Tastes It.
At nine o’clock in the evening, packing his bundles for the next morning’s start, Waldo looked up, and was surprised to see Em’s yellow head peeping in at his door. It was many a month since she had been there. She said she had made him sandwiches for his journey, and she stayed a while to help him put his goods into the saddlebags.
“You can leave the old things lying about,” she said; “I will lock the room, and keep it waiting for you to come back some day.”
To come back some day! Would the bird ever return to its cage? But he thanked her. When she went away he stood on the doorstep holding the candle till she had almost reached the house. But Em was that evening in no hurry to enter, and, instead of going in at the back door, walked with lagging footsteps round the low brick wall that ran before the house. Opposite the open window of the parlour she stopped. The little room, kept carefully closed in Tant Sannie’s time, was well lighted by a paraffin lamp; books and work lay strewn about it, and it wore a bright, habitable aspect. Beside the lamp at the table in the corner sat Lyndall, the open letters and papers of the day’s post lying scattered before her, while she perused the columns of a newspaper. At the centre table, with his arms folded on an open paper, which there was not light enough to read, sat Gregory. He was looking at her. The light from the open window fell on Em’s little face under its white kapje as she looked in, but no one glanced that way.
“Go and fetch me a glass of water!” Lyndall said, at last.
Gregory went out to find it; when he put it down at her side she merely moved her head in recognition, and he went back to his seat and his old occupation. Then Em moved slowly away from the window, and through it came in spotted, hard-winged insects, to play round the lamp, till, one by one, they stuck to its glass, and fell to the foot dead.
Ten o’clock struck. Then Lyndall rose, gathered up her papers and letters, and wished Gregory good night. Some time after Em entered; she had been sitting all the while on the loft ladder, and had drawn her kapje down very much over her face.
Gregory was piecing together the bits of an envelope when she came in.
“I thought you were never coming,” he said, turning round quickly, and throwing the fragments onto the floor. “You know I have been shearing all day, and it is ten o’clock already.”
“I’m sorry. I did not think you would be going so soon,” she said in a low voice.
“I can’t hear what you say. What makes you mumble so? Well, good night, Em.”
He stooped down hastily to kiss her.
“I want to talk to you, Gregory.”
“Well, make haste,” he said pettishly. “I’m awfully tired. I’ve been sitting here all the evening. Why couldn’t you come and talk before?”
“I will not keep you long,” she answered very steadily now. “I think, Gregory, it would be better if you and I were never to be married.”
“Good Heaven! Em, what do you mean? I thought you were so fond of me? You always professed to be. What on earth have you taken into your head now?”
“I think it would be better,” she said, folding her hands over each other, very much as though she were praying.
“Better, Em! What do you mean? Even a woman can’t take a freak all about nothing! You must have some reason for it, and I’m sure I’ve done nothing to offend you. I wrote only today to my sister to tell her to come up next month to our wedding, and I’ve been as affectionate and happy as possible. Come—what’s the matter?”
He put his arm half round her shoulder, very loosely.
“I think it would be better,” she answered, slowly.
“Oh, well,” he said, drawing himself up, “if you won’t enter into explanations you won’t; and I’m not the man to beg and pray—not to any woman, and you know that! If you don’t want to marry me I can’t oblige you to, of course.”
She stood quite still before him.
“You women never do know your own minds for two days together; and of course you know the state of your own feelings best; but it’s very strange. Have you really made up your mind, Em?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m very sorry. I’m sure I’ve not been in anything to blame. A man can’t always be billing and cooing; but, as you say, if your feeling for me has changed, it’s much better you shouldn’t marry me. There’s nothing so foolish as to marry some one you don’t love; and I only wish for your happiness, I’m sure. I daresay you’ll find some one can make you much happier than I could; the first person we love is seldom the right one. You are very young; it’s quite natural you should change.”
She said nothing.
“Things often seem hard at the time, but Providence makes them turn out for the best in the end,” said Gregory. “You’ll let me kiss you, Em, just for old friendship’s sake.” He stooped down. “You must look upon me as a dear brother, as a cousin at least; as long as I am on the farm I shall always be glad to help you, Em.”
Soon after the brown pony was cantering along the footpath to the daub-and-wattle house, and his master as he rode whistled John Speriwig and the Thorn Kloof Schottische.
