A PURITAN BOHEMIA
PROLOGUE
""I go to prove my soul"
"You hold my whole life in the hollow of your hand, like that."
The speaker held out a broad palm, and a great drop of rain splashed into it.
"Whatever strength or talent I possess is vowed to your service."
"You are letting the rain drop on my face," said the girl, with an accent of reproach.
The young man righted the umbrella and gazed gloomily, past the west-bound steamer that lay off the wharf, out toward the sea. The twinkle had died out of his eyes. His stalwart figure drooped a little with an expression of defeat. Anne Bradford glanced up at him, and a look of pity softened the merry determination of her face.
"I can't do it, Howard," she said softly. "It would spoil my whole life."
"Tell me why," he demanded, with an impatient shake of his head that brought a lock of hair down over his forehead.
"I haven't time," answered the girl mischievously.
"The steamer doesn't start for fifteen minutes," he groaned.
"I mean that I haven't time to take care of you. I am too busy."
"I won't waste your time."
"But I am serious. This is no laughing matter," said the girl reprovingly.
"I had an idea that you thought it was," he muttered.
"I have my work to do, the work that I have wanted ever since I was a little girl. I have spent five years here in getting ready for it. Now I wish to go back to America to try my power. It will take all my time and strength and devotion"
"That's just the way," he interrupted, "that the modern young woman talks in story-books. You have read too many novels. She is always bent on a solitary and egoistic life, but in the end she always gives in."
"That is only in story-books," retorted Anne Bradford. "And I'm not a modern young woman. I am old-fashioned, and very much like my Puritan grandfather."
"I wish," said Howard Stanton, with a sudden flash of impertinence, "that you were a little bit more like your Puritan grandmother."
"You see," said Anne wistfully, "I've got to do it all myself. I am not a genius, and yet I think that if I was born for any purpose it was to paint pictures. Is trying to find one's best self-expression egoism?"
Her eyes were following the red-brown sail of a tiny boat, just disappearing in the fog. She would like to catch and keep that colour effect.
Howard Stanton looked down in silence. It was useless to plead. There was resolution in every line of the little figure in the gray-checked travelling-dress. The obstinacy of that clear-cut face under the visor of the close-fitting cap he had known since childhood.
"I can't stand it, Nannie!" he exclaimed. "Reasons and arguments simply have nothing to do with it. I cannot stand it to wait here and see you sail away out of my life. You are in the warp and the woof of the whole of it. I have loved you ever since I was five years old."
The vehement words of the young man and the girl's broken answers were drowned in the noises of the wharf and the sound of the water breaking on the piles. Presently there was a lull. A cry of "All ashore!" came from the steamer. Anne Bradford paused on the gang-plank and looked up, hurt by her sympathy with this strong feeling that she could not understand.
"Plunge into your work," she said reassuringly. "You came to Europe to work, you remember."
"No," he answered, "I came to Europe to find you. I can't do my work without you."
"And I can't do mine with you. Isn't it unfortunate? Now you must go ashore."
"I am not going ashore," he asserted doggedly. "I am going to stay on the steamer and go home too."
The girl grasped her travelling-bag.
"If you stay on, of course I must go back."
As the vessel moved away the young man stood among the boxes on the wharf, his head uncovered in the rain. Anne Bradford watched from the slippery deck. The city, with its one cathedral spire, faded in gray mist beyond the flat green fields and shadowy windmills.
"Europe is all over for me," she sighed.
The fog in the air and the moisture in his eyes soon hid from Howard Stanton the little figure at the vessel's stern. He turned on his heel.
"Theories be damned," he said savagely as he strode away.