"I wisht ye'd git married, Roger," said Catherine Ames. "I'm gitting
too old to work--seventy last April--and who's going to look after ye
when I'm gone. Git married, b'y--git married."
Roger Temple winced. His aunt's harsh, disagreeable voice always
jarred horribly on his sensitive nerves. He was fond of her after a
fashion, but always that voice made him wonder if there could be
anything harder to endure.
Then he gave a bitter little laugh.
"Who'd have me, Aunt Catherine?" he asked.
Catherine Ames looked at him critically across the supper table. She
loved him in her way, with all her heart, but she was not in the least
blind to his defects. She did not mince matters with herself or with
other people. Roger was a sallow, plain-featured fellow, small and
insignificant looking. And, as if this were not bad enough, he walked
with a slight limp and had one thin shoulder a little higher than the
other--"Jarback" Temple he had been called in school, and the name
still clung to him. To be sure, he had very fine grey eyes, but their
dreamy brilliance gave his dull face an uncanny look which girls did
not like, and so made matters rather worse than better. Of course
looks didn't matter so much in the case of a man; Steve Millar was
homely enough, and all marked up with smallpox to boot, yet he had got
for wife the prettiest and smartest girl in South Bay. But Steve was
rich. Roger was poor and always would be. He worked his stony little
farm, from which his father and grandfather had wrested a fair living,
after a fashion, but Nature had not cut him out for a successful
farmer. He hadn't the strength for it and his heart wasn't in it. He'd
rather be hanging over a book. Catherine secretly thought Roger's
matrimonial chances very poor, but it would not do to discourage the
b'y. What he needed was spurring on.
"Ye'll git someone if ye don't fly too high," she announced loudly and
cheerfully. "Thar's always a gal or two here and thar that's glad to
marry for a home. 'Tain't no use for _you_ to be settin' your thoughts
on anyone young and pretty. Ye wouldn't git her and ye'd be worse off
if ye did. Your grandfather married for looks, and a nice useless wife
he got--sick half her time. Git a good strong girl that ain't afraid
of work, that'll hold things together when ye're reading
po'try--that's as much as you kin expect. And the sooner the better.
I'm done--last winter's rheumatiz has about finished _me_. An' we
can't afford hired help."
Roger felt as if his raw, quivering soul were being seared. He looked
at his aunt curiously--at her broad, flat face with the mole on the
end of her dumpy nose, the bristling hairs on her chin, the wrinkled
yellow neck, the pale, protruding eyes, the coarse, good-humoured
mouth. She was so extremely ugly--and he had seen her across the table
all his life. For twenty-five years he had looked at her so. Must he
continue to go on looking at ugliness in the shape of a wife all the
rest of his life--he, who worshipped beauty in everything?
"Did my mother look like you, Aunt Catherine?" he asked abruptly.
His aunt stared--and snorted. Her snort was meant to express kindly
amusement, but it sounded like derision and contempt.
"Yer ma wasn't so humly as me," she said cheerfully, "but she wan't no
beauty either. None of the Temples was ever better lookin' than was
necessary. We was _workers_. Yer pa wa'n't bad looking. You're humlier
than either of 'em. Some ways ye take after yer grandma--though _she_
was counted pretty at one time. She was yaller and spindlin' like you,
and you've got her eyes. What yer so int'rested in yer ma's looks all
at once fer?"
"I was wondering," said Roger coolly, "if Father ever looked at her
across the table and wished she were prettier."
Catherine giggled. Her giggle was ugly and disagreeable like
everything else about her--everything except a certain odd, loving,
loyal old heart buried deep in her bosom, for the sake of which Roger
endured the giggle and all the rest.
"Dessay he did--dessay he did. Men al'ays has a hankerin' for good
looks. But ye've got to cut yer coat 'cording to yer cloth. As for yer
poor ma, she didn't live long enough to git as ugly as me. When I
come here to keep house for yer pa, folks said as it wouldn't be long
'fore he married me. _I_ wouldn't a-minded. But yer pa never hinted
it. S'pose he'd had enough of ugly women likely."
