A fire is burning in the unused hearth of the cabin. The fuel blazes
up, and lights the black rafters, and warms the faded red lions on the
quilt, and fills the little room with a glow of warmth and light made
brighter by contrast, for outside the night is chill and misty.
Before the open fireplace sits a stranger, his tall, slight figure
reposing in the broken armchair, his keen blue eyes studying the fire
from beneath delicately pencilled, drooping eyelids. One white hand
plays thoughtfully with a heavy flaxen moustache; yet, once he starts,
and for an instant the languid lids raise themselves; there is a keen,
intent look upon the face as he listens for something. Then he leans
back in his chair, fills his glass from the silver flask in his bag, and
resumes his old posture.
Presently the door opens noiselessly. It is Lyndall, followed by Doss.
Quietly as she enters, he hears her, and turns.
“I thought you were not coming.”
“I waited till all had gone to bed. I could not come before.”
She removed the shawl that enveloped her, and the stranger rose to offer
her his chair; but she took her seat on a low pile of sacks before the
window.
“I hardly see why I should be outlawed after this fashion,” he said,
reseating himself and drawing his chair a little nearer to her; “these
are hardly the quarters one expects to find after travelling a hundred
miles in answer to an invitation.”
“I said, ‘Come if you wish.’”
“And I did wish. You give me a cold reception.”
“I could not take you to the house. Questions would be asked which I
could not answer without prevarication.”
“Your conscience is growing to have a certain virgin tenderness,” he
said, in a low, melodious voice.
“I have no conscience. I spoke one deliberate lie this evening. I said
the man who had come looked rough, we had best not have him in the
house; therefore I brought him here. It was a deliberate lie, and I hate
lies. I tell them if I must, but they hurt me.”
“Well, you do not tell lies to yourself, at all events. You are candid,
so far.”
She interrupted him.
“You got my short letter?”
“Yes; that is why I come. You sent a very foolish reply; you must take
it back. Who is this fellow you talk of marrying?”
“A young farmer.”
“Lives here?”
“Yes; he has gone to town to get things for our wedding.”
“What kind of a fellow is he?”
“A fool.”
“And you would rather marry him than me?”
“Yes; because you are not one.”
“That is a novel reason for refusing to marry a man,” he said, leaning
his elbow on the table and watching her keenly.
“It is a wise one,” she said shortly. “If I marry him I shall shake him
off my hand when it suits me. If I remained with him for twelve months
he would never have dared to kiss my hand. As far as I wish he should
come, he comes, and no further. Would you ask me what you might and what
you might not do?”
Her companion raised the moustache with a caressing movement from his
lip and smiled. It was not a question that stood in need of any answer.
“Why do you wish to enter on this semblance of marriage?”
“Because there is only one point on which I have a conscience. I have
told you so.”
“Then why not marry me?”
“Because if once you have me you would hold me fast. I shall never be
free again.” She drew a long, low breath.
“What have you done with the ring I gave you?” he said.
“Sometimes I wear it; then I take it off and wish to throw it into the
fire; the next day I put it on again, and sometimes I kiss it.”
“So you do love me a little?”
“If you were not something more to me than any other man in the world,
do you think--” She paused. “I love you when I see you; but when you are
away from me I hate you.”
“Then I fear I must be singularly invisible at the present moment,” he
said. “Possibly if you were to look less fixedly into the fire you might
perceive me.”
He moved his chair slightly, so as to come between her and the
firelight. She raised her eyes to his face.
“If you do love me,” he asked her, “why will you not marry me?”
“Because, if I had been married to you for a year I should have come to
my senses and seen that your hands and your voice are like the hands and
the voice of any other man. I cannot quite see that now. But it is all
madness. You call into activity one part of my nature; there is a higher
part that you know nothing of, that you never touch. If I married
you, afterward it would arise and assert itself, and I should hate you
always, as I do now sometimes.”
“I like you when you grow metaphysical and analytical,” he said, leaning
his face upon his hand. “Go a little further in your analysis; say, ‘I
love you with the right ventricle of my heart, but not the left, and
with the left auricle of my heart, but not the right; and, this being
the case, my affection for you is not of a duly elevated, intellectual
and spiritual nature.’ I like you when you get philosophical.”
She looked quietly at him; he was trying to turn her own weapons against
her.