The sun had not yet touched the outstretched arms of the prickly pear upon the kopje, and the early cocks and hens still strutted about stiffly after the night’s roost, when Waldo stood before the wagon-house saddling the grey mare. Every now and then he glanced up at the old familiar objects: they had a new aspect that morning. Even the cocks, seen in the light of parting, had a peculiar interest, and he listened with conscious attention while one crowed clear and loud as it stood on the pigsty wall. He wished good morning softly to the Kaffer woman who was coming up from the huts to light the fire. He was leaving them all to that old life, and from his height he looked down on them pityingly. So they would keep on crowing, and coming to light fires, when for him that old colourless existence was but a dream.
He went into the house to say good-bye to Em, and then he walked to the door of Lyndall’s room to wake her; but she was up, and standing in the doorway.
“So you are ready,” she said.
Waldo looked at her with sudden heaviness; the exhilaration died out of his heart. Her grey dressing-gown hung close about her, and below its edge the little bare feet were resting on the threshold.
“I wonder when we shall meet again, Waldo? What you will be, and what I?”
“Will you write to me?” he asked of her.
“Yes; and if I should not, you can still remember, wherever you are, that you are not alone.”
“I have left Doss for you,” he said.
“Will you not miss him?”
“No; I want you to have him. He loves you better than he loves me.”
“Thank you.” They stood quiet.
“Good-bye!” she said, putting her little hand in his, and he turned away; but when he reached the door she called to him: “Come back, I want to kiss you.” She drew his face down to hers, and held it with both hands, and kissed it on the forehead and mouth. “Good-bye, dear!”
When he looked back the little figure with its beautiful eyes was standing in the doorway still.
Em, who was in the storeroom measuring the Kaffer’s rations, looked up and saw her former lover standing betwixt her and the sunshine. For some days after that evening on which he had ridden home whistling he had shunned her. She might wish to enter into explanations, and he, Gregory Rose, was not the man for that kind of thing. If a woman had once thrown him overboard she must take the consequences, and stand by them. When, however, she showed no inclination to revert to the past, and shunned him more than he shunned her, Gregory softened.
“You must let me call you Em still, and be like a brother to you till I go,” he said; and Em thanked him so humbly that he wished she hadn’t. It wasn’t so easy after that to think himself an injured man.
On that morning he stood some time in the doorway switching his whip, and moving rather restlessly from one leg to the other.
“I think I’ll just take a walk up to the camps and see how your birds are getting on. Now Waldo’s gone you’ve no one to see after things. Nice morning, isn’t it?” Then he added suddenly, “I’ll just go round to the house and get a drink of water first;” and somewhat awkwardly walked off. He might have found water in the kitchen, but he never glanced toward the buckets. In the front room a monkey and two tumblers stood on the centre-table; but he merely looked round, peeped into the parlour, looked round again, and then walked out at the front door, and found himself again at the storeroom without having satisfied his thirst. “Awfully nice morning this,” he said, trying to pose himself in a graceful and indifferent attitude against the door. “It isn’t hot and it isn’t cold. It’s awfully nice.”
“Yes,” said Em.
“Your cousin, now,” said Gregory in an aimless sort of way—“I suppose she’s shut up in her room writing letters.”
“No,” said Em.
“Gone for a drive, I expect? Nice morning for a drive.”
“No.”
“Gone to see the ostriches, I suppose?”
“No.” After a little silence Em added, “I saw her go by the kraals to the kopje.”
Gregory crossed and uncrossed his legs.
“Well, I think I’ll just go and have a look about,” he said, “and see how things are getting on before I go to the camps. Good-bye; so long.”
Em left for a while the bags she was folding and went to the window, the same through which, years before, Bonaparte had watched the slouching figure cross the yard. Gregory walked to the pigsty first, and contemplated the pigs for a few seconds; then turned round, and stood looking fixedly at the wall of the fuel-house as though he thought it wanted repairing; then he started off suddenly with the evident intention of going to the ostrich-camps; then paused, hesitated, and finally walked off in the direction of the kopje.
Then Em went back to the corner and folded more sacks.
On the other side of the kopje Gregory caught sight of a white tail waving among the stones, and a succession of short, frantic barks told where Doss was engaged in howling imploringly to a lizard who had crept between two stones, and who had not the slightest intention of re-sunning himself at that particular moment.
The dog’s mistress sat higher up, under the shelving rock, her face bent over a volume of plays upon her knee. As Gregory mounted the stones she started violently and looked up; then resumed her book.
“I hope I am not troubling you,” said Gregory as he reached her side. “If I am I will go away. I just—”
“No; you may stay.”
“I fear I startled you.”
