"That is dear of you. I shall always keep your present, just as grannie
will keep your love for her. It's very precious."
Hope and will went out of her. She put her clasped hands on the chair in
front of her, and bent her head upon them, trembling.
"What is it?" she said at last, "what is it that has come between us? Is
it what you told me once in the playhouse? that you were going to give
your life away when you chose?"
He laughed a little, sadly, to himself.
"How long ago that seems!" he mused. "No, it was a different thing I
meant then."
"What was it? Tell me, Osmond."
"I can tell you now, for I shall never do it. It smells of madness to
me, now I see what living demands of us. It was only,--well, my body
hadn't done me much service in the ways I should have liked."
"Tell me, Osmond!"
"I meant to give it, living, to some scientist, to experiment on. To a
doctor, if I could find one that would meet me as I wanted to be met, to
work on,--with drugs, with germs,--the things they do to dogs, you
know."
She forgot how he had held himself aloof from her, or that some grain of
pride might well have met his coldness. She was kneeling beside him, her
hands about his neck, her head upon his breast.
"No, Osmond, no," she sobbed. "It would kill me."
The man sat still. Then he spoke, and his voice was hard as iron.
"It will never happen, I tell you."
"To have you tortured," she was sobbing. "To have them hurt you--your
hands, your dear hands--"
He lifted one of them, in a dazed way, and looked at it, all brown with
work and yet a wonder in its virile power. Then a flame passed over him
and burned up what kept him from her. His arms were about her and he
bent his mouth to hers. For the first time since he could remember, he
forgot what he had called his destiny. And after they had kissed, he
said,--
"Now, sweetheart, now we can talk. It's better so, even if we say
good-by to-morrow."
She drew apart from him and went back to her chair. But there she
stretched out her hands to him and Osmond took them, and so, holding
them, they spoke out their true minds. Her eyes were brimming full.
"I wasn't sure you would take my present," she said. "It's dear of you
to take it, Osmond."
"Your love, your wonderful love!"
"I selected it with great care, dear." She was laughing. "It's very
shiny, and nice, and warranted to last. It's the strongest love I could
find. I never saw one like it. Shall we live in the playhouse now,
dear?"
"You will live in my heart. Rose, I kissed you."
She bent to him.
"Kiss me again. Kisses are little blooms budding out of my love. You are
a gardener-man. You know the faster flowers are picked, the sooner they
bloom again."
He was regarding her in wonder.
"You must be crazy to think you like me!" he said honestly. Again she
laughed.
"I am! stark mad. I feel as if a thousand birds were singing and all the
lilies opening: You remember how they smelled that night, Osmond? You
wouldn't go with me to smell them. They've come to us. They're here."
He held her gaze.
"Be serious," he said.
"I can't, I like you so!"
"Only till I ask you this. You said once you had always been in love
with love."
"Always. Ought I to be ashamed of it? I am not. I am proud. To find the
half of you that you have been lonesome for, and then be faithful to
it,--oh, beautiful!"
"Are you in love with love, or are you in love with me?"
"With you, dear Osmond." The clear eyes answered him in a joyous
confidence.
"I must have taken hold of your imagination."
"Yes! You make me see visions and dream dreams. Hear how fast I talk to
you! The words can't tumble out quick enough, there are so many more
pushing them."
"No, I mean I have taken hold of your imagination because I am so
queer."
"You are queer, Osmond. It's queer to be so darling."
"If I were sure!" He loosed her hands and looked away from her, and his
face set gravely.
"What, Osmond?"
"If I were sure it was fair to you--best for you to let you know the
truth--then I'd tell you."
"Tell me what?"
He drew her hands back into his. He was looking at her with the first
voluntary yielding of his whole self. It lighted his face into beauty,
the chrism of the adoring spirit laid upon trembling lip and flashing
eye. "I have withheld from you," he said, in quick, short utterance,
"because it had to be. But if you care, too, why deny us both one hour
of happiness, if we part to-morrow?"
