IN THE RAIN
Shirley stood looking out at the rain. It was falling in no steady
downpour which held forth promise of ending, but with a gentle constancy
that gave the hills a look of sodden discomfort and made disconsolate
miry pools by the roadside. The clouds were not too thick, however, to
let through a dismal gray brightness that shone on the foliage and
touched with glistening lines of high-light the draggled tufts of the
soaked bluegrass. Now and then, across the dripping fields, fraying
skeins of mist wandered, to lie curdled in the flooded hollows where,
here and there, cattle stood lowing at intervals in a mournful key.
The indoors had become impossible to her. She was sick of trying to
read, sick of the endless pacings and purposeless invention of needless
tasks. She wanted movement, the cobwebby mist about her knees, the wet
rain in her face. She ran up-stairs and came down clad in a close
scarlet jersey, with leather gaiters and a soft hat.
Emmaline saw her thus accoutered with disapproval. "Lawdy-mercy,
chile!" she urged; "you ain't goin' out? It's rainin' cats en dawgs!"
"I'm neither sugar nor salt, Emmaline," responded Shirley listlessly,
dragging on her rain-coat, "and the walk will do me good."
On the sopping lawn she glanced up at her mother's window. Since the
night of the ball her own panging self-consciousness had overlaid the
fine and sensitive association between them. She had been full of a
horrible feeling that her face must betray her and the cause of her loss
of spirits be guessed.
Her mother had, in fact, been troubled by this, but was far from
guessing the truth. A somewhat long indisposition had followed her first
sight of Valiant, and she had not witnessed the tournament. She had hung
upon Shirley's description of it, however, with an excited interest that
the other was later to translate in the light of her own discovery. If
the thought had flitted to her that fate might hold something deeper
than friendship in Shirley's acquaintance with Valiant, it had been of
the vaguest. His choice of her as Queen of Beauty had seemed a natural
homage to that swift and unflinching act of hers which had saved his
life. There was in her mind a more obvious explanation of Shirley's
altered demeanor. "Perhaps it's Chilly Lusk," she had said to herself.
"Have they had a foolish quarrel, I wonder? Ah, well, in her own time
she will tell me."
* * * * *
There was some relief to Shirley's overcharged feelings in the very
discomfort of the drenched weather: the sucking pull of the wet clay on
her boots and the flirt of the drops on her cheeks and hair. She thrust
her dog-skin gloves into her pocket and held her arms outstretched to
let the wind blow through her fingers. The moisture clung in damp
wreaths to her hair and rolled in great drops down her coat as she went.
The wildest, most secluded walks had always drawn her most and she
instinctively chose one of these to-day. It was the road whereon
squatted Mad Anthony's whitewashed cabin. "Dah's er man gwine look in
dem eyes, honey, en gwine make 'em cry en cry." She had forgotten the
incident of that day, when he had read her fortune, but now the
quavering prophecy came back to her with a shivering sense of reality.
"Fo' dah's fiah en she ain' afeahd, en dah's watah en she ain' afeahd.
Et's de thing whut eat de ha'at outen de breas'--dat whut she afeahd
of!" If it were only fire and water that threatened her!
She struck her hands together with an inarticulate cry. She remembered
the laugh in Valiant's eyes as they had planted the roses, the
characteristic gesture with which he tossed the waving hair from his
forehead--how she had named the ducks and the peacock and chosen the
spots for his flowers; and she smiled for such memories, even in the
stabbing knowledge that these dear trivial things could mean nothing to
her in the future. She tried to realize that he was gone from her life,
that he was the one man on earth whom to marry would be to strike to the
heart her love and loyalty to her mother, and she said this over and
over to herself in varying phrases:
"You can't! No matter how much you love him, you can't! His father
deliberately ruined your mother's life--your own mother! It's bad enough
to love him--you can't help that. But you can help marrying him. You
would hate yourself. You can never kiss him again, or feel his arms
around you. You can't touch his hand. You mustn't even see him. Not if
it breaks your heart--as your mother's heart was broken!"
She had turned into an unbeaten way that ambled from the road through a
track of tall oaks and pines, scarce more than a bridle-path, winding
aimlessly through bracken-strewn depths so dense that even the
wild-roses had not found them. In her childish hurts she had always fled
to the companionship of the trees. She had known them every one--the
black-gum and pale dogwood and gnarled hickory, the prickly-balled
"button-wood," the lowly mulberry and the majestic red oak and walnut.
They had seemed friendly and pitying counselors, standing about her with
arms intertwined. Now, with the rain weeping in soughing gusts through
them, they offered her no comfort. She suddenly threw herself face down
on the soaked moss.
"Oh, God!" she cried. "I love him so! And I had only that one evening.
It doesn't seem just. If I could only have him, and suffer some other
way! He's suffering, too, and it isn't our fault! We neither of us
harmed any one! He isn't responsible for what his father did--why, he
hardly knew him! Oh, God, why must it be so hard for us? Millions of
other people love each other and nothing separates them like this!"
