From that day until they separated there was no change in her. It was
scarcely two weeks before their paths diverged again; but, in looking
back upon it afterward, it always seemed to Tredennis that some vaguely
extending length of time must have elapsed between the night when he
dismounted at the gate in the moonlight, and the morning when he turned
to look his last at Bertha, standing in the sun. Each morning when she
gave him his breakfast in the old-fashioned room, and he watched her as
she moved about, or poured out his coffee, or talked to Meg or Jack, who
breakfasted with them; each afternoon when Janey was brought down to lie
on the sofa, and she sat beside her singing pretty, foolish songs to
her, and telling her stories; each evening when the child fell asleep in
her arms, as she sang; each brief hour, later on, when the air had
cooled, and she went out to sit on the porch, or walk under the
trees,--seemed an experience of indefinite length, not to be marked by
hours, nor by sunrise and sunset, but by emotions. Her gentle interest
in his comfort continued just what it had been the first day he had been
so moved by it, and his care for her she accepted with a gratitude which
might have been sweet to any man. Having long since established his rank
in Janey's affections it was easy for him to make himself useful, in his
masculine fashion. During her convalescence his strong arms became the
child's favorite resting-place; when she was tired of her couch he could
carry her up and down the room without wearying; she liked his long,
steady strides, and the sound of his deep voice, and his unconscious air
of command disposed of many a difficulty. When Bertha herself was the
nurse he watched her faithfully, and when he saw in her any signs of
fatigue he took her place at once, and from the first she made no
protest against his quietly persistent determination to lighten her
burdens. Perhaps, through the fact that they were so lightened, or
through her relief from her previous anxiety, she seemed to grow
stronger as the child did. Her color became brighter and steadier, and
her look of lassitude and weariness left her. One morning, having been
beguiled out of doors by Jack and Meg, Tredennis heard her laugh in a
tone that made him rise from his chair by Janey, and go to the open
window.
He reached it just in time to see her run like a deer across the
sun-dappled grass, after a bright ball Meg had thrown to her, with an
infantile aimlessness which precluded all possibility of its being
caught. She made a graceful dart at it, picked it up, and came back
under the trees, tossing it in the air, and catching it again with a
deft turn of hand and wrist. She was flushed with the exercise, and, for
the moment, almost radiant; she held her dress closely about her figure,
her face was upturned and her eyes were uplifted, and she was as
unconscious as Meg herself.
When she saw him she threw the ball to the children, and came forward to
the window.
"Does Janey want me?" she asked.
"No. She is asleep."
"Do you want me?"
"I want to see you go on with your game."
"It is not my game," she answered, smiling. "It is Jack's and Meg's.
Suppose you come and join them. It will fill them with rapture, and I
shall like to look on."
When he came out she sat down under a tree leaning against the trunk,
and watched him, her eyes following the swift flight of the ball high
into the blue above them, as he flung it upward among the delighted
clamor of the children. He had always excelled in sports and feats of
strength, and in this simple feat of throwing the ball his physical
force and grace displayed themselves to decided advantage. The ball went
up, as an arrow flies from the bow, hurtling through the air, until it
was little more than a black speck to the eye. When it came back to
earth he picked it up and threw it again, and each time it seemed to
reach a greater height than the last.
"That is very fine," she said. "I like to see you do it."
"Why?" he asked, pausing.
"I like the force you put into it," she answered. "It scarcely seems
like play."
"I did not know that," he said; "but I am afraid I am always in earnest.
That is my misfortune."
"It is a great misfortune," she said. "Don't be in earnest," with a
gesture as if she would sweep the suggestion away with her hand. "Go on
with your game. Let us be like children, and play. Our holiday will be
over soon enough, and we shall have to return to Washington and effete
civilization."
"Is it a holiday?" he asked her.
"Yes," she answered. "Now that Janey is getting better I am deliberately
taking a holiday. Nothing rests me so much as forgetting things."
"Are you forgetting things?" he asked.
"Yes," she replied, looking away; "everything."
Then the children demanded his attention, and he returned to his
ball-throwing.
If she was taking a holiday with deliberate intention she did it well.
