Robert Lloyd was sitting on the veranda behind the green trail of
vines when Ellen came up the walk. He never forgot the girl's face
looking over her bunch of sweet-peas. There was in it something
indescribably youthful and innocent, almost angelic. The light from
the window made her hair toss into gold; her blue eyes sought
Cynthia with the singleness of blue stars. It was evident whom she
had come to see. She held out her flowers towards her with a gesture
at once humble and worshipful, like that of some devotee at a
shrine.
She said "Good-evening" with a shy comprehensiveness, then, to
Cynthia, like a child, "I thought maybe you would like some of my
sweet-peas."
Both gentlemen rose, and Risley looked curiously from the young girl
to Cynthia, then placed his chair for her, smiling kindly.
"The sweet-peas are lovely," Cynthia said. "Thank you, my dear. They
are much prettier than any I have had in my garden this year. Please
sit down," for Ellen was doubtful about availing herself of the
proffered chair. She had so hoped that she might find Cynthia alone.
She had dreamed, as a lover might have done, of a tête-à-tête with
her, what she would say, what Cynthia would say. She had thought,
and trembled at the thought, that possibly Cynthia might kiss her
when she came or went. She had felt, with a thrill of spirit, the
touch of Cynthia's soft lips on hers, she had smelt the violets
about her clothes. Now it was all spoiled. She remembered things
which she had heard about Mr. Risley's friendship with Cynthia, how
he had danced attendance upon her for half a lifetime, and thought
that she did not like him. She looked at his smiling, grizzled,
blond face with distrust. She felt intuitively that he saw straight
through her little subterfuge of the flowers, that he divined her
girlish worship at the shrine of Cynthia, and was making fun of her.
"Do you object to a cigar, Miss Brewster?" asked Robert, and Risley
looked inquiringly at her.
"Oh, no," replied Ellen, with the eager readiness of a child to fit
into new conditions. She thought of the sitting-room at home, blue
with the rank pipe-smoke of Nahum Beals and his kind. She pictured
them to herself sitting about on these warm evenings in their
shirt-sleeves, and she saw the two gentlemen in their light summer
clothes with their fragrant cigars at their lips, and all of a
sudden she realized that between these men and the others there was
a great gulf, and that she was trying to cross it. She did not
realize, as later, that the gulf was one of externals, and of width
rather than depth, but it seemed to her then that from one shore she
could only see dimly the opposite. A great fear and jealousy came
over her as to her own future accessibility to those of the other
kind among whom she had been brought up, like her father and
Granville.
Ellen felt all this as she sat beside Cynthia, who was casting about
in her mind, in rather an annoyed fashion, for something to say to
this young beneficiary of hers which should not have anything to do
with the benefit.
Finally she inquired if she were having a pleasant vacation, and
Ellen replied that she was. Risley looked at her beautiful face with
the double radiance of the electric-light and the lamp-light from
the window on it, giving it a curious effect. It suddenly occurred
to him to wonder why everybody seemed to have such an opinion as to
the talents of this girl. Why did Cynthia consider that her native
ability warranted this forcible elevation of her from her own sphere
and setting her on a height of education above her kind? She looked
and spoke like an ordinary young girl. She had a beautiful face, it
is true, and her shyness seemed due to the questioning attitude of a
child rather than to self-consciousness, but, after all, why did she
give people that impression? Her valedictory had been clever, no
doubt, and there was in it a certain fire of conviction, which,
though crude, was moving; but, after all, almost any bright girl
might have written it. She had been a fine scholar, no doubt, but
any girl with a ready intelligence might have done as well. Whence
came this inclination of all to rear the child upon a pedestal?
Risley wondered, looking at her, narrowing his keen, light eyes
under reflective brows, puffing at his cigar; then he admitted to
himself that he was one with the crowd of Ellen's admirers. There
was somehow about the girl that which gave the impression of an
enormous reserve out of all proportion to any external evidence.
