SWEET DANGER
Kate Ransom had attempted no close analysis of her absorbing
interest in Gordon's work. The change in her life from weariness
to thrilling interest had been its own justification. Wealth had
robbed her of the mystery and charm of accident. The future was
fixed; there could be no unknown. The men she had met in society
were mere fops, or expert butlers who wrote books on etiquette.
Life was a problem for them of what the tailors could do.
She had been isolated from humanity. Now she felt the red blood
tingling to her finger tips. Her days were full of sweet surprises
or sudden revelations of drama and tragedy, and her woman's soul
responded with eager interest.
She had never loved. Such a woman could not love a tailor's dummy.
Her nature was warm, rich and passionate, and she was consumed with
longing for the moment of bliss when her whole being would so burn
with sacrificial fire for her beloved that she could walk with him
naked in winter snows, unconscious of cold.
Dress, the great mania of the empty minded, she had outgrown. She
knew instinctively the colour and the style most becoming to her
beauty, and she used these with the ease and assurance of an expert.
She was proud of her beautiful face and figure and held them as
divine gifts, the surest tokens of the fulfilment of her desires.
Her heart, rich in the ripened treasures of unspent motherhood,
brooded in tenderness over her new work--the tortures of half-starved
mothers, their doomed babes, their idle fathers, and the misery of
the poor and the fallen. This yearning to help she knew to be the
cry within her own soul for peace. How to express this fullness
of life Gordon was teaching her. Slowly and unconsciously she
was clothing this powerful, athletic man with every attribute of
her ideal. His steel-gray eyes seemed to pierce her very soul and
say, "I understand you; come with me." His eloquence and emotional
thinking were more and more to her the voice of a prophet seer. His
face, that flashed and trembled, smiled and clouded with fires of
smouldering passion, held her as in a spell. She knew this power
was slowly tightening about her heart, yet she rejoiced in its very
pain. When she greeted him, and he unconsciously held her soft hand
in his big blue-veined grasp, a sense of restful joy came she knew
not whence nor why.
Her enthusiasm in his work, her faith and cheering flattery were
drawing him with resistless magnetism.
As the summer advanced the heat became so terrific and the suffering
in the city so great that Gordon determined to stay at his post and
take his vacation in the fall. Mrs. Ransom fussed and fumed over
Kate's determination to stay, but there was no help for it.
July broke the record of forty years for heat. Scores were
prostrated daily and dead horses blocked traffic at almost every
hour. A drought threatened the water-supply, and night brought no
relief to the millions who sweltered in the tenements.
The babies began to die by thousands--more than two thousand a
week on Manhattan. Island alone. The city's wagons raked the little
black coffins up and dumped them into the Potters' Field, one on top
of the other, like so many dead flies. Down every tenement-walled
street the white ribbons fluttered their tragic story from cellar
to attic. At night tired mothers walked the pavements, hot and
radiating heat, till the sun rose again, carrying their sick babies,
or crowded the housetops, fanning them as they lay on their pallets,
pale and still, fighting with Death the grim, silent battle.
Kate Ransom finally gave her entire time to these children. She
fitted up a hotel in the mountains of Pennsylvania and kept it full.
She chartered a steamer and took a thousand of them for a day up
the Hudson as an experiment, and asked Gordon to go with them. They
would have music, and a dinner spread under the trees of the park
which stretched back from the water's edge into the towering hills.
He met them at the ferry slip from which the steamer sailed. Kate
was already there, and the throng filled every inch of the floor
space. She was moving about among them, while they gazed at her
in admiration no words in their vocabulary could express. Her face
was flushed with excitement, and her violet eyes, wide open, were
sparkling with pleasure.
The man's eyes lingered on the scene, feeling that, for all her
magnificently human body, no angel ever made a fairer vision.
He was struck with the silence of these children. As he looked
closer it was only too plain they were not children. They were only
little wizen-faced men and women, who had never learned to laugh or
smile or play; little pinched faces with weak eyes that had never
seen God's green fields; little dirty ears that had been bruised
with a thousand beastly noises, but had never heard the murmur
of beautiful waters in the depths of a forest. His heart went out
to them in a great yearning pity as he recalled his own enchanted
childhood.
His voice was soft with tears as he greeted Kate.
"A more pathetic sight than this crowd of silent children old earth
never saw. But the shining figure in the centre lights the shadows
with a touch of divine beauty."
"It does break one's heart to see such children, doesn't it?" she
answered, looking at them tenderly and ignoring his pointed tribute
to her beauty.
"Are we all ready?" Gordon cried.
"If you are. Is Mrs. Gordon not coming?"
"No; I couldn't persuade her. She took our chicks to the seashore."
As the boat moved swiftly up the great river in the fresh morning
air and the breeze blowing down its channel strengthened, they sat
together on the after deck and watched the dead souls of the little
ones stir with life under the kiss of the wind and the caress of
the music.
In the park they spread out in the whispering stillness of the
woods. Nature breathed the sweet breath of her life into their
hearts again and they began to twist their queer little faces and
try to laugh. They called to one another and listened with mute
wonder at the echo among the rock-ribbed hills. Gordon watched
curiously in their faces the flash of the inherited memory of forest
habits, choked and stunted and dormant in all city folks, and yet
alive as long as the human heart beats. Within two hours they had
grown noisy with play after a timid, clumsy fashion.