In a few days Janey was well enough to be carried out and laid on one of
the two hammocks swung beneath the trees, and then far the greater part
of the day was spent in the open air. To Tredennis it seemed that Bertha
made the most of every hour, whether she swung in her hammock with her
face upturned to the trees, or sat reading, or talking as she worked
with the decorous little basket, at which she had jeered, upon her knee.
He was often reminded in these days of what the professor had said of
her tenderness for her children. It revealed itself in a hundred
trifling ways, in her touch, in her voice, in her almost unconscious
habit of caring for them, and, more than all, in a certain pretty,
inconvenient fashion they had of getting close to her, and clinging
about her, at all sorts of inopportune moments. Once when she had run to
comfort Meg who had fallen down, and had come back to the hammock,
carrying her in her arms, he was betrayed into speaking.
"I did not think,"--he began, and then he checked himself guiltily.
"You did not think?" she repeated.
He began to recognize his indiscretion.
"I beg your pardon," he said, "I was going to make a blunder."
She sat down in the hammock, with the child in her arms.
"You were going to say that you did not think I cared so much for my
children," she said, gently. "Do you suppose I did not know that? Well,
perhaps it was not a blunder. Perhaps it is only one of my pretences."
"Don't speak like that," he implored.
The next instant he saw that tears had risen in her eyes.
"No," she said. "I will not. Why should I? It is not true. I love them
very much. However bad you are, I think you must love your children. Of
course, my saying that I loved them might go for nothing; but don't you
see," she went on with a pathetic thrill in her voice, "that they love
_me_? They would not love me, if I did not care for them."
"I know that," he returned remorsefully. "It was only one of my
blunders, as I said. But you have so bewildered me sometimes. When I
first returned I could not understand you. It was as if I found myself
face to face with a creature I had never seen before."
"You did," she said. "That was it. Perhaps I never was the creature you
fancied me."
"Don't say that," he replied. "Since I have been here I have seen you as
I used to dream of you, when I sat by the fire in my quarters in the
long winter nights."
"Did you ever think of me like that?" she said slowly, and with surprise
in her face.
He had not thought of what he was revealing, and he did not think of it
now.
"I never forgot you," he said. "Never."
"It seems very strange--to hear that now," she said. "I never dreamed of
your thinking of me--afterwards. You seemed to take so little notice of
me."
"It is my good fortune," he said, with a touch of bitterness, "that I
never _seem_ to take notice of anything."
"I suppose," she went on, "that you remembered me because you were
lonely at first, and there was no one else to think of."
"Perhaps that was it," he answered.
"After all," she said, "it was natural--only I never thought"--
"It was as natural that you should forget as that I should remember," he
said.
Her face had been slightly averted, and she turned it toward him.
"But I did not forget," she said.
"You did not?"
"No. At first, it is true, I scarcely seemed to have time for anything,
but to be happy and enjoy the days, as they went by. Oh! what bright
days they were, and how far away they seem! Perhaps, if I had known that
they would come to an end really, I might have tried to make them pass
more slowly."
"They went slowly for me," he said. "I was glad when they were over."
"Were you so very lonely!" she asked.
"Yes."
"Would it have pleased you, if I had written to you when papa did?"
"Did you ever think of doing it?" he asked.
The expression dawning in her eyes was a curious one--there was a
suggestion of dread in it.
"Once," she replied. "I began a letter to you. It was on a dull day,
when I was restless and unhappy for the first time in my life; and
suddenly I thought of you, and I felt as if I should like to speak to
you again,--and I began the letter."
"But you did not finish it."
"No. I only wrote a few lines, and then stopped. I said to myself that
it was not likely that you had remembered me in the way I had remembered
you, so I laid my letter aside. I saw it only a few days ago among some
old papers in my trunk."
"You have it yet?"
"I did not know that I had it, until I saw it the other day. It seems
strange that it should have lain hidden all these years, and then have
come to light. I laid it away thinking I might find courage to finish it
sometime. There are only a few lines, but they prove that my memory was
not so bad as you thought."
He had been lying on the grass a few feet away from her. As she talked
he had looked not at her, but at the bits of blue sky showing through
the interlacing greenness of the trees above him. Now he suddenly half
rose and leaned upon his elbow.
