“Surely this is Indian Summer—strayed or stolen!” said Frank one
morning a few days later, as she wheeled Durkin and his big arm-chair
into the sunlight by the open window.
His arm was healing slowly, and his strength was equally slow in coming
back to him. Yet she was not altogether unhappy during those fleeting
days of work and anxiety.
Her darkest moments were those when she saw that Durkin was fretting
over the loss of his ill-gained fortune, burning with his subterranean
fires of hatred for MacNutt, and inwardly vowing that he would yet live
to have his day.
She was still hoping that time, the healer, would in some way attend to
each of his wounds, though that of the spirit, she knew, was the deeper
of the two. Yet from day to day she saw that his resentment lay sourly
embedded in him, like a bullet; her only hope was that what nature could
neither reject nor absorb it would in due time encyst with indifference.
So if she herself became a little infected with his spirit of
depression, she struggled fiercely against it and showed him only the
cheeriest inglenooks of her many-chambered emotions.
“See, it’s almost like spring again!” she cried joyously, as she leaned
over his chair and watched the morning sunlight, misty and golden on the
city house-tops.
The window-curtains swayed and flapped in the humid breeze; the clatter
of feet on the asphalt, the rumble of wheels and the puff and whir of
passing automobiles came up to them from the street below.
“It seems good to be alive!” she murmured pensively, as she slipped down
on the floor and sat in the muffled sunlight, leaning against his knees.
There was neither timidity nor self-consciousness in her attitude, as
she sat there companionably, comfortably, with her thoughts far away.
For a long time Durkin looked down at her great tumbled crown of
chestnut hair, glinting here and there with its touch of reddish gold.
He could see the quiet pulse beating in the curved ivory of her throat.
She grew conscious of his eyes resting on her, in time, and turned her
face solemnly up to him. He held it there, with the oval of her chin
caught in the hollow of his hand.
“Frank, there’s something I’m going to ask you, for the twentieth time!”
She knew what it was even before he spoke. But she did not stop him, for
this new note of quiet tenderness in his voice had taken her by
surprise.
“Frank, can’t you—won’t you marry me, now?”
She shook her head mournfully.
“Isn’t it enough that I’m near you and can help you, and that we can
both still go and come as we want to?”
“No, I get only the little fragments of your life, and I want all of it.
If you can’t do it willingly, of course, it’s as silly for me to demand
it as to try to nail that sunbeam down to the floor there! But tell me,
has there ever been another?”
“No, never, Jim!” she cried. “There was never any one who could make me
so happy—and so miserable,—who could make me so unsatisfied with
myself and with my life!”
He studied her upturned face. In it he imagined he could see all the old
opposition of the dual and strangely contending nature. About the
shadowy eyes seemed to lurk the weariness and the rebelliousness of the
inwardly pure woman who had been driven to face life in its more dubious
phases, the woman who had broken laws and essayed great hazards with
him. Yet about the fresh young mouth remained all the pride and virginal
purity of the woman whose inward life was till virginal and pure. In
this, he felt, lay the bitterest thing of all. She was still a good
woman, but the memory of how, through the dark and devious ways of the
career that seemed to have engulfed her, she had fought and struggled
for that almost incongruous purity of mind and body, remained to him a
tragic and autumnal emblem of what her unknown earlier, April-like
goodness of girlish soul must have been. He sighed as he thought of it,
before he began to speak again, for it gave him the haunting impression
that he had been cheated out of something; that the beauty and rapture
of that Aprilian girlhood should have been his, and yet had eluded him.
“Even though there had been another,” he went on quietly, “I don’t
believe it would count. Isn’t it strange how we all beat and flutter and
break our wings around a beautiful face! One face, just a little softer,
one woman’s eyes, just a little deeper, and one voice, a little
mellower; and dear me, dear me—how this wayward mortal passion of ours
throbs and beats and surges about it! One beautiful face, and it sends
world-history all awry, and brings out armies and changes maps, and
makes men happy or miserable, as it likes!”
