It was late afternoon. The fiery sun had just dipped below the jagged
Adirondack hill-peaks to the south, still casting a carmine glow
between the scattered and low-boughed pines. The square window of the
high-ceiled sanitarium room was specked with pale-appearing stars, and
the snow-draped slopes beneath showed dim in the elusive beauty that
lurks in soft color and low tones. Daunt lay silent, facing the window,
and Margaret, tired from romping with the doctor’s children, rested on
a low hassock beside his reclining chair. Slowly the carmine faded from
the snow, and the hastening winter-dark trailed its violescent gossamer
up and down the rock-clefts and across the purpling hollows.
He turned his eyes, all at once feeling her lifted gaze. He reached out
his right hand and touched the lace edge of her white nurse’s cap, with
a faint smile. Something in the smile and the gesture caught at her
heart. She leaned suddenly toward him, and taking his hand in both her
own, laid her face upon it.
He drew his hand away, breathing sharply.
“Dear!” she said. “Do you remember that afternoon on the sands? You
kissed me then! I am the same Margaret now--not changed at all.”
A shudder passed over him, but he did not reply.
Then she knelt beside him, quite close, laying her cheek by his face
on the pillow and drawing his one live hand up to her lips. “You are
everything to me,” she whispered--“everything, everything! That day
on the beach I was happy; but not more happy, dear, than I am now. You
were everything else in the world to me then, but now you are _me_,
myself! Don’t turn away; look at me!” Reaching over, she drew his
nerveless left arm across her neck.
He turned his face to her with an effort, his lips struggling to speak.
“Kiss me!” she commanded.
He tried to push her back. “No! No!” he cried vehemently, drawing away.
“That’s past.”
“Not even that! Just think how long I’ve waited!” She was smiling.
“Richard,” she said, “do you know what it means for a woman to kneel
to a man like this? I haven’t a bit of pride about it. Only think how
ashamed I will be if you refuse to take me! What does a woman do when a
man refuses her?”
A white pain had settled upon Daunt’s face. “Margaret,” he faltered,
“don’t; I can’t stand it! You don’t know what you say.”
She kissed his hand again. “Yes, I do! I am saying just as plainly as I
can that I love you; that I belong to you, and that I ask for nothing
else but to belong to you as long as I live.”
His hand made a motion of protest.
“I want you just as much as I did the day you first kissed me. I want
the right to stay with you always and care for you.”
He winced visibly. “‘Care for me!’” he repeated. “It would be _all_
care. I have nothing to bring you now but sorrow and regret. I’m not
the Daunt who offered himself to you at Warne. I’m only a fragment. I
had health and hopes then. I had beautiful dreams, Margaret--dreams of
work and a home and you. I shan’t ever forget those dreams, but they
can never come true!”
She smoothed his hand caressingly. “I have had dreams, too,” she
answered. “This is the one that comes oftenest of all. It is about you
and me.” She turned her head, with a spot of color in either cheek.
“Sometimes it is in the day. You are lying, writing away at a new book
of yours, and I am filling your pipe for you, while the tea is getting
hot. I see you smile up to me and say, ‘Clever girl! how did you know I
wanted a smoke?’ Then you read your last chapter to me, and I tell you
how I wouldn’t have said it the way the woman in the story does, and
you pretend you are going to change it, and don’t.
“Sometimes it is in the evening, and we are looking out at the sunset
just as we have been doing to-night.”
He would have spoken, but she covered his mouth with her hand. His
moist breath wrapped her palm.
“And then it is dark and there is a big red lamp on the table--the one
I had in my old room--and I am reading the latest novel to you, and
when we have got to the end, you are telling me how you would have done
it.”
While she had been speaking, glowing and dark-eyed, a mystical peace--a
divine forgetfulness had touched him. He lifted his hand to his
forehead, feeling her soft fingers. The pictures she painted were so
sweet!
Presently he threw his arm down with a swallowed sob. The dream-scene
faded, and he lay once more helpless and despairing, weighted with the
heaviness of useless limbs, a numb burden for whom there could be no
love, no joy, nothing but the inevitable rebuke of enduring pain. He
smoothed the wide dun-gold waves of her hair gently.
“You are not for such a sacrifice, Margaret,” he said sadly. “I am not
such a coward. You are a woman--a perfect, beautiful woman--the kind
that God made all happiness for.”
“But I couldn’t be happy without you!” she cried.
“Nor with me,” he answered. “No, I’ve got to face it! All the long
years I should watch that womanhood of yours growing dimmer and less
full, your outlook narrowing, your life’s sympathies shrinking. I
shall be shut up to myself and grow away from the world, but you shall
not grow away from it with me! It would be a crime! I should come to
hate myself. I want you to live your life out worthily. I would rather
remember you as you are now, and as loving me once for what I was!”
Margaret’s eyes were closed. She was thinking of Melwin and Lydia.
“Woman needs more to fill her life than the love of a man’s mind. She
wants more, dear. She wants the love of the heart-beat. She wants
home--the home I wanted to make for you--the kind I used to dream
of--the----” His voice broke here and failed.
The door pushed open without a knock. A tiny night-gowned figure stood
swaying on the sill, outlined sharply against the glare of lamp-light.
“Vere’s ’iss Mar’det?” he said in high baby key. “I yants her to tiss
me dood-night!”
Margaret’s hand still lay against Daunt’s cheek, and as she drew it
away, she felt a great hot tear suddenly wet her fingers.