock. When he stumbled back into the little den, Annie Lawless, springing up from a chair in her father's office, followed him.

"What's the matter?" she cried sharply, as he sank down with his head bowed on the work-bench. She started to summon someone, but a second glance at his pale face with tiny beads of perspiration around the nostrils, caused her to change her mind. She passed swiftly to the door and closed it. Then, detaching a jewelled smelling-bottle from her belt, she held it under his nose with her little shaking hand. When Emil came to himself, he saw bending over him a delicate face shaped like a pear, the cheeks white almost as his own. This face was furnished with soft open lips, like an infant's, and, by contradiction, with two blue eyes which, for the moment, looked into his with an almost maternal solicitude.

"Are you better?" The question was blended with the odour of violets, subtle and overpowering, with the gleam of diamonds, with the touch of a soft fabric, warm with life, beneath his cheek.

The next instant he sat up, flushing all over. And Annie Lawless blushed too.

"Yes, I'm all right, perfectly right," he muttered, and tried to laugh. "It's only this infernal heat," supporting his head in a strange fashion as if he feared it would drop off.

"Yes, it is awfully hot," Annie answered. "Is that the model for the cylinder press?" she asked presently. "I've heard Father speak of your inventions."

Emil, whose head was still giddy, had a childish wish that she would come near him again and put those hands, covered with rings, on his brow. He looked at her as she stood speaking. When she turned sidewise he noticed dreamily how small her waist was, he believed he could span it with his two hands; and her nose was slightly hooked, which combined with her quick movements, gave her somewhat of the appearance of a bird.

"I've heard Papa say that he thinks your press is going to be a big thing," she continued, "but I should think he ought to give you a better place to work in."

At these words Emil roused himself. He had not known before that Mr. Lawless believed in the press. "Why yes, if I had a decent place to work in—" he began.

"Papa ought to pay you more money," she said with conviction. "Why, he used to have a man who invented things and he gave him special rooms and a fine salary besides. Papa says a man with the inventive bee in his bonnet isn't fit to look after himself. But that man was," she concluded, "for he left Papa one day in the lurch and went to inventing things on his own account, and since then he has made a pile of money. You'll do that too if they aren't careful."

The upshot of the matter was that she began making plans for the relief of the stranger who, with his extraordinary air, seemed more interesting to her than anyone she had ever known.

"It may take a little time, but I'll manage it somehow," she told him as she left.

And she did manage it.

She saw Emil several times, arousing a perfect furor of gossip among the artists by the temerity of her visits. When she knew that her father and his partner were out of the building, she slipped in to see Emil, and, more than once as the summer advanced, she met him at an appointed place on his homeward walk.

Finally, acting on her advice, he sent in a written protest to his employers, stating that it was impossible for him to complete the work at his present salary and setting forth his desire for a more fully equipped workroom. In conclusion, he intimated that if his requests were not acceded to, in view of the services he had already rendered them, he should feel free to quit their employ.

The day following this step, Annie appeared with triumph written all over her face.

"It's all settled," she announced. "Mr. Just and the general manager were at our house last night. They talked about you and I listened at the library door. Papa made Mr. Wakefield admit that he'd been wrong in his estimate of you. And then Papa went on to say that he thought they might as well, first as last, offer to grub stake you. Do you know what that means?" she cried, laughing. "It means that they will pay all your expenses and give you rooms somewhere like that Mr. Pennyworth I told you about. He said already, by the different improvements you'd made on this and that machine, you'd saved the firm thousands of dollars. You didn't know that, I guess. He said you were too valuable a man to lose. And that's not all," she went on to cover her embarrassment, for Emil was staring at her, "you're to have a few weeks somewhere in the country if you want them, and I'm sure you need a vacation badly enough."

"How did you manage it?" he asked, speaking with difficulty.

"Oh, I just kept Papa thinking about you by the things I said. One day I said that the factory was horribly stuffy and I should think the artists, and you particularly, would just die. And then I asked him carelessly if he thought your press was going to be any good, and he said, 'Good!—well, if he can be got to finish it, that's all we want. The man's a genius!' And I laughed and told him he'd better look out or his genius would have sunstroke. I explained to him that you were probably so worn out that you couldn't finish it. I said a thing here and a thing there, mere nothings, but I made him uneasy, and then came your letter throwing up the whole scheme before it was completed. Oh I knew he'd do it, if it was managed all right!" she exclaimed gleefully. And then changing her tone: "Are you glad?" and she wrinkled her brow into anxious furrows beneath her light summer hat.

