OWEN FORD’S CONFESSION
“I’m so sorry Gilbert is away,” said Anne. “He had to go--Allan Lyons
at the Glen has met with a serious accident. He will not likely be
home till very late. But he told me to tell you he’d be up and over
early enough in the morning to see you before you left. It’s too
provoking. Susan and I had planned such a nice little jamboree for
your last night here.”
She was sitting beside the garden brook on the little rustic seat
Gilbert had built. Owen Ford stood before her, leaning against the
bronze column of a yellow birch. He was very pale and his face bore
the marks of the preceding sleepless night. Anne, glancing up at him,
wondered if, after all, his summer had brought him the strength it
should. Had he worked too hard over his book? She remembered that for
a week he had not been looking well.
“I’m rather glad the doctor is away,” said Owen slowly. “I wanted to
see you alone, Mrs. Blythe. There is something I must tell somebody,
or I think it will drive me mad. I’ve been trying for a week to look
it in the face--and I can’t. I know I can trust you--and, besides, you
will understand. A woman with eyes like yours always understands. You
are one of the folks people instinctively tell things to. Mrs. Blythe,
I love Leslie. LOVE her! That seems too weak a word!”
His voice suddenly broke with the suppressed passion of his utterance.
He turned his head away and hid his face on his arm. His whole form
shook. Anne sat looking at him, pale and aghast. She had never
thought of this! And yet--how was it she had never thought of it? It
now seemed a natural and inevitable thing. She wondered at her own
blindness. But--but--things like this did not happen in Four Winds.
Elsewhere in the world human passions might set at defiance human
conventions and laws--but not HERE, surely. Leslie had kept summer
boarders off and on for ten years, and nothing like this had happened.
But perhaps they had not been like Owen Ford; and the vivid, LIVING
Leslie of this summer was not the cold, sullen girl of other years.
Oh, SOMEBODY should have thought of this! Why hadn’t Miss Cornelia
thought of it? Miss Cornelia was always ready enough to sound the
alarm where men were concerned. Anne felt an unreasonable resentment
against Miss Cornelia. Then she gave a little inward groan. No matter
who was to blame the mischief was done. And Leslie--what of Leslie?
It was for Leslie Anne felt most concerned.
“Does Leslie know this, Mr. Ford?” she asked quietly.
“No--no,--unless she has guessed it. You surely don’t think I’d be cad
and scoundrel enough to tell her, Mrs. Blythe. I couldn’t help loving
her--that’s all--and my misery is greater than I can bear.”
“Does SHE care?” asked Anne. The moment the question crossed her lips
she felt that she should not have asked it. Owen Ford answered it with
overeager protest.
“No--no, of course not. But I could make her care if she were free--I
know I could.”
“She does care--and he knows it,” thought Anne. Aloud she said,
sympathetically but decidedly:
“But she is not free, Mr. Ford. And the only thing you can do is to go
away in silence and leave her to her own life.”
“I know--I know,” groaned Owen. He sat down on the grassy bank and
stared moodily into the amber water beneath him. “I know there’s
nothing to do--nothing but to say conventionally, ‘Good-bye, Mrs.
Moore. Thank you for all your kindness to me this summer,’ just as I
would have said it to the sonsy, bustling, keen-eyed housewife I
expected her to be when I came. Then I’ll pay my board money like any
honest boarder and go! Oh, it’s very simple. No doubt--no
perplexity--a straight road to the end of the world!
“And I’ll walk it--you needn’t fear that I won’t, Mrs. Blythe. But it
would be easier to walk over red-hot ploughshares.”
Anne flinched with the pain of his voice. And there was so little she
could say that would be adequate to the situation. Blame was out of
the question--advice was not needed--sympathy was mocked by the man’s
stark agony. She could only feel with him in a maze of compassion and
regret. Her heart ached for Leslie! Had not that poor girl suffered
enough without this?
“It wouldn’t be so hard to go and leave her if she were only happy,”
resumed Owen passionately. “But to think of her living death--to
realize what it is to which I do leave her! THAT is the worst of all.