"Will you give it to me?" he said.
"Do you want it? It is only a yellow scrap of paper."
"I think it belongs to me," he said. "I have a right to it."
She got up without a word and went toward the house, leading Meg by the
hand. Tredennis watched her retreating figure in silence until she went
in at the door. His face set, and his lips pressed together, then he
flung himself backward and lay at full length again, seeing only the
bright green of the leaves and the bits of intense blue between. It was
well that he was alone. His sense of impotent anguish was more than he
had strength to bear, and it wrung a cry from him.
"My God!" he said; "my God!" He was still lying so when Bertha returned.
She had not been away many minutes, and she came back alone with the
unfinished letter in her hand.
He took it from her without comment, and looked at it. The faint odor of
heliotrope he knew so well floated up to him as he bent over the paper.
As she had said, there were only a few lines, and she had evidently been
dissatisfied with them, and irresolute about them, for several words
were erased as if with girlish impatience. At the head of the page was
written first: _Dear Philip_, and then _Dear Captain Tredennis_, and
there were two or three different opening sentences. As he read each one
through the erasures, he thought he understood the innocent, unconscious
appeal in it, and he seemed to see the girl-face bending above it,
changing from eagerness to uncertainty, and from uncertainty to the
timidity which had made her despair.
"I wish you had finished it," he said.
"I wish I had," she answered, and then she added vaguely, "if it would
have pleased you."
He folded it, and put it in his breast-pocket and laid down once more,
and it was not referred to again.
It seemed to Tredennis, at least, that there never before had been such
a day as the one which followed. After a night of rain the intense heat
subsided, leaving freshness of verdure, skies of the deepest, clearest
blue, and a balmy, luxurious sweetness in the air, deliciously pungent
with the odors of cedar and pine.
When he came down in the morning, and entered the breakfast room, he
found it empty. The sunlight streamed through the lattice-work of vines,
and the cloth was laid, with the pretty blue cups and saucers in
waiting; but Bertha was not there, and, fancying she had risen later
than usual, he went out into the open air.
The next morning he was to return to Washington. There was no absolute
need of his remaining longer. The child had so far recovered that, at
the doctor's suggestion, in a few days she was to be removed to the
sea-side. Nevertheless, it had cost him a struggle to arrive at his
decision, and it had required resolution to announce it to Bertha. It
would have been far easier to let the days slip by as they would, and
when he told her of his intended departure, and she received the news
with little more than a few words of regret at it, and gratitude for the
services he had rendered, he felt it rather hard to bear.
"If it had been Arbuthnot," he thought, "she would not have borne it so
calmly." And then he reproached himself bitterly for his inconsistency.
"Did I come here to make her regret me, when I left her?" he said. "What
a fool a man can make of himself, if he gives way to his folly!"
As he descended the steps of the porch he saw her, and he had scarcely
caught sight of her before she turned and came toward him. He recognized
at once that she had made a change in her dress; that it was no longer
such as she had worn while in attendance upon Janey, and that it had a
delicate holiday air about it, notwithstanding its simplicity.
"Was there ever such a day before?" she said, as she came to him.
"I thought not, as I looked out of my window," he replied.
"It is your last," she said, "and I should like you to remember it as
being pleasanter than all the rest; though," she added, thoughtfully,
"the rest have been pleasant."
Then she looked up at him, with a smile.
"Do you see my gala attire?" she said. "It was Janey who suggested it.
She thinks I have not been doing myself justice since you have been
here."
"That," he said, regarding her seriously, "is a very beautiful gown,
but"--with an entirely respectful sense of inadequacy of
expression--"you always wear beautiful gowns, I believe."
"Did Mr. Arbuthnot tell you so?" she said, "or was it Miss Jessup?"
They breakfasted together in the sunny room, and after breakfast they
rambled out together. It was she who led, and he who followed, with a
curious, dreamy pleasure in all he did, and in every beauty around him,
even in the unreal passiveness of his very mood itself. He had never
been so keenly conscious of things before; everything impressed itself
upon him,--the blue of the sky, the indolent sway of the leaves, the
warmth of the air, and the sweet odors in it, the broken song of the
birds, the very sound of Bertha's light tread as they walked.