Emil took one of her little hands timidly. He turned a ring round and round on her tiny finger, staring at her, endeavouring to find words. Suddenly two arms were laid about his neck and all quivering in the storm of her own emotions, like a bird seeking shelter, she fluttered against his breast. Her hat had slipped to her shoulders. He felt that she was sobbing violently, and scarcely knowing what he did, he clasped her closely in his arms and muttering unintelligible words which he himself did not understand, he pressed his lips again and again to her small blond head.

But the plum that tumbles into our lap without the asking is seldom as fine as the fruit we climb for, strain for, spend hours in thirsting after. Three weeks—and this fierce agitation of the senses had subsided. It was an excitement, a fever, which at the time had been augmented by so many equivocal influences; by the noise of the presses which had seemed to keep time to his pulses, by the gleam of the girl's jewels, by the softness of her attire, by the fact, more than all else, that she was his chief's daughter.

A whiff of sea air and Emil looked back on the affair with utter weariness. Without a conscience, he was accustomed to follow simply the dictates of his own nature. The memory of the girl irked him, therefore with heavy sighs like a weary horse, he destroyed her letters. However, the phantom of love had passed very close, and it was not in vain that all the electric currents of his being had been set in motion. He was awake now to another world than that in which he had hitherto dwelt,—awake, with his great inquisitive eyes, attentive.

It was at this juncture that Rachel Beckett dawned on his horizon. When she came round the rock leading the cow, a novel sensation convulsed that strange uncultivated heart of his. A man's heart is a garden in which, before the coming of death, many flowers of emotion bloom; and the history of these flowers is the history of his life.

CHAPTER VIII
IN THE CAUSE OF SCIENCE

Since the night of Emil's departure, which had brought such terror to her heart, a divine serenity had fallen upon Mrs. St. Ives. His frequent letters, filled with the vitality of his genius and all radiant with love, were to her a second baptism of youth. Palpitating with enthusiasm, she carried them to her room where she read and reread them. Sometimes she wept over them, and for days after the receipt of one, she went about with an expression of utter peace. But when, for some reason, a letter failed to arrive, then in that house far removed from the scenes among which he dwelt, she would clasp her hands in silent agony, she would be given over to anxiety, glancing about her, more nervous than any bird; she would rebuke the teasing grandchildren and fiercely demand the letter which, she imagined, her daughter-in-law kept from her. Then became evident in her no longer the triumph of youth but the tragedy of age.

Without doing anything to deserve her special affection, both Edgar and his wife were jealous of her absorbing love for Emil. They ridiculed this worship. And no one except the singular object of her devotion comprehended the extent of her suffering. Vague and unsatisfactory as he was in all other relations, where she was concerned he was gifted with an insight that might have done credit to a woman. Full well he comprehended that she was living her life in his, and, for that reason, he strove to make it gorgeous for her. Poor devil of an inventor, with his toes all but through his boots and his head in the clouds! He would often brood over her situation with tears in his eyes. He cherished the hope of one day having her with him, and, in the event of her coming, planned like a lover, to greet her royally. But once plunged in his work, it must be confessed that for days together he incontinently forgot all about her. Then, perhaps, a feeble scrawl would arrive, announcing a headache or some trifling woman's worry, and contrition would be rampant in him. Rousing himself, he would write her one of his long, characteristic letters, fairly pouring out his life on the page.

As may be conjectured, his being sent to Old Harbour to rest and, incidentally, to add the finishing touches to the metal plate and cylinder press, was subject matter for a glowing epistle, which brought to the mother a wealth of happiness and sent her to bed night after night with touching prayers of gratitude on her lips. Once settled in the hotel at Old Harbour, however, Emil abandoned the work in hand and fell to making a depth indicator. How think of anything else with the sea out there waiting to be plumbed? In vain Annie Lawless hinted that her father was anxious to install the press and counselled haste, as has been related, Emil destroyed her letters and went feverishly forward with his self-appointed task.

On the afternoon of the day of his meeting with Rachel he was in fine feather. The presence of the girl and the prospect of testing his invention filled him with animation. At moments, as he tinkered at the boat's rim, he whistled so shrilly that the sea gulls paused in their wheeling to listen; and this complicated energy, this unusual virility, was as much a tribute to her who sat in the grey nest of boulders, as a testimony of interest in the work. And so she understood it.

