When Christopher turned so abruptly from Maria's gaze he was
conscious only of a desperate impulse of flight. At the instant
his strength seemed to fail him utterly, and he realised that for
the first time in his life he feared to trust himself to face the
imminent moment. His one thought was to escape quickly from her
presence, and in the suddenness of his retreat he did not weigh
the possible effect upon her of his rudeness. A little later,
however, when he had put the field between him and her haunting
eyes, he found himself returning with remorse to his imaginings
of what her scattered impressions must have been.
Between regret and perplexity the day dragged through, and he met
his mother's exacting humours and Cynthia's wistful inquiries
with a curious detachment of mind. He had reached that middle
state of any powerful emotion when even the external objects
among which one moves seem affected by the inward struggle
between reason and desire--the field in which he worked, the
distant landscape, the familiar faces in the house, and those
frail, pathetic gestures of his mother's hands, all expressed in
outward forms something of the passion which he felt stirring in
his own breast. It was in his nature to dare risks blindly--to
hesitate at no experience offered him in his narrow life, and
there were moments during this long day when he found himself
questioning if one might not, after all, plunge headlong into the
impossible.
As he rose from the supper table, where he had pushed his
untasted food impatiently away, he remembered that he had
promised in the morning to meet Will Fletcher at the store, and,
lighting his lantern, he started out to keep the appointment he
had almost forgotten. He found Will overflowing with his domestic
troubles, and it was after ten o'clock before they both came out
upon the road and turned into opposite ways at the beginning of
Sol Peterkin's lane.
"I'll help you with the ploughing, of course," Christopher said,
as they lingered together a moment before parting; "make your
mind quite easy about that. I'll be over at sunrise on Monday and
put in a whole day's job."
Then, as he fell back into his own road, he found something like
satisfaction in the prospect of driving Will Fletcher's plough.
The easy indifference with which he was accustomed to lend a hand
in a neighbour's difficulty had always marked his association
with the man whose ruin, he still assured himself, he had
wrought.
It was a dark, moonless night, with only a faint, nebulous
whiteness where the clouded stars shone overhead. His lantern,
swinging lightly from his hand, cast a shining yellow circle on
the ground before him, and it was by this illumination that he
saw presently, as he neared the sunken road into which he was
about to turn, a portion of the shadow by the ice-pond detach
itself from the surrounding blackness and drift rapidly to meet
him. In his first start of surprise, he raised the lantern
quickly above his head and waited breathlessly while the
advancing shape assumed gradually a woman's form. The old ghost
stories of his childhood thronged confusedly into his brain, and
then, before the thrilling certainty of the figure before him, he
uttered a single joyous exclamation:
"You!"
The light flashed full upon Maria's face, which gave back to him
a white and tired look. Her eyes were heavy, and there was a
strange solemnity about them--something that appealed vaguely to
his religious instinct.
"What in heaven's name has happened?" he asked, and his voice
escaped his control and trembled with emotion.
With a tired little laugh, she screened her eyes from the
lantern.
"I had a talk with grandfather about Will," she answered, "and he
got so angry that he locked me out of doors. He had had a
worrying day in town, and I think he hardly knew what he was
doing--but he has put up the bars and turned out the lights, and
there's really no way of getting in."
He thought for a moment. "Will you go on to your brother's, or is
it too far?"
"At first I started there, but that must have been hours ago, and
it was so dark I got lost by the ice-pond. After all, it would
only make matters worse if I saw Will again; so the question is,
Where am I to sleep?"
"At Tom Spade's, then--or--" he hesitated an instant, "if you
care to come to us, my sister will gladly find room for you."
She shook her head. "No, no; you are very kind, but I can't do
that. It is best that I shouldn't leave the place, perhaps, and
when the servant comes over at sunrise I can slip up into my
room. If you'll lend me your lantern I'll make myself some kind
of a bed in the barn. Fortunately, grandfather forgot to lock the
door."