"Deny me nothing," she was murmuring. "Let me see your heart."
"You should see my soul, if it could be. Dearest, it was so from the
first minute. I was afraid of you with the terrible fear of love. Don't
you see how different it is with us? You longed for love because you are
the angel of it. I was afraid of it because it would have to mean hunger
and pain and thirst."
"But not now! not now! We have found each other, and it means the same
thing for both of us."
"We have got to part, you know, for a couple of ages or so, or even till
we die. Maybe I can get into some sort of trim by that time, if I give
my mind to it; but here it's no use, dear, you see."
"No use! Osmond, I have given you my love. What do you mean to do with
it?"
He caught his breath miserably.
"I am going to--God! what am I going to do! You are honest," he cried,
"you mean it all, but--sweetheart, look at me, and see it is not
possible. To-night ends it."
She withdrew her hands from his, and sat upright in her chair.
"Then," she said, "you are a coward."
"Am I?" He looked at her, blanched and sorrowful. "Am I, Rose?"
"You are a coward. You love me--"
"You know it! You do know that!"
"You know you do, and then you refuse to take the simple, sweet,
faithful way with me."
"What way, my dear?"
She did not even flush at the words, sprung from a great sincerity.
"Shall I ask you? Shall I ask you to let me take your name and live with
you, and be true to you?"
They looked at each other in the terrible recognition that brings souls
almost too close.
"You are a great woman, my dear," said Osmond. He rose and stood before
her. "Look at me. I hate my body. Could you love it?"
"I do love it," said the woman. "And I love your soul. And I am ashamed
to think we can know the things we have known and then think of the
bodies we live in. Grannie believes in immortal life. I believe in it
too, since I have known you."
"There are a good many hours, my dear, when we forget immortal life. The
world goes hard with us. In those times, shall you look at me and hate
me?"
She was smiling at him through tears.
"I shall look at you and love you, stupid!" she said. "Oh, how little
men know!"
"And then," he was continuing, in his bitter honesty, "I am a laboring
man. I told Peter you were a terrible Parisian."
She shook her head.
"You don't quite know what you are, Osmond. There's a good deal of
grannie in you. Perhaps that is one of the things I love. You work with
your hands. Everything is possible to you, every kind of splendid thing,
because you have not been spoiled by artificial life, the ambitions of
it, the poor, mean hypocrisies. Strange that I should be talking about
labor!"
"Why strange?"
"Because I hated the mention of it while my father lived. But now I seem
to have gone back to my old feeling of a kind of pity for them all,--the
ones that work blindly out of the light,--I see them as Ivan Gorof saw
them, that great sea of the oppressed."
"But not every workingman is oppressed."
"No, no! Not here. But in other countries where they are surging and
trying to have their ignorant way. And they are no more to be pitied
than the rich. And I keep wishing for them, not money and power and
leisure, such as the rich have, but something better, something I wish
the rich had, too."
"The heart that sees God, grannie would say."
"Maybe grannie would pray for it, Osmond. Maybe I could sing it--I hope
to sing now--maybe you could put it into the land and bring it out in
flowers."
"That's poetry!" said Osmond. He was smiling at her unconscious way of
showing him how lovely she was and how loving. "I am going now, dear. I
am going to take your present home carefully and look at it alone."
She knitted wistful brows a moment. Then she too smiled.
"You will see how valuable it is when you look at it," she said. "It
will shine so."
He had risen and stood before her, looking at her.
"Rose," he said, "you're a darling."
"Am I?" She was radiant.
"I am going to think up the things lovers have said, and read Solomon's
Song, maybe! But now I'm going back to the plantation, to let the
Almighty God and the undergods have a chance to tell me how to give you
up."
"Ask them now, Osmond," she breathed. "Ask here, while I am here to
answer, too."
"No," said Osmond. He shook his head. "Not while we are together. I
can't listen to Him."
* * * * *