Catherine snorted amiably again. Roger got up--he couldn't endure any
more just then. He must escape.
"Now you think over what I've said," his aunt called after him. "Ye've
gotter git a wife soon, however ye manage it. 'Twon't be so hard if
ye're reasonable. Don't stay out as late as ye did last night. Ye
coughed all night. Where was ye--down at the shore?"
"No," said Roger, who always answered her questions even when he hated
to. "I was down at Aunt Isabel's grave."
"Till eleven o'clock! Ye ain't wise! I dunno what hankering ye have
after that unchancy place. _I_ ain't been near it for twenty year. I
wonder ye ain't scairt. What'd ye think ye'd do if ye saw her ghost?"
Catherine looked curiously at Roger. She was very superstitious and
she believed firmly in ghosts, and saw no absurdity in her question.
"I wish I _could_ see it," said Roger, his great eyes flashing. He
believed in ghosts too, at least in Isabel Temple's ghost. His uncle
had seen it; his grandfather had seen it; he believed he would see
it--the beautiful, bewitching, mocking, luring ghost of lovely Isabel
Temple.
"Don't wish such stuff," said Catherine. "Nobody ain't never the same
after they've seen her."
"Was Uncle different?" Roger had come back into the kitchen and was
looking curiously at his aunt.
"Diff'rent? He was another man. He didn't even _look_ the same. Sich
eyes! Al'ays looking past ye at something behind ye. They'd give
anyone creeps. He never had any notion of flesh-and-blood women after
that--said a man wouldn't, after seeing Isabel. His life was plumb
ruined. Lucky he died young. I hated to be in the same room with
him--he wa'n't canny, that was all there was to it. _You_ keep away
from that grave--_you_ don't want to look odder than ye are by nature.
And when ye git married, ye'll have to give up roamin' about half the
night in graveyards. A wife wouldn't put up with it, as I've done."
"I'll never get as good a wife as you, Aunt Catherine," said Roger
with a little whimsical smile that gave him the look of an amused
gnome.
"Dessay you won't. But someone ye have to have. Why'n't ye try 'Liza
Adams. She _might_ have ye--she's gittin' on."
"'Liza ... Adams!"
"That's what I said. Ye needn't repeat it--'Liza ... Adams--'s if I'd
mentioned a hippopotamus. I git out of patience with ye. I b'lieve in
my heart ye think ye ought to git a wife that'd look like a picter."
"I do, Aunt Catherine. That's just the kind of wife I want--grace and
beauty and charm. Nothing less than that will ever content me."
* * * * *
Roger laughed bitterly again and went out. It was sunset. There was no
work to do that night except to milk the cows, and his little home boy
could do that. He felt a glad freedom. He put his hand in his pocket
to see if his beloved Wordsworth was there and then he took his way
across the fields, under a sky of purple and amber, walking quickly
despite his limp. He wanted to get to some solitary place where he
could forget Aunt Catherine and her abominable suggestions and escape
into the world of dreams where he habitually lived and where he found
the loveliness he had not found nor could hope to find in his real
world.
Roger's mother had died when he was three and his father when he was
eight. His little, old, bedridden grandmother had lived until he was
twelve. He had loved her passionately. She had not been pretty in his
remembrance--a tiny, shrunken, wrinkled thing--but she had beautiful
grey eyes that never grew old and a soft, gentle voice--the only
woman's voice he had ever heard with pleasure. He was very critical as
regards women's voices and very sensitive to them. Nothing hurt him
quite so much as an unlovely voice--not even unloveliness of face. Her
death had left him desolate. She was the only human being who had ever
understood him. He could never, he thought, have got through his
tortured school days without her. After she died he would not go to
school. He was not in any sense educated. His father and grandfather
had been illiterate men and he had inherited their underdeveloped
brain cells. But he loved poetry and read all he could get of it. It
overlaid his primitive nature with a curious iridescence of fancy and
furnished him with ideals and hungers his environment could never
satisfy. He loved beauty in everything. Moonrises hurt him with their
loveliness and he could sit for hours gazing at a white
narcissus--much to his aunt's exasperation. He was solitary by nature.
