CHAPTER FIVE
Conkling, as he waited in the shadowy-arbor, was conscious of a series of rhythms. One was the distant rise and fall of lake water on its pebbled shore. Another was the antiphonal call of katydids from the mass of shrubbery behind him. Still another was the stridulous chorus of the crickets in the parched grass, rising and falling with a cadence of its own. And still another was the beat of his own pulse, quickened with an expectancy which tended to disturb him.
He waited for almost half an hour. Then Julia Keswick came ghost-like out of the dusk, heavy with its mingled smell of phlox and mignonette. He stood up, once he was sure who it was. She, too, stood, without speaking, face to face with him in the filtered moonlight.
"Was it hard?" he asked inadequately and with a quaver in his voice. She missed his small gesture of self-accusation in the darkness.
"It was dangerous," she admitted, more composedly than he had expected.
"What would happen if they knew?" he questioned, more conscious of her nearness than of the words he was uttering.
"I could never go back," she told him. The forlornness of her voice, for all its composure, brought a surge of pity through his body. There was, however, something faintly dismissive in her movement as she sat down on the rough seat. "I want to talk to you about the pictures," she said in a more resolute voice.
"But I'd much rather talk about you," he objected, and he waited, with his heart in his mouth, to see if she challenged that audacity.
"I've seen you only three times before to-night," she said, staring off through a break in the shrubbery where a stretch of the lake lay like moving quicksilver.
"Well, a good deal can happen in that time," he argued, wondering where his courage had gone.
"I've found that out," she said with her Keswick candor.
He leaned closer to see her face. She did not move.
"Everything seemed clouded and hopeless before you came," he heard her saying.
"Oh, you're still thinking of the pictures," he said, with a note of disappointment.
She laughed, almost inaudibly.
"I wish we didn't have to think about them," she told him.
He found something oddly inflammatory in that acknowledgment. "Then let's not think about them," he suggested. "Why should we, on a night like this!"
She did not answer him. But out of the prolonged silence that fell between them a tree toad shrilled sharply somewhere over their heads. He turned and stared across the garden at the distant house front. It seemed less sinister, bathed as it was in its etherealized wash of light. But it depressed him.
"I shouldn't have asked you to do this," he said, with remorse in his voice.
"It's the most wonderful night I have ever known," her small voice answered through the dusk.
"It is to me, too," he told her, conscious of some gathering tide which was creeping up to him, which was taking possession of him, which was carrying him along on its tumbling and racing immensities.
"And it can never happen again," she said, as much to herself as to him.
"Why can't it?" he demanded.
"How can it?" she quietly countered.
"But I intend to make it!" he cried.
She sat back against the arbor railing, apparently startled by the passion in his voice.
"I'd rather you didn't say things like that," she told him.
"Why?" he asked.
"I want you to be always wonderful to me."
"But I mean it," he said, his voice shaking.
She stood up with what seemed her first gesture of timidity. He could see her face, flower soft, in the ragged square of moonlight which fell across her shoulders. He rose to his feet and stood beside her, with his pulses pounding. Then in the silence he reached out for her hand and turned her about so that she faced him.
"Don't you see what it means to me?" he said, his face above hers in the uncertain light.
She looked down at her imprisoned hand, but that was all. He leaned closer. Her eyes closed as he kissed her.
"You must not do that if you don't mean it," she said almost abruptly and with a passionate intensity which startled him.
"But I do mean it, so much more than I could ever put into words," he cried, more shaken than he had imagined. "I love you."
Her hand went up to his shoulder in a gesture of helplessness.
"Are you sure?" she exacted. "Are you certain?" she repeated, with a soft desperation which left her adorable.
He took her in his arms and held her close as he murmured, "As certain as life!"
He kissed her again, this time more appropriately, more masterfully. And with it a lifetime of repression went up in flames.
"I love you," she said, her grim Keswick candor once more asserting itself. "I'll always have to love you, whatever happens." She turned away from him a little and stared toward the shadowy front of the old manor-house. "I don't care so much now what they say."
"Why should you?" he demanded, realizing how little he had thought of the world beyond that arbor.
"This is my only home," she told him, quite simply. "I can live here only by doing what is demanded of me."
"But when those demands are absurd?"
"That doesn't seem to have made much difference."
"But you're—you're a woman now, and you have your human rights."
"That's easy to say," she told him. "But my world's been very different from yours."
"Then we've got to bring them closer together," he said, stirred by the wistfulness of her face.
"Bring what together?" she asked, apparently not following him.
"Your world and mine!" he said, quite grimly.
He took possession of her hand again. But she moved her head slowly from side to side. It seemed a protest against the impossible.
"It's got to be done!" he proclaimed. That cry, however, seemed to fall short of her attention.
"But I can show you the pictures now," she said in a tone of quiet challenge.
"What have the pictures got to do with us?" he demanded, resenting the intrusion of a workaday world on that moment of tensed emotion.
"Everything," the girl told him. "That's why you must see them."
"When!" he asked, resenting not only her movement away from him but also the manner in which the trivialities of his calling could so stubbornly re-impose themselves on his moments of exaltation.
"It will have to be like our meeting to-night—without their knowing. I'll send you word in some way—in the morning. But it will have to be secret. And now I must go!"
"That way?" he challenged, with bitterness in his voice.
She came to a stop, staring at him through the dusk for a moment of silence. Then she slowly lifted her arms, and as slowly stepped across the filtered moonlight until she came to where he stood waiting for her.