“Yes; your step was firmer than it generally is. I thought it was that of some one else.”
“Who could it be but me?” asked Gregory, seating himself on a stone at her feet.
“Do you suppose you are the only man who would find anything to attract him to this kopje?”
“Oh, no,” said Gregory.
He was not going to argue that point with her, nor any other; but no old Boer was likely to take the trouble of climbing the kopje, and who else was there?
She continued the study of her book.
“Miss Lyndall,” he said at last, “I don’t know why it is you never talk to me.”
“We had a long conversation yesterday,” she said without looking up.
“Yes; but you ask me questions about sheep and oxen. I don’t call that talking. You used to talk to Waldo, now,” he said, in an aggrieved tone of voice. “I’ve heard you when I came in, and then you’ve just left off. You treated me like that from the first day; and you couldn’t tell from just looking at me that I couldn’t talk about the things you like. I’m sure I know as much about such things as Waldo does,” said Gregory, in exceeding bitterness of spirit.
“I do not know which things you refer to. If you will enlighten me I am quite prepared to speak of them,” she said, reading as she spoke.
“Oh, you never used to ask Waldo like that,” said Gregory, in a more sorely aggrieved tone than ever. “You used just to begin.”
“Well, let me see,” she said, closing her book and folding her hands on it. “There at the foot of the kopje goes a Kaffer; he has nothing on but a blanket; he is a splendid fellow—six feet high, with a magnificent pair of legs. In his leather bag he is going to fetch his rations, and I suppose to kick his wife with his beautiful legs when he gets home. He has a right to; he bought her for two oxen. There is a lean dog going after him, to whom I suppose he never gives more than a bone from which he has sucked the marrow; but his dog loves him, as his wife does. There is something of the master about him in spite of his blackness and wool. See how he brandishes his stick and holds up his head!”
“Oh, but aren’t you making fun?” said Gregory, looking doubtfully from her to the Kaffer herd, who rounded the kopje.
“No; I am very serious. He is the most interesting and intelligent thing I can see just now, except, perhaps, Doss. He is profoundly suggestive. Will his race melt away in the heat of a collision with a higher? Are the men of the future to see his bones only in museums—a vestige of one link that spanned between the dog and the white man? He wakes thoughts that run far out into the future and back into the past.”
Gregory was not quite sure how to take these remarks. Being about a Kaffer, they appeared to be of the nature of a joke; but, being seriously spoken, they appeared earnest; so he half laughed and half not, to be on the safe side.
“I’ve often thought so myself. It’s funny we should both think the same; I knew we should if once we talked. But there are other things—love, now,” he added. “I wonder if we would think alike about that. I wrote an essay on love once; the master said it was the best I ever wrote, and I can remember the first sentence still—‘Love is something that you feel in your heart.’”
“That was a trenchant remark. Can’t you remember any more?”
“No,” said Gregory, regretfully; “I’ve forgotten the rest. But tell me what do you think about love?”
A look, half of abstraction, half amusement, played on her lips.
“I don’t know much about love,” she said, “and I do not like to talk of things I do not understand; but I have heard two opinions. Some say the devil carried the seed from hell and planted it on the earth to plague men and make them sin; and some say, that when all the plants in the garden of Eden were pulled up by the roots, one bush that the angels planted was left growing, and it spread its seed over the whole earth, and its name is love. I do not know which is right—perhaps both. There are different species that go under the same name. There is a love that begins in the head, and goes down to the heart, and grows slowly; but it lasts till death, and asks less than it gives. There is another love, that blots out wisdom, that is sweet with the sweetness of life and bitter with the bitterness of death, lasting for an hour; but it is worth having lived a whole life for that hour. I cannot tell, perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out; perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it. It is a blood-red flower, with the colour of sin; but there is always the scent of a god about it.”
Gregory would have made a remark; but she said, without noticing:
“There are as many kinds of loves as there are flowers; everlastings that never wither; speedwells that wait for the wind to fan them out of life; blood-red mountain-lilies that pour their voluptuous sweetness out for one day, and lie in the dust at night. There is no flower has the charm of all—the speedwell’s purity, the everlasting’s strength, the mountain-lily’s warmth; but who knows whether there is no love that holds all—friendship, passion, worship?
“Such a love,” she said, in her sweetest voice, “will fall on the surface of strong, cold, selfish life as the sunlight falls on a torpid winter world; there, where the trees are bare, and the ground frozen, till it rings to the step like iron, and the water is solid, and the air is sharp as a two-edged knife that cuts the unwary.