With her slight figure relieved against the skyline, she waited for him to complete his preparations. Now and then her eyes travelled, with unerring directness, to the mound of sand where he had that morning buried the letter. What did those hard-packed grains of sand conceal? Instinctively she played with the question and its import sat deep in her eye. As if by a stroke of art, she had placed herself in direct line with the figure-head, so that no one glancing that way could fail to be struck by the dissimilarity between image and maid. Mobility and an ardent capacity for a rich and varied existence were written all over her; that something which is the potency of womanhood itself seemed to have awakened suddenly from the torpor of youth in that little heart and to have come abroad for the first time experimentally. There she sat, and whenever he turned his head, he was struck anew with her, so that he must needs look again and yet again.

She had covered her feet with her skirts and her hands were clasped decorously in her lap. Her brow had a male gravity, as distinguished from her chin which was softly-turned and exceeding feminine. Her hair was parted and trained in two shining unbroken portions and tucked away behind her ears, something as a curtain is looped back from a window. The sphinx-like mystery of Leonardo's La Gioconda was alive in her eyes.

Even while the girl, in her essential self, remained superlatively innocent and unconscious, there looked out from her little virgin countenance at Emil, gravely selecting him, the 'Genius of the Species.' Her glance proclaimed sex and intellectual detachment.

Presently Emil turned his face over his shoulder and beckoned to her; and his laugh was repeated by the water coursing up the beach and curling round the boat in white-lipped waves. The fog had disappeared and the sun was now shining joyously.

Rachel grasped the oars, rowing with long even strokes, and Emil sat in the bow. To one side of the boat and projecting into the water, he had attached a bell, which gave out when struck a special, sharp, short note; and on the other side of the boat he had placed a telephone receiver connected with a small box.

"And inside that box is another still smaller of metal," he told her, "and that contains the secret of the whole device. Did you ever hear of the microphone?"

She shook her head.

"Well, it's a tiny affair no larger than a pea, and will so magnify sound in connection with an electric current and a telephone receiver, such as I have here, that the footsteps of a fly on a sheet of paper sound about like the tramping of an army. It's so powerful," he continued, "that if I were to place it in the end of a tube and point the tube, say, toward that island out there, any noise going on—-a wagon rattling along the road or a child naming—I should be able to hear on this side, provided I had arranged the microphone so as to shut out all intervening noises. For instance, this microphone here is sensitive to no sound but that of the bell and the vibrations that I hope may be reflected back from the sea bottom. But we'll soon know whether it will work," he cried. "Row about twenty rods farther and then I'll tell you not only the depth of the water at that point, but the character of the bottom and whether it will be safe for our big liner to advance."

He was trembling all over and Rachel reflected his interest. She sent the boat forward a few strokes, then rested on the dripping oars. Nature, it seemed, was in her most approachable mood and at a hint of coaxing would reveal her secrets; yet the girl was conscious of something in the phenomena of the sea implacable and resistant to the efforts of man. Concealed promontories, hidden shoals, submerged headlands, treacherous peaks, drowned under the ceaseless rushing of waters—would the Voice come back bearing tale of all this?—or, if mud, weeds, fish, incrustations of shell—would the Voice proclaim safety, and the inventor know the very thickness of that rolling, beauteous mantle of mystery?

Nothing of the poetic significance of the test was lost on the girl, and she felt the hand of pity at her throat when she witnessed Emil's disappointment manifest all over him like a blight. Then she gloried when she saw him repeat the test.

Come what might, it was clear he had faith in himself.

Tenaciously he passed from one test to another. He contorted himself, stooping in the bottom of the boat, his eyes bright with the steady flame of his determination. He took off his coat and, flinging back his hair, listened with the receiver at one ear while he covered the other with his free hand. At last he was able to hear: first, the muffled stroke of the bell, then the extremely feeble sound vibrations reflected from the sea bottom through the microphone-telephone; and by the period of time which elapsed between the bell stroke and the return impulse, he was able, after innumerable experiments, to estimate closely the distance which the sound travelled before being sent back.

The afternoon advanced and waned, twilight approached, and, by his complete absorption, he revealed to Rachel the toil, the cautious experiments, the days and nights of labour expended for such meagre, very meagre results. He became, all at once, in her imagination, a figure exalted and pathetic. But it was plain that the unsatisfactory test had consumed a portion of his existence. At last, with an abrupt gesture, he directed her to put back to the shore.

