LOVE WILL BUILD HIS LILY WALLS
Late in the afternoon of St. Patrick’s Day, Camperdown, in a smart new
buggy that he had bought to please Zilla, but with Polypharmacy—whom he
had refused to give up—harnessed to it, was driving along Barrington
Street, that runs in a wavering line through the town and out into the
country.
Since early morning there had been several kinds of weather—as is
usually the case in Halifax on the seventeenth of March. The parade and
demonstration in honor of the saint had been held in a driving
snow-storm. Then followed brilliant sunshine and a high wind that
rattled the masses of wires suspended over the streets, and tossed to
and fro the banks of dead white snow heaped in billowy ridges against
the black and muddy earth.
When Camperdown set out, another change had taken place. The wind had
died away, and reluctant snowflakes were beginning to fall from dark,
smoke-colored clouds that were slowly rolling in over the harbor.
The walking was slushy and disagreeable. Pedestrians in rubber footgear
passed along the sidewalks, looking in the shop windows, where pots of
pseudo shamrock were freely displayed, or entering stores and offices to
transact business in the leisurely, unhurried fashion peculiar to the
inhabitants of the city by the sea. Every Irishman wore a large tuft of
green in his hat or his buttonhole, and many horses showed the
nationality of their masters by proudly shaking their heads, whereon was
the emerald rosette.
A crowd of boys on a street corner, rapturously engaged in watching one
of their number, who was rubbing green powder on the back of the
unconscious Mrs. Macartney, as she stood waiting for a horse car,
attracted Dr. Camperdown’s attention.
“You rascals!” he called to them, and suppressing a smile as they
scampered away, he took off his hat to the lady and drove on. Past the
City Hall he went, and steep Jacob Street, once the terminus of the
ancient palisade wall that enclosed the early settlement of Halifax, and
beyond which it was not safe for a white man to go unless he were
willing to be scalped by the ever-watchful Indians, and entered into the
dingy part of the street, where traffic to and from the railroad station
is loudest and noisiest.
Below him was the dockyard with its arsenals, magazines, parade ground,
and houses for officials, and its few remaining trophies of the war of
1812. He looked grimly toward it; called up some of his father’s stories
of the day so many years ago, that the lads of the town ran to see the
“Shannon” and the “Chesapeake” coming up the harbor with their decks
stained with blood; and then smiled as he reflected on the ardent
diatribes against war that he had heard from Stargarde and Vivienne.
Polypharmacy deliberately drew his hoofs in and out of the snow and mud
in the street, and soon had his master to the suburb of Richmond and the
contraction of the harbor, where the lovely, sudden, and beautiful view
of the basin burst upon him.
Calm and quiet, surrounded by bold hills and dusky forests, it lay.
Drawn half-way across it, as if giant hands had begun to stretch it
there, and then had ceased, growing weary of their task, was a covering
of white ice; where the ice ended abruptly the water was dark and
tranquil. Five miles from him, at the head of the basin, nestled the
little village of Bedford; and on the west shore his eyes sought and
rested on lonely Prince’s Lodge, a melancholy souvenir, with its ruined
gardens and lawns, of a once gay place of sojourn of His Royal Highness,
the Duke of Kent.
His survey of the basin over, Camperdown brought back his gaze to his
immediate surroundings. Just across from him, by the broken piers of a
former bridge over the Narrows, were ships laid up for the winter.
“Potato ships probably,” he ejaculated. “Get on, Polypharmacy; here’s a
train coming.”
Polypharmacy crept on slowly, though his master had drawn him up between
the railway track and a high, snowy bank with overhanging trees, up
which he would find it impossible to go, no matter how frightened he
would be. But Polypharmacy did not mind a train. When it came shrieking
around the curve beside him, he merely flicked the ear next it in
temporary annoyance, and proceeded philosophically on his way.
“Why, there’s Stargarde!” exclaimed Camperdown, surveying a figure some
distance ahead of him on the narrow road. “On some Quixotic errand, of
course,” frowning and hurrying after her.
Polypharmacy had shed his fine peal of bells with the sleigh, and
Stargarde not hearing the carriage wheels in the soft mud, started
slightly on hearing her name pronounced.
Such a rosy, laughing face she turned to him! But his annoyance did not
pass away. “What foolishness is this? where are you going?”
“To see a sick friend near the three-mile house. And you?”
“Young man fell off a barn while shingling it; brain fever, and I’m
attending him.”
“That’s my friend,” said Stargarde.
“Then we’ll go together,” putting out a hand to assist her into the
carriage.
“I think I would rather walk, Brian.”
“I don’t see why you should go rambling all over the country alone,” he
said, all his dissatisfaction coming out in one burst of irritability.
“It’s abominable. Where is your dog?”
“I didn’t think I was coming out and Vivienne took him to the park.”
“Will you come with me?” he asked in patient exasperation.
