LOVE’S LONG GOOD-BY.
AWARE that his ruse in locking the jail upon his jailers would hold them
only till they could think of taking off the lock and knocking out the
sword-end, Adam was nevertheless determined upon going to David Donner’s
residence, for the purpose of seeing Mistress Garde.
With this purpose in view, and expecting his pursuers to be soon on a
keen race for the open flats, which he had been known to cross before,
in his successful escape to the woods, he led his retinue straight off
at right angles from such a course, and brought them in fifteen minutes
to the silent ship-yard of William Phipps.
Here, with small ado, they climbed the fence and struck across the
enclosure, past the gaunt skeleton of a ship, growing on the ways, and
so came to a quiet bit of water, at the private landing, where three
small boats were moored in safety.
The trio were soon aboard the lightest skiff and rowing her westward,
with silent, effectual strokes. Guided by the rover, the beef-eaters
steered for the shore, and after a ten-minute pull Adam landed near the
spot where he had sat upon a rock, waiting for night, on the occasion of
his last meeting with his sweetheart.
“Wait for me here,” he said. “I shall not be long.”
He was soon at the gate and then in the garden. There was not a sound to
be heard. The house was dark. He raised a little whistle, as he slowly
walked about the place, watching the windows intently.
Garde heard him. She was up. She had not had a moment of peace or
freedom from dreadful suspense since arriving at the house, while
waiting, listening, starting at all those uncanny sounds of stretching,
in which a building will indulge itself at night. Greater unhappiness or
despair she had never known, nor greater worry, fearing that Adam would
come, and then fearing more that he would not.
When she heard him whistle, her heart seemed suddenly dislodged in her
bosom. Her breath came laboredly. She opened the window in the kitchen,
this room being furthest from her grandfather’s apartment, and saw Adam
limp eagerly toward her.
“Garde!—Sweetheart!” he said.
“Oh—oh, you—you got away,” she faltered, faintly. “Here, I have—tied you
up—a luncheon. Take it, please, and—and you had better go—at once.”
“God bless you!” said Adam, stuffing the parcel she gave him inside his
coat. “I have brought you back the keys. My Garde! My own blessed
sweetheart. Oh, Garde, dearest, come out to me, just for a moment—just
for one little good-by.”
“I—I cannot,” Garde said, fighting heroically against the greatest
temptation she had ever known. “We must say——good-by, now, and I must——”
“Yes, I know, dear,” he broke in impetuously, “but just for a moment,
just——”
He was at the window. He tried to take her hands, to draw her toward
him. She shrank away with an action so strange that his sentence died on
his lips. “Why, Garde,” he said, “can’t I even touch your hands?”
She shook her head. He could barely see her, in the pale light which the
stars diffused.
“I—I must never see—never see you—again,” she stammered, painfully, “we
must say—say good-by.”
“You must never——Garde—why—we must say—But, Garde, dear,—I don’t
understand you. What does all this mean?”
“Oh, please go—now,” she said. “That is all—all I can say. It must be
good-by.”
Adam was made dumb for a moment. He stared at her unbelievingly. He
passed his hand across his brow, as if he feared his fasting and
long-endured labors had weakened his mind.
“What in heaven’s name has happened?” he said, as if partially to
himself. “Am I Adam Rust? Are you Garde? Say good-by?——Dearest, has
anything happened?”
She nodded to him, forcing back the sob that arose in her throat.
“Something—something has happened,” she repeated. For maidenly shame she
could not broach the subject of the Indian child.
He was silent for a moment before replying.
“But you came to-night and gave me the keys, an hour or so ago,” he
said, in wonderment and confusion. “You did that?”
“I—couldn’t—do less,” she answered, mastering her love and anguish by a
mighty resolution.
“Do you mean—you would have done the same for anybody?” he asked. And
seeing her nod an affirmative he gave a little laugh. “I am crazy now,
or I have been crazy before,” he told himself. “Something has happened.
Something—Of course—it couldn’t help happening, in time. Some one has
told you——I might have known it would happen.... And yet—you once said
you could wait for me fifty years. And I believed it.... Well, I thank
you. I have been amused.”
His broken sentences seemed to Garde to fill in the possible gaps of the
story—to make his confession complete. But Adam had, in reality, stopped
himself on the verge of accusing her of listening to the love-making of
some one other than himself, in his absence.
She made no reply to what he had said. She felt there was absolutely
nothing she could say. Her heart would have cried out to him wildly.
When he spoke so lightly of the fifty years which she could have waited,
she swayed where she stood, ready to drop. Almost one atom more of
impulse and she would have thrown herself in his arms, crying out her
love passionately, in defiance of the story of his perfidy. But her
honor, her maidenly resolution, steeled her in the nick of time. Though
her heart should break, she could not accept the gilded offer of such a
love.
“Oh, Garde—sweetheart, forgive me,” said Adam, after a moment of
terrible silence. “I have wronged you. Forgive me and tell me it is all
some nightmare—some dreadful——”
The night stillness was broken by the sound of men running swiftly up
the street. Randolph had thought of the possibility of Adam’s visit to
Mistress Merrill.
Garde heard and comprehended. Rust heard and was careless.
“Oh, go, Ad—Mr. Rust, please go at once,” pleaded the girl already
closing down the window.
“Garde! Garde!—not forever?” cried the man in a last despair.
“Forever,” she answered, so faintly that he barely heard, and then the
window came down to its place.
Limping back into the shadow, at the rear of the garden, Adam lay out
full length on the ground, as two tiptoeing figures entered the gate and
came sneaking silently about the somber house. He saw them make a
circuit of the garden. One of them walked to within a rod of where he
lay—therefore within a rod of death,—and then turned uncertainly away
and retired from the place with his fellow-hound.
The rover heard them go on up the street, hurriedly making toward the
woods. He came back to the place by the window, at last, and whistled
softly once again, unable to believe that what he had heard could be so.
There must be some explanation, if only he could get it.
There was no response, partially for the reason that Garde had sunk down
upon the floor, on the other side of the window, in a dead faint.
His lameness fully upon him again, Adam hobbled a few steps away, halted
to look back, yearningly, and then once more dragged himself off, to
join the faithful beef-eaters, waiting in patience with the boat.
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