When he took her hand to assist her to rise he felt it tremble in his
own.
"It was not a pleasant story," he said. "I ought not to have told it to
you."
They scarcely spoke at all as they descended. He did not understand his
own unreasoning happiness. What reason was there for it, after all? If
he had argued the matter, he was in the mood to have said that what he
gained in the strange sweetness of the flying moments could only hurt
himself, and was enough in itself to repay him for any sense of pain and
loss which might follow. But he did not argue at all. In Laurence
Arbuthnot's place he would scarcely have given himself the latitude he
was giving himself now.
"It is safe enough for _me_," was the sharp-edged thought which had cut
through all others once or twice. "It is safe enough for _me_ to be as
happy as I may."
But he forgot this as they went down the hill, side by side. For the
time being he only felt, and each glance he turned upon Bertha's
downcast face gave him cause to realize, what intensity his feelings had
reached, and wakened him to that sudden starting of pulse and heart
which is almost a pain. When they reached the house Bertha went in
search of Janey. She remained with her for about half an hour, and then
came out to the hammock with her work-basket. The carnations at her
waist were crushed a little, and something of the first freshness of her
holiday air was gone. She held a letter in her hand, which she had
evidently been reading. She had not returned it to its envelope, and it
was still half open.
"It is from Richard," she said, after she had taken her seat in the
hammock. "It was brought in from the post-office at Lowville about an
hour ago."
"From Richard?" he said. "He is coming home, I suppose."
"No," she answered, looking down at the closely written sheets,--"he is
not coming yet. He was wise enough not to take a serious view of Janey's
case. He is very encouraging, and expresses his usual confidence in my
management."
There was nothing like bitterness in her voice, and it struck him that
he had never seen so little expression of any kind in her face. She
opened the letter and looked over the first page of it.
"He has a great many interesting things to say," she went on; "and he is
very enthusiastic."
"About what?" Tredennis asked. She looked up.
"About the Westoria lands," she answered. "He finds all sorts of
complications of good fortune connected with them. I don't understand
them all, by any means. I am not good at business. But it seems as
though the persons who own the Westoria lands will be able to command
the resources of the entire surrounding country,--if the railroad is
carried through; of course it all depends upon the railroad."
"And the railroad," suggested Tredennis, "depends upon"--
"I don't know," she replied. "On several people, I suppose. I wish it
depended on me."
"Why?" said Tredennis.
She smiled slightly and rather languidly.
"I should like to feel that anything so important depended on me," she
said. "I should like the sense of power. I am very fond of power."
"I once heard it said that you had a great deal of it," Tredennis said;
"far more than most women."
She smiled again, a trifle less languidly.
"That is Laurence Arbuthnot," she observed. "I always recognize his
remarks when I hear them. He did not mean a compliment exactly, either,
though it sounds rather like one. He has a theory that I affect people
strongly, and he chooses to call that power. But it is too trivial. It
is only a matter of pleasing or displeasing, and I am obliged to exert
myself. It does not enable me to bestow things, and be a potentate. I
think that to be a potentate might console one for a great many
things,--and for the lack of a great many. If you can't take, it must
distract your attention to be able to give."
"I do not like to hear you speak as if the chief thing to be desired was
the ability to distract one's self," Tredennis said.
She paused a second.
"Then," she said, "I will not speak so now. To-day I will do nothing you
do not like." Then she added, "As it is your last day, I wish to
retrieve myself."
"What have you to retrieve?" he asked.
"Myself," she answered, "as I said."
She spread the letter upon her lap, and gave her attention to it.
"Isn't it rather like Richard," she said, "that, when he begins to
write, he invariably writes a letter like that? Theoretically he detests
correspondence, but when he once begins, his letter always interests
him, and even awakens him to a kind of enthusiasm, so that instead of
being brief he tells one everything. He has written twelve pages here,
and it is all delightful."
"That is a wonderful thing to do," remarked Tredennis; "but it does not
surprise me in Richard."
"No," she replied, "Richard can always interest himself; or, rather, he
does not interest _himself_,--it is that he is interested without making
an effort; that is his strong point."
She replaced the letter in the envelope and laid it in the basket, from
which she took a strip of lace-work, beginning to employ herself with it
in a manner more suggestive of graceful leisure than of industrious
intention. It seemed to accentuate the fact that they had nothing to do
but let the day drift by in luxurious idleness.
