swift miracle of their love and engagement. Maurice had passed his
fiftieth year, so clean from dissipation, so full of vitality and the
beauty of a long race of strong men, that he did not look forty, and
in all out-door activities rivalled the boys in their early twenties.
He was an expert mountain-climber and explorer of regions from which
he brought his own literary material; inured to fatigue, patient in
hardship, and resourceful in danger. Money and reputation and the
power which attends them he had wrung from fate as his right, and felt
himself fit to match with the best blood in the world—except hers.
Yet she was only his social equal, and had grown up next door, while
his unsatisfied nature searched the universe for its mate—a wild
sweetbrier-rose of a child, pink and golden, breathing a daring,
fragrant personality. He hearkened back to some recognition of her
charm from the day she ran out bareheaded and slim-legged on her
father's lawn and turned on the hose for her play. Yet he barely
missed her when she went to an Eastern school, and only thrilled
vaguely when she came back like one of Gibson's pictures, carrying
herself with stateliness. There was something in her blue eyes not
to be found in any other blue eyes. He was housed with her family in
the same hotel at the island before he completely understood the
magnitude of what had befallen him.
“I am awfully set up because you have chosen me,” she admitted at
first. He liked to have her proud as of a conquest, and he was
conscious of that general favor which stamped him a good match, even
for a girl half his age.
“How much have you done this morning?” she inquired, looking at his
desk.
“Enough to tide over the time until you came. Determination and
execution are not one with me now.” Her hands were cold, and he warmed
them against his face.
“It was during your married life that determination and execution were
one?”
“Decidedly. For that was my plodding age. Sometimes when I am
tingling with impatience here I look back in wonder on the dogged
drive of those days. Work is an unhappy man's best friend. I have no
concealments from you, Lily. You know I never loved my wife—not this
way—though I made her happy; I did my duty. She told me when she died
that I had made her happy. People cannot help their limitations.”
“Do you love me?” she asked, her lips close to his ear.
“I am you! Your blood flows through my veins. I feel you rush through
me. You don't know what it is to love like that, do you?”
She shook her head.
“When you are out of my sight I do not live; I simply wait. What is
the weird power in you that creates such gigantic passion?”
“The power is all in your imagination. You simply don't know me. You
think I am a prize. Why, I—flirt—and I've—kissed men!”
He laughed. “You would be a queer girl, at your age, if you
hadn't—kissed men—a little. Whatever your terrible past has been, it
has made you the infinite darling that you are!”
She moved her eyes to watch the leaves twinkling in front of the
lime-kiln.
“I must go,” she said.
“‘I must go'!” he mocked. “You are no sooner here than—'I must go'!”
“I can't be with you all the time. You don't care for appearances, so
I have to.”
“Appearances are nothing. This is the only real thing in the universe.”
“But I really must go.” She lifted her wilful chin and sat still. They
stared at each other in the silence of lovers. Though the girl's face
was without a line, she was more skilled in the play of love than he.
“Indeed I must go. Your eyes are half shut, like a gentian.”
“When you are living intensely you don't look at the world through
wide-open eyes,” said Maurice. “I never let myself go before.
Repression has been the law of my life. Think of it! In a long
lifetime I have loved but two persons—the woman I told you of, and
you. Twenty years ago I found out what life meant. For the first
time, I knew! But I was already married. I took that beautiful love
by the throat and choked it down. Afterwards, when I was free, the
woman I first loved was married. How long I have had to wait for you
to bloom, lotus flower! This is living! All the other years were
preparation.”
“Do you never see her?” inquired the girl.
“Who? That first one? I have avoided her.”
“She loved you?”
“With the blameless passion that we both at first thought was the most
perfect friendship.”
“Wouldn't you marry her now if she were free?”
“No. It is ended. We have grown apart in renunciation for twenty
years. I am not one that changes easily, you see. You have taken what
I could not withhold from you, and it is yours. I am in your power.”
They heard a great steamer blowing upon the strait. Its voice
reverberated through the woods. The girl's beautiful face was full
of a tender wistfulness, half maternal. Neither jealousy nor pique
marred its exquisite sympathy. It was such an expression as an untamed
wood-nymph might have worn, contemplating the life of man.
“Don't be sad,” she breathed.
Vague terror shot through Maurice's gaze.
“That is a strange thing for you to say to me, Lily. Is it all you can
say—when I love you so?”
“I was thinking of the other woman. Did she suffer?”