The darkness had fallen and the waves wetted the beach indefatigably, the ocean murmured incomprehensibly, and from the heavens poured the imperturbable light of the stars. The stars threw their calm radiance over the figure that, silent and absorbed, leaped out of the boat and without a word made off around the rocks.

A shadowy presence, which immediately disclosed itself as a boy, emerged from among the boulders and scowled after the retreating form. "The next time he's for rowing round in such crazy fashion, I'll take him." And with his strong arms, André helped Rachel beach the boat.

She flung down the end of rope and faced him. "You'll do nothing of the sort," she cried; "you'll mind your business, do you understand?"

These words, spit out upon him, made him open his eyes in astonishment, but before he could find speech, she likewise had disappeared in the gloom.

CHAPTER IX
THE OLD FASCINATION

In spite of André's interference and her grandfather's mild questionings, in spite, even, of Nora Gage's curious and sly looks, Rachel continued to take Emil out in the boat every day. But on the fifth day when she went to the beach, he did not appear. For a time she waited in acute loneliness, then, with a magnificent effort, she returned to the house, deliberately donned her best dress, and, haughtily, under Nora's little inquisitive eyes, started for Old Harbour. Some powerful law of existence was at work driving her blindly forward to realize a distant idea in the face of the challenges of her maidenhood.

She walked rapidly until she gained the main street of the little village. Then her steps flagged, and with her head turning idly from side to side, she noticed, as if for the first time, the names over the doors of the storm-beaten shops:—"Old Harbour Yacht Yard," "Ship Chandlery and Hardware," "Paint, Cordage and Boat Trimmings."

In her dainty trappings, with the shadow from her hat in her eyes and folds of her crisp muslin dress in one sunburnt hand to keep it from the soil of the road, she might have been a stranger on a first stroll through the curious little town that smelled rankly of fish, instead of a maid born and bred in those parts. Finally she paused before a window where yellow oilskin coats were grotesquely displayed, together with lanterns and canvas pails and other objects of signal interest to one of her sex and age; and at that instant Emil, lounging in the door of the hotel opposite with a pipe planted between his lips, spied her.

For two blocks she walked rapidly, and when she did permit him to overtake her, she scarcely gave answer to his greeting. As if by mutual consent they turned their steps in the direction of the old Burying Point, a rocky promontory at the town's edge where for two centuries Old Harbour had persistently discovered graves for its dead among the boulders. Rocks and bones of men disputed the place, and yet, what more fit than that they should be laid to rest there, those staunch old captains and brave wives, whose very spirits had more in common with rocks than with flowers? Yet flowers bloomed there in scanty elegance, and sprays of 'lady's ear-drop' and 'Queen Anne's lace,' testifying to some feminine grace hidden away in neighbouring graves, caught and clung to Rachel's dress as she passed.

Emil, who was frankly pleased to see her, kept laughing loudly as he switched off the heads of the tall grass: but Rachel turned away her face and bit her lip; now that she saw him, she was indifferent to him. She was not thoroughly aware of her own actions until they were accomplished. Constantly something vast fought within her. Indeed, in this scrap of a girl was manifest one of the greatest desires, the greatest volitions of the universe.

Reaching the edge of the cemetery where it ran out in a jutting cliff that commanded a view of extended range and beauty, she sank down on an old seat and cast a challenging glance at Emil.

"Is the depth indicator complete?" she asked. "I did not know that you considered it finished."

"Yes, it's practically finished," he answered; "anyhow, I shan't be able to do anything more to it for the present. I've got to finish my lithographic outfit. They're hurrying me. I'm heartily sick of it, but there's nothing else to be done."

"Of course you must finish it," she agreed quickly, and the last little cloud vanished from her eyes.

With instinctive tact she began making more attractive to him the duty that lay before him. She made him explain the salient features of the lithographic improvement and she nodded her head sagely at each point as if she understood. Then she praised its ingenuity. Finally, having divined his feeling for his mother, she hinted at her pleasure in his success.

"Your mother must be excited these days," she said, "and proud, too."

The glow in his glance had been deepening, and pride was visible all over him, but at the mention of his mother his expression changed.

"Yes, it must go through for her sake," he said soberly. "Oh, I'm a queer devil," he continued, hitching his shoulders in some impatience; "I've a brain exactly like one of the monkeys in the Zoo—attracted first by this thing, then by that, just like one of the monkeys in the Zoo. I say, you're coming to-morrow?" he asked, as she rose. "If I'm to finish in time, someone's got to bring me to account."