“You are acting foolishly, Lyndall,” he said, suddenly changing his
manner, and speaking earnestly, “most foolishly. You are acting like a
little child; I am surprised at you. It is all very well to have ideals
and theories; but you know as well as any one can that they must not be
carried into the practical world. I love you. I do not pretend that it
is in any high, superhuman sense; I do not say that I should like you as
well if you were ugly and deformed, or that I should continue to prize
you whatever your treatment of me might be, or to love you though
you were a spirit without any body at all. That is sentimentality for
beardless boys. Every one not a mere child (and you are not a child,
except in years) knows what love between a man and a woman means. I love
you with that love. I should not have believed it possible that I
could have brought myself twice to ask of any woman to be my wife, more
especially one without wealth, without position, and who--”
“Yes--go on. Do not grow sorry for me. Say what you were going to--‘who
has put herself into my power, and who has lost the right of meeting me
on equal terms.’ Say what you think. At least we two may speak the truth
to one another.”
Then she added after a pause:
“I believe you do love me, as much as you possibly could love anything;
and I believe that when you ask me to marry you you are performing the
most generous act you ever have performed in the course of your life, or
ever will; but, at the same time, if I had required your generosity, it
would not have been shown me. If, when I got your letter a month
ago, hinting at your willingness to marry me, I had at once written,
imploring you to come, you would have read the letter. ‘Poor little
devil!’ you would have said, and tore it up. The next week you would
have sailed for Europe, and have sent me a check for a hundred and fifty
pounds (which I would have thrown in the fire), and I would have heard
no more of you.”
The stranger smiled.
“But because I declined your proposal, and wrote that in three weeks
I should be married to another, then what you call love woke up. Your
man’s love is a child’s love for butterflies. You follow till you have
the thing, and break it. If you have broken one wing, and the thing
flies still, then you love it more than ever, and follow till you break
both; then you are satisfied when it lies still on the ground.”
“You are profoundly wise in the ways of the world; you have seen far
into life,” he said.
He might as well have sneered at the firelight.
“I have seen enough to tell me that you love me because you cannot bear
to be resisted, and want to master me. You liked me at first because
I treated you and all men with indifference. You resolved to have me
because I seemed unattainable. This is all your love means.”
He felt a strong inclination to stoop down and kiss the little lips that
defied him; but he restrained himself. He said, quietly: “And you loved
me--”
“Because you are strong. You are the first man I ever was afraid of.
And”--a dreamy look came into her face--“because I like to experience, I
like to try. You don’t understand that.”
He smiled.
“Well, since you will not marry me, may I inquire what your intentions
are, the plan you wrote of. You asked me to come and hear it, and I have
come.”
“I said, ‘Come if you wish.’ If you agree to it, well; if not, I marry
on Monday.”
“Well?”
She was still looking beyond him at the fire.
“I cannot marry you,” she said slowly, “because I cannot be tied; but if
you wish, you may take me away with you, and take care of me; then
when we do not love any more we can say good-bye. I will not go down
country,” she added; “I will not go to Europe. You must take me to the
Transvaal. That is out of the world. People we meet there we need not
see again in our future lives.”
“Oh, my darling,” he said, bending tenderly, and holding his hand out
to her, “why will you not give yourself entirely to me? One day you will
desert me and go to another.”
She shook her head without looking at him.
“No, life is too long. But I will go with you.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. I have told them that before daylight I go to the next farm.
I will write from the town and tell them the facts. I do not want them
to trouble me; I want to shake myself free of these old surroundings; I
want them to lose sight of me. You can understand that is necessary for
me.”
He seemed lost in consideration; then he said:
“It is better to have you on those conditions than not at all. If you
will have it, let it be so.”
He sat looking at her. On her face was the weary look that rested there
so often now when she sat alone. Two months had not passed since
they parted; but the time had set its mark on her. He looked at her
carefully, from the brown, smooth head to the little crossed feet on the
floor. A worn look had grown over the little face, and it made its charm
for him stronger. For pain and time, which trace deep lines and write a
story on a human face, have a strangely different effect on one face and
another. The face that is only fair, even very fair, they mar and flaw;
but to the face whose beauty is the harmony between that which speaks
from within and the form through which it speaks, power is added by all
that causes the outer man to bear more deeply the impress of the inner.
The pretty woman fades with the roses on her cheeks, and the girlhood
that lasts an hour; the beautiful woman finds her fullness of bloom
only when a past has written itself on her, and her power is then most
irresistible when it seems going.
From under their half-closed lids the keen eyes looked down at her. Her
shoulders were bent; for a moment the little figure had forgotten its
queenly bearing, and drooped wearily; the wide, dark eyes watched the
fire very softly.
It certainly was not in her power to resist him, nor any strength in her
that made his own at that moment grow soft as he looked at her.
He touched one little hand that rested on her knee.
“Poor little thing!” he said; “you are only a child.”
She did not draw her hand away from his, and looked up at him.
“You are very tired?”
“Yes.”
She looked into his eyes as a little child might whom a long day’s play
had saddened.
He lifted her gently up, and sat her on his knee.
“Poor little thing!” he said.
