BETWEEN DAY AND NIGHT.
Hermia sat by the window waiting for Quintard. It was the saddest hour
of the day—that hour of dusk when the lamplighter trudges on his
rounds. How many women have sat in their darkening rooms at that hour
with their brows against the glass and watched their memories rise and
sing a dirge! Even a child—if it be a woman-child—is oppressed in that
shadow-haunted land between day and night, for the sadness of the future
is on her. It is the hour when souls in their strain feel that the
tension must snap; when tortured hearts send their cries through
forbidding brains. The sun has gone, the lamps are unlit, the shadows
lord and mock until they are blotted out under falling tears.
Hermia rose suddenly and left the room. She went into the dining-room
and drank a glass of sherry. She wore a black gown, and her face was as
wan as the white-faced sky; but in a moment the wine brought color to
her lips and cheeks. Then she went into the jungle and lit the lamps.
She was standing by one of the date-trees as Quintard entered. As he
came up to her he took her hand in both his own, but he did not kiss
her; he almost dreaded a renewal of last night’s excitement. Hermia,
moreover, was a woman whose moods must be respected; she did not look as
if she were ready to be kissed.
“Are you ill?” he asked, with a tenderness in his voice which made her
set her teeth. “Your eyes are hollow. I am afraid you did not sleep.
I”—the dark color coming under his skin—“did not sleep either.”
“I slept,” said Hermia—“a little; but I have a headache.”
They went to the end of the room and sat down, she on the bank, he
opposite, on a seat made to represent a hollowed stump.
They talked of many things, as lovers do in those intervals between the
end of one whirlwind and the half-feared, half-longed-for beginning of
another. He told her that the Poet’s Club, after a mighty battle which
had threatened disruption, had formally elected him a member. Word had
been sent to his rooms late in the afternoon. Then he told her that they
were to be married on Thursday, and to sail for Europe in the early
morning on his yacht. He spoke of the places they would visit, the old
cities he had loved to roam about alone, where idle talk would have
shattered the charm. And he would take her into the heart of nature and
teach her to forget that the world of men existed. And the sea—they
both loved the sea better than all. He would teach her how every ocean,
every river, every stream spoke a language of its own, and told legends
that put to shame those of forest and mountain, village and wilderness.
They would lie on the sands and listen to the deep, steady voice of the
ocean telling the secrets she carried in her stormy heart—secrets that
were safe save when some mortal tuned his ear to her tongue. He threw
back his head and quoted lingeringly from the divinest words that have
ever been written about the sea:
“Mother of loves that are swift to fade,
Mother of mutable winds and hours,
A barren mother, a mother-maid,
Cold and clean as her faint, salt flowers.
I would we twain were even as she,
Lost in the night and the light of the sea,
Where faint sounds falter and wan beams wade,
Break and are broken, and shed into showers.
* * * * * * *
“O tender-hearted, O perfect lover,
Thy lips are bitter, and sweet thine heart.
The hopes that hurt and the dreams that hover,
Shall they not vanish away and apart?
But thou, thou art sure, thou art older than earth;
Thou art strong for death and fruitful of birth;
Thy depths conceal and thy gulfs discover;
From the first thou wert; in the end thou art.”
Hermia leaned forward and pressed her hands into his. “Come!” she said.
He dropped on the cushion beside her and caught her to him in an embrace
that hurt her; and under his kiss the coming hour was forgotten.
After a time he pushed her back among the cushions and pressed his lips
to her throat. Suddenly he stood up. “I am going,” he said. “We will be
married at eight o’clock on Thursday night. I shall not see you until
then.”
She stood up also. “Wait a moment,” she said, “I want to say something
to you before you go.” She looked at him steadily and said: “I was
everything to Ogden Cryder.”
For a moment it seemed as if Quintard had not understood. He put out his
hand as if to ward off a blow, and looked at her almost inquiringly.
“What did you say?” he muttered.
“I tried to believe that I loved him, and failed. There is no excuse. I
knew I did not. I tell you this because I love you too well to give you
what you would have spurned had you known; and I tell you that you may
forget me the sooner.”
Quintard understood. He crossed the short distance between them and
looked into her face.
Hermia gave a rapturous cry. All that was brutal and savage in her
nature surged upward in response to the murderous passion in this man
who was bone of herself. Never had she been so at one with him; never
had she so worshiped him as in that moment when she thought he was going
to kill her. Then, like a flash, he left her.
* * * * *