“But when its sun shines on it, through its whole dead crust a throbbing yearning wakes: the trees feel him, and every knot and bud swell, aching to open to him. The brown seeds, who have slept deep under the ground, feel him, and he gives them strength, till they break through the frozen earth, and lift two tiny, trembling green hands in love to him. And he touches the water, till down to its depths it feels him and melts, and it flows, and the things, strange sweet things that were locked up in it, it sings as it runs, for love of him. Each plant tries to bear at least one fragrant little flower for him; and the world that was dead lives, and the heart that was dead and self-centred throbs, with an upward, outward yearning, and it has become that which it seemed impossible ever to become. There, does that satisfy you?” she asked, looking down at Gregory. “Is that how you like me to talk?”
“Oh, yes,” said Gregory, “that is what I have already thought. We have the same thoughts about everything. How strange!”
“Very,” said Lyndall, working with her little toe at a stone in the ground before her.
Gregory felt he must sustain the conversation. The only thing he could think of was to recite a piece of poetry. He knew he had learnt many about love; but the only thing that would come into his mind now was the “Battle of Hohenlinden,” and “Not a drum was heard,” neither of which seemed to bear directly on the subject on hand.
But unexpected relief came to him from Doss, who, too deeply lost in contemplation of his crevice, was surprised by the sudden descent of the stone Lyndall’s foot had loosened, which, rolling against his little front paw, carried away a piece of white-skin. Doss stood on three legs, holding up the paw with an expression of extreme self-commiseration; he then proceeded to hop slowly upward in search of sympathy.
“You have hurt that dog,” said Gregory.
“Have I?” she replied indifferently, and re-opened the book, as though to resume her study of the play.
“He’s a nasty, snappish little cur!” said Gregory, calculating from her manner that the remark would be endorsed. “He snapped at my horse’s tail yesterday, and nearly made it throw me. I wonder his master didn’t take him, instead of leaving him here to be a nuisance to all of us!”
Lyndall seemed absorbed in her play; but he ventured another remark.
“Do you think now, Miss Lyndall, that he’ll ever have anything in the world—that German. I mean—money enough to support a wife on, and all that sort of thing? I don’t. He’s what I call soft.”
She was spreading her skirt out softly with her left hand for the dog to lie down on it.
“I think I should be rather astonished if he ever became a respectable member of society,” she said. “I don’t expect to see him the possessor of bank-shares, the chairman of a divisional council, and the father of a large family; wearing a black hat, and going to church twice on a Sunday. He would rather astonish me if he came to such an end.”
“Yes; I don’t expect anything of him either,” said Gregory, zealously.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Lyndall; “there are some small things I rather look to him for. If he were to invent wings, or carve a statue that one might look at for half an hour without wanting to look at something else, I should not be surprised. He may do some little thing of that kind perhaps, when he has done fermenting and the sediment has all gone to the bottom.”
Gregory felt that what she said was not wholly intended as blame.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said sulkily; “to me he looks like a fool. To walk about always in that dead-and-alive sort of way, muttering to himself like an old Kaffer witchdoctor! He works hard enough, but it’s always as though he didn’t know what he was doing. You don’t know how he looks to a person who sees him for the first time.”
Lyndall was softly touching the little sore foot as she read, and Doss, to show he liked it, licked her hand.
“But, Miss Lyndall,” persisted Gregory, “what do you really think of him?”
“I think,” said Lyndall, “that he is like a thorn-tree, which grows up very quietly, without any one’s caring for it, and one day suddenly breaks out into yellow blossoms.”
“And what do you think I am like?” asked Gregory, hopefully.
Lyndall looked up from her book.
“Like a little tin duck floating on a dish of water, that comes after a piece of bread stuck on a needle, and the more the needle pricks it the more it comes on.”
“Oh, you are making fun of me now, you really are!” said Gregory feeling wretched. “You are making fun, aren’t you, now?”
“Partly. It is always diverting to make comparisons.”
“Yes; but you don’t compare me to anything nice, and you do other people. What is Em like, now?”
“The accompaniment of a song. She fills up the gaps in other people’s lives, and is always number two; but I think she is like many accompaniments—a great deal better than the song she is to accompany.”
“She is not half so good as you are!” said Gregory, with a burst of uncontrollable ardour.
“She is so much better than I, that her little finger has more goodness in it than my whole body. I hope you may not live to find out the truth of that fact.”
“You are like an angel,” he said, the blood rushing to his head and face.