She turned her face to his shoulder, and buried it against his neck; he
wound his strong arm about her, and held her close to him. When she had
sat for a long while, he drew with his hand the face down, and held
it against his arm. He kissed it, and then put it back in its old
resting-place.
“Don’t you want to talk to me?”
“No.”
“Have you forgotten the night in the avenue?”
He could feel that she shook her head.
“Do you want to be quiet now?”
“Yes.”
They sat quite still, excepting that only sometimes he raised her
fingers softly to his mouth.
Doss, who had been asleep in the corner, waking suddenly, planted
himself before them, his wiry legs moving nervously, his yellow eyes
filled with anxiety. He was not at all sure that she was not being
retained in her present position against her will, and was not a little
relieved when she sat up and held out her hand for the shawl.
“I must go,” she said.
The stranger wrapped the shawl very carefully about her.
“Keep it close around your face, Lyndall; it is very damp outside. Shall
I walk with you to the house?”
“No. Lie down and rest; I will come and wake you at three o’clock.”
She lifted her face that he might kiss it, and, when he had kissed it
once, she still held it that he might kiss it again. Then he let her
out. He had seated himself at the fireplace, when she reopened the door.
“Have you forgotten anything?”
“No.”
She gave one long, lingering look at the old room. When she was gone,
and the door shut, the stranger filled his glass, and sat at the table
sipping it thoughtfully.
The night outside was misty and damp; the faint moonlight, trying to
force its way through the thick air, made darkly visible the outlines of
the buildings. The stones and walls were moist, and now and then a drop,
slowly collecting, fell from the eaves to the ground. Doss, not liking
the change from the cabin’s warmth, ran quickly to the kitchen doorstep;
but his mistress walked slowly past him, and took her way up the winding
footpath that ran beside the stone wall of the camps. When she came
to the end of the last camp, she threaded her way among the stones and
bushes till she reached the German’s grave. Why she had come there she
hardly knew; she stood looking down. Suddenly she bent and put one hand
on the face of a wet stone.
“I shall never come to you again,” she said.
Then she knelt on the ground, and leaned her face upon the stones.
“Dear old man, good old man, I am so tired!” she said (for we will come
to the dead to tell secrets we would never have told to the living).
“I am so tired. There is light, there is warmth,” she wailed; “why am I
alone, so hard, so cold? I am so weary of myself! It is eating my
soul to its core--self, self, self! I cannot bear this life! I cannot
breathe, I cannot live! Will nothing free me from myself?” She pressed
her cheek against the wooden post. “I want to love! I want something
great and pure to lift me to itself! Dear old man, I cannot bear it any
more! I am so cold, so hard, so hard; will no one help me?”
The water gathered slowly on her shawl, and fell on to the wet stones;
but she lay there crying bitterly. For so the living soul will cry to
the dead, and the creature to its God; and of all this crying there
comes nothing. The lifting up of the hands brings no salvation;
redemption is from within, and neither from God nor man; it is wrought
out by the soul itself, with suffering and through time.
Doss, on the kitchen doorstep, shivered, and wondered where his mistress
stayed so long; and once, sitting sadly there in the damp, he had
dropped asleep, and dreamed that old Otto gave him a piece of bread,
and patted him on the head, and when he woke his teeth chattered, and
he moved to another stone to see if it was drier. At last he heard his
mistress’ step, and they went into the house together. She lit a candle,
and walked to the Boer-woman’s bedroom. On a nail under the lady in
pink hung the key of the wardrobe. She took it down and opened the great
press. From a little drawer she took fifty pounds (all she had in the
world), relocked the door, and turned to hang up the key. The marks
of tears were still on her face, but she smiled. Then she paused,
hesitated.
“Fifty pounds for a lover! A noble reward!” she said, and opened the
wardrobe and returned the notes to the drawer, where Em might find them.
Once in her own room, she arranged the few articles she intended to take
tomorrow, burnt her old letters, and then went back to the front room to
look at the time. There were two hours yet before she must call him. She
sat down at the dressing-table to wait, and leaned her elbows on it, and
buried her face in her hands. The glass reflected the little brown head
with its even parting, and the tiny hands on which it rested. “One day I
will love something utterly, and then I will be better,” she said once.
Presently she looked up. The large, dark eyes from the glass looked back
at her. She looked deep into them.
“We are all alone, you and I,” she whispered; “no one helps us, no one
understands us; but we will help ourselves.” The eyes looked back at
her. There was a world of assurance in their still depths. So they had
looked at her ever since she could remember, when it was but a small
child’s face above a blue pinafore. “We shall never be quite alone, you
and I,” she said; “we shall always be together, as we were when we were
little.”
The beautiful eyes looked into the depths of her soul.
“We are not afraid; we will help ourselves!” she said. She stretched
out her hand and pressed it over them on the glass. “Dear eyes! we will
never be quite alone till they part us--till then!”