"I am going to give the day to you," she had said. "And you shall see
the children's favorite camping-ground on the hill. Before Janey was ill
we used to go there almost every day."
Behind the house was a wood-covered hill, and half-way up was the
favored spot. It was a sort of bower formed by the clambering of a great
vine from one tree to another, making a canopy, under which, through a
break in the trees, could be seen the most perfect view of the country
below, and the bend of the river. The ground was carpeted with moss, and
there was a moss-covered rock to lean against, which was still
ornamented with the acorn cups and saucers with which the children had
entertained their family of dolls on their last visit.
"See," said Bertha, taking one of them up when she sat down. "When we
were here last we had a tea-party, and it was poor Janey's headache
which brought it to a close. At the height of the festivities she laid
down her best doll, and came to me to cry, and we were obliged to carry
her home."
"Poor child!" said Tredennis. He saw only her face upturned under the
shadow of the white hat,--a pretty hat, with small, soft, downy plumes
upon it, and a general air of belonging to the great world.
"Sit down," said Bertha, "or you may lie down, if you like, and look at
the river, and not speak to me at all." He lay down, stretching his
great length upon the soft moss, and clasping his hands beneath his
head. Bertha clasped her hands about her knee and leaned slightly
forward, looking at the view as if she had never seen it before.
"Is this a dream?" Tredennis said, languidly, at last. "I think it must
be."
"Yes," she answered, "that is why the air is so warm and fragrant, and
the sky so blue, and the scent of the pines so delicious. It is all
different when one is awake. That is why I am making the most of every
second, and am determined to enjoy it to the very utmost."
"That is what I am doing," he said.
"It is not a good plan, as a rule," she began, and then checked herself.
"No," she said, "I won't say that. It is a worldly and Washingtonian
sentiment. I will save it until next winter."
"Don't save it at all," he said; "it is an unnatural sentiment. It isn't
true, and you do not really believe it."
"It is safer," she said.
He lay still a moment, looking down the hillside through the trees at
the broad sweep of the river bend and the purple hills beyond.
"Bertha," he said, at last, "sometimes I hate the man who has taught you
all this."
She plucked at the red-tipped moss at her side for a second or so before
she replied; she showed no surprise or hurry when she spoke.
"Laurence Arbuthnot!" she said. "Sometimes I hate him, too; but it is
only for a moment,--when he tells me the simple, deadly truth, and I
know it is the truth, and wish I did not."
She threw the little handful of moss down the hill as if she threw
something away with it.
"But this is not being happy," she said. "Let us be happy. I _will_ be
happy. Janey is better, and all my anxiety is over, and it is such a
lovely day, and I have put on my favorite gown to celebrate it in. Look
at the color of the hills over there--listen to those doves in the
pines. How warm and soft the wind is, and how the scent of my carnations
fills the air! Ah, what a bright world it is, after all!"
She broke into singing softly, and half under breath, a snatch of a gay
little song. Tredennis had never heard her sing it before, and thought
it wonderfully sweet. But she sang no more than a line or two, and then
turned to him, with a smile in her eyes.
"Now," she said, "it is your turn. Talk to me. Tell me about your life
in the West; tell me all you did the first year, and begin--begin just
where you left me the night you bade me good-by at the carriage-door."
"I am afraid it would not be a very interesting story," he said.
"It would interest me," she answered. "There are camp-fires in it, and
scalps, and Indians, and probably war-paths." And her voice falling a
little, "I want to discover why it was that you always seemed to be so
much alone, and sat and thought in that dreary way by the fire in your
quarters. It seems to me that you have been a great deal alone."
"I have been a great deal alone," he said; "that is true."
"It must have been so even when you were a child," she went on. "I heard
you tell Janey once that when you were her age you belonged to no one. I
don't like to think of that. It touches the maternal side of me. It
makes me think of Jack. Suppose Jack belonged to no one; and you were
not so old as Jack. I wonder if you were at all like him, and how you
looked. I wish there was a picture of you I could see."
He had never regarded himself as an object likely to interest in any
degree, and had lost many of the consolations and excitements of the
more personal kind thereby; and to find that she had even given a
sympathetic thought to the far-away childhood whose desolateness he
himself had never quite analyzed, at once touched and bewildered him.