“At any rate, she has the whole world now—beauty, talent, wealth,
social prestige. She is one of the most successful women in this
country.”
“Do I know her name?”
“Quite well. She has been a person of consequence since you were a
child.”
“I couldn't capture the whole world,” mused Lily. Maurice kissed her
small fingers.
“Some one else will put it in your lap, to keep or throw away as you
choose.”
The hurried tink-tank of an approaching cow-bell suggested passers.
Then a whir of wheels could be heard through tangled wilderness. The
girl met his lips with a lingering which trembled through all his
body, and withdrew herself.
“Now I am going. Are you coming down the trail with me?”
Maurice shut the lime-kiln door, and crossed with her a grassy avenue
to find among birches the ravelled ends of a path called the White
Islander's Trail. You may know it first by a triangle of roots at the
foot of an oak. Thence a thread, barely visible to expert eyes, winds
to some mossy dead pines and crosses a rotten log. There it becomes a
trail cleaving the heights, and plunging boldly up and down evergreen
glooms to a road parallel with the cliff. Once, when the island was
freshly drenched in rain, Lily breathed deeply, gazing down the tunnel
floored with rock and pine-needles, a flask of incense. “It is like
the violins!”
In that seclusion of heaven Maurice could draw her slim shape to him,
for the way is so narrow that two are obliged to walk close. They
parted near the wider entrance, where a stamp reared itself against
the open sky, bearing a stick like a bow, and having the appearance of
a crouching figure.
“There is the Indian on the trail,” said Lily. “You must go back now.”
“He looks so formidable,” said Maurice; “especially in twilight, and,
except at noon, it is always twilight here. But when you reach him he
is nothing but a stump.”
“He is more than a stump,” she insisted. “He is a real Indian, and
some day will get up and take a scalp! It gives me a shiver every time
I come in sight of him crouched on the trail!”
“Do you know,” complained her lover, “that you haven't told me once
to-day?”
“Well—I do.”
“How much?”
“Oh—a little!”
“A little will not do!”
“Then—a great deal.”
“I want all—all!”
Her eyes wandered towards the Indian on the trail, and the bow of her
mouth was bent in a tantalizing curve.
“I have told you I love you. Why doesn't that satisfy you?”
“It isn't enough!”
“Perhaps I can't satisfy you. I love you all I can.”
“All you can?”
“Yes. Maybe I can't love you as much as you want me to. I am shallow!”
“For God's sake, don't say you are shallow! There is deep under deep
in you! I couldn't have staked my life on you, I couldn't have loved
you, if there hadn't been! Say I have only touched the surface yet,
but don't say you are shallow!”
The girl shook her head.
“There isn't enough of me. Do you know,” she exclaimed, whimsically,
“that's the Indian on the trail! You'll never feel quite sure of me,
will you?”
Maurice's lips moved. “You are my own!”
She kept him at bay with her eyes, though they filled slowly with
tears.
“I am a child of the devil!” exclaimed Lily, with vehemence. “I give
people trouble and make them suffer!”
“She classes me with 'people'!” Maurice thought. He said, “Have I ever
blamed you for anything?”
“No.”
“Then don't blame yourself. I will simply take what you can give me.
That is all I could take. Forgive me for loving you too much. I will
try to love you less.”
“No,” the girl demurred. “I don't want you to do that.”
“I am very unreasonable,” he said, humbly. “But the rest of the world
is a shadow. You are my one reality. There is nothing in the universe
but you.”
She brushed her eyes fiercely. “I mustn't cry. I'll have to explain it
if I do, and the lids will be red all day.”
The man felt internally seared, as by burning lava, with the
conviction that he had staked his all late in life on what could
never be really his. She would diffuse herself through many. He was
concentrated in her. His passion had its lips burned shut.
“I am Providence's favorite bag-holder,” was his bitter thought. “The
game is never for me.”
“Good-bye,” said Lily.
“Good-bye,” said Maurice.
“Are you coming into the casino to-night?”
“If you will be there.”
“I have promised a lot of dances. Good-bye. Go back and work.”
“Yes, I must work,” said Maurice.
She gave him a defiant, radiant smile, and ran towards the Indian on
the trail. He turned in the opposite direction, and tramped the woods
until nightfall.
At first he mocked himself. “Oh yes, she loves me! I'm glad, at any
rate, that she loves me! There will be enough to moisten my lips with;
and if I thirst for an ocean that is not her fault.”