He stood smiling at her, the sun lighting up his rough locks and causing him to half close his questioning, eager eyes in which there was a touch of anxiety.

She lifted toward him her sensitive and responsive face.

"Will you come?" he insisted. His eyes held hers.

Her brows rose ingenuously, her lips parted, though no word passed them. Then, with a mute gesture of assent, she turned away.

Reaching home, she deemed it expedient to conceal her towering spirits. But even so, it seemed extraordinary that her grandfather did not surprise the thought that informed her cheeks, her eyes and every curve of her body with witchery. In Emil's presence her bearing had not been what she could have wished, but now it was that of a queen.

At bedtime, before her mirror, she arranged her hair after a new fashion. She stared into her bright soft face. Standing in her nightgown she hugged closely to her breast her happiness that was young and young and once again young.

Borne forward in obedience to an irresistible command of nature, she continued to meet St. Ives. In spite of tears and passionate revolts and innumerable petty hypocrisies by which she strove to put another face on her actions, that was awake in her which would not be gainsaid. And, thanks to her sex which so readily can blind itself, her movements for the most part remained superbly instinctive and unconscious.

When she set out of an afternoon for Old Harbour she caught and held every eye, like something bright and sparkling. Nora Gage observed her and malignity appeared to deepen the creases of her fat; while Lizzie Goodenough longed for the temerity to give warning to the motherless slip. All unmindful of them, Rachel, with such bravery of raiment as she could command, pursued her course. And her accoutrement, which was always the same, was by no means inconsiderable. The dress was of yellow barred-muslin and the skirt swayed as she walked like the corolla of a drooping flower. The waist fitted her closely, save at the bosom where there was an over-lapping fulness and in this surplice front was pinned carelessly, surely with the height of art, a cluster of evening primroses. These frail flowers, constantly agitated by the mad beating of her heart, drooped finally, as if in sheer delight at their enviable position. Fastened beneath her chin was the ribbon of her flower-decked hat. This ribbon, passing round that little smooth face and seeming to hold it in a dainty embrace, was a triumph of coquetry: it had life and spoke, calling attention to the down on the cheek, to the lift of the upper lip, finally to the eyes, innocent as a stag's—eyes that never the less revealed in this ardent, complex, highly-spiritual creature intense aspirations towards a fuller existence.

One afternoon on arriving at the cemetery she seated herself on a certain flat-topped tomb, and there some minutes later Emil joined her. The look from under his rough mane came at her diagonally, as with head lowered on his hand, he sat beside her. His eyes shed on her admiration; his moustache leaped against his cheek as he smiled.

"It's good to be near you."

Rachel glanced at him askance, and one little hand trembled so on the other that she had to intertwine their fingers strongly. Though she drank in these words like wine, she did not know how to prolong the moment. Instead,—O perverse instinct that frequently dominates helpless youth!—she inquired about his work. For interminable hours she had longed for this very moment, yet here she was shortening it!

Emil rose joyously to her question. Not only did he reply to it, but he amplified his explanation and finally launched into a detailed description of the instrument on which he was then engaged.

Once started on the subject, she knew he would not abandon it until she rose as a signal that the interview must end.

Happiness was diminished, but for an instant only. Disappointment was drowned in pride. It was something to have demonstrated to her her value as a confidante. To her imagination this stranger dropped by Fate at her feet, was all that the childish André was not. He appealed to her by reason of his stronger magnetism and his greater mind. Not only did he seem to her to possess every quality of the ideal lover, but,—and the discovery completed her subjugation and was essential to it,—he was the eternal child of genius whom she longed to protect.

The moment came when they had to part. Sometimes they separated at the gate of the cemetery; sometimes, if dusk had overtaken them, Emil walked home with her. Frequently, at the moment of parting, he caught her hand and looked fixedly at her eyes and mouth. Though judging from the expression of both eyes and mouth, the permission he sought was not absolutely withheld, the firm, round face fronting his in the evening light seemed to mask a host of imperious possibilities. Its look, on the whole, was equivocal. Scarcely aware of what restrained him, he pressed her trusting little fingers and let her go. Rachel was one of those fortunate maidens who are never treated with levity by men.

After the young girl had disappeared in the house, the spell she had cast over Emil's restless heart was in a measure dissipated. He straightened his cap, thrust his hands into his pockets and swung away, his thoughts once more on his work.