He felt horribly alone in a crowded building but never in the woods or
in the wild places along the shore. It was because of this that his
aunt could not get him to go to church--which was a horror to her
orthodox soul. He told her he would like to go to church if it were
empty but he could not bear it when it was full--full of smug, ugly
people. Most people, he thought, were ugly--though not so ugly as he
was--and ugliness made him sick with repulsion. Now and then he saw a
pretty girl at whom he liked to look but he never saw one that wholly
pleased him. To him, the homely, crippled, poverty-stricken Roger
Temple whom they all would have scorned, there was always a certain
subtle something wanting, and the lack of it kept him heartwhole. He
knew that this probably saved him from much suffering, but for all
that he regretted it. He wanted to love, even vainly; he wanted to
experience this passion of which the poets sang so much. Without it he
felt he lacked the key to a world of wonder. He even tried to fall in
love; he went to church for several Sundays and sat where he could see
beautiful Elsa Carey. She was lovely--it gave him pleasure to look at
her; the gold of her hair was so bright and living; the pink of her
cheek so pure, the curve of her neck so flawless, the lashes of her
eyes so dark and silken. But he looked at her as at a picture. When he
tried to think and dream of her, it bored him. Besides, he knew she
had a rather nasal voice. He used to laugh sarcastically to himself
over Elsa's feelings if she had known how desperately he was trying to
fall in love with her and failing--Elsa the queen of hearts, who
believed she had only to look to reign. He gave up trying at last, but
he still longed to love. He knew he would never marry; he could not
marry plainness, and beauty would have none of him; but he did not want
to miss everything and he had moments when he was very bitter and
rebellious because he felt he must miss it forever.
He went straight to Isabel Temple's grave in the remote shore field of
his farm. Isabel Temple had lived and died eighty years ago. She had
been very lovely, very wilful, very fond of playing with the hearts of
men. She had married William Temple, the brother of his
great-grandfather, and as she stood in her white dress beside her
bridegroom, at the conclusion of the wedding ceremony, a jilted lover,
crazed by despair, had entered the house and shot her dead. She had
been buried in the shore field, where a square space had been dyked
off in the centre for a burial lot because the church was then so far
away. With the passage of years the lot had grown up so thickly with
fir and birch and wild cherry that it looked like a compact grove. A
winding path led through it to its heart where Isabel Temple's grave
was, thickly overgrown with long, silken, pale green grass. Roger
hurried along the path and sat down on the big grey boulder by the
grave, looking about him with a long breath of delight. How
lovely--and witching--and unearthly it was here. Little ferns were
growing in the hollows and cracks of the big boulder where clay had
lodged. Over Isabel Temple's crooked, lichened gravestone hung a young
wild cherry in its delicate bloom. Above it, in a little space of sky
left by the slender tree tops, was a young moon. It was too dark here
after all to read Wordsworth, but that did not matter. The place, with
its moist air, its tang of fir balsam, was like a perfumed room where
a man might dream dreams and see visions. There was a soft murmur of
wind in the boughs over him, and the faraway moan of the sea on the
bar crept in. Roger surrendered himself utterly to the charm of the
place. When he entered that grove, he had left behind the realm of
daylight and things known and come into the realm of shadow and
mystery and enchantment. Anything might happen--anything might be
true.
