CHAPTER X
WISDOM SET AT NAUGHT
LOVE, who engages himself to be the impossible, and performs all manner of valors to prove himself, makes his appointments at unwonted seasons. He got these two up at a gray hour, when to look at the sky is like looking up into a pearl. With nothing so gross as words for understanding they foresaw each other's impulse. They were led out and found each other. Voices of birds were faintly awakened among the trees. Large shapes of forests and mountains had not yet fallen asleep in the sun. The world around them had the still face of awe. They saw it only as a background for each other's face, smiling and full of color, full of the rapture of living. The moon had woven no illusions. They were not to be disappointed. They suffered no diminution of spirits in the high, even light and wide spaces. They saw each other real. They called to each other from a distance, and ran together with a thousand questions. They walked down the sloping floor of the woods while the light greatened and the shadows grew dark beneath their feet; together, near, yet not near enough for touching, released from everything but each other, bound to each other and not knowing it. Their voices flowed together.
"And what did you think when you first saw me?"
"I thought you had a great opinion of yourself and had come up here for some important reason—perhaps to buy the place."
"And I thought you were two people, a child and a woman. I think so still, only you are many more persons yet. You were so funny, such a cool hand, and so sophisticated."
"O, me! I didn't feel so. I was quite in awe of you, even before I saw you, to hear mother talk."
"She didn't want me to stay?"
"Yes, she did, rather, really; but she felt as I did, you see, that wherever you were something was bound to happen."
"And now it has?"
She smiled, was silent.
"She didn't want it to?"
"She doesn't know you."
Carron had a thought that up to this time he had not known himself.
"She thinks, you know," Blanche explained, "that you and I are still only strangers."
"Then she doesn't know," Carron said, quite gravely. So they disposed of caution and experience.
"But I don't think she'll mind so much now, when she gets used to the idea," Blanche told him. "What did she say to you afterward?"
"Nothing. You wicked girl—to make her, when she hates me!"
"She doesn't hate you, she only has a silly idea about you; that you are a terrible, dangerous person."
"O, ho, and didn't you have some such idea yourself?"
"No." They could laugh together about it now, so much had grown between them, through the night, while they had not seen each other. "That was quite different."
"Then what made you run away?"
"O, that was because—"
"Yes—because?"
She drooped, looking down. "It wasn't you, it was myself I thought was terrible. I felt as if I had given myself away, just made a gift of myself, to some one who didn't want me."
"Think of my taking you in that way! Think of my taking you tolerantly, forbearingly! Why I—" He would have shown her again how he would take her, but it was "hands off" with her yet. She would permit not so much as a finger-tip. This arbitrary distance she imposed between them kept an uneasy fog of distrusts in his heart. A thought came, like a black shadow. "How about Ferrier?" he suddenly said.
She opened large eyes, as if to take in a presence so small to her mind that she could hardly see it. "Well, what of him?"
"Has he anything to say about—this?"
Humor was mixed with the disdain that lifted the corners of her mouth. "I should like to hear him! Why?" The resentment of outside interference, a tendency overquick in her, looked out at him. "Has mother said anything to you about him?"
"Not a word," he declared hastily. "I only thought from the way he behaved the night we played whist—"
"How did he behave? I didn't notice him."
Carron had a very clear memory of exactly the way Ferrier had looked, backing down the road in the half moon's light, sending back his warning. "Like a man who has a claim."
"Well, he has not!" she said indignantly, but still with an impulse to smile, as if she could scarcely take the matter seriously. "Poor Bert! I'm afraid mother is a little responsible for the way he feels; she likes him. He's so harmless." She smiled understandingly upon Carron. "He's a good boy to her, fetches and carries, when he isn't sitting around some store, reading the socialistic weeklies. And then, he's good-looking."
"Good-looking!" Was that her translation of the appearance of the knock-kneed male! Carron exclaimed in his soul over the ideas of women. "And you don't like him?"
"Well, of course, I can't admire Bert. He's rather weak. There are some things about him that are simply deplorable. He won't lift his finger to help his brother, would not even acknowledge him if I didn't make him."
"His brother?"
"Yes, you know, George."
"Good Lord!"
"I forgot—you feel that way too. But still, if he was your brother, you know you would look out for him. It seems cruel. It is because Bert is ashamed of it, and so terribly afraid of what people will think. As if that mattered. But, in a way, I'm fond of Bert. I've known him so long and so well; and he is very loyal."
Carron looked at her with compunction, with silent pity. She had known the fellow so long, eight years! And this was her idea of him. Did she suppose that weakness and loyalty ever went together? There the dear vanity of the woman spoke. Disloyal to every one else in the world, perhaps, but loyal to her!
"He will do anything for me," she said.
Carron could believe her there. What the fellow would do for her—which was to say for the sake of possessing her—had been made evident. He had been ready even to chance the risk of losing her for that. What he would do disinterestedly for her, was nothing. It had taken the horse-breaker just four days to add up Ferrier's mental sum; and the impulse was on his tongue to speak it. Speak not only that, but his own as well. The story of his coming and the reason of it. Couldn't he show her, as Rader had urged, his side of the business—risk his plea? But she was not his as yet, was she? He was not certain. She seemed to be hovering on the edge of giving herself up; suppose this question of his be all that was needed to startle her away?