"Give them a week and they would learn to laugh!" Kate exclaimed.
But the man was now more interested in watching the woman than
the children, as he saw her satin skin flush with pleasure and the
creamy lace on her full bosom rise and fall.
They sat down on a rock beside a brook.
"What an inspiration to see this old yet ever new miracle of
regeneration unfold under the magic touch of a woman's hand!"
"You mean a man's hand," she replied. "This would never have
interested me except that you led me to see it."
"Then we've helped one another. I'm beginning to feel you are
indispensable. I wonder if you, too, will leave us after awhile as
so many pass on."
"No; this has become my very life," she soberly answered, looking
down at the ground and then into his face with frank, open-eyed
pleasure.
He was silent for several minutes and then softly laughed.
"What is it?" she cried.
"You could never guess."
She lifted her superb arms, showing bare to the elbow, and felt of
the mass of auburn hair. "That load of red hay about to fall?"
"Don't be sacrilegious. No."
"Harness broken anywhere?" She felt of her belt, and ran her hands
down the lines of her beautiful figure, eyeing him laughingly.
"I'll tell you," he said, sinking his voice to its lowest note
of expressive feeling, while a whimsical smile played round the
corners of his eyes. "Sitting here in the woods by your side on
this glorious summer day, your eyes looked so blue in the creamy
satin of your face, I suddenly thought I smelled the violets with
which God mixed their colours."
"You think of such silly things," she said with mock severity.
"There's nothing silly about it. Beauty is an attribute of the
divine. I worship it for its own sweet sake wherever I find it, in
pearl or opal, dewdrop or flower, the stars, or a woman's face or
form or eyes."
She lowered her head.
"Do you know the old legend of the opal?" he asked.
He took some stones from his pocket and held in the light an opal
of rare luster.
"Isn't it beautiful?" she cried.
"And its story is as beautiful as its face. Listen: A sunbeam
lingered under a leaf in the forest at sunset, loath to leave
so fair a spot, until the moon suddenly rose. Enraptured with the
shimmering beauty of a moonbeam, he stood entranced and trembling
and could not go. In ecstasy they met, embraced and kissed. The
sun sank and left him in her arms. The opal is the child of their
love. In its fair face is forever mingled the silver of the rising
moon and the golden glory of the sunset."
"I believe you made that up," she laughed.
"I wish I were poet enough."
"I had no idea you dreamed of such romantic nonsense."
"Yes, I dream many things. I had a funny dream about you the other
night."
"Tell me what it was," she begged.
"I dare not."
"I thought you would dare anything."
"No; you see, dreams are such intimate, unconventional mysteries.
Dreams have no regard for law or custom The soul and the body seem
equally free and without sin or shame. I have a curious feeling
of awe about sleep and dreams. It's the surest evidence I have of
immortality and the reality of a spiritual life. It is to me the
prophecy of the ideal world, too, in which we will dare to live
some day what we really are, without pretence or hypocrisy--live
that deep secret inner life we try sometimes to hide from the eye
of God."
"And you will not even give me a hint of this dream?"
"No. It was very foolish, but very charming and beautiful. It was
in part a picture from that dream which made me laugh awhile ago
about your eyes."
"I think it mean in you to tell me that much and no more."
"I would tell you if I dared. I may dare some day."
She was afraid to ask him after that, and yet something within
cried for joy.
They rose, gathered the children for dinner, ands after three hours
in the woods, returned to the city as the twilight softly fell over
its ragged steel and granite sky-line.
"You must take tea with us to-night," she said, as they stepped
from the boat.
His wife would not return for supper and he consented.
It was not the first time he had spent an hour at the table of
the Ransom household. Mrs. Ransom deemed herself honoured by his
visits, and his chats with the invalid father about books were
bright spots in his life.
Kate had sent the stringed band from the boat to the house and
stationed them in the conservatory opening into the dining-room.
The tender strains of the music, the splash of a fountain mingled
with the songs of birds in their cages, the gleam of silver and
diamond flash of cut glass, gave Gordon's senses a soothing contrast
to the wild beauty of the woods. His nature responded to art and
luxury as quickly as to the sensuous voice of Nature in the glory
of her summer's splendour.
There was something in this glittering beauty, cold and cruel,
that appealed to him. He always felt at home in such surroundings.
Beneath his idealism and love of humanity there was still hidden
somewhere the nerve of an Epicurean.
When Kate appeared, dressed for tea, simply but richly, with her
splendid neck and shoulders bare and little ringlets of hair curling
about her face as though scorched by the warmth of the red blood
below, he felt the picture complete.
She chatted with him before entering the dining-room.
Her manner was always flattering and frankly gracious, but to-night
there was an added note of warmth and familiar comradeship. Never
had he seen her so charming and so resistless. Always intensely
conscious of her sex, she seemed to have the power to-night of
communicating to the man before her that consciousness so intimately,
so directly and yet so delicately that he was led captive.
With scarcely a spoken word their relationship leaped the space of
years. The quiver of her eyelid, the dilation of a nostril, little
inarticulate exclamations, the turn of her head, the rising and
falling of her bosom, the flash of her violet eyes, the subtle
perfume of her hair or the graceful movement of her magnificent
form spoke the language of life deep and rhythmic which no words
have ever expressed.
He went home, on fire with the dream of an ideal life and work with
such a woman of supreme beauty.