But for Rachel there existed no such opposing interest. Each day, through the hours of separation, she lived on the exhaustless, ardent vitality absorbed during their last interview. But it was not long ere the glory of her dream was partially eclipsed. The guileless disturber of her bliss was a certain Lottie Loveburg who caught up with her one afternoon as she was striking into the road for Pemoquod Point. As she had parted from Emil some minutes earlier, Rachel was not averse to Lottie's company.

"I'm going your way, at least as far as Mr. Patch's," Lottie announced with a panting breath. "Mother wants me to get a mess of pease for supper. Bliss and Mason are all sold out."

The two girls went on side by side.

Lottie was a few years older than Rachel. In school she had been considered an out-and-out stupid, but once released from school she was acknowledged a belle. She was a large full-bosomed lass with a head of heavy blond hair. The one misfortune of her face was the slight crossing of the blue eyes. As far as possible, she remedied the defect by a frequent lowering of the lids, though the precaution was one which she did not trouble herself to take when walking, as at present, with one of her own kind. From this big lazy girl there issued a compelling and entirely innocent charm that attacked the opposite sex. To the absorbed and dreamy Rachel she was as cornet to flute, when both blow the same ravishing air.

For a space the pair followed the road in silence. Had any observer been present, he might well have asked himself how much of the hope depicted on the countenances of these two young creatures was destined to be fulfilled. Were they destined to be mothers of sons and daughters who, in turn, would inhabit this desolate coast?—or was it written that something of their superabundance of dream and romance be realized? It was significant that they set their faces toward the immense infinite ocean, suggestive that their skirts, whipped to the side by the breeze, seemed waving a farewell to the rude life of the land.

Though their shoulders touched, for sometime each seemed unconscious of the other. Lottie was the first to speak.

"Well," she cried, "here we are at Mr. Patch's and I haven't said a word of what's weighing on my mind."

Rachel started and glanced sideways at her. She feared some allusion to her meetings with Emil.

But Lottie was too much engrossed in her own affairs to give a thought to her companion's. "Yes, I think I must tell you," she continued with a sigh that was a frank announcement of vanity. "Well then, Mr. Forebush intends to fight Jim Wright. He's going to follow Jim as he goes along home past the cemetery, and when they reach a lonely place, he's going to drag Jim in behind the wall and settle things."

"The cemetery?" cried Rachel sharply. The cemetery was her territory.

"They won't be disturbed there—that's all Mr. Forebush is thinking of. He travels for a New York shoe firm, you know, and he says he's sick of finding Jim hanging round our house every time he comes to town."

"Then does Mr. Forebush—does he like you?" Rachel questioned. Though she made free use of a warmer term in her meditations, she hesitated to pronounce it.

But the more experienced Lottie had no such scruple. "Like me!" She threw her hands apart with an expansive motion. "Why he loves me!" And to cover her embarrassment she burst into laughter.

Rachel crimsoned. "Yes, but how do you know he does?" she persisted.

Lottie continued laughing. "Oh, you queer child! You understand nothing!" Then, as the other darted an angry look at her,—"Why, doesn't the fight prove it, even if he hadn't said it? But he has said it. I wouldn't take stock in him if he hadn't. No looks and kisses without words for me! But I'm leaving you here. Wonder if Mr. Patch is at home." Then, as she was passing in at the gate she added with a return of the sentimental manner, "I'm sure I hope Jim won't hurt Mr. Forebush; he's some bigger, you know."

Rachel did not remain to discuss this possibility. Instead, she threw over her shoulder a curt "good-bye" and pursued her course.

When she was with Emil what did he talk about? Try as she would she could recall no topic on which he dwelt save his own work. Ideas for new inventions, for wonderful instruments jostled each other on his lips. He explained them with fire;—plans, details, he mapped them all out before her. "Fine to do!" he would cry, and while the words came forth in the most ringing tones of his voice and his eyes constantly sought hers, conscious that he revived in her presence his courage and light-heartedness, she herself was tricked into contentment. But now she questioned the extent of her power over him.

Until she had covered the distance from Zarah Patch's to "the barn," her feeling was nicely balanced between dejection and hope. But from "the barn" onward to her grandfather's house, hope flagged. Presently, in the privacy of her own room, she succumbed to despair:

"It may be that I'm not good-looking enough!"