"The child says nothing remarkable," he told Cynthia, after she had
gone that evening, "but somehow she gives me an impression of power
to say something extraordinary, and do something extraordinary.
There is electricity and steel behind that soft, rosy flesh of hers.
But all she does which is evident to the eye of man is to worship
you, Cynthia."
"Worship me?" repeated Cynthia, vaguely.
"Yes, she has one of those aberrations common to her youth and her
sex. She is repeating a madness of old Greece, and following you as
a nymph might a goddess."
"It is only because she is grateful," returned Cynthia, looking
rather annoyed.
"Gratitude may be a factor in it, but it is very far from being the
whole of the matter. It is one of the spring madnesses of life; but
don't be alarmed, it will be temporary in the case of a girl like
that. She will easily be led into her natural track of love. Do you
know, Cynthia, that she is one of the most normal, typical young
girls I ever saw, and that makes me wonder more at this impression
of unusual ability which she undoubtedly gives. She has all the
weaknesses of her age and sex, she is much younger than some girls
of her age, and yet there is the impression which I cannot shake
off."
"I have it, too," said Cynthia, rather impatiently.
"Cynthia Lennox, I don't believe you care in the least for this
young devotee of yours, for all you are heaping benefits upon her,"
Risley said, looking at her quizzically.
"I am not sure that I do," replied Cynthia, calmly.
"Then why on earth--?"
Suddenly Cynthia began speaking rapidly and passionately,
straightening herself in her chair. "Oh, Lyman, do you think I could
do a thing like that, and not repent it and suffer remorse for it
all these years?" she cried.
"A thing like that?"
"Like stealing that child," Cynthia replied, in a whisper.
"Stealing the child? You did not steal the child."
"Yes, I did."
"Why, it was only a few hours that you kept her."
"What difference does it make whether you steal anything for a few
hours or a lifetime? I kept her, and she was crying for her mother,
and her mother was suffering tortures all that time. Then I kept it
secret all these years. You didn't know what I have suffered,
Lyman."
Cynthia regarded him with a wan look.
Risley half laughed, then checked himself. "My poor girl, you have
the New England conscience in its worst form," he said.
"You yourself told me it was a serious thing I was doing," Cynthia
said, half resentfully. "One does not wish one's sin treated lightly
when one has hugged its pricks to one's bosom for so long--it
detracts from the dignity of suffering."
"So I did, but all those years ago!"
"If you don't leave me my remorse, how can I atone for the deed?"
"Cynthia, you are horribly morbid."
"Maybe you are right, maybe it is worse than morbid. Sometimes I
think I am unnatural, out of drawing, but I did not make myself, and
how can I help it?" Cynthia spoke with a pathetic little laugh.
She leaned her head back in her chair, and looked at a star through
a gap in the vines. The shadows of the leaves played over her long,
white figure. Again to Risley, gazing at her, came the conviction as
of subtle spiritual deformity in the woman; she was unnatural in
something the same fashion that an orchid is unnatural, and it was
worse, because presumably the orchid does not know it is an orchid
and regret not being another, more evenly developed, flower, and
Cynthia had a full realization and a mental mirror clear enough to
see the twist in her own character.
Risley had never kissed her in his life, but that night, when they
parted, he laid a hand on her soft, gray hair, and smoothed it back
with a masculine motion of tenderness, leaving her white forehead,
which had a candid, childish fulness about the temples, bare. Then
he put his lips to it.
"You are a silly girl, Cynthia," he said.
"I wish I were different, Lyman," she responded, and, he felt, with
a double meaning.
"I don't," he said, and stroked her hair with a great tenderness,
which seemed for the time to quite fill and satisfy his heart. He
was a man of measureless patience, born to a firm conviction of the
journey's end.
"There are worse things than loving a good woman your whole life and
never having her," he said to himself as he went home, but he said
it without its full meaning. Risley's "nerves" were always lighted
by the lamp of his own hope, which threw a gleam over unknown seas.