A broad yellow beam sliding under the door brought Maria into
sudden consciousness, and rising hastily from the straw, where
her figure had shaped an almost perfect outline, she crossed the
dusky floor smelling of trodden grain and went out into the early
sunshine, which slanted over the gray fields. A man trundling a
wheelbarrow from the market garden, and a milkmaid crossing the
lawn with a bucket of fresh milk, were the only moving figures in
the landscape, and after a single hurried glance about her she
followed the straight road to the house and entered the rear
door, which Malindy had unlocked.
Meeting Fletcher a little later at breakfast, she found, to her
surprise, that he accepted her presence without question and made
absolutely no allusion to the heated conversation of the evening
before. He looked sullen and dirty, as if he had slept all night
in his clothes, and he responded to Maria's few good-humoured
remarks with a single abrupt nod over his coffee-cup. As she
watched him a feeling of pity for his loneliness moved her heart,
and when he rose hastily at last and strode out into the hall she
followed him and spoke gently while he paused to take down his
hat from one of the old antlers near the door.
"If I could only be of some use to you, grandfather," she said;
"are you sure there is nothing I can do?"
With his hand still outstretched, he hesitated an instant and
stood looking down upon her, his heavy features wrinkling into a
grin.
"I've nothing against you as a woman," he responded, "but when
you set up and begin to charge like a judge, I'll be hanged if I
can stand you."
"Then I won't charge any more. I only want to help you and to do
what is best. If you would but let me make myself of some
account."
He laughed not unkindly, and flecked with his stubby forefinger
at some crumbs which had lodged in the folds of his cravat.
"Then I reckon you'd better mix a batch of dough and feed the
turkeys," he replied, and touching her shoulder with his hat-
brim, he went hurriedly out of doors.
When he had disappeared beyond the last clump of shrubbery
bordering the drive, she remembered the lantern she had left
hanging in the barn, and, going to look for it, carried it
upstairs to her room. In the afternoon, however, it occurred to
her that Christopher would probably need the light by evening,
and swinging the handle over her arm, she set out across the
newly ploughed fields toward the Blake cottage. The stubborn
rustic pride which would keep him from returning to the Hall
aroused in her a frank, almost tender amusement. She had long ago
wearied of the trivial worldliness of life; in the last few years
the shallowness of passion had seemed its crowning insult, and
over the absolute sincerity of her own nature the primal emotion
she had heard in Christopher's voice exerted a compelling charm.
The makeshift of a conventional marriage had failed her utterly;
her soul had rejected the woman's usual cheap compromise with
externals; and in her almost puritan scorn of the vanities by
which she was surrounded she had attained the moral elevation
which comes to those who live by an inner standard of purity
rather than by outward forms. In the largeness of her nature
there had been small room for regret or for wasted passion, and
until her meeting with Christopher on the day of her homecoming
he had existed in her imagination only as a bright and impossible
memory. Now, as she went rapidly forward along the little path
that edged the field, she found herself wondering if, after all,
she had worn unconsciously his ideal as an armour against the
petty temptations and the sudden melancholies of the last six
years.
As she neared the fence that divided the two farms she saw him
walking slowly along a newly turned furrow, and when he looked up
she lifted the lantern and waved it in the air. Quickening his
steps, he swung himself over the rail fence with a single bound,
and came to where she stood amid a dried fringe of last summer's
yarrow.
"So you are none the worse for the night in the barn?" he asked
anxiously.
"Why, I dreamed the most beautiful dreams," she replied, "and I
had the most perfect sleep in the world."
"Then the mice kept away?"
"At least they didn't wake me."
"I stayed within call until sunrise," he said quietly. "You were
not afraid?"
Her rare smile shone suddenly upon him, illumining the delicate
pallor of her face. "I knew that you were there," she answered.
For a moment he gazed steadily into her eyes, then with a
decisive movement he took the lantern from her hand and turned as
though about to go back to his work.
"It was very kind of you to bring this over," he said, pausing
beside the fence.
"Kind? Why, what did you expect? I knew it might hang there
forever, but you would not come for it."
"No, I should not have come for it," he replied, swinging the
lantern against the rails with such force that the glass
shattered and fell in pieces to the ground.
"Why, what a shame!" said Maria; "and it is all my fault."
A smile was on his face as he looked at her.
"You are right--it is all your fault," he repeated, while his
gaze dropped to the level of her lips and hung there for a
breathless instant.
With an effort she broke the spell which had fallen over her,
and, turning from him, pointed to the old Blake graveyard on the
little hill.
"Those black cedars have tempted me for days," she said. "Will
you tell me what dust they guard so faithfully?"
He followed her gesture with a frown.
"I will show you, if you like," he answered. "It is the only spot
on earth where I may offer you hospitality."
"Your people are buried there?"
"For two hundred years. Will you come?"
While she hesitated, he tossed the lantern over into his field
and came closer to her side. "Come," he repeated gently, and at
his voice a faint flush spread slowly from her throat to the
loosened hair upon her forehead. The steady glow gave her face a
light, a radiance, that he had never seen there until to-day.
"Yes, I will come if you wish it," she responded quietly.
Together they went slowly up the low, brown incline over the
clods of upturned earth. When they reached the bricked-up wall,
which had crumbled away in places, he climbed over into the bed
of periwinkle and then held out his hands to assist her in
descending. "Here, step into that hollow," he said, "and don't
jump till I tell you. Ah, that's it; now, I'm ready."
At his words, she made a sudden. spring forward, her dress caught
on the wall, and she slipped lightly into his outstretched arms.