Why had a woman been made who could inspire such passion without
returning it? He reminded himself that she was of a later, a gayer,
lighter, less strenuous generation than his own. Thousands of men had
waded blood for a principle and a lost cause in his day. In hers
the gigantic republic stood up a menace to nations. The struggle
for existence was over before she was born. Yet women seemed more
in earnest now than ever before. He said to himself, “I have always
picked out natures as fatal to me as a death-warrant, and fastened my
life to them.”
The thought stabbed him that perhaps his wife, whom he had believed
satisfied, had carried such hopeless anguish as he now carried. Tardy
remorse for what he could not help gave him the feeling of a murderer.
And since he knew himself how little may be given under the bond of
marriage, he could not look forward and say, “My love will yet be
mine!”
He would, indeed, have society on his side; and children—he drew his
breath hard at that. Her ways with children were divine. He had often
watched her instinctive mothering of, and drawing them around her. And
it should be much to him that he might look at and touch her. There
was life in her mere presence.
He felt the curse of the artistic temperament, which creates in man
the exquisite sensitiveness of woman.
Taking the longest and hardest path home around the eastern beach,
Maurice turned once on impulse, parted a screen of birches, and
stepped into an amphitheatre of the cliff, moss-clothed and
cedar-walled. It sloped downward in three terraces. A balcony or high
parapet of stone hung on one side, a rock low and broad stood in the
centre, and an unmistakable chair of rock, cushioned with vividly
green-branched moss, waited an occupant. Maurice sat down, wondering
if any other human being, perplexed and tortured, had ever domiciled
there for a brief time. Slim alder-trees and maples were clasped in
moss to their waists. The spacious open was darkened by dense shade
overhead. Bois Blanc was plainly in view from the beach. But the
eastern islands stretched a line of foliage in growing dusk. Maurice
felt the cooling benediction of the place. This world is such a good
world to be happy in, if you have the happiness.
When the light faded he went on, climbing low headlands which jutted
into the water, and sliding down on the other side; so that he reached
the hotel physically exhausted, and had his dinner sent to his room.
But a vitality constantly renewing itself swept away every trace of
his hard day when he entered the gayly lighted casino.
He no longer danced, not because dancing ceased to delight him, but
because the serious business of life had left no room for it. He
walked along the waxed floor, avoiding the circling procession of
waltzers, and bowing to a bank of pretty faces, but thinking his own
thought, in growing bitterness: “They who live blameless lives are
the fools of fate. If I had it to do over again, I would take what I
wanted in spite of everything, and let the consequences fall where
they would!” Looking up, he met in the eyes the woman of his early
love.
She was holding court, for a person of such consequence became the
centre of the caravansary from the instant of her arrival; and she
gave him her hand with the conventional frankness and self-command
that set her apart from the weak. Once more he knew she was a woman to
be worshipped, whose presence rebuked the baseness he had just thought.
“Perhaps it was she who kept me from being worse,” Maurice recognized
in a flash; “not I myself!”
“Why, Mrs. Carstang, I didn't know you were here!” he spoke, with
warmth around the heart.
“We came at noon.”
“And I was in the woods all day.” Maurice greeted the red-cheeked,
elderly Mr. Carstang, whom, according to half the world, his wife
doted upon, and according to the other half, she simply endured. At
any rate, he looked pleased with his lot.
While Maurice stood talking with Mrs. Carstang, the new grief and
the old strangely neutralized each other. It was as if they met and
grappled, and he had numb peace. The woman of his first love made
him proud of that early bond. She was more than she had been then.
But Lily moved past him with a smile. Her dancing was visible music.
It had a penetrating grace—hers, and no other person's in the world.
The floating of a slim nymph down a forest avenue, now separating
from her partner, and now joining him at caprice, it rushed through
Maurice like some recollection of the Golden Age, when he had stood
imprisoned in a tree. There was little opportunity to do anything
but watch her, for she was more in demand than any other girl in the
casino. Hop nights were her unconscious ovations. He took a kind of
aching delight in her dancing. For while it gratified an artist to the
core, it separated her from her lover and gave her to other men.
Next morning he waited for her in the study with a restlessness which
would not let him sit still. More than once he went as far as the
oak-tree to watch for a glimmer. But when Lily finally appeared at the
door he pretended to be very busy with papers on his desk, and looked
up, saying, “Oh!”