"In the barn?" he echoed, surprised.
"Oh, I went there first, but after I lay down I suddenly
remembered the mice and got up and came away. I'm mortally afraid
of mice in the dark; but your lantern will keep them off, will it
not?"
She smiled at him from the shining circle which surrounded her
like a halo, and for a moment he forgot her words in the
wonderful sense of her nearness. Around them the night stretched
like a cloak, enclosing them in an emotional intimacy which had
all the warmth of a caress. As she leaned back against the body
of a tree, and he drew forward that he might hold the lantern
above her head, the situation was resolved, in spite of the
effort that he made, into the eternal problem of the man and the
woman. He was aware that his blood worked rapidly in his veins,
and as her glance reached upward from the light to meet his in
the shadow he realised with the swiftness of intuition that in
her also the appeal of the silence was faced with a struggle.
They would ignore it, he knew, and yet it shone in their eyes,
quivered in their voices, and trembled in their divided hands;
and to them both its presence was alive and evident in the space
between them. He saw her bosom rise and fall, her lips part
slightly, and a tremor disturb the high serenity of her
self-control, and there came to him the memory of their first
meeting at the cross-roads and of the mystery and the rapture of
his boyish love. He had found her then the lady of his dreams,
and now, after all the violence of his revolt against her, she
was still to him as he had first seen her--the woman whose soul
looked at him from her face.
For a breathless moment--for a single heart-beat--it seemed to
him that he had but to lean down and gather her eyes and lips and
hands to his embrace, to feel her awaken to life within his arms
and her warm blood leap up beneath his mouth. Then the madness
left him as suddenly as it had come, and she grew strangely
white, and distant, and almost unreal, in the spiritual beauty of
her look. He caught his breath sharply, and lowered his gaze to
the yellow circle that trembled on the ground.
"But you will be afraid even with the light," he said, in a voice
which had grown almost expressionless.
As if awaking suddenly from sleep, she passed her hand slowly
across her eyes.
"No, I shall not be afraid with the light," she answered, and
moved out into the road.
"Then let me hold it for you--the hill is very rocky."
She assented silently, and quickened her steps down the long
incline; then, as she stumbled in the darkness, he threw the
lantern over upon her side. "If you will lean on me I think I can
steady you," he suggested, waiting until she turned and laid her
hand upon his arm. "That's better now; go slowly and leave the
road to me. How in thunder did you come over it in the pitch
dark?"
"I fell several times," she replied, with a little unsteady
laugh, "and my feet are oh! so hurt and bruised. Tomorrow I shall
go on crutches."
"A bad night's work, then."
"But not so bad as it might have been," she added cheerfully.
"You mean if I had not found you it would have been worse. Well,
I'm glad that much good has come out of it. I have spared you a
cold--so that goes down to my credit; otherwise--But what
difference does it make?" he finished impatiently. "We must have
met sooner or later even if I had run across the world instead of
merely across a tobacco field. After all, the world is no bigger
than a tobacco field, when it comes to destiny."
"To destiny?" she looked up, startled. "Then there are fatalists
even among tobacco-growers?"
He met her question with a laugh. "But I wasn't always a tobacco-
grower, and there were poets before Homer, who is about the only
one I've ever read. It's true I've tried to lose the little
education I ever had--that I've done my best to come down to the
level of my own cattle; but I'm not an ox, after all, except in
strength, and one has plenty of time to think when one works in
the field all day. Why, the fancies I've had would positively
turn your head."
"Fancies--about what?"
"About life and death and the things one wants and can never get.
I dream dreams and plot unimaginable evil--"
"Not evil," she protested.
"Whole crops of it; and harvest them, too."
"But why?"
"For pure pleasure--for sheer beastly love of the devilment I
can't do."
She shook her head, treating his words as a jest.
"There was never evil that held its head so high."
"That's pride, you know."
"Nor that wore so frank a face."
"And that's hypocrisy."
"Nor that dared to be so rude."