“Yes, probably; angels are of many orders.”
“You are the one being that I love!” said Gregory quivering. “I thought I loved before, but I know now! Do not be angry with me. I know you could never like me; but, if I might but always be near you to serve you, I would be utterly, utterly happy. I would ask nothing in return! If you could only take everything I have and use it; I want nothing but to be of use to you.”
She looked at him for a few moments.
“How do you know,” she said slowly, “that you could not do something to serve me? You could serve me by giving me your name.”
He started, and turned his burning face to her.
“You are very cruel; you are ridiculing me,” he said.
“No, I am not, Gregory. What I am saying is plain, matter-of-fact business. If you are willing to give me your name within three weeks’ time, I am willing to marry you, if not, well. I want nothing more than your name. That is a clear proposal, is it not?”
He looked up. Was it contempt, loathing, pity, that moved in the eyes above! He could not tell; but he stooped over the little foot and kissed it.
She smiled.
“Do you really mean it?” he whispered.
“Yes. You wish to serve me, and to have nothing in return!—you shall have what you wish.” She held out her fingers for Doss to lick. “Do you see this dog? He licks my hand because I love him; and I allow him to. Where I do not love I do not allow it. I believe you love me; I too could love so, that to lie under the foot of the thing I loved would be more heaven than to lie in the breast of another. Come! let us go. Carry the dog,” she added; “he will not bite you if I put him in your arms. So—do not let his foot hang down.”
They descended the kopje. At the bottom, he whispered:
“Would you not take my arm? the path is very rough.”
She rested her fingers lightly on it.
“I may yet change my mind about marrying you before the time comes. It is very likely. Mark you!” she said, turning round on him; “I remember your words: You will give everything, and expect nothing. The knowledge that you are serving me is to be your reward; and you will have that. You will serve me, and greatly. The reasons I have for marrying you I need not inform you of now; you will probably discover some of them before long.”
“I only want to be of some use to you,” he said.
It seemed to Gregory that there were pulses in the soles of his feet, and the ground shimmered as on a summer’s day. They walked round the foot of the kopje and past the Kaffer huts. An old Kaffer maid knelt at the door of one grinding mealies. That she should see him walking so made his heart beat so fast, that the hand on his arm felt its pulsation. It seemed that she must envy him.
Just then Em looked out again at the back window and saw them coming. She cried bitterly all the while she sorted the skins.
But that night when Lyndall had blown her candle out, and half turned round to sleep, the door of Em’s bedroom opened.
“I want to say good night to you, Lyndall,” she said, coming to the bedside and kneeling down.
“I thought you were asleep,” Lyndall replied.
“Yes, I have been asleep; but I had such a vivid dream,” she said, holding the other’s hands, “and that woke me. I never had so vivid a dream before.
“It seemed I was a little girl again, and I came somewhere into a large room. On a bed in the corner there was something lying dressed in white, and its little eyes were shut, and its little face was like wax. I thought it was a doll, and I ran forward to take it; but some one held up her finger and said: ‘Hush! it is a little dead baby.’ And I said: ‘Oh, I must go and call Lyndall, that she may look at it also.’
“And they put their faces close down to my ear and whispered: ‘It is Lyndall’s baby.’
“And I said: ‘She cannot be grown up yet; she is only a little girl! Where is she?’ And I went to look for you, but I could not find you.
“And when I came to some people who were dressed in black, I asked them where you were, and they looked down at their black clothes, and shook their heads, and said nothing; and I could not find you anywhere. And then I awoke.
“Lyndall,” she said, putting her face down upon the hands she held, “it made me think about that time when we were little girls and used to play together, when I loved you better than anything else in the world. It isn’t any one’s fault that they love you; they can’t help it. And it isn’t your fault; you don’t make them love you. I know it.”
“Thank you, dear,” Lyndall said. “It is nice to be loved, but it would be better to be good.”
Then they wished good night, and Em went back to her room. Long after Lyndall lay in the dark thinking, thinking, thinking; and as she turned round wearily to sleep she muttered:
“There are some wiser in their sleeping than in their waking.”
A fire is burning in the unused hearth of the cabin. The fuel blazes up, and lights the black rafters, and warms the faded red lions on the quilt, and fills the little room with a glow of warmth and light made brighter by contrast, for outside the night is chill and misty.
