SHE rose, and, without warning, stepped out upon the rock. “Here's
where you build your fire,” she cried at the discovery of a blackened
heap of ashes. He secured the canoe and followed her. “Ideal,” she
breathed. The sound of the fall below was faintly audible; the quavering
cry of an owl, the beating of heavy wings, rose above the bank. “Don't
you envy the old pastoral people following their flocks from land to
land, setting up their tents by streams like this, waking with the dawn
on the world? or gipsies... you must read 'Lavengro.'”
“I don't envy any one on God's little globe,” he asserted; “to be here
with you is the best thing possible.”
“Something more desirable would soon occur to you.”
“Than you!” he protested; “than you!”
“But people get tired of what they have.”
“It's what they don't have that makes them old and tired,” he told her
with sudden prescience; “when I think of what I am going to lose, of
what I can never have, it makes me crazy.”
“Why do you say that?... How can you know?”
She was standing close to him in the constricted space, the tangible
shock of her nearness sweeping over him in waves of heady emotion. The
water gurgling by the rock was the only sound in a world-stillness.
“I mean you.”
“Well, I'm not fairy gold; I'm not the end of the rainbow. I am just
Eliza.”
“Just Eliza!” he scoffed. Then the possibility contained in her words
struck him dumb. The feeling irresistibly returned that because of
her heavenly ignorance, her charity, she mistook him to be worthy. The
necessity to guard her from her own divinity impelled him to repeat,
miserably, all that she had ignored.
“I'm not much account,” he said laboriously; “you see, I never stuck at
anything, and, somehow, things have never stuck to me. It was that way
at school--I was expelled from four. I'm supposed to be shiftless.”
“I don't care in the least for that!” she declared; “only one thing is
really important to me... something, oh, so different.” Suddenly she
laid her hand upon his sleeve, and, pitifully white, faced him. “I've
had the beautifullest feeling about you,” she whispered; “Anthony, tell
me truly, are you... good?” A sob rose uncontrollably in his throat, and
his eyes filled with tears that spilled over his cheeks. For a moment he
struggled to check them, then, unashamed, slipped onto his knees before
her and held her tightly in his arms. “No one in the world can say that
I am not--what you mean.”
She stooped, and sat beside him on the stone, holding his hand close to
her slight body. “My dream,” she said simply. “I didn't understand it at
first; you see, I was only a child. And then when I grew older, and--and
heard things, it seemed impossible. That sort of goodness only bored
other girls... they liked men of the world, men with a past. I thought
perhaps I was only morbid, and lost trust in--in you.”
“It was a kind of accident,” he admitted; “I never thought about it the
way you did. It seemed young to me.”
“I don't believe it was an accident in the least,” she insisted. A mist
rose greyly from the darker surface of the stream, and settled cold and
clammy about Anthony's face. It drew about them in wavering garlands,
growing steadily denser. Eliza was sitting now pressed against him, and
he felt a shiver run through her. “You are cold!” he cried instantly,
and rose, lifting her to her feet. She smiled, in his arms, and he bent
down and kissed her. She clung to him with a deep sigh, and met his lips
steadily with her own. The mist slipped like a veil over Eliza's head
and drops of moisture shone in her hair. Anthony turned and unfastened
the canoe; and, suddenly conscious of the length of their delay, he
urged it with long sweeps over the stream. Beyond the lilacs, distilling
their potent sweetness in the dark, Eliza was motionless, silent, a
flicker of white in the gloom.
They swept almost immediately into the broad reach where they had
started. The lights from the windows of a boat house, the voices of
the others, streamed gaily over the water. He felt Eliza tremble as he
lifted her ashore.
“It's happiness,” she told him; “I am ever so warm inside.”