I
“Not that way,” said Dreeme hastily as Deborah instinctively turned up
the Leeminster Road toward the Saccarac River.
Everybody seemed to head in that direction as though there were
a magnet at the end of the road attracting them irresistibly. He
would change the scheme of things by facing another way, by facing
an opposite direction than that in which lay the Westcott farm, the
burned mill, the trampled bank of the river, and the creaking bridge
that had groaned with the weight of the coroner’s buggy. She wheeled
on her small feet and followed him obediently and they passed the dark
front of his little house and the tarnished brass plate upon which was
inscribed “Dr. Daniel Dreeme.” A moment later they were walking side
by side through the main street of Marlborough, a main street that
speedily opened into a tiny square faced by the small church, the post
office and general store, and Mrs. Larkin’s boarding house where nobody
ever boarded. The blank fronts of the scattered buildings gloomed at
them incuriously. Though this was the heart of the community Dreeme
could not hear a single beat. The heart had stopped pulsing for the
night and even in the daylight it functioned but sluggishly. No lights
glimmered from the windows of the houses for all the inhabitants
had long ago crept into their beds and stretched out beneath their
home-made quilts to wait uneagerly for another early rising. Yet the
moon flooded the square and made it as bright as day and in that
crystal bath they walked slowly, feeling the cold light run along their
faces and ripple over their arms.
“Did you expect to see me tonight?” asked Deborah. Her voice was a thin
silver wire plucked by a soft finger.
“No,” said Dreeme. “But I wanted to see you. I didn’t know it, though,
until you came down the path like a little ghost.”
“I’m not a ghost,” she said. “I wanted to see you all evening. I sat by
the window and waited.”
“Why?” he asked.
She was silent at that and only shook her head.
“Have you anything to tell me?” he inquired.
She shook her head again.
Moved by a sudden impulse he put his finger under her chin and raised
her face. Her violet-blue eyes gazed at him calmly but something in
them, some far-away message, set his pulses pounding furiously. He
dropped his hand and looked away. Unconsciously they hastened their
pace, passing through the square and the narrow side street that led
toward the lower end of the town. The houses thinned out, falling away
like specters from them, and an instant later they were trudging along
a country road.
“If you follow this road far enough,” he said with an effort at
lightness, “you’ll reach the real world.”
“I shall travel on it soon,” she answered. There was a break in her
voice.
“What is the real world like?” she asked after a moment.
“It is full of people,” he said. “It is full of cities. It is like a
noisy jungle. It is easy to hide there.”
She did not answer him. For a long time they walked in silence, their
shoulders touching lightly as their bodies swayed over the uneven road.
His hand rubbed against hers as they moved along the sandy stretch
and for no reason whatsoever he resisted the temptation to take her
small fingers in his own. There didn’t seem to be anything worth
saying although he was conscious that she was waiting confidently for
something to be said. He knew what it was and she knew, also, that both
of them were saying it without words, without the use of futile speech.
Their brushing shoulders said it to one another and their touching
hands made it unmistakably plain.
“We’d better turn back,” he remarked finally. They were far along the
road now and no houses loomed their dark bulks against the white sea of
the flowing moon.
They turned and retraced their steps, walking swiftly through the
loose sand and pebbles of the road. She continued to look straight
ahead and occasionally he would glance sideways at the cool oval of
her face. It seemed but an instant before they were back among the
squatting houses, closed in by the silent walls and shut away from the
full light of the moon. In the shadow of the frame-building that served
for post office and general store she stopped and turned to him and
said:
“I put my best dress on.”
A moment later he realized that both his arms were about her and that
he was saying:
“I love you! I love you! I love you!”
He kept repeating it and she did not interrupt him but leaned against
him listening contentedly. When he stopped she looked up at him and
said:
“Shall I tell you that I love you?” He said:
“I’m babbling like a fool. I’ve been wanting to tell you this all day
and I didn’t know it till just now.”
“I led you on,” she said soberly. Then she laughed with a quick
feverish gaiety.
“I didn’t need to be led on,” he declared. “It was the getting started
that was difficult. I’m a slow idiot. I wasn’t sure. I’m not sure even
now.”
“That you love me?” she gasped.
“That _you_ love _me_,” he returned.
“Oh, _that_!” she said.
She put both her slim arms around his neck and embraced him tightly.
For an instant he seemed to be wearing a necklace of fire.
“It was because I loved you that I ran to you this morning,” she
announced. “I wanted you to protect me.”
“Good Lord! Was it only this morning?” he exclaimed.
“It was only yesterday that we met,” she said. There was wonder in her
voice, too.
He bent down to her and kissed her for the first time. Her lips were
like damp rose-petals and they clung to his greedily.
“If it was only yesterday,” he said, “how long our Paradise will be.”
She disengaged herself from him and they walked slowly up the street
toward the Slater house, hand in hand.
“Some day,” he said gravely, “I’m going to ask you what your last name
is.”
A small ripple of laughter broke from her.
“It’s Morton,” she announced. “My name is Deborah Morton.”
“My first name is Daniel,” he declared. “At present I am in the lion’s
den. I haven’t been bitten, though.”
“Daniel and Deborah,” she repeated softly to herself.
At the gate to the Slater house they paused and he looked down at her,
noting her fresh white dress and the fragility of her small figure.
“You are nothing but a child,” he said. “What is this?”
He touched the square brooch on her breast. She unpinned it and handed
it to him.
“Do you want it?” she asked. “I’ve had it always. It was given to me by
my mother. My father gave it to her and his father gave it to him. It
has been in the Morton family for years, for ages.”
He held it up to the moonlight and inspected it and as he saw what it
was an exclamation of amazement broke from him.
“What is it?” she asked. “Have you seen it before?”
“No,” he said, handing it back to her. “Keep it. It must be some sort
of an heirloom.”
She pinned it back on her breast and lifted up her face that he
might kiss her. “Good-night,” he murmured, and an instant later her
ghost-like form hurried up the path to the front door. Dreeme turned
toward his own house, wondering why Deborah should have a brooch upon
which was the finely-cut cameo of a goat’s head, the exact replica of
the drawing he had wrenched from the dead hand of Wagner.