Before the open fireplace sits a stranger, his tall, slight figure reposing in the broken armchair, his keen blue eyes studying the fire from beneath delicately pencilled, drooping eyelids. One white hand plays thoughtfully with a heavy flaxen moustache; yet, once he starts, and for an instant the languid lids raise themselves; there is a keen, intent look upon the face as he listens for something. Then he leans back in his chair, fills his glass from the silver flask in his bag, and resumes his old posture.
Presently the door opens noiselessly. It is Lyndall, followed by Doss. Quietly as she enters, he hears her, and turns.
“I thought you were not coming.”
“I waited till all had gone to bed. I could not come before.”
She removed the shawl that enveloped her, and the stranger rose to offer her his chair; but she took her seat on a low pile of sacks before the window.
“I hardly see why I should be outlawed after this fashion,” he said, reseating himself and drawing his chair a little nearer to her; “these are hardly the quarters one expects to find after travelling a hundred miles in answer to an invitation.”
“I said, ‘Come if you wish.’”
“And I did wish. You give me a cold reception.”
“I could not take you to the house. Questions would be asked which I could not answer without prevarication.”
“Your conscience is growing to have a certain virgin tenderness,” he said, in a low, melodious voice.
“I have no conscience. I spoke one deliberate lie this evening. I said the man who had come looked rough, we had best not have him in the house; therefore I brought him here. It was a deliberate lie, and I hate lies. I tell them if I must, but they hurt me.”
“Well, you do not tell lies to yourself, at all events. You are candid, so far.”
She interrupted him.
“You got my short letter?”
“Yes; that is why I come. You sent a very foolish reply; you must take it back. Who is this fellow you talk of marrying?”
“A young farmer.”
“Lives here?”
“Yes; he has gone to town to get things for our wedding.”
“What kind of a fellow is he?”
“A fool.”
“And you would rather marry him than me?”
“Yes; because you are not one.”
“That is a novel reason for refusing to marry a man,” he said, leaning his elbow on the table and watching her keenly.
“It is a wise one,” she said shortly. “If I marry him I shall shake him off my hand when it suits me. If I remained with him for twelve months he would never have dared to kiss my hand. As far as I wish he should come, he comes, and no further. Would you ask me what you might and what you might not do?”
Her companion raised the moustache with a caressing movement from his lip and smiled. It was not a question that stood in need of any answer.
“Why do you wish to enter on this semblance of marriage?”
“Because there is only one point on which I have a conscience. I have told you so.”
“Then why not marry me?”
“Because if once you have me you would hold me fast. I shall never be free again.” She drew a long, low breath.
“What have you done with the ring I gave you?” he said.
“Sometimes I wear it; then I take it off and wish to throw it into the fire; the next day I put it on again, and sometimes I kiss it.”
“So you do love me a little?”
“If you were not something more to me than any other man in the world, do you think—” She paused. “I love you when I see you; but when you are away from me I hate you.”
“Then I fear I must be singularly invisible at the present moment,” he said. “Possibly if you were to look less fixedly into the fire you might perceive me.”
He moved his chair slightly, so as to come between her and the firelight. She raised her eyes to his face.
“If you do love me,” he asked her, “why will you not marry me?”
“Because, if I had been married to you for a year I should have come to my senses and seen that your hands and your voice are like the hands and the voice of any other man. I cannot quite see that now. But it is all madness. You call into activity one part of my nature; there is a higher part that you know nothing of, that you never touch. If I married you, afterward it would arise and assert itself, and I should hate you always, as I do now sometimes.”
“I like you when you grow metaphysical and analytical,” he said, leaning his face upon his hand. “Go a little further in your analysis; say, ‘I love you with the right ventricle of my heart, but not the left, and with the left auricle of my heart, but not the right; and, this being the case, my affection for you is not of a duly elevated, intellectual and spiritual nature.’ I like you when you get philosophical.”
She looked quietly at him; he was trying to turn her own weapons against her.
“You are acting foolishly, Lyndall,” he said, suddenly changing his manner, and speaking earnestly, “most foolishly. You are acting like a little child; I am surprised at you. It is all very well to have ideals and theories; but you know as well as any one can that they must not be carried into the practical world. I love you. I do not pretend that it is in any high, superhuman sense; I do not say that I should like you as well if you were ugly and deformed, or that I should continue to prize you whatever your treatment of me might be, or to love you though you were a spirit without any body at all. That is sentimentality for beardless boys. Every one not a mere child (and you are not a child, except in years) knows what love between a man and a woman means. I love you with that love. I should not have believed it possible that I could have brought myself twice to ask of any woman to be my wife, more especially one without wealth, without position, and who—”
“Yes—go on. Do not grow sorry for me. Say what you were going to—‘who has put herself into my power, and who has lost the right of meeting me on equal terms.’ Say what you think. At least we two may speak the truth to one another.”