The morning was chill, and she seemed a fair Russian in fur-edged
cloth as she put her cold fingers teasingly against his neck.
“Are you working hard?”
“Trying to. I am behind.”
“But if there is a good wind this afternoon you are not to forget the
Carstangs' sail They will be here only a day or two, and you mustn't
neglect them. Mrs. Carstang told me if I saw you first to invite you.”
Maurice met the girl's smiling eyes, and the ice of her hand went
through him.
“Isn't Mrs. Carstang lovely! As soon as I saw you come in last night,
I knew she was—the other woman.”
“You didn't look at me.”
“I can see with my eyelashes. Do you know, I have often thought I
should love her if I were a man!”
There was not a trace of jealousy in Lily's gentle and perfect manner.
“You resemble her,” said Maurice. “You have the blond head, and the
same features—only a little more delicate.”
“I have been in her parlor all morning,” said Lily. “We talked about
you. I am certain, Maurice, Mrs. Carstang is in her heart still
faithful to you.”
That she should thrust the old love on him as a kind of solace seemed
the cruelest of all. There was no cognizance of anything except this
one maddening girl. She absorbed him. She wrung the strength of his
manhood from him as tribute, such tribute as everybody paid her, even
Mrs. Carstang. He sat like a rock, tranced by the strong control which
he kept over himself.
“I must go,” said Lily. She had not sat down at all. Maurice shuffled
his papers.
“Good-bye,” she spoke.
“Good-bye,” he answered.
She did not ask, “Are you coming down the trail with me?” but ebbed
softly away, the swish of her silken petticoat subsiding on the grassy
avenue.
Her lover stretched his arms across the desk and sobbed upon them with
heart-broken gasps.
“It is killing me! It is killing me! And there is no escape. If I took
my life my disembodied ghost would follow her, less able to make
itself felt than now! I cannot live without her, and she is not for
me—not for me!”
He cursed the necessity which drove him out with the sailing party,
and the prodigal waste of life on neutral, trivial doings which cannot
be called living. He could see Lily with every pore of his body, and
grew faint keeping down a wild beast in him which desired to toss
overboard the men who crowded around her. She was more deliciously
droll than any comédienne, full of music and wit, the kind of spirit
that rises flood-tide with occasion. He was himself hilarious also
during this experience of sailing with two queens surrounded by
courtiers and playing the deep game of fascination, as if men were
created for the amusement of their lighter moments. Lily's defiant,
inscrutable eyes mocked him. But Mrs. Carstang gave him sweet
friendship, and he sat by her with the unchanging loyalty of a devotee
to an altar from which the sacrament has been removed.
Next morning Lily did not come to the lime-kiln. Maurice worked
furiously all day, and corrected proof in his room at night, though
tableaux were shown in the casino, both Mrs. Carstang and Lily being
head and front of the undertaking.
The second day Lily did not come to the lime-kiln. But he saw her pass
along the grassy avenue in front of his study with Mrs. Carstang, a
man on each side of them. They waved their hands to him.
Maurice sat with his head on his desk all the afternoon, beaten and
broken-hearted. He told himself he was a poltroon; that he was losing
his manhood; that the one he loved despised him, and did well to
despise him; that a man of his age who gave way to such weakness must
be entering senility. The habit of rectitude would cover him like
armor, and proclaim him still of a chivalry to which he felt recreant.
But it came upon him like revelation that many a man had died of what
doctors had called disease, when the report to the health-officer
should have read: “This man loved a woman with a great passion, and
she slew him.”
The sigh of the woods around, and the sunlight searching for him
through his door, were lonelier than illimitable space. It was what
the natives call a “real Mackinac day,” with infinite splendor of sky
and water.
Maurice heard the rustle of woman's clothes, and stood up as Lily came
through the white waste of stones. She stopped and gazed at him with
large hunted eyes, and submitted to his taking and kissing her hands.
It was so blessed to have her at all that half his trouble fled before
her. They sat down together on the bench.
Much of his life Maurice had been in the attitude of judging whether
other people pleased him or not. Lily reversed this habit of mind, and
made him humbly solicitous to know whether he pleased her or not. He
silently thanked God for the mere privilege of having her near him.
Passionate selfishness was chastened out of him. One can say much
behind the lips and make no sound at all.
“If I drench her with my love and she does not know it,” thought
Maurice, “it cannot annoy her. Let me take what she is willing to
give, and ask no more.”
“The Carstangs are gone,” said Lily.