But Tredennis could not help seeing that for a while the tone of her
mood, so to speak, was lowered. And yet, curiously enough, nothing of
his own dreamy exaltation died away. The subtle shadow which seemed to
have touched her, for a moment, only intensified his feeling of
tenderness. In fact there were few things which would not have so
intensified it; his mental condition was one which must advance by
steady, silent steps of development to its climax. He was not by nature
a reckless man, but he was by no means unconscious that there was
something very like recklessness in his humor this last day.
As for the day itself, it also advanced by steady steps to its climax,
unfolding its beauties like a perfect flower. The fresh, rain-washed
morning drifted into a warm, languorous noon, followed by an afternoon
so long and golden that it seemed to hold within itself the flower and
sun, shade and perfume, of a whole summer. Tredennis had never known so
long an afternoon, he thought, and yet it was only lengthened by the
strange delight each hour brought with it, and was all too short when it
was over. It seemed full of minute details, which presented themselves
to his mind at the time as discoveries. Bertha worked upon her lace, and
he watched her, waiting for the moment when she would look up at him,
and then look down again with a quick or slow droop of the lids, which
impressed itself upon him as a charm in itself. There was a little ring
she wore which made itself a memory to him,--a simple turquoise, which
set upon the whiteness of her hand like a blue flower. He saw, with a
new sense of recognition, every fold and line of her thin, white
drapery, the slight, girlish roundness of her figure, the dashes of
brightness in the color of her hair, the smallness of the gold thimble
on her finger, her grace when she rose or sat down, or rested a little
against the red cushions in her hammock, touching the ground now and
then with her slender slipper and swaying lightly to and fro.
"Do you know," he said to her once, as he watched her do this, "do you
know,"--with absorbed hesitation,--"that I feel as if--as if I had never
really seen you until to-day--until this afternoon. You seem somehow to
look different."
"I am not sure," she answered, "that I have ever seen you before; but it
is not because you look different."
"Why is it?" he asked, quite ready to relinquish any idea of his own in
the pursuit of one of hers.
She looked down a moment.
"To-day," she said, "I don't think you have anything against me."
"You think," he returned, "that I have usually something against you?"
"Yes," she answered.
"Will you tell me what you think it is?"
"I do not need to tell you," she said. "You know so well--and it would
rather hurt me to put it into words."
"Hurt you?" he repeated.
"I should be harder than I am," she returned, "if it had not hurt me to
know it myself--though I would not tell you that at any other time than
now. I dare say I shall repent it to-morrow," she said.
"No," he answered, "you won't repent it. Don't repent it."
He felt the vehemence of his speech too late to check it. When he ended
she was silent, and it was as if suddenly a light veil had fallen upon
her face, and he felt that, too, and tried to be calmer.
"No," he repeated, "you must not repent. It is I who must repent that I
have given you even a little pain. It is hard on me to know that I have
done that."
The afternoon stretched its golden length to a sunset which cast deep,
velvet shadows upon the grass and filled the air with an enchanted
mellow radiance. Everything took a tinge of gold,--the green of the
pines and the broad-leaved chestnut trees, the gray and brown of their
trunks, the red of the old house, the honeysuckle and Virginia creeper
clambering about it, the birds flying homeward to their nests. When the
rich clearness and depth of color reached its greatest beauty Bertha
folded her strip of lace and laid it in the little basket.
"We ought simply to sit and watch this," she said. "I don't think we
ought even to speak. It will be all over in a few minutes, and we shall
never see it again."
"No," said Tredennis, with a sad prescience; "nor anything at all like
it."
"Ah!" was Bertha's rejoinder, "to _me_ it has always seemed that it is
not the best of such hours that one _does_ see others like them. I have
seen the sun set like this before."
"_I_ have not," he said.
As he stood silent in the stillness and glow a faint, rather bitter,
smile touched his lips and faded out. He found himself, he fancied, face
to face with Laurence Arbuthnot again. He was sharing the sunset with
him; there were ten chances against one that he had shared the day with
him also.
Bertha sat in the deepening enchanted light with a soft, dreamy look. He
thought it meant that she remembered something; but he felt that the
memory was one to which she yielded herself without reluctance, or that
she was happy in it. At last she lifted her eyes to his, and their
expression was very sweet in its entire gentleness and submission to the
spell of the moment.
"See!" she said, "the sun has slipped behind the pines already. We have
only a few seconds left."