Shirley's warm breath made a little fog against the star-eyed moss. She
was scarcely conscious of her wet and clinging clothing, and the soaked
strands of her hair. She was so wrapped in her desolation that she no
longer heard the sound of the persevering rain and the wet swishing of
the bushes--parting now to a hurried step that fell almost without sound
on the spongy forest soil. She started up suddenly to see Valiant before
her.
He was in a somewhat battered walking suit of brown khaki, with a
leather belt and a felt hat whose brim, stiff with the wet, was curved
down visor-wise over his brow. In an instant he had drawn her upright,
and they stood, looking at each other, drenched and trembling.
"How can you?" he said with a roughness that sounded akin to anger.
"Here in this atrocious weather--like this!" he laid a hand on her arm.
"You're wet through."
"I--don't mind the rain," she answered, drawing away, yet feeling with a
guilty thrill the masterfulness of his tone, as well as its real
concern. "I'm often wet."
His gaze searched her face, feature by feature, noting her pallor, the
blue-black shadows beneath her eyes, the caught breath, uneven like a
child's from crying. He still held her hands in his.
"Shirley," he said, "I know what you intended to tell me by those
flowers--I went to St. Andrew's that night, in the dark, after I read
your letter. Who told you? Your--mother?"
"No, no!" she cried. "She would never have told me!"
His face lighted. With an irresistible movement he caught her to him.
"Shirley!" he cried. "It shan't be! It shan't, I tell you! You can't
break our lives in two like this! It's unthinkable."
"No, no!" she said piteously, pushing him from her. "You don't
understand. You are a man, and men--can't."
"I do understand," he insisted. "Oh, my darling, my darling! It isn't
right for that spectral thing to come between us! Why, it belonged to a
past generation! However sad the outcome of that duel, it held no
dishonor. I know only too well the ruin it brought my father! It's
enough that it wrecked three lives. It shan't rise again, like Banquo's
ghost to haunt ours! I know what you think--I would love you the more,
if I _could_ love you more, for that sweet loyalty--but it's wrong,
dear. It's wrong!"
"It's the only way."
"Listen. Your mother loves you. If she knew you loved me, she would bear
_anything_ rather than have you suffer like this. You say she wouldn't
have told you herself. Why, if my father--"
She tore her hands from his and faced him with a cry. "Ah, that is it!
You knew your father so little. He was never to you what she is to me.
Why, I've been all the life she has had. I remember when she mended my
dolls, and held me when I had scarlet fever, and sang me the songs the
trees sang to themselves at night. I said my prayers at her knee till I
was twelve years old. We were never apart a day till I went away to
school."
She paused, breathless.
"Doesn't that prove what I say?" he said, bending toward her. "She loves
you far better than herself. She wants _your_ happiness."
"Could that mean hers?" she demanded, her bosom heaving. "To see us
together--always--always! To be reminded in everything--the lines of
your face--the tones of your voice, maybe,--of _that_! Oh, you don't
know how women feel--how they remember--how they grieve! I've gone over
all you can say till my soul cries out, but it can't change it. It
can't!"
Valiant felt as though he were battering with bruised knuckles at a
stone wall. A helpless anger simmered in him. "Suppose," he said
bitterly, "that your mother one day, perhaps after long years, learns of
your sacrifice. She is likely to guess in the end, I think. Will it add
to her pleasure, do you fancy, to discover that out of this conception
of filial loyalty--for it's that, I suppose!--you have spoiled your own
life?"
She shuddered. "She will never learn," she said brokenly. "Oh, I know
she would not have spoken. She would suffer anything for my happiness.
But I wouldn't have her bear any more for my sake."
His anger faded suddenly, and when he looked at her again, tears were
burning in his eyes.
"Shirley!" he said. "It's _my_ heart, too, that you are binding on the
wheel! I love you. I want nothing but you! I'd rather beg my bread from
door to door with your hand in mine than sit on a throne without you!
What can there be in life for me unless you share it? Think of our love!
Think of the fate that brought me here to find you in Virginia! Think of
our garden--where I thought we would live and work and dream, till we
were old and gray--_together_, darling! Don't throw our love away like
this!"
His entreaties left her only whiter, but unmoved. She shook her head,
gazing at him through great clear tears that welled over and rolled down
her cheeks.
"I can't fight," she said. "I have no strength left." She put out her
hand as she spoke and dropped it with a little limp gesture that had in
it tired despair, finality and hopelessness. It caught at his heart more
strongly than any words. He felt a warm gush of pity and tenderness.
He took her hand gently without speaking, and pressed it hard against
his lips. It seemed to him very small and cold.
They passed together through the wet bracken, his strong arm guiding her
over the uneven path, and came to the open in silence.
"Don't come with me," she said then, and without a backward glance, went
rapidly from him down the shimmering road.