“Yes; I bade them good-bye this morning before I came to the
lime-kiln.”
“You don't say you regret their going.”
“I never seek Mrs. Carstang.”
He sat holding the girl's hands and never swerving a glance from her
face, which was weirdly pallid—the face of her spirit. He felt himself
enveloped and possessed by her, his will subject to her will. He said
within himself, voicelessly: “I love you. I love the firm chin, the
wilful lower lip, and the Cupid's bow of the upper lip. I love the
oval of your cheeks, the curve of your ears, the etched eyebrows,
and all the little curls on your temples. I love the proud nose and
most beautiful forehead. Every blond hair n that dear head is mine!
Its upward tilt on the long throat is adorable! Have you any gesture
or personal trait which does not thrill me? But best of all, because
through them you yourself look at me, revealing more than you think, I
adore your blue eyes.”
“What are you thinking?” demanded Lily.
“Of a man who lay face downward far out in the desert, and had not a
drop of water to moisten his lips.”
“Is he in your story?”
“Yes, he is in my story.”
“I thought perhaps you didn't want me to come here any more,” she said.
“You didn't think so!” flashed Maurice.
“But you turned your cheek to me the last time I was here. You were
too busy to do more than speak.”
Voicelessly he said: “I lay under your feet, my life, my love!
You walked on me and never knew it.” Aloud he answered; “Was I so
detestable? Forgive me. I am trying to learn self-control.”
“You are all self-control! If you have feeling, you manage very well
to conceal it.”
“God grant it!” he said, in silence, behind his lips. “For the touch
of your hand is rapture. My God! how hard it is to love so much and be
still!” Aloud he said, “Don't you know the great mass of human beings
are obliged to conceal their feelings because they have not the gift
of expression?”
“Yes, I know,” answered Lily, defiantly.
“But that can never be said of you,” Maurice went on. “For you are so
richly endowed with expression that your problem is how to mask it.”
“Are you coming down the trail with me? It is sunset, and time to shut
the study for the day.”
He prepared at once to leave his den, and they went out together
on the trail, lingering step by step. Though it was the heart of
the island summer, the maples still had tender pink leaves at the
extremities of branches; and the trail looked wild and fresh as if
that hour tunnelled through the wilderness. Sunset tried to penetrate
western stretches with level shafts, but none reached the darkening
path where twilight already purpled the hollows.
The night coolness was like respite after burning pain. Maurice
wondered how close he might draw this changeful girl to him without
again losing her. He had compared her to a wild sweetbrier-rose. She
was a hundred-leaved rose, hiding innumerable natures in her depths.
They passed the dead pines, crossed the rotten log, and came silently
within sight of the Indian on the trail, but neither of them noted it.
The Indian stood stencilled against a background of primrose light,
his bow magnified.
It was here that Maurice felt the slight elastic body sag upon his arm.
“I am tired,” said Lily. “I have been working so hard to amuse your
friends!”
“Would that I were my friends!” responded Maurice. He said, silently:
“I love you! I wonder if I shall ever learn to love you less?”
The unspoken appeal of her swaying figure put him off his guard, and
he found himself holding her, the very depths of his passion rushing
out with the force of lava.
“It is you I want!—the you that is not any other person on earth
or in the universe! Whatever it is—the identity—the spirit—that
is you—the you that was mated with me in other lives—that I
have sought—will seek—must have, whatever the price in time and
anguish!—understand!—there is nobody but you!”
Tears oozed from under her closed lids. She lay in his arms passive,
as in a half-swoon.
“You do the talking,” she breathed. “I do the loving!”
Without opening her eyes she met him with her perfect mouth, and gave
herself to him in a kiss. He understood a spirit so passionately
reticent that it denied to itself its own inward motions. The
wilfulness of a solitary exalted nature melted in that kiss. All the
soft curves of her face concealed and belied the woman who opened her
wild blue eyes and looked at him, passionately adoring, fierce for her
own, yet doubtful of fate.
“If I let you know that I loved you all I do, you would tire of me!”
“How can you say I could ever tire of you?”
“I know it! When you are not quite sure of me, you love me best!”
Maurice laughed against her lips. “You said that was the Indian on the
trail—my never being quite sure of you! Will you take an oath with me?”
“Yes.”
“This is the oath: I swear before God that I love you more than any
one else on earth; more than any one else in the universe.”
She repeated: “I swear before God that I love you more than any one
else on earth; more than any one else in the universe!”