Eighty long years had come and gone, but Isabel Temple, thus cruelly
torn from life at the moment when it had promised her most, did not
even yet rest calmly in her grave; such at least was the story, and
Roger believed it. It was in his blood to believe it. The Temples were
a superstitious family, and there was nothing in Roger's upbringing to
correct the tendency. His was not a sceptical or scientific mind. He
was ignorant and poetical and credulous. He had always accepted
unquestioningly the tale that Isabel Temple had been seen on earth
long after the red clay was heaped over her murdered body. Her
bridegroom had seen her, when he went to visit her on the eve of his
second and unhappy marriage; his grandfather had seen her. His
grandmother, who had told him Isabel's story, had told him this too,
and believed it. She had added, with a bitterness foreign to his idea
of her, that her husband had never been the same to her afterwards;
his uncle had seen her--and had lived and died a haunted man. It was
only to men the lovely, restless ghost appeared, and her appearance
boded no good to him who saw. Roger knew this, but he had a curious
longing to see her. He had never avoided her grave as others of his
tribe did. He loved the spot, and he believed that some time he would
see Isabel Temple there. She came, so the story went, to one in each
generation of the family.
He gazed down at her sunken grave; a little wind, that came stealing
along the floor of the grove, raised and swayed the long, hair-like
grass on it, giving the curious suggestion of something prisoned under
it trying to draw a long breath and float upward.
Then, when he lifted his eyes again, he saw her!
She was standing behind the gravestone, under the cherry tree, whose
long white branches touched her head; standing there, with her head
drooping a little, but looking steadily at him. It was just between
dusk and dark now, but he saw her very plainly. She was dressed in
white, with some filmy scarf over her head, and her hair hung in a
dark heavy braid over her shoulder. Her face was small and
ivory-white, and her eyes were very large and dark. Roger looked
straight into them and they did something to him--drew something out
of him that was never to be his again--his heart? his soul? He did not
know. He only knew that lovely Isabel Temple had now come to him and
that he was hers forever.
For a few moments that seemed years he looked at her--looked till the
lure of her eyes drew him to his feet as a man rises in sleep-walking.
As he slowly stood up, the low-hanging bough of a fir tree pushed his
cap down over his face and blinded him. When he snatched it off, she
was gone.
* * * * *
Roger Temple did not go home that night till the spring dawn was in
the sky. Catherine was sleepless with anxiety about him. When she
heard him come up the stairs, she opened her door and peeped out.
Roger went along the hall without seeing her. His brilliant eyes
stared straight before him, and there was something in his face that
made Catherine steal back to her bed with a little shiver of fear. He
looked like his uncle. She did not ask him, when they met at
breakfast, where or how he had spent the night. He had been dreading
the question and was relieved beyond measure when it was not asked.
But, apart from that, he was hardly conscious of her presence. He ate
and drank mechanically and voicelessly. When he had gone out,
Catherine wagged her uncomely grey head ominously.
"He's bewitched," she muttered. "I know the signs. He's seen her--drat
her! It's time she gave up that kind of work. Well, I dunno what to
do--thar ain't anything I can do, I reckon. He'll never marry now--I'm
as sure of that as of any mortal thing. He's in love with a ghost."
It had not yet occurred to Roger that he was in love. He thought of
nothing but Isabel Temple--her lovely, lovely face, sweeter than any
picture he had ever seen or any ideal he had dreamed, her long dark
hair, her slim form and, more than all, her compelling eyes. He saw
them wherever he looked--they drew him--he would have followed them to
the end of the world, heedless of all else.
He longed for night, that he might again steal to the grave in the
haunted grove. She might come again--who knew? He felt no fear,
nothing but a terrible hunger to see her again. But she did not come
that night--nor the next--nor the next. Two weeks went by and he had
not seen her. Perhaps he would never see her again--the thought filled
him with anguish not to be borne. He knew now that he loved
her--Isabel Temple, dead for eighty years. This was love--this
searing, torturing, intolerably sweet thing--this possession of body
and soul and spirit. The poets had sung but weakly of it. He could
tell them better if he could find words. Could other men have loved at
all--could any man love those blowzy, common girls of earth? It seemed
impossible--absurd. There was only one thing that could be loved--that
white spirit. No wonder his uncle had died. He, Roger Temple, would
soon die too. That would be well. Only the dead could woo Isabel.