"I have not been without friends," he said, "but I am sure no one ever
gave much special thought to me. Perhaps it is because men are scarcely
likely to give such thoughts to men, and I have not known women. My
parents died before I was a year old, and I don't think any one was ever
particularly fond of me. People did not dislike me, but they passed me
over. I never wondered at it, but I saw it. I knew there was something a
little wrong with me; but I could not understand what it was. I know
now: I was silent, and could not express what I thought and felt."
"Oh!" she cried; "and was there no one to help you?"
There was no thought of him as a full-grown person in the exclamation;
it was a womanish outcry for the child, whose desolate childhood seemed
for the moment to be an existence which had never ended.
"I know about children," she said, "and what suffering there is for them
if they are left alone. They can say so little, and we can say so much.
Haven't I seen them try to explain things when they were at a
disadvantage and overpowered by the sheer strength of some full-grown
creature? Haven't I seen them make their impotent little struggle for
words and fail, and look up with their helpless eyes and see the
uselessness of it, and break down into their poor little shrieks of
wrath and grief? The happiest of them go through it sometimes, and those
who are left alone--Why didn't some woman see and understand?--some
woman ought to have seen and cared for you."
Tredennis found himself absorbed in contemplation of her. He was not
sure that there were not tears in her eyes, and yet he could hardly
believe it possible.
"That is all true," he said; "you understand it better than I did. I
understood the feeling no better than I understood the reason for it."
"I understand it because I have children," she answered. "And because I
have watched them and loved them, and would give my heart's blood for
them. To have children makes one like a tiger, at times. The passion one
can feel through the wrongs of a child is something _awful_. One can
feel it for any child--for all children. But for one's own"--
She ended with a sharply drawn breath. The sudden uncontrollable
fierceness, which seemed to have made her in a second,--in her soft
white gown and lace, and her pretty hat, with its air of good
society,--a small, wild creature, whom no law of man could touch,
affected him like an electric shock; perhaps the thrill it gave him
revealed itself in his look, and she saw it, for she seemed to become
conscious of herself and her mood, with a start. She made a quick,
uneasy movement and effort to recover herself.
"I beg your pardon," she said, with a half laugh. "But I couldn't help
it. It was"--and she paused a second for reflection,--"it was the
primeval savage in me." And she turned and clasped her hands about her
knee again, resuming her attitude of attention, even while the folds of
lace on her bosom were still stirred by her quick breathing.
But, though she might resume her attitude, it was not so easy to resume
the calmness of her mood. Having been stirred once, it was less
difficult to be stirred again. When he began, at last, to tell the story
of his life on the frontier, if his vanity had been concerned he would
have felt that she made a good listener. But his vanity had nothing to
do with his obedience to her wish. He made as plain a story as his
material would allow, and also made persistent, though scarcely
successful, efforts to avoid figuring as a hero. He was, indeed, rather
abashed to find, on recurring to facts, that he had done so much to
bring himself to the front. He even found himself at last taking refuge
in the subterfuge of speaking of himself in the third person as "one of
the party," when recounting a specially thrilling adventure in which he
discovered that he had unblushingly distinguished himself. It was an
exciting story of the capture of some white women by the Indians at a
critical juncture, when but few men could be spared from the fort, and
the fact that the deadly determination of "one of the party" that no
harm should befall them was not once referred to in words, and only
expressed itself in daring and endurance, for which every one but
himself was supposed to be responsible, did not detract from its force.
This "one of the party," who seemed to have sworn a silent oath that he
would neither eat, nor sleep, nor rest until he had accomplished his end
of rescuing the captives, and who had been upon the track almost as soon
as the news had reached the fort, and who had followed it night and day,
with his hastily gathered and altogether insufficient little band, and
at last had overtaken the captors, and through sheer courage and
desperate valor had overpowered them, and brought back their prisoners
unharmed,--this "one of the party," silent, and would-be insignificant,
was, in spite of himself, a figure to stir the blood.
"It was _you_ who did that?" she said, when he had finished.
"I was only one of the company," he answered, abashed, "and obeyed
orders. Of course a man obeys orders."