“Yes,” and she stepped into the buggy.
He was in a wretched humor; but she was in one so gay, so light-hearted,
that she gradually charmed him out of it.
Then, having yielded, he fell into an opposite humor, for he had long
ago given up as impracticable the transparent fiction that he had ceased
to love her with his former devotion.
“I am glad that we have arrived,” said Stargarde laughing and blushing,
as Polypharmacy of his own accord stopped short on the snowy, country
road before a dull red farmhouse flanked by a yellow barn.
Camperdown, splashing through snow and water in his big, rubber boots,
opened a long gate and looked at Polypharmacy, who accepted the mute
invitation to come in and be tied to a “hitching post.”
Stargarde walked up the little path which in summer time was bordered by
flowers, and tapped softly at the door. A neighbor opened it and
bestowed on her sundry confidences in half-tones with regard to the sick
man, whose mother, she said was “clean distracted.”
They sat for some time in the old-fashioned kitchen of the house, by an
open fireplace in which sticks of wood burned and sputtered in a subdued
way, till the farmer’s wife came in from the sickroom, tears running
down her cheeks. The doctor was going to stay a little while to observe
her son’s symptoms, she said, and she begged that Miss Turner would wait
for him as the roads were too bad for her to walk home.
The neighbor rose, and busied herself in drawing a many-legged table
from the corner of the room, spreading a white cloth on it, and putting
deftly in their places a number of blue, willow-patterned dishes. When
everything was in order on the table, she approached the fireplace, and
swinging toward her the crane suspended over the blaze, poured boiling
water from a teakettle hanging to it into a brown teapot that she placed
in a corner of the brick hearth.
Refusing all entreaties to stay and partake of the meal, by saying that
she must return to her family, she took leave of Stargarde, of the
farmer’s wife, and of the farmer himself, who at that moment came in.
The long twilight began to close, and still Camperdown lingered. The
mother had been with him some time in the sick-room. Stargarde sat
quietly consoling the farmer as she had consoled his wife.
“My son, my son, my only son,” were all the words the old man could
utter till Dr. Camperdown stood quietly beside him and laid a hand on
his shoulder. “Mr. White, your son is going to get well, with God’s
blessing.”
The old man started up, wrung his hand, ejaculated, “God bless you,
sir!” and hurried from the room.
“They won’t leave him,” said Camperdown looking away from Stargarde who
was wiping sympathetic tears from her eyes. “Mrs. White says for us to
take some tea before we go. They’ll be offended if we don’t.”
He lifted the enormous brown teapot to a stand on the table, and while
waiting for Stargarde to sit down, walked noiselessly about the room
scanning with curious eye the high cupboards, the ancient latches on the
doors, the brass candlesticks on the mantel shelf, and the long oven set
in the wall and arched over with brickwork.
Finally he came to a standstill at the table, and surveyed the various
dishes that the farmer’s wife in her gratitude had offered to them.
“Potted head, that she has made herself,” he said; “rolls also. Her own
brown bread, such as bakers do not dream of; beans grown by themselves;
pork from a porker off the farm; preserve of berries from her own little
garden; eggs from her biddies; cream from her cows; doughnuts frizzled
in the lard of her own swine. Come, Stargarde, will you say grace and
pour the tea?”
“Yes, Brian,” taking the chair that he placed for her, and examining
approvingly and with feminine minuteness of observation the spotless
cleanliness of the little table.
“You have picked up wonderfully,” said Camperdown a few minutes later,
moving the lamp in order that he might have a better view of her
features. “I was worried about you two weeks ago.”
“I am in excellent health now, thanks to your doses,” said Stargarde
with a laughing grimace that revealed to him the two rows of teeth that
Zilla in her vile slang called “white nuns.”
“Your tea is ready,” she went on, holding out one of the big, blue
teacups that he had sent to her to be refilled for the third time.
He had fallen into a sudden reverie, and seeing that he sat with eyes
bent abstractedly on his knife and fork, Stargarde got up and took the
cup around the table to him.
When she set it down he glanced up quickly, and was about to ask her
pardon, but stopped short, the words arrested on his lips by the
expression of her face as she stood looking down at him. At last it was
a pleasure to her to minister to him, at last his “bird of free and
careless wing” had been caught.
He grew pale, drew his breath hard and fast and laid his hand
masterfully over hers.
She started, and drew her fingers from him. Then with her throat
suffused with color, and streaks of red across her white cheeks, she
walked to the window and gazed out at a drizzling rain that had begun to
fall.
Camperdown raised the cup to his lips once or twice without tasting the
tea, then set it down, and with a last glance at the straight, lissome
back of the disconsolate figure by the window, returned to his patient.
Stargarde glanced over her shoulder in a startled manner when the door
closed behind him. “I must get away; I cannot go back with him. Mrs.