This was the thought that caused her the most exquisite pang. If she failed on that score, as well yield up all hope at once. And in fancy she ranged herself beside this spinster and that of her acquaintance until the consciousness of the contrast between eighteen and fifty brought a smile flickering to her lips. But did she fail in the matter of looks? When dressed in her best, didn't she look as well as Lottie Loveburg? To be sure Lottie had a rope of hair as big as your arm, but then, there were her eyes!

To glance in the mirror over her bureau at her own resources of face and figure was a natural action for a young thing in such harassing doubt. At present, however on the subject of her looks, Rachel had all of a child's ignorance. She was no more capable of appreciating the sensitive changeful beauty of her colouring and expression than a canary bird is of appreciating the beauty of its yellow plumage.

Turning from the mirror to a window, she lost herself in reverie. Her thoughts returned again and again to the vision of two eyes that entered audaciously into hers,—two eyes with a mind in them,—two good lips laughing and talking from the covert of a curling beard; and as she studied the exciting vision, the gloom lifted from her face. It was indeed a great honour to be the confidante of such a man, she assured herself; and once more was isolated by the realization on a dizzy eminence above all her girl companions.

CHAPTER X
IN WHICH A KISS IS GIVEN AND REGRETTED

Unconscious of the grim humour that lurked in the fact of their having selected it as a place to foregather, Emil and Rachel continued to meet at the old Burying Point. No other lovers came there, and as deaths were infrequent in Old Harbour and a funeral pageant an event, they were practically secure from interruption. There, where the wind bent the grass above the graves with a sound that struck pleasantly on the ear and the insect world was all abroad on busy wings, they found the isolation their spirits craved. The place was, at most, but a setting for their two selves, for their sweet, intoxicating emotions.

Emil would look at Rachel pensively, almost appealingly. She stirred in him depths of tenderness and often he would have been tempted into some indiscretion had not her Arcadian innocence disconcerted him. With a shrug of the shoulders and a sigh, he would turn away from her as if offended at something. Though neither of them guessed it, what raised the level of the situation and decreased its dangers, was the unflagging interest she exhibited in his work. A woman's interest in his achievement is always fruitful for a man. For the exuberant and egotistic inventor, it was as fuel to flame. It immensely increased his powers.

Had anyone, prompted by curiosity, troubled himself to spy on the pair, he would have discovered an enthusiastic young fellow ranting on matters scientific and a slip of a girl sitting nearby with delight and despair depicted on her mobile countenance. The delight, he would have remarked, was a fluctuating emotion; the despair in danger of becoming a lasting one.

The two had been meeting in this way for upwards of three weeks and the lithographic sheets and press were all but ready for triumphant shipment, when Rachel's patience came unexpectedly to an end. Her change of front was due directly to the weather. The temperature of Pemoquod on a particular afternoon in late August made the wearing of the muslin dress seem out of the question, for the day, while bright, was distinctly chilly and by the time she quitted the cemetery according to all reasonable calculations, the air would be cold. She therefore made no change in her dress at all, but in her every-day frock, with an old drab silk shawl, which had belonged to her mother, over her shoulders and a book from the circulating library under her arm, she took her way to Old Harbour, her prospects for a pleasant interview considerably damaged. In this dull attire she would forego Emil's lightning glances of pleasure, "For he might as well look at a rock or a stump," she told herself disconsolately, "as look at me the way I am to-day."

The weather beside the sea is nothing if not capricious, and by the time she reached the cemetery, the air had become warm. It was between four and five o'clock and the sun was sending long level shafts between the graves, as if looking for something, when Rachel took her accustomed place on the flat-topped tomb and let the shawl slip down her back till it lay about her in a semicircle of rippling folds.

"Just my bad luck!" she soliloquized. "It's warm enough for a gauze dress if one had such a thing. But I'd like to know what's the sense of all this?" she resumed indignantly. "It isn't fair that he should judge me by my clothes entirely and I'll not have it. I've a mind as well as he!"

Now there was no evidence that Emil had judged her as lacking this particular endowment, but she was in no mood to adhere closely to facts. She began turning the pages of her book at random. She was engaged in reading, with most imperfect attention it must be confessed, a glowing description of the sphinx, when he arrived.

From a distance he spied her and she appeared to him to light up with her grace the whole desolate place. For eight hours he had devoted himself solely to work; now like one who receives but his just reward, he drew near with a jovial smile on his lips. Rachel, though she was conscious of his approach in every fibre of her being, was all for concealing the fact. Partly through resentment, partly through coquetry, she kept her eyes to her page. Suddenly Emil halted. Of a truth, there was material enough in the picture she made, perched there on the old table-tomb, for twenty conquests.