Then she added after a pause:
“I believe you do love me, as much as you possibly could love anything; and I believe that when you ask me to marry you you are performing the most generous act you ever have performed in the course of your life, or ever will; but, at the same time, if I had required your generosity, it would not have been shown me. If, when I got your letter a month ago, hinting at your willingness to marry me, I had at once written, imploring you to come, you would have read the letter. ‘Poor little devil!’ you would have said, and tore it up. The next week you would have sailed for Europe, and have sent me a check for a hundred and fifty pounds (which I would have thrown in the fire), and I would have heard no more of you.”
The stranger smiled.
“But because I declined your proposal, and wrote that in three weeks I should be married to another, then what you call love woke up. Your man’s love is a child’s love for butterflies. You follow till you have the thing, and break it. If you have broken one wing, and the thing flies still, then you love it more than ever, and follow till you break both; then you are satisfied when it lies still on the ground.”
“You are profoundly wise in the ways of the world; you have seen far into life,” he said.
He might as well have sneered at the firelight.
“I have seen enough to tell me that you love me because you cannot bear to be resisted, and want to master me. You liked me at first because I treated you and all men with indifference. You resolved to have me because I seemed unattainable. This is all your love means.”
He felt a strong inclination to stoop down and kiss the little lips that defied him; but he restrained himself. He said, quietly: “And you loved me—”
“Because you are strong. You are the first man I ever was afraid of. And”—a dreamy look came into her face—“because I like to experience, I like to try. You don’t understand that.”
He smiled.
“Well, since you will not marry me, may I inquire what your intentions are, the plan you wrote of. You asked me to come and hear it, and I have come.”
“I said, ‘Come if you wish.’ If you agree to it, well; if not, I marry on Monday.”
“Well?”
She was still looking beyond him at the fire.
“I cannot marry you,” she said slowly, “because I cannot be tied; but if you wish, you may take me away with you, and take care of me; then when we do not love any more we can say good-bye. I will not go down country,” she added; “I will not go to Europe. You must take me to the Transvaal. That is out of the world. People we meet there we need not see again in our future lives.”
“Oh, my darling,” he said, bending tenderly, and holding his hand out to her, “why will you not give yourself entirely to me? One day you will desert me and go to another.”
She shook her head without looking at him.
“No, life is too long. But I will go with you.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. I have told them that before daylight I go to the next farm. I will write from the town and tell them the facts. I do not want them to trouble me; I want to shake myself free of these old surroundings; I want them to lose sight of me. You can understand that is necessary for me.”
He seemed lost in consideration; then he said:
“It is better to have you on those conditions than not at all. If you will have it, let it be so.”
He sat looking at her. On her face was the weary look that rested there so often now when she sat alone. Two months had not passed since they parted; but the time had set its mark on her. He looked at her carefully, from the brown, smooth head to the little crossed feet on the floor. A worn look had grown over the little face, and it made its charm for him stronger. For pain and time, which trace deep lines and write a story on a human face, have a strangely different effect on one face and another. The face that is only fair, even very fair, they mar and flaw; but to the face whose beauty is the harmony between that which speaks from within and the form through which it speaks, power is added by all that causes the outer man to bear more deeply the impress of the inner. The pretty woman fades with the roses on her cheeks, and the girlhood that lasts an hour; the beautiful woman finds her fullness of bloom only when a past has written itself on her, and her power is then most irresistible when it seems going.
From under their half-closed lids the keen eyes looked down at her. Her shoulders were bent; for a moment the little figure had forgotten its queenly bearing, and drooped wearily; the wide, dark eyes watched the fire very softly.
It certainly was not in her power to resist him, nor any strength in her that made his own at that moment grow soft as he looked at her.
He touched one little hand that rested on her knee.
“Poor little thing!” he said; “you are only a child.”
She did not draw her hand away from his, and looked up at him.
“You are very tired?”
“Yes.”
She looked into his eyes as a little child might whom a long day’s play had saddened.
He lifted her gently up, and sat her on his knee.
“Poor little thing!” he said.
She turned her face to his shoulder, and buried it against his neck; he wound his strong arm about her, and held her close to him. When she had sat for a long while, he drew with his hand the face down, and held it against his arm. He kissed it, and then put it back in its old resting-place.
“Don’t you want to talk to me?”