And then, even as they looked at the great fire, made brighter by the
dark branches through which they saw it, it sank a little lower, and a
little lower, and with an expiring flame was gone.
Bertha drew a quick breath, there was a second or so of silence, and
then she stirred.
"It is over," she said; "and it has been like watching some one die,
only sadder."
She took up the little work-basket and rose from her seat.
"It seems a pity to speak of mundane things," she said; "but I think we
must go in to tea."
When the children were taken upstairs for the night Bertha went with
them. It had been her habit to do this during their sojourn in the
country, and naturally Janey had been her special care of late.
"I cannot often do such things when I am in Washington," she had
explained once to Tredennis. "And I really like it as much as they do.
It is part of the holiday."
As he sat on the porch in the starlight Tredennis could hear her voice
mingling with the children's. The windows were wide open; she was moving
from one room to the other, and two or three times she laughed in answer
to some childish speech.
It was one of these laughs which, at last, caused Tredennis to leave his
seat and go to the place under the trees where the hammocks were swung,
and which was far more the place of general rendezvous than the parlor
windows. From this point he could see the corner of the brightly lighted
room, near the window where it was Bertha's custom to sit in her low
chair, and rock Janey to sleep when she was restless.
She was doing it to-night. He could see the child's head lying on her
bosom, and her own bent so that her cheek rested against the bright
hair. In a few moments all was quiet, and she began to sing, and as she
sang, swaying to and fro, Tredennis looked and listened without
stirring.
But, though it was gay no longer, he liked to hear her song, and to his
mind the moments in which he stood in the odorous dark, looking upward
at the picture framed by the vine-hung window, were among the tenderest
of the day. It was his fate to be full of a homely sentiment, which
found its pleasure in unsophisticated primary virtues and affections.
Any deep passion he might be moved by would necessarily have its
foundation in such elements. He was slow at the subtle analysis whose
final result is frequently to rob such simplicities of their value. His
tendency was to reverence for age, tenderness to womanhood and
childhood, faithfulness to all things. There was something boyish and
quixotic in his readiness to kindle in defence of any womanly weakness
or pain. Nothing he had ever said, or done, had so keenly touched and
delighted Professor Herrick as his fiery denunciation, one night, of a
man who was the hero of a scandalous story. There had been no
qualifications of his sweeping assertion that in such cases it must be
the man who had earned the right to bear the blame.
"It is _always_ the man who is in the wrong," he had cried, flushing
fiercely, "coward and devil--it is in the nature of things that he
should be. Let him stand at the front and take what follows, if he has
ever been a man for an hour!" And the professor had flushed also,--the
fainter flush of age,--and had given some silent moments to reflection
afterwards, as he sat gazing at the fire.
It was these primitive beliefs and sentiments which stirred within him
now. He would not have lost one low note of the little song for the
world, and he had left his seat only that he might see what he saw
now,--her arm about her child, her cheek pressed against its hair.
It was not long before her little burden fell asleep he saw, but she did
not rise as soon as this happened. She sat longer, and her song went on,
finally dying away into brooding silence, which reigned for some time
before she moved.
At length she lifted her face gently. She looked down at the child a
few seconds, and slowly changed the position in which she lay, with an
indescribably tender and cautious movement. Then she rose, and after
standing an instant, holding her in her folding arms, crossed the room
and passed out of sight.
Tredennis turned and began mechanically to arrange the cushions in the
hammock. He felt sure she would come to-night and talk to him, for a
little while at least.
It was not very long before he recognized her white figure in the
door-way, and went toward it.
"They are all asleep," she said, in a voice whose hushed tone seemed to
belong half to the slumber she had left and half to the stillness of the
hour.
"Will you come out to the hammock," he said, "or will you sit here?"
She came forward and descended the steps.
"I will sit in the hammock," she replied. "I like the trees above me."
They went down the path together, and reaching the hammock she took her
usual seat among its cushions, and he his upon a rough rustic bench near
her.
"I was thinking before you came," he said, "of what you said this
afternoon of my having something against you. I won't deny that there
has been something in my thoughts of you that often has been miserable,
and you were right in saying it was not in them to-day. It has not been
in them for several days. What I was thinking just now was that it could
never be in them again."
She did not stir.
"Don't you see," he went on, "I can't go back. If there had been nothing
but to-day, I could not go back--beyond to-day. It would always be a
factor in my arguments about you. I should always say to myself when
things seemed to go wrong: 'There was no mistake about that day,--she
was real then,' and I should trust you against everything. To-day--and
in the other days too--I have seen you as you are, and because of that
I should trust you in spite of everything."