I would give my life to make her happy--and I can do nothing even to
help her--nothing. She is bound forever to that poor wretch--with
nothing to look forward to but growing old in a succession of empty,
meaningless, barren years. It drives me mad to think of it. But I
must go through my life, never seeing her, but always knowing what she
is enduring. It’s hideous--hideous!”
“It is very hard,” said Anne sorrowfully. “We--her friends here--all
know how hard it is for her.”
“And she is so richly fitted for life,” said Owen rebelliously.
“Her beauty is the least of her dower--and she is the most beautiful
woman I’ve ever known. That laugh of hers! I’ve angled all summer to
evoke that laugh, just for the delight of hearing it. And her
eyes--they are as deep and blue as the gulf out there. I never saw
such blueness--and gold! Did you ever see her hair down, Mrs. Blythe?”
“No.”
“I did--once. I had gone down to the Point to go fishing with Captain
Jim but it was too rough to go out, so I came back. She had taken the
opportunity of what she expected to be an afternoon alone to wash her
hair, and she was standing on the veranda in the sunshine to dry it.
It fell all about her to her feet in a fountain of living gold. When
she saw me she hurried in, and the wind caught her hair and swirled it
all around her--Danae in her cloud. Somehow, just then the knowledge
that I loved her came home to me--and realized that I had loved her
from the moment I first saw her standing against the darkness in that
glow of light. And she must live on here--petting and soothing Dick,
pinching and saving for a mere existence, while I spend my life longing
vainly for her, and debarred, by that very fact, from even giving her
the little help a friend might. I walked the shore last night, almost
till dawn, and thrashed it all out over and over again. And yet, in
spite of everything, I can’t find it in my heart to be sorry that I
came to Four Winds. It seems to me that, bad as everything is, it
would be still worse never to have known Leslie. It’s burning, searing
pain to love her and leave her--but not to have loved her is
unthinkable. I suppose all this sounds very crazy--all these terrible
emotions always do sound foolish when we put them into our inadequate
words. They are not meant to be spoken--only felt and endured. I
shouldn’t have spoken--but it has helped--some. At least, it has given
me strength to go away respectably tomorrow morning, without making a
scene. You’ll write me now and then, won’t you, Mrs. Blythe, and give
me what news there is to give of her?”
“Yes,” said Anne. “Oh, I’m so sorry you are going--we’ll miss you
so--we’ve all been such friends! If it were not for this you could
come back other summers. Perhaps, even yet--by-and-by--when you’ve
forgotten, perhaps--”
“I shall never forget--and I shall never come back to Four Winds,” said
Owen briefly.
Silence and twilight fell over the garden. Far away the sea was
lapping gently and monotonously on the bar. The wind of evening in the
poplars sounded like some sad, weird, old rune--some broken dream of
old memories. A slender shapely young aspen rose up before them
against the fine maize and emerald and paling rose of the western sky,
which brought out every leaf and twig in dark, tremulous, elfin
loveliness.
“Isn’t that beautiful?” said Owen, pointing to it with the air of a man
who puts a certain conversation behind him.
“It’s so beautiful that it hurts me,” said Anne softly. “Perfect
things like that always did hurt me--I remember I called it ‘the queer
ache’ when I was a child. What is the reason that pain like this seems
inseparable from perfection? Is it the pain of finality--when we
realize that there can be nothing beyond but retrogression?”
“Perhaps,” said Owen dreamily, “it is the prisoned infinite in us
calling out to its kindred infinite as expressed in that visible
perfection.”
“You seem to have a cold in the head. Better rub some tallow on your
nose when you go to bed,” said Miss Cornelia, who had come in through
the little gate between the firs in time to catch Owen’s last remark.
Miss Cornelia liked Owen; but it was a matter of principle with her to
visit any “high-falutin” language from a man with a snub.
Miss Cornelia personated the comedy that ever peeps around the corner
at the tragedy of life. Anne, whose nerves had been rather strained,
laughed hysterically, and even Owen smiled. Certainly, sentiment and
passion had a way of shrinking out of sight in Miss Cornelia’s
presence. And yet to Anne nothing seemed quite as hopeless and dark
and painful as it had seemed a few moments before. But sleep was far
from her eyes that night.