"He hasn't and never has had a ghost of a reason to expect anything of me," she said. "Then, a few weeks ago, we had a misunderstanding about something, something he did that seemed to me not like a gentleman. We haven't been very good friends since then."
Carron clapped that information to the hint that the scholar had let fall, which was, that Ferrier had come by his knowledge of the horse in some way not quite open, or as Blanche had put it, not like a gentleman. Well, that description fitted the fellow like a cap. Evidently that finished his question. He threw the matter of Ferrier to the winds. "Then, if he is nothing to you, why won't you—" His arms tried to clasp her, and closed on empty air.
How she laughed at him! "What a funny thing you are, always looking for a reason, or a fact!"
It dawned on him that she had no reason in the world to keep away from him, except that mysterious, buried reason of women, that she wanted to. She seemed to find this interval while they were near, yet not so near as even to clasp hands, the most to be cherished; like the hour in which they walked, beautiful only because the sun is coming, yet most beautiful before it rises.
He could not understand her here. What he wanted, he wanted to have in fact, not to dream of how he might have it; he lacked the poison of the idealist, who suspects the thing he can touch. He loved the more for possessing. Her holding him off appeared to him a sentimental scruple; but the awe love brings to its object made him almost patient with her whim. Love—the word had not been used between them; it might not yet have been formed in her mind; and he was as shy of the spoken sound as a half-grown boy is of a kiss. But he was living in it—scarcely knowing, too far gone in it to question his own feelings, or too much afraid of the depths he might discover. He followed her wayward course, thinking no woman had ever set her feet so lightly in the grass, or turned her head to look back with such a supple motion. Tamer of horses, orderer of men, captious dictator, he was caught in the crook of a little finger, the wave of a lock of hair, the curl of an eyelash. He saw her passing on soundless feet, from shadow to shadow, through light and light. She went most like a wild thing, with movements so poised and beautifully balanced, they gave no sense of bodily weight. To capture her on the edge of day, at the moment when the fiery path would stretch out to them!
It was not to happen then; nor at mid-day, ghostly with accumulated mist of heat, when all the business of the house separated them, and the steady, undiverted eye of Mrs. Rader glanced between them. Not until the afternoon was tiring, with the languors of the whole hot day in its lap, did he lure her out again and down to the old spring well. Here her parole came to an end, and they were no longer laughing as they had been at sunrise, but afraid of themselves and desperately in earnest.
"I thought we were to be friends—just friends, aren't we?" her cry sounded.
"Yes, friends if you like, but not just friends. We'd be enemies."
"O, but I don't want—"
The tide of her fears flowed to and fro, swung in, flung back again. The strength of the feeling made for fluctuation. Soul and body, which had kept such separate lives, each in its own fountain head, must toss together and struggle with each other before they could flow strongly out in the one channel. Not at once would the current sweep smooth. Even when, clasped and kissed, acknowledged lovers, though by no spoken word, they stood together, he looking down on her dark head.
Five days—and she was here in the middle of his life. She was in every direction in which he looked. The future he could not look into; the present was too large, filled all his horizon. The past was a dark alley. The harmless, natural life of the man who had lived there looked black. "What a brute I am!" he thought fearfully. "What does she, what can she see in me?"
She lifted her head at last, flung it back against his shoulder, and fixed her eyes on him a moment before she spoke. "Tell me something?" she questioned.
"Anything."
"What was it you wanted to ask me in the sewing-room, just as you came toward me?"
This startled him.
"What made you think I wanted to ask anything?"
"Because you said, 'Tell me,' as you started toward me."
He had been unaware that he had spoken anything of his thought, and he faced this idea with dismay. He had the opportunity he had wanted, yet now he looked upon it with disenchantment. He pushed it away. He did not want it now—the trouble of it, while her eyes were on his, and his hand beneath her knocking heart.
"I think," he said, " I had the inspired presumption to begin to ask you if you loved me." He said it, and in that moment it had become true to him. It seemed to him, indeed, as if that had been the only thing he had ever wanted. He lost his sense of perspective—left the past behind.
Straight into the house they went from their tryst, and Carron was to recall for a long while the scene without a word which followed. Mrs. Rader was sitting in the dining-room in the half light, her body relaxed easelessly in one of the stiff uncompromising chairs, her hands lying palms up, half open, apart, the weariness of the work of all day in her lap. Her head drooped a little aside; her eyes gazed at destiny, resigned, immuned to disappointment. To her her daughter went, coming behind her chair, put arms around her neck, laid a cheek against her mother's, and pressed it there in a dumb little caress. The poor woman, startled, half loosened the girl's arms, looked up. It seemed she understood. The overplus of love had touched her cheek. She looked searchingly, imploringly into her daughter's eyes; but evidently this was all there was to be told. Youth knew no more, perhaps, of its own tumultuous heart; knew, perhaps, but selfishly hugged the secret; hugged it, perhaps, not selfishly but with a deeper understanding than experience has of the one brief season in a whole life when man and woman are loosed from all expediency and advisability—from reason altogether—and snatch their moment alone in their small field of flowers among the bristling thorns of the world. Youth, overriding, sure of himself, and proud, scorned to call in experience; disdained to ask itself what it meant. The future to these two was as negligible as the past, or as the other souls living near them. They wanted to dream; to read each other's faces as open books, thousands of words on the pages, the same words a thousand times over; to float undisturbed on their tide of feeling; to gaze unaroused at their miracle; to ask, "How did we come together?" not "Where are we going?"