Dressed in the famous muslin, the rarest quality of her beauty, a certain lurking mystery, was lost amid furbelows which simply emphasized her youth. Now clothed in a sober little frock that appeared to be as much part of her as its smooth bark is part of a sapling, there was nothing to divert attention from her actual self. There she sat with her book open on her lap, a kind of sibyl, while about her hummed and buzzed and fluttered tribes of nimble-bodied insects. Great blundering bees pilfered rude kisses from the willing lips of some pink phlox swaying at her knee, a butterfly came to rest on the tomb and even crawled with curious, quivering antennae toward the hand outspread on the stone. A thrush poured out its heart from a little whip of a tree over her head. In the midst of this place of death, she spoke compellingly of life.

"I've come!"

Emil's voice trembled. The blood beat in his temples.

"How long have you been here?" he questioned, as he opened his hand grudgingly and released her fingers. "How much have I missed of you?"

She ignored the form of the question. "Oh, I've not been here long, I think," with disconcerting calmness, "though when I have a book I lose all track of time."

At this unexpectedly repressing manner, he moved a few paces off.

"What is your book?" he inquired after a pause.

"'Impressions of the Nile Country,'" and she made a motion as if to hand him the volume. But he kept his face away. Thereupon she plucked a spear of grass and placed it carefully between the pages, while a peculiarly significant and feminine expression played about her mouth.

"Oh," she sighed with sudden fervour, "how I should like to travel! particularly how I should love to travel in Egypt."

"But why Egypt?" and he swung round.

"The sphinx;" she explained briefly. "It sits there gazing before it forever and forever, and it never reveals the secret of the hands that fashioned it, while the sun scorches it and the sands blow over it and will finally throttle it, I suppose, but it will never tell."

With her arms crossed on her lap, she was staring at a near-by shrub. It was a starved old rose-bush which had long since ceased to bear, but she seemed to see in it a vision, for a smile unclosed her lips and narrowed her eyes. She looked up at him and her bosom lifted.

"Yes," she repeated softly, "I should like mightily to see the sphinx."

He was regarding her with a strange, fixed attention. Now he thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket with a convulsive movement.

"You're something by way of being a sphinx yourself," he said unsteadily.

Reaching behind her she slowly drew up the shawl until straight folds of the material fell about her face. Then she extended a hand on either knee and gazed before her. The imitation was admirable. Not a feature or limb stirred. The sun penetrated the worn silken shawl and vaguely defined her round little form. It gilded her forehead and chin and traced a line of humid light along the lids of the eyes the pupils of which were so obstinately contemplating Eternity. But what that celestial body could not accomplish with its bold steady gaze, was given to a mortal to achieve with a single glance. St. Ives bent over her.

The sphinx was lost in the woman.

Throbbing with delicious dread, Rachel gave him her eyes. She returned look for look, while her breathing ceased and her little hands, still stretched along her knees, trembled. Lower and lower he bent his head, higher and higher she lifted hers, to the length of its delicate, palpitating throat. At the very brink—an ecstatic, troubled, reeling pause, then—their lids sank, their lips met.

About them the insects continued their aggressive activity. A bee, greedy for the last drop of honey, lit on a purple aster and the whole light spray of blossoms swayed to his weight. The butterfly that had lately visited Rachel's hand, joined its mate high up in the thin blue air. From the branch of a sapling the thrush swelled its throat once more in a joyful song. Ignorant that those two motionless heads announced creatures differing in aught from themselves, the host of creeping and winged things enrolled them for the nonce in their lists.

Rachel was the first to recoil from the caress. She drew back,—sweetly ashamed, shyly-radiant, with that in her eyes a man would have died rather than lessen.

But on Emil the shock of the caress had a contrary effect.

"In Heaven's name!" he cried, without looking at her, "forgive me." The words leaped forth from his very heart. He wasn't half worthy that kiss and he had the astonishing grace to know it.

As though any apology were necessary, however, as though events could have happened otherwise! The kiss had been as sure to come as the imminent meeting of evening with deep dark night. And so Rachel, by her manner, seemed to say. In an anguish of expectancy she looked up at him—ready to be assured, or ready to be stricken in her pride as never maid was stricken before.