"He wanted to sell the island; he sent me off on that business lately.
He'll sell it sometime, of course, but I don't know how complicating the
delay is. He's the kind of man you can't ask; you have to wait until he
tells you. You can't _make_ a person have confidence in you. Won't you
please have some of these strawberries with me? Do!"
"No; you must eat them _all_," said Dosia, with charming authority, her
arms before her on the table, elbow-sleeved, white and dimpled, as she
regarded him. He seemed to take up all the corner, against the
background of the green honeysuckle in the fresh morning light. With
that smile upon his face, he seemed extraordinarily masculine and
absorbing, yet appealing, too.
Dosia felt carried out of herself by a sudden heady resolution--or,
rather, not a new resolution, but one that she had had in mind for a
long, long time, before, oh, before she had even known who this man
was. She had planned over and over again how she was to say those words,
and now the time had come. She could not sit here with him in this new,
sweet friendliness without saying them. She had imagined the scene in so
many different ways! When she had gone over it by herself, her cheeks
had flushed, her eyes had shone with the tears in them. The words as she
spoke them had gone deeply, convincingly, from heart to heart--or
perhaps, in an assumed, tremulous lightness, the meaning in her impulse
had shown all the clearer to one who understood. For a year and a half
the uttered thought had been the climax to which her dreams had led; it
would have seemed a monstrous, impossible thing that it had not been
reached before.
She began now, in a moment's pause, only to find, too late, that all
warmth and naturalness had left her with the effort. Fluent
dream-practice is only too apt to make one uncomfortably crude and
conscious in real life.
"I want to thank you for being so kind to me the night of that accident
on the train coming up from the South." Poor Dosia instantly felt
committed to a mistake. Her eyes fell for a moment on his hand, as it
lay upon the table, with a terribly disconcerting remembrance that hers
had not only rested in it, but that in fancy she had more than once
pillowed her cheek upon it, and, knowing that he had seen the look, she
continued in desperation, with still increasing stiffness and formality:
"I have always known, of course, that it was you. You must pardon me for
not thanking you before."
The old unapproachable manner instantly incased him, as if in
remembrance of something that hurt. "Oh, pray don't mention it," he
said, with a formality that matched hers. "It was nothing but what
anyone would have done--little enough, anyway."
What happened afterward she did not know, except that in a few minutes
he had gone.
She watched him go off down the path with that swift, long, easy step;
watched till the last vestige of the gray suit was out of sight--he had
a fashion of wearing gray!--before clearing off the table. Then she went
and sat on the back steps that led into the little garden, bright with
the sunshine and a blaze of tulips at her feet....
She had never supposed that any girl could care for a man until he had
shown that he cared for her--it was the unmaidenly, impossible thing.
And now--how beautiful he was, how dear! A wistful smile trembled around
her lips. All that had gone before with other men suddenly became as
nothing, forgotten and out of mind, and she herself made clean by this
purifying fire. Even if she never had anything more in her whole life,
she had this--even if she never had anything more. Yet what had she?
Nothing and less than nothing. If he had ever thought of her, if he had
ever dreamed of her, if her soft, frightened hand trustfully clinging
fast to his, only to be comforted by his touch, had been a sign and a
symbol to him of some dearer trust and faith for him alone--if in some
way, as she dimly visioned it, the thought had once been his, it had
gone long ago. Every action showed it. And yet, and yet--so
unconquerably does the soul speak that, though he might deny her
attraction for him, she knew that she had it. It was something to which
he might never give way, but it was unalterably there--as it was
unalterably there with her. All that year at home, when she believed she
had not been thinking of him, she really had been thinking of him. We
learn to know each other sometimes in long absences. She began to
perceive in him now a humility and a pride strangely at variance with
each other and both equally at variance with the bright assurance of his
outer manner. He gave to every one; he would work early and late for
others, in his yearning sympathy and affection: yet he himself, from the
very intenseness of his desire for it, stood aloof, and drew back from
the insistence of any claim for himself. They might meet a hundred times
and grow no closer; they might grow farther and farther away.
Dosia felt that other women must have loved him--how could they have
helped it? She had a pang of sorrow for them--for herself it made no
difference. If she had pain for all her life afterward, she was glad at
this moment that he was worthy to be loved; she need never be ashamed of
loving him--he was "good." The word seemed to contain some beautiful
comfort and uplifting. No matter what experience he had passed through
in his struggle with the world, he had held some simple, honorable,
_clean_ quality intact. The Dosia who must always have some heart-warm
dream to live by had it now; for all her life she could love him, pray
for him. She had always thought that to love was to be happy; now she
was to love and be unhappy--yet she would not have it otherwise.
So slight, so young, so lightly dealt with, Dosia had the pathetically
clear insight and the power that comes to those who see, not themselves
alone, their own desires and hopes, but the universe in which they
stand, and view their acts and thoughts in relation to it. She must see
Truth, "and be glad, even if it hurt."
The sunshine fell upon her in the garden; she was bathed in it. Whether
she had nights of straining, bitter wakefulness and days of heartache
afterward, this joy of loving was enough for her to-day--the joy of
loving him. She saw in that lovely, brooding thought of him what that
first meeting had taught of his character, and molded in with it her
knowledge of him now, to make the real man far more imperfect, though
far dearer. Yet, if he ever loved her as she loved him, part of that for
which she had always sought love would have to be foregone--she could
never come to him, as she had fondly dreamed of doing, and pour out to
him all those hopes and fears, those struggles and mistakes and trials
and indignities, the shame and the penitence that had been hers. She
could never talk of Lawson--her past must be forever unshriven and
uncomforted. Bailey Girard would be the last man on earth to whom she
could bare her heart in confession; these were the things that touched
him on the raw. He "hated the sound of Lawson's name." How many times
had George Sutton's face blotted out hers? If he knew _that_! She must
forever be unshriven. There would be things also, perhaps, that _she_
could not bear to hear! The eternal hurt of love, that it never can be
truly one with the beloved, touched her with its sadness, and then
slipped away in the thought of him now--not the man who was just to help
and protect her with his love, but the man whom she longed to help also.
His pleased eyes, his lips, the way his hair fell over his forehead--She
thought of him with the fond dream-passion of the maiden, that is often
the shyest thing on earth, ready to veil itself and turn and elude and
hide at the first chance that it may be revealed.
"Dosia! Dosia, where are you?"
Suddenly she saw that the sunshine had faded out, the sky had grown
gray, a chill wind had sprung up. All the trouble, all the stress of the
world, seemed to encompass her with that tone in the voice of Lois.