“No.”
“Have you forgotten the night in the avenue?”
He could feel that she shook her head.
“Do you want to be quiet now?”
“Yes.”
They sat quite still, excepting that only sometimes he raised her fingers softly to his mouth.
Doss, who had been asleep in the corner, waking suddenly, planted himself before them, his wiry legs moving nervously, his yellow eyes filled with anxiety. He was not at all sure that she was not being retained in her present position against her will, and was not a little relieved when she sat up and held out her hand for the shawl.
“I must go,” she said.
The stranger wrapped the shawl very carefully about her.
“Keep it close around your face, Lyndall; it is very damp outside. Shall I walk with you to the house?”
“No. Lie down and rest; I will come and wake you at three o’clock.”
She lifted her face that he might kiss it, and, when he had kissed it once, she still held it that he might kiss it again. Then he let her out. He had seated himself at the fireplace, when she reopened the door.
“Have you forgotten anything?”
“No.”
She gave one long, lingering look at the old room. When she was gone, and the door shut, the stranger filled his glass, and sat at the table sipping it thoughtfully.
The night outside was misty and damp; the faint moonlight, trying to force its way through the thick air, made darkly visible the outlines of the buildings. The stones and walls were moist, and now and then a drop, slowly collecting, fell from the eaves to the ground. Doss, not liking the change from the cabin’s warmth, ran quickly to the kitchen doorstep; but his mistress walked slowly past him, and took her way up the winding footpath that ran beside the stone wall of the camps. When she came to the end of the last camp, she threaded her way among the stones and bushes till she reached the German’s grave. Why she had come there she hardly knew; she stood looking down. Suddenly she bent and put one hand on the face of a wet stone.
“I shall never come to you again,” she said.
Then she knelt on the ground, and leaned her face upon the stones.
“Dear old man, good old man, I am so tired!” she said (for we will come to the dead to tell secrets we would never have told to the living). “I am so tired. There is light, there is warmth,” she wailed; “why am I alone, so hard, so cold? I am so weary of myself! It is eating my soul to its core—self, self, self! I cannot bear this life! I cannot breathe, I cannot live! Will nothing free me from myself?” She pressed her cheek against the wooden post. “I want to love! I want something great and pure to lift me to itself! Dear old man, I cannot bear it any more! I am so cold, so hard, so hard; will no one help me?”
The water gathered slowly on her shawl, and fell on to the wet stones; but she lay there crying bitterly. For so the living soul will cry to the dead, and the creature to its God; and of all this crying there comes nothing. The lifting up of the hands brings no salvation; redemption is from within, and neither from God nor man; it is wrought out by the soul itself, with suffering and through time.
Doss, on the kitchen doorstep, shivered, and wondered where his mistress stayed so long; and once, sitting sadly there in the damp, he had dropped asleep, and dreamed that old Otto gave him a piece of bread, and patted him on the head, and when he woke his teeth chattered, and he moved to another stone to see if it was drier. At last he heard his mistress’ step, and they went into the house together. She lit a candle, and walked to the Boer-woman’s bedroom. On a nail under the lady in pink hung the key of the wardrobe. She took it down and opened the great press. From a little drawer she took fifty pounds (all she had in the world), relocked the door, and turned to hang up the key. The marks of tears were still on her face, but she smiled. Then she paused, hesitated.
“Fifty pounds for a lover! A noble reward!” she said, and opened the wardrobe and returned the notes to the drawer, where Em might find them.
Once in her own room, she arranged the few articles she intended to take tomorrow, burnt her old letters, and then went back to the front room to look at the time. There were two hours yet before she must call him. She sat down at the dressing-table to wait, and leaned her elbows on it, and buried her face in her hands. The glass reflected the little brown head with its even parting, and the tiny hands on which it rested. “One day I will love something utterly, and then I will be better,” she said once. Presently she looked up. The large, dark eyes from the glass looked back at her. She looked deep into them.
“We are all alone, you and I,” she whispered; “no one helps us, no one understands us; but we will help ourselves.” The eyes looked back at her. There was a world of assurance in their still depths. So they had looked at her ever since she could remember, when it was but a small child’s face above a blue pinafore. “We shall never be quite alone, you and I,” she said; “we shall always be together, as we were when we were little.”
The beautiful eyes looked into the depths of her soul.
“We are not afraid; we will help ourselves!” she said. She stretched out her hand and pressed it over them on the glass. “Dear eyes! we will never be quite alone till they part us—till then!”