Meanwhile he revelled in his torment and his happiness--so madly
commingled that he never knew whether he was in heaven or hell. It was
beautiful--and dreadful--and wonderful--and exquisite--oh, so
exquisite. Mortal love could never be so exquisite. He had never lived
before--now he lived in every fibre of his being.
He was glad Aunt Catherine did not worry him with questions. He had
feared she would. But she never asked any questions now and she was
afraid of Roger, as she had been afraid of his uncle. She dared not
ask questions. It was a thing that must not be tampered with. Who knew
what she might hear if she asked him questions? She was very unhappy.
Something dreadful had happened to her poor boy--he had been bewitched
by that hussy--he would die as his uncle had died.
"Mebbe it's best," she muttered. "He's the last of the Temples, so
mebbe she'll rest in her grave when she's killed 'em all. I dunno what
she's sich a spite at _them_ for--there'd be more sense if she'd haunt
the Mortons, seein' as a Morton killed her. Well, I'm mighty old and
tired and worn out. It don't seem that it's been much use, the way
I've slaved and fussed to bring that b'y up and keep things together
for him--and now the ghost's got him. I might as well have let him die
when he was a sickly baby."
If this had been said to Roger he would have retorted that it was
worthwhile to have lived long enough to feel what he was feeling now.
He would not have missed it for a score of other men's lives. He had
drunk of some immortal wine and was as a god. Even if she never came
again, he had seen her once, and she had taught him life's great
secret in that one unforgettable exchange of eyes. She was his--his in
spite of his ugliness and his crooked shoulder. No man could ever take
her from him.
But she did come again. One evening, when the darkening grove was full
of magic in the light of the rising yellow moon shining across the
level field, Roger sat on the big boulder by the grave. The evening
was very still; there was no sound save the echoes of noisy laughter
that seemed to come up from the bay shore--drunken fishermen, likely
as not. Roger resented the intrusion of such a sound in such a
place--it was a sacrilege. When he came here to dream of her, only the
loveliest of muted sounds should be heard--the faintest whisper of
trees, the half-heard, half-felt moan of surf, the airiest sigh of
wind. He never read Wordsworth now or any other book. He only sat
there and thought of her, his great eyes alight, his pale face flushed
with the wonder of his love.
She slipped through the dark boughs like a moonbeam and stood by the
stone. Again he saw her quite plainly--saw and drank her in with his
eyes. He did not feel surprise--something in him had known she would
come again. He would not move a muscle lest he lose her as he had lost
her before. They looked at each other--for how long? He did not know;
and then--a horrible thing happened. Into that place of wonder and
revelation and mystery reeled a hiccoughing, laughing creature, a
drunken sailor from a harbour ship, with a leering face and
desecrating breath.
"Oh, you're here, my dear--I thought I'd catch you yet," he said.
He caught hold of her. She screamed. Roger sprang forward and struck
him in the face. In his fury of sudden rage the strength of ten seemed
to animate his slender body and pass into his blow. The sailor reeled
back and put up his hands. He was a coward--and even a brave man might
have been daunted by that terrible white face and those blazing eyes.
He backed down the path.
"Shorry--shorry," he muttered. "Didn't know she was your girl--shorry
I butted in. Shentlemans never butt in--shorry--shir--shorry."
He kept repeating his ridiculous "shorry" until he was out of the
grove. Then he turned and ran stumblingly across the field. Roger did
not follow; he went back to Isabel Temple's grave. The girl was lying
across it; he thought she was unconscious. He stooped and picked her
up--she was light and small, but she was warm flesh and blood; she
clung uncertainly to him for a moment and he felt her breath on his
face. He did not speak--he was too sick at heart. She did not speak
either. He did not think this strange until afterwards. He was
incapable of thinking just then; he was dazed, wretched, lost.
Presently he became aware that she was timidly pulling his arm. It
seemed that she wanted him to go with her--she was evidently
frightened of that brute--he must take her to safety. And then--
She moved on down the little path and he followed. Out in the moonlit
field he saw her clearly. With her drooping head, her flowing dark
hair, her great brown eyes, she looked like the nymph of a wood-brook,
a haunter of shadows, a creature sprung from the wild. But she was
mortal maid, and he--what a fool he had been! Presently he would laugh
at himself, when this dazed agony should clear away from his brain. He
followed her down the long field to the bay shore. Now and then she
paused and looked back to see if he were coming, but she never spoke.