White,” to the farmer’s wife, who came gliding like a happy ghost to her
side, “I cannot wait any longer for the doctor; don’t tell him I’ve
gone.”
The woman, hardly conscious of what she was doing in her rapturous state
of mind at the prospect of her son’s recovery, wrapped Stargarde’s cloak
about her.
“Tell him that I don’t mind the rain and the darkness,” said Stargarde
hurriedly. “I need the walk; I will come again to-morrow to see you. I
am praying for your boy; good-night,” and with feverish haste she
slipped away.
Over the wet and sloppy road she went, sometimes breaking into a run,
then walking so slowly that she scarcely seemed to be moving, her
tortured face bent on her breast, or lifted inquiringly to the dripping
sky above her. The road was almost deserted, but once or twice she
shrunk aside to allow belated Negroes to pass her, who were urging on
their horses in the direction of their homes in Hammonds Plains.
She did not choose the way by which they had gone to the farmhouse, but
turned into the long stretch of road leading past the cotton factory,
and skirting the wide common where military parades are held.
It was a highway cheerful enough on a bright day, but unspeakably lonely
and dreary on a dark night, when sky and earth were alike mournful. Soon
she sank down on a stone by the roadside, and burst into a flood of
passionate tears. “I cannot—I will not—it is not right! O God, show me
my duty.” Then kneeling on the ground with her head against the stone,
she prayed long and fervently.
It was some time before the struggle was over, the battle fought, but at
last she arose, self under foot, as it usually was in her conflicts. She
tried to shake the water from her garments, then patiently plodded on in
the direction of the town, the electric lamps shining like signal lights
before her.
A splashing sound behind made her pause suddenly and look back. There
were the two lights of the carriage, Polypharmacy looming between them
like a mountain of a horse. Her heart beat violently. How acutely her
lover had guessed that she would take this road to the town. A wild
first impulse to hide from him made her slip into the shadow of a
building that she was passing.
He was driving slowly, and at every few paces was putting out his head
and narrowly inspecting the road. “Stargarde, Stargarde,” she heard him
say softly when he was at a little distance from her.
Something impelled her to go to him despite herself. “Here I am, Brian,”
she said with a final convulsive sob, and wearily dragging her limbs
over the miry way.
He dropped the reins, put out both hands and assisted her in beside him.
“Poor child, you are very wet,” he said in his ordinary tone of voice;
“you should not have run away from me.” Then seeing that she turned her
face to the cloth-covered side of the buggy, he forebore further
question or remark, and they drove in silence across the Common and down
through the town to the Pavilion.
There he sprang out and assisted her to alight, then followed her to her
room where she sat down beside a bright fire and shivered slightly.
“You will at once change your wet things,” he said.
She blushed deeply, but neither spoke nor looked at him till his hand
was laid on the door. Then she turned her deep, blue eyes toward him.
“Good Brian, dear patient Brian.”
He drew a little nearer to her as if fascinated.
“So long you have had to wait,” she said with an adorable smile. “Now——”
“You confess that you love me,” he said quietly.
“Yes, with my whole heart and soul.”
“You made a brave fight, Stargarde.”
“Oh, I did not know what it was,” she said ardently. “I knew love was
not selfish, yet I thought it would crowd my people out of my affections
to love you. Then I did not want to give up my will. I thought I had
chosen my life-work.”
“And what do you think now?” he asked, folding his arms and coming a
little nearer to her.
“The love that I feel for you,” she exclaimed, clasping her hands over
her beautiful breast, “it makes me love humanity not less but more, a
thousand times more. Every man is dearer to me for your dear sake, every
woman because she is part of man——”
As she spoke she lifted her face to a photograph of the gemlike Garvagh
Madonna that hung on the wall above her. The large hat, slipping from
her golden head, showed numberless little rings of hair curled tightly
by the damp air of the evening. Her parted lips, her rapt expression,
instead of drawing her lover nearer, made him suddenly retreat with a
gesture of inexpressible pain.
Her features at once lost their unearthly expression. “Brian,” she said,
holding out her hands to him, “Brian, my dear boy——”
And still he hesitated. “What is wrong with you?” she asked in most
womanly anxiety.
“You are so much above me,” vehemently and brokenly, “I am not fit for
you. You are like something holy. I dare not touch you.”
“You will get over that,” she said, shaking her head and smiling
happily; “and I wish I were half as good as you fancy me. Come, dear
lad, I will make the first advance. Here is a betrothal kiss for you;
and then you must go home.”
She got up, and for the first time the dimpled cheek was laid willingly
against his, her arm slipped around his neck, and like a man in a trance
of painful ecstasy he pressed his lips to the beloved head laid upon his
breast, and heard her sweet lips murmur a tender prayer for a blessing
on their united lives.
Then with a passionate embrace and a heartfelt cry of “Unworthy,
unworthy,” he hurried in his tumultuous fashion from the room.