“That’s the first time I ever knew you were a poet!” she cried in almost
a coo of pride.
His hand lay heavily on her crown of tumbled gold hair. “Won’t you marry
me?” he asked again, as quietly as before.
“Oh, Jim,” she cried, “I’m afraid of it! I’m afraid of myself, and of
you!”
“But see what we’ve been through together—the heights and the depths.
And we never hated each other, there!”
“But there were times, I know there were times when you might have, if
you were tied to me! We were each free to go and come. But it’s not
that, Jim, I’m so afraid of. It’s the keeping on at what we have been
doing, the danger of not keeping decent, of getting our thoughts and
feelings deadened, of getting our hearts macadamized. That’s why I could
never marry you until we are both honest once more!”
“But if I do try to get decent—I can’t promise to turn angel all at
once, you know!—if I _do_ try to be decent, then will you marry me, and
help me along?”
“I don’t look for miracles,—neither of us can be all good, anyway; it’s
the trying to be good!”
“But we _have_ tried—so often!”
“Who was it said that the Saints were only the sinners who kept on
trying?”
“Wasn’t there a bishop in your family?” he asked, with a quizzical
little upthrust of his mouth corners.
“A bishop?” she asked, all gravity.
“There must have been a bishop, somewhere—you take to preaching so
easily!”
“It’s only to make it easier for you,” she reproved him. Then she added
drearily, “Heaven knows, I’m not self-righteous!”
“Then take me as I am, and you will be making it easier for me!”
“I could, Jim, if I thought you would begin by doing one thing.”
“And that is?”
“Not try to get even with MacNutt.”
She could feel the galvanic movement of uncontrol that sped down his
knees.
“When that damned welcher gives me back what is mine, fair and square
and honest, then he can go his way and I’ll go mine—but not before!”
“But, _was_ it fair and square and honest?”
“About as much so as most of the money people get—and I’m going to have
it!”
“And that means going back to all the old mean, humiliating ways, to the
old, degrading dodges, and the old, incessant dangers!”
“But it’s ours, that money—every cent of it—it’s what we’ve got to
have to start over again with!”
“Then you will scheme and plot and fight for it? And keep on and on and
on, struggling in this big quicksand of wrong-doing, until we are deeper
than ever?”
“Do _you_ forgive MacNutt?”
“No, I do not! I can’t, for your sake. But I would rather lie and scheme
and plot myself than see you do it. A woman is different—I don’t know
how or why it is, but in some way she has a fiercer furnace of
sacrifice. If her wickedness is for another, her very love burns away
all the dross of deceit and selfishness!”
“I hate to hear you talk that way, when you know you’re good and true as
gold, through and through. And I want you to be my wife, Frank, no
matter what it costs or what it means.”
“But will you make this promise?”
“It’s—it’s too hard on _you_! Think of the grind and the monotony and
the skimping! And besides, supposing you saw a chance to get the upper
hand of MacNutt in some way, would you fold your hands and sigh meekly
and let it slip past?”
“I can’t promise that _I_ would! But it’s you I’m afraid of, and that
I’m trying to guard and protect and save from yourself!”
She caught up his free hand and held it closely in her own.
“Listen,” he broke in irrelevantly, “there’s a hurdy-gurdy somewhere
down in the street! Hear it?”
The curtains swayed in the breeze; the street sounds crept to them,
muffled and far away.
“Can’t you promise?” she pleaded.
“I could promise you anything, Frank,” he said after a long pause.
“Yes,” he repeated, “I promise.”
She crept closer to him, and with a little half-stifled, half-hungry cry
held his face down to her own. He could feel the abandon of complete
surrender in the most intimate warmth of her mouth, as it sought and
clung to his own.
When her uplifted arms that had locked about his neck once more fell
away, and the heavy head of dull gold sank capitulatingly down on his
knee, the hurdy-gurdy had passed out of hearing, and the lintel-shadow
had crept down to where they sat.