When she reached the shore road she turned and went along it until
they came to an old grey house fronting the calm grey harbour. At its
gate she paused. Roger knew now who she was. Catherine had told him
about her a month ago.
She was Lilith Barr, a girl of eighteen, who had come to live with her
uncle and aunt. Her father had died some months before. She was
absolutely deaf as the result of some accident in childhood, and she
was, as his own eyes told him, exquisitely lovely in her white,
haunting style. But she was not Isabel Temple; he had tricked
himself--he had lived in a fool's paradise--oh, he must get away and
laugh at himself. He left her at her gate, disregarding the little
hand she put timidly out--but he did not laugh at himself. He went
back to Isabel Temple's grave and flung himself down on it and cried
like a boy. He wept his stormy, anguished soul out on it; and when he
rose and went away, he believed it was forever. He thought he could
never, never go there again.
* * * * *
Catherine looked at him curiously the next morning. He looked
wretched--haggard and hollow-eyed. She knew he had not come in till
the summer dawn. But he had lost the rapt, uncanny look she hated;
suddenly she no longer felt afraid of him. With this, she began to ask
questions again.
"What kept ye out so late again last night, b'y?" she said
reproachfully.
Roger looked at her in her morning ugliness. He had not really seen
her for weeks. Now she smote on his tortured senses, so long drugged
with beauty, like a physical blow. He suddenly burst into a laughter
that frightened her.
"Preserve's, b'y, have ye gone mad? Or," she added, "have ye seen
Isabel Temple's ghost?"
"No," said Roger loudly and explosively. "Don't talk any more about
that damned ghost. Nobody ever saw it. The whole story is balderdash."
He got up and went violently out, leaving Catherine aghast. Was it
possible Roger had sworn? What on earth had come over the b'y? But
come what had or come what would, he no longer looked _fey_--there was
that much to be thankful for. Even an occasional oath was better than
that. Catherine went stiffly about her dish-washing, resolving to have
'Liza Adams to supper some night.
For a week Roger lived in agony--an agony of shame and humiliation and
self-contempt. Then, when the edge of his bitter disappointment wore
away, he made another dreadful discovery. He still loved her and
longed for her just as keenly as before. He wanted madly to see
her--her flower-like face, her great, asking eyes, the sleek, braided
flow of her hair. Ghost or woman--spirit or flesh--it mattered not. He
could not live without her. At last his hunger for her drew him to the
old grey house on the bay shore. He knew he was a fool--she would
never look at him; he was only feeding the flame that must consume
him. But go he must and did, seeking for his lost paradise.
He did not see her when he went in, but Mrs. Barr received him kindly
and talked about her in a pleasant garrulous fashion which jarred on
Roger, yet he listened greedily. Lilith, her aunt told him, had been
made deaf by the accidental explosion of a gun when she was eight
years old. She could not hear a sound but she could talk.
"A little, that is--not much, but enough to get along with. But she
don't like talking somehow--dunno why. She's shy--and we think maybe
she don't like to talk much because she can't hear her own voice. She
don't ever speak except just when she has to. But she's been trained
to lip-reading something wonderful--she can understand anything that's
said when she can see the person that's talking. Still, it's a
terrible drawback for the poor child--she's never had any real
girl-life and she's dreadful sensitive and retiring. We can't get her
to go out anywhere, only for lonely walks along shore by herself.
We're much obliged for what you did the other night. It ain't safe for
her to wander about alone as she does, but it ain't often anybody from
the harbour gets up this far. She was dreadful upset about it--hasn't
got over her scare yet."