He caught up her laugh.
"You have me there, I grant you. What a brute I must have seemed
this morning."
"You were certainly not a Chesterfield--nor a Bolivar Blake."
With a start he looked down upon her. "Then you, too, are aware
of the old chap?" he asked.
"Of Bolivar Blake--why, who isn't? I used to be taught one of his
maxims as a child--'If you can't tell a polite lie, don't tell
any.'"
"Good manners, but rather bad morality, eh?" he inquired.
"Unfortunately, the two things seem to run together," she
replied; "which encourages me to hope that you will prove to be a
pattern of virtue."
"Don't hope too hard. I may merely have lost the one trait
without developing the other."
"At least, it does no harm to believe the best," she returned in
the same careless tone. Ahead of them, where the great oaks were
massed darkly against the sky, he saw the steep road splotched
into the surrounding blackness. Her soft breathing came to him
from the obscurity at his side, and he felt his arm burn beneath
the light pressure of her hand. For the first time in his lonely
and isolated life he knew the quickened emotion, the fulness of
experience, which came to him with the touch of the woman whom,
he still told himself, he could never love. Not to love her had
been so long for him a point of pride as well as of honour that
even while the wonderful glow pervaded his thoughts, while his
pulses drummed madly in his temples, he held himself doggedly to
the illusion that the appeal she made would vanish with the
morning. It was a delirium of the senses, he still reasoned, and
knew even as the lie was spoken that the charm which drew him to
her was, above all things, the spirit speaking through the flesh.
"I fear I have been a great bother to you," said Maria, after a
moment, "but you will probably solace yourself with the
reflection that destiny would have prepared an equal nuisance had
you gone along another road."
"Perhaps," he answered, smiling; "but philosophy sometimes fails
a body, doesn't it?"
"It may be. I knew a man once who said he leaned upon two
crutches, philosophy and religion. When one broke under him he
threw his whole weight on the other--and lo! that gave way."
"Then he went down, I suppose."
"I never heard the end--but if it wasn't quite so dark, you would
find me really covered with confusion. I have not only brought
you a good mile out of your road, but I am now prepared to rob
you of your light. Can you possibly find your way home in the
dark?"
As she looked up, the lantern shone in his face, and she saw that
he wore a whimsical smile.
"I have been in the dark all my life," he answered, "until to-
night."
"Until to-night?"
"Until now--this very minute. For the first time for ten years I
begin to see my road at this instant--to see where I have been
walking all along."
"And where did it lead you?"
He laughed at the seriousness in her voice.
"Through a muck-heap--in the steps of my own cattle. I am sunk
over the neck in it already."
Her tone caught the lightness of his and carried it off with
gaiety.
"But there is a way out. Have you found it?"
"There is none. I've wallowed so long in the filth that it has
covered me."
"Surely it will rub off," she said.
For a moment the lantern's flash rested upon his brow and eyes,
relieving them against the obscurity which still enveloped his
mouth.
The high-bred lines of his profile stood out clear and fine as
those of an ivory carving, and their very beauty saddened the
look she turned upon him. Then the light fell suddenly lower and
revealed the coarsened jaw, with the almost insolent strength of
the closed lips. The whole effect was one of reckless power, and
she caught her breath with the thought that so compelling a force
might serve equally the agencies of good or evil.
They had reached the lawn, and as he responded to her hurried
gesture of silence they passed the house quickly and entered the
great open door of the barn. Here he hung the lantern from a
nail, and then, pulling down some straw from a pile in one
corner, arranged it into the rude likeness of a pallet.
"I don't think the mice will trouble you," he said at last, as he
turned to go, "but if they do--why, just call out and I'll come
to slaughter--"
"You won't go home, then?" she asked, amazed.
He nodded carelessly.
"Not till daybreak. Remember, if you feel frightened, that I'm
within earshot."
Then, before she could protest or detain him for an explanation,
he turned from her and went out into the darkness.