For three days Charles-Norton remained on earth sedulously. It was a
pleasant earth. They wandered together in the small area about the cabin;
they walked, swam, fished, picked flowers, and spent hours concocting, on
the fire before the cabin, nice little dishes which they negotiated
gourmandly, like children. On the second day Nicodemus, furry and fat
with idleness, was saddled, and they three went down the trail toward the
camp. Charles-Norton hid on the fringe of the forest while Dolly shopped
sagely in the general store, to the general approval of the somnolent
inhabitants who, by this time, had diminished to five; and then they
returned in the twilight, Nicodemus a bit wistful with the weight of the
many useful and good things within his bags. They worked about the cabin
the next day, and Dolly performed wonders with burlap and chintz.
Curtains draped the three small windows, a carpet spread upon the floor,
and on the big tree-trunk which, sawed off evenly in the center of the
cabin, served as a table, a shining lamp was set, promising of calm
evenings.
"We'll live here forever!" cried Charles-Norton, enthusiastically.
Dolly did not answer; her back was turned and she was busy tacking chintz
along one of the bunks.
On the fourth morning Charles-Norton felt a vague hunger which breakfast
did not satisfy. It was with him all day as he wandered on the ground,
the tips of his long wings stained with grass. It was with him stronger
the following morning; and after breakfast, he sprang suddenly into the
air. "Look!" he cried to Dolly.
And before her, above the meadow, he went through his flying repertory.
He cut clashing diagonals through the air; he rose and fell in
undulations like music; he shot about, gleaming white against the blue
sky; and finally he came down to her from the very zenith of the dome in
a sizzing straight line which opened, almost at her feet, in a white
explosion of suddenly extended wings.
"You baby!" said Dolly, as once more he stood before her, panting
slightly, and his eyes dilated; "you baby!" she said, indulgently.
Charles-Norton, shifting his position to one foot, scratched his head.
Somehow, this was not quite what he had expected. He had thought Dolly
more changed about this flying business; and here she seemed--well, not
so very much changed. Within him he felt something vaguely bristle. It
was still bristling there the next morning, and gave to his voice a
certain brusqueness when, kissing Dolly on the forehead after breakfast,
he said: "Well, so long, Dolly!"
"So long," he said; and Dolly, from her seat on the sward, saw him leap
from her and wing away in powerful flight. He made straight for the
crest; she saw him, flitting up there, a little white confetti in the
eddy of a breeze. Rising, falling, darting capriciously, he gradually
slid off down the range, and was gone.
Dolly rose. The meadow suddenly had become very quiet. A tree,
sap-bursting, cracked resoundingly; the sound went through her like a
sliver. She stood there, poised as if for flight, feeling upon her from
every tree, rock and bush, the hostile eyes of peering things; and she
was mighty glad when Nicodemus came running to her resonantly across the
clearing, demanding a pancake.
Somehow, Charles-Norton did not enjoy his flight as much as he had
expected. He bore with him a vague uneasiness which no amount of speeding
could quite lose. He could feel, all the time, Dolly away down there
alone in the deserted meadow. He returned much earlier than usual.
Dolly was cooking by the fire in the clearing, and she greeted him
cheerfully, without the slightest sign of reproach. After a while,
though, he noted upon her right cheek a little smudge. It was shaped like
a miniature comet; it was, rather, like the slight sediment left upon a
window-pane by a drop of rain. Charles-Norton, determinedly, refused to
see it. But it was there all the same.
And it was there the next day when he returned, and the next, and the
next. Each night, as he lit again upon earth after his long voyaging
of the air, Dolly greeted him with an ostentatious cheerfulness
beneath which could be felt something subtly plaintive, and on her
cheek--sometimes the right, sometimes the left--always would be
the little accusing smudge.
It spoiled his flights. Following the three days spent on earth, the
hunger of the spaces had come back to him, gnawing at his vitals; each
morning he was leaving earlier, each evening he was returning later. But
all the time, in his wildest soarings, there went with him ... a leaden
pellet, a little leaden pellet, very stubborn and indissoluble, there in
his heart ... the knowledge that, alighting, at the end he would have to
face that little black smudge; that he would have to meet Dolly's
cheerful greeting with its subtle, plaintive undercurrent, and the faint
smudge upon her cheek.
Dolly, as a matter of fact, was not weeping all the time, down there in
the meadow. The care of the cabin, the preparation of the meals, gave her
each day several hours of humming content; and in the afternoon she would
have several good romps with Nicodemus. But there were also heavy hours
during which the solitude of the land seemed to draw nigh from all
sides; when she panted, almost, to its pressure, and felt very little
and miserable indeed. So that Charles-Norton, dropping like an archangel
out of the sky, found always upon her cheek the trace of an erasure made
completely enough to show a determination to hide tears, but not quite
enough to obliterate the determination; and leaving in the morning, he
felt her eyes wistful upon him in a humble and unspoken reproach which
all day followed him, stubborn as his own shadow, the shadow which he
could never escape. He fought well, did Charles-Norton. He tried hard not
to see the little black smudge, not to think about it; and above all, not
to let her know that he saw it. But all the time the weight was there
within him, spoiling his flights.
One morning, seeing in a sudden flash of naive hope a solution of their
problem, he tried to take her with him. Making a sling out of a strip of
blanket, he passed it about his waist, sat her in the slack, and rose in
the air. Thus, holding her beneath the shadow of his wings as in a swing,
he flitted about, above the meadow, rising, chuting down in long, smooth
slants, circling, soaring. Once he thought he heard from her a slight
suppressed cry, and then, after a while, astonished at her silence, he
came down to the shore of the lake.
Her eyes were closed, her cheeks were white, and her hands were cold; and
it was only after he had dashed water upon her that she revived.
"Dolly, Dolly," he murmured.
She looked at him, smiling bravely with her white lips. "Goosie, dear,"
she said, a bit wearily; "Goosie, dear, I can't. I can't dear. I get
dizzy. It makes me dreadfully sick."
He stood there on one leg, embarrassed. He wanted to take her in his arms
in great tenderness, but was held back by the tenacity of his purpose, by
the knowledge of the peril of such a course.
"Go on," said Dolly, finally. "Go, Goosie; go on and fly. I'll stay here.
With Nicodemus," she added wistfully.
And Charles-Norton, the brute, still inexorable, flapped his great wings
and went away, leaving her there in the meadow alone, with Nicodemus.
But he was to get his punishment. A few days later, returning at night,
he found Dolly truly weeping.
She was kneeling by the fire, frying-pan in hand, preparing the evening
meal; and at regular intervals two big dew-drops trickled out from her
lowered lashes and dropped upon her hand. Charles-Norton, abashed and
puzzled, went about a while, making a great show of occupation, and
pretending not to see. And then, suddenly, out of the corner of his eyes
he noted the rag which she had wrapped about the handle of the
frying-pan. It was not the usual rag. It was a filmy thing within which
ran a color like a flame. Lordy--it was the scarf which, several weeks
before, he had stolen one night from the girl on the veranda, in the inn
above the valley, and which he had since forgotten in the clothes-bag
that served him as pillow.
He kept a prudent silence, and pretended not to see it, though vaguely
tormented by the very menial service to which Dolly successively put that
once radiant scarf. And Dolly said not a word about it. She went on with
her little housekeeping routine very carefully and submissively, while
now and again a tear oozed from her long lashes. But Charles-Norton felt
vaguely now that the balance had swung, that he was fighting now at a
terrible disadvantage.