When Lilith came in, her ivory-white face went scarlet all over at the
sight of Roger. She sat down in a shadowy corner. Mrs. Barr got up
and went out. Roger was mute; he could find nothing to say. He could
have talked glibly enough to Isabel Temple's ghost in some unearthly
tryst by her grave, but he could not find a word to say to this slip
of flesh and blood. He felt very foolish and absurd, and very
conscious of his twisted shoulder. What a fool he had been to come!
Then Lilith looked up at him--and smiled. A little shy, friendly
smile. Roger suddenly saw her not as the tantalizing, unreal, mystic
thing of the twilit grove, but as a little human creature, exquisitely
pretty in her young-moon beauty, longing for companionship. He got up,
forgetting his ugliness, and went across the room to her.
"Will you come for a walk," he said eagerly. He held out his hand like
a child; as a child she stood up and took it; like two children they
went out and down the sunset shore. Roger was again incredibly happy.
It was not the same happiness as had been his in that vanished
fortnight; it was a homelier happiness with its feet on the earth. The
amazing thing was that he felt she was happy too--happy because she
was walking with _him_, "Jarback" Temple, whom no girl had even
thought about. A certain secret well-spring of fancy that had seemed
dry welled up in him sparklingly again.
Through the summer weeks the odd courtship went on. Roger talked to
her as he had never talked to anyone. He did not find it in the least
hard to talk to her, though her necessity of watching his face so
closely while he talked bothered him occasionally. He felt that her
intent gaze was reading his soul as well as his lips. She never talked
much herself; what she did say she spoke so low that it was hardly
above a whisper, but she had a voice as lovely as her face--sweet,
cadenced, haunting. Roger was quite mad about her, and he was horribly
afraid that he could never get up enough courage to ask her to marry
him. And he was afraid that if he did, she would never consent. In
spite of her shy, eager welcomes he could not believe she could care
for him--for _him_. She liked him, she was sorry for him, but it was
unthinkable that she, white, exquisite Lilith, could marry him and sit
at his table and his hearth. He was a fool to dream of it.
To the existence of romance and glamour in which he lived, no gossip
of the countryside penetrated. Yet much gossip there was, and at last
it came blundering in on Roger to destroy his fairy world a second
time. He came downstairs one night in the twilight, ready to go to
Lilith. His aunt and an old crony were talking in the kitchen; the
crony was old, and Catherine, supposing Roger was out of the house,
was talking loudly in that horrible voice of hers with still more
horrible zest and satisfaction.
"Yes, I'm guessing it'll be a match as ye say. Oh the b'y's doing
well. He ain't for every market, as I'm bound to admit. Ef she wan't
deaf she wouldn't look at him, no doubt. But she has scads of
money--they won't need to do a tap of work unless they like--and she's
a good housekeeper too her aunt tells me. She's pretty enough to suit
him--he's as particular as never was--and he wan't crooked and she
wan't deaf when they was born, so it's likely their children will be
all right. I'm that proud when I think of the match."
Roger fled out of the house, white of face and sick of heart. He went,
not to the bay shore, but to Isabel Temple's grave. He had never been
there since the night when he had rescued Lilith, but now he rushed to
it in his new agony. His aunt's horrible practicalities had filled him
with disgust--they dragged his love in the dust of sordid things. And
Lilith was rich; he had never known that--never suspected it. He could
never ask her to marry him now; he must never see her again. For the
second time he had lost her, and this second losing could not be
borne.
He sat down on the big boulder by the grave and dropped his poor grey
face in his hands, moaning in anguish. Nothing was left him, not even
dreams. He hoped he could soon die.
He did not know how long he sat there--he did not know when she came.
But when he lifted his miserable eyes, he saw her, sitting just a
little way from him on the big stone and looking at him with something
in her face that made his heart beat madly. He forgot Aunt Catherine's
sacrilege--he forgot that he was a presumptuous fool. He bent forward
and kissed her lips for the first time. The wonder of it loosed his
bound tongue.
"Lilith," he gasped, "I love you."
She put her hand into his and nestled closer to him.
"I thought you would have told me that long ago," she said.