"Oh!" she cried. "Don't trust me too much!" There was anguish in the
sound, and he recognized it.
"I can't trust you too much," he answered, with obstinacy. "No honest
human being can trust another honest human being too much."
"Am I an honest human being?" she said.
"I shall believe you one until the end," he returned.
"That is saying a great deal," was her reply.
"Listen," he said. "You know I am not like Arbuthnot and the rest. If I
were to try to be like them I should only fail. But, though you never
told me that I could be of any use to you, and you never will, I shall
know if the time should come--and I shall wait for it. Have we not all
of us something that belongs to ourselves, and not to the world,--it may
be a pleasure or a pain, it does not matter which?"
"No," she put in, "it does not matter which."
"It does not matter to those on the outside," he went on; "it only
matters to us, and I think we all have it to bear. Even I"--
"What," she said, "you, too?"
"Yes," he answered, "I, too; but it does not matter, if no one is hurt
but ourselves."
"There are so many things that 'do not matter,'" she said. "To say that,
only means that there is no help."
"That is true," was his reply, "and I did not intend to speak of myself,
but of you."
"No," she said, "don't speak of me,--don't speak of me!"
"Why not?" he asked.
"Because I tell you that you are trusting me too much."
"Go on," he said.
She had covered her face with her hands, and held them so for a little
while, then she let them fall slowly to her lap.
"If I tell you the truth," she said, "it will not be my fault if you
still trust me too much. I don't want it to be my fault. The worst of me
is, that I am neither bad nor good, and that I cannot live without
excitement. I am always changing and trying experiments. When one
experiment fails, I try another. They all fail after a while, or I get
tired of them."
"Poor child!" he said.
She stirred slightly; one of the flowers fell from her belt upon her
lap, and she let it lie there.
"It does not matter," she answered. "All that matters is, that you
should know the truth about me,--that I am not to be depended upon, and
that, above all, you need not be surprised at any change you see in me."
"When we meet again in Washington?" he suggested.
She hesitated a moment and then made her response.
"When we meet again in Washington, or at any time."
"Are you warning me?" he inquired.
"Yes," was her reply, and he recognized that in spite of her effort it
was faintly given. "I am warning you."
He looked down at the grass and then at her. The determined squareness
of chin, which was one of the chief characteristics of his face, struck
her as being more marked than she had ever seen it.
"It is unnecessary," he said. "I won't profit by it."
He rose abruptly from his seat, and there was meaning in the movement,
and in his eyes looking down upon her deep and dark in the faint light.
"You cannot change _me_," he said. "And you would have to change me
before your warning would carry weight. Change yourself as you like--try
as many experiments as you like--you cannot change the last ten days."
Even as the words were uttered, the day was ended for them as they had
never once thought of its ending. There fell upon the quiet the sound of
horses' feet approaching at a rapid pace and coming to a stop before
the gate. The dogs came bounding and baying from the house, and above
their deep-mouthed barking a voice made itself heard, calling to some
one to come out,--a voice they both knew.
Tredennis turned toward it with a sharp movement.
"Do you hear that?" he exclaimed.
"Yes," said Bertha; and suddenly her manner was calm almost to
coldness,--"it is Laurence Arbuthnot, and papa is with him. Let us go
and meet them."
And in a few seconds they were at the gate, and the professor was
explaining their unexpected appearance.
"It is all Mr. Arbuthnot's fault, my dear," he said; "he knew that I
wished to see you, and, having an idea that I was not strong enough to
make the journey alone, he suddenly affected to have business in this
vicinity. It was entirely untrue, and I was not in the least deceived;
but I humored him, as I begin to find it best to do, and allowed him to
bring me to you."
Arbuthnot had dismounted, and was fastening his horse to the gate, and
he replied by one of the gayest and most discriminatingly pitched of the
invaluable laughs.
"It is no use," he said; "the professor does not believe in me. He
refuses to recognize in me anything but hollow mockery."
Bertha went to him. There was something hurried in her movement; it was
as if she was strangely, almost feverishly, glad to see him. She went to
his horse's head and laid her hand on the creature's neck.
"That takes me back to Washington," she said: "to Washington. It was
like you to come, and I am glad, but--you should have come a little
sooner."
And, as she stood there, faintly smiling up at him, her hand was
trembling like a leaf.