"Notely! You will be leading Fluke to go wrong, Notely. He takes no
interest at home or in the fishing since you and those pleasure-men you
have with you have been keeping open house at the Neck. When he comes
home he has been wild and drinking, and is moody. It is a week since
you have been away from your home and wife with your yacht anchored
here off shore, hunting and cruising, and such times at the old
Garrison place at night--it is the talk!"
Notely laughed and rose. Vesty had been standing looking down at him
earnestly, where he sat in her doorway: she held her baby asleep on one
strong arm, its face against her neck.
Notely turned his own face away a little, jingling the free coin in his
pockets. "Why, I have been making money on my own account, Mrs. Gurdon
Rafe," he cried gayly, "since I opened the quarry. And no man, nor no
woman either, now says to me, Do this or do that, go here or go there.
From all accounts, moreover, my wife and mother are enjoying themselves
extremely well as ever during my absence. As for Fluke Rafe, he is a
good fellow, but he was always wild as a hawk."
"O Notely! if you would only help such men, as you might, instead of
being as wild as a hawk with them!"
"It takes a hawk to catch a hawk, my dear: all the ministers will tell
you that."
"Is that what you are doing it for?"
"Well, no; since you are a Basin, and only truth avails, there has been
hitherto no deep moral design in my merry orgies at the Neck. But
to-night, Vesty, is my grand affair; to be hallowed by the presence of
all the Basins: my feast and ball to them, you know--my oldest and best
friends. And you--why, Vesty," he went on, in another tone, "you
remember we had always a dance a week at the Basin, and you and I led
them off together. Come, then, for the sake of old times and the
feeling of the rest, though you may enjoy it yourself no more."
He spoke with reckless meaning, and his eyes, that had such fatal power
of expression in them, looked deep into hers. She paled; the baby
threw up a sleeping hand against her face.
"There is another thing, Notely," she said. "Gurdon does not like it
that you come here for an hour or more every day to sit and talk alone
with me while they are at the fishing. He is not much to suspect, and
he was always fond of you and trusted you; but it is not doing right by
Gurdon."
Her eyes looked infinitely sorrowful into his; blushes, like pain, dyed
her cheeks.
"O Vesty, my pure one!--then tell me that you love me still--love me as
you used to do--and I'll go away content, and not come any more. Touch
my head as you used to do; kiss me once more, with those words, and----"
The baby's white, sleeping palm pressed hard against the mother's
burning cheek.
"Such words must not be any more, Notely. Go away and be the good,
powerful man God meant you to be, and I shall love you more than I ever
did in my life."
"Saint Vesta! I have lost you!" said Notely: his voice shook with
passion; the thin, strong hand that he put up, as if shading his eyes,
hid wild and angry tears.
"I have been faithfully engaged in the career to which you so tenderly
and considerately dedicated me," he went on. "What will you have? I
worked last winter like a dog; nothing is easy won, I think: but there
is no young man in this State who has been so flattered with public
notice as I. I am making my own money--no young man more shrewdly,
they say. What will you have? I have growing fame, prosperity, an
accomplished society woman for my wife. Was not that what you wished
for me?" His words stung.
Vesty had her dim look; she had turned cold; her speech groped
pitifully. "But I think I saw--I think I understood a little, after
all--because I loved you--what are you doing it _for_, Notely?"
"Ah, there, indeed!--what for? I have lost my object, you know, Saint
Vesta. For fame and frolic and the devil, I suppose--since we are
talking face to face with an immortal Basin--and to fill up the time
generally."
"I am glad that I did what I did," cried the poor girl, her tongue
touched with sudden fire, as if from outside herself; "you loved me a
little, but you did not love me much!"
"Ah!" he caught his breath, his deep eyes thrilled her.
"If you had loved me much--such a man as to be true to me through hard
work and time and sorrow and all--then you could not have borne to be
any less a man, Notely Garrison, though you lost me, or whatever you
lost. But if anything could turn you from _that_, then time and trial
and all would have turned you, sooner or later, to be unkind and untrue
to me. I know it. Before God, I know it! You loved me a little, but
you did not love me much!"
"I am glad, for your sake and for my own," she said; "I am glad that I
did not marry you."
Then, as the fire flamed out, tears of despair rushed to her eyes,
because he looked as though she had hurt him so--his face more like a
beautiful cameo than ever, pure and sharp; he who was so debonair and
generous with them all, genial toward them always, and familiar with
the simplest and poorest. She longed impulsively to take him to her
heart, to give him with yearning tenderness the one caress he had
pleaded for: but, still seeing dimly where he was blind, she would not.
Notely watched that struggle, saw the impulse fade upon her face into a
white resolve; watched her keenly meanwhile with tumultuous hope.
"Vesty, once when we were little more than children, we were playing on
Ladle Rock and I fell. You did not leave me, frightened; insensible as
I was, you bathed my face and stayed by me. When I came to myself my
head was in your lap. You had on a brown cotton frock, made in an
old-womanish grave fashion, and you were looking down at me. From that
moment all my life changed--who can explain it? I was a child in my
feeling toward you no longer, with childish thoughts. I loved
you--loved you as I love you now--but you have robbed me of my life."
"No," she said. That sad fire from outside herself came back to her.
"You have only been denied one pleasure the more that you wanted, and
that would not have been so dear to you long if you had not lost it.
Life is above that, you used to tell me, but you have forgotten."
"Rather, I have grown wiser," he said, but for the instant he set his
clear, fine face away from her. "It is a distorted notion that our
existence here is for cold denial, from however pure an imagination.
It is better to run with life, to follow joyfully the great trend of
nature."
He looked at her: her staid, unreproachful eyes, her calm and holy
face, smote him.
"My pleasure-friends, as you call them, say that the Basins are simple.
That is a superficial observation;" he laughed with despair, and
proceeded to fill his pipe. "The Basins are like a rock."
"Notely," said she very slowly then, "your face is dear to me as this
little one upon my breast; it eats into my heart."
All life's sorrow looked through her, and a faith, a purpose, stronger
than life. Notely cast his misery from him with a sigh; the game was
over.
"Saint Vesta," said he simply, "I have lost you; that is the sad fact,
and I accept it. Still, since you care for me some, I shall be a
little merry. Come to my ball--Gurdon promised me you would both come."