For the half of a second he held her against his breast; then, as
she released herself, he drew back and lifted his eves to meet
the serene composure of her expression. He was conscious that his
own face flamed red hot, but to all outward seeming she had not
noticed the incident which had so moved him. The calm distinction
of her bearing struck him as forcibly as it had done at their
first meeting. "What a solemn place," she said, lowering her
voice as she looked about her.
For answer he drew aside the screening boughs of a cedar and
motioned to the discoloured marble slabs strewn thickly under the
trees.
"Here are my people," he returned gravely. "And here is my
ground."
Pausing, she glanced down on his father's grave, reading with
difficulty the inscription beneath the dry dust from the cedars.
"He lived to be very old," she said, after a moment.
"Seventy years. He lived exactly ten years too long."
"Too long?"
"Those last ten years wrecked him. Had he died at sixty he would
have died happy."
He turned from her, throwing himself upon the carpet of
periwinkle, and coming to where he lay, she sat down on a granite
slab at his side.
"One must believe that there is a purpose in it," she responded,
raising a handful of fine dust and sifting it through her
fingers, "or one would go mad over the mystery of things."
"Well, I dare say the purpose was to make me a tobacco-grower,"
he replied grimly, "and if so, it has fulfilled itself in a
precious way. Why, there's never been a time since I was ten
years old when I wouldn't have changed places, and said 'thank
you,' too, with any one of those old fellows over there. They
were jolly chaps, I tell you, and led jolly lives. It used to be
said of them that they never won a penny nor missed a kiss."
"Nor learned a lesson, evidently. Well, may they rest in peace;
but I'm not sure that their wisdom would carry far. There are
better things than gaming and kissing, when all is said."
"Better things? Perhaps."
"Have you not found them?"
"Not yet; but then, I can't judge anything except tobacco, you
know."
For a long pause she looked down into his upturned face.
"After all, it isn't the way we live nor the work we do that
matters," she said slowly, "but the ideal we put into it. Is
there any work too sordid, too prosaic, to yield a return of
beauty?"
"Do you think so?" he asked, and glanced down the hill to his
ploughshare lying in the ripped-up field. "But it is not beauty
that some of us want, you see--it's success, action, happiness,
call it what you will."
"Surely they are not the same. I have known many successful
people, and the only three perfectly happy ones I ever met were
what the world calls failures."
"Failures?" he echoed, and remembered Tucker.
Her face softened, and she looked beyond him to the blue sky,
shining through the interlacing branches of bared trees.
"Two were women," she pursued, clasping and unclasping the quiet
hands in her lap, "and one was a Catholic priest who had been
reared in a foundling asylum and educated by charity. When I knew
him he was on his way to a leper island in the South Seas, where
he would be buried alive for the remainder of his life. All he
had was an ideal, but it flooded his soul with light. Another was
a Russian Nihilist, a girl in years and yet an atheist and a
revolutionist in thought, and her unbelief was in its way as
beautiful as the religion of my priest. To return to Russia meant
death; she knew, and yet she went back, devoted and exalted, to
lay down her life for an illusion. So it seems, when one looks
about the world, that faith and doubt are dry and inanimate forms
until we pour forth our heart's blood, which vivifies them."
She fell silent, and he started and touched softly the hem of her
black skirt.
"And the other?" he asked.
"The other had a stranger and a longer story, but if you will
listen I'll tell it to you. She was an Italian, of a very old and
proud family, and as she possessed rare loveliness and charm, a
marriage was arranged for her with a wealthy nobleman, who had
fallen in love with her before she left her convent. She was a
rebellious soul, it seems, for the day before her wedding, just
after she had patiently tried on her veil and orange blossoms,
she slipped into the dress of her waiting-maid and ran off with a
music-teacher--a beggarly fanatic, they told me--a man of red
republican views, who put dangerous ideas into the heads of the
peasantry. From that moment, they said, her life was over; her
family shut their doors upon her, and she fell finally so low as
to be seen one evening singing in the public streets. Her story
touched me when I heard it: it seemed a pitiable thing that a
woman should be wrecked so hopelessly by a single moment of
mistaken courage; and after months of searching I at last found
the place she lived in, and went one May evening up the long
winding staircase to her apartment--two clean, plain rooms which
looked on a little balcony where there were pots of sweet basil
and many pigeons. At my knock the door opened, and I knew her at
once in the beautiful white face and hands of the woman who stood
a little back in the shadow. Her forty years had not coarsened
her as they do most Italian women, and her eyes still held the
unshaken confidence of extreme youth. Her husband was sleeping in
the next room, she said; he had but a few days more to live, and
he had been steadily dying for a year. Then, at my gesture of
sympathy, she shook her head and smiled.
"I have had twenty years," she said, "and I have been perfectly
happy. Think of that when so many women die without having even a
single day of life. Why, but for the one instant of courage that
saved me, I myself might have known the world only as a vegetable
knows the garden in which it fattens. My soul has lived, and
though I have been hungry and cold and poorly clad, I have never
sunk to the level of what they would have made me. He is a
dreamer," she finished gently, "and though his dreams were
nourished upon air, and never came true except in our thoughts,
still they have touched even the most common things with beauty."
While she talked, he awoke and called her, and we went in to see
him. He complained a little fretfully that his feet were cold,
and she knelt down and warmed them in the shawl upon her bosom.
The mark of death was on him, and I doubt if even in the fulness
of his strength he were worthy of the passion he inspired--but
that, after all, makes little difference. It was a great love,
which is the next best thing to a great faith."
As she ended, he raised his eyes slowly, catching the fervour of
her glance.
"It was more than that--it was a great deliverance," he said.
Then, as she rose, he followed her from the graveyard, and they
descended the low brown hill together.