JOURNEY'S END
Over the hills went Johnny Byrd and down the trail and into a grove of
pines.
Up to the left went Barry Elder, out of sight among the larches. He
walked briskly at first, his face clouded but set. Then he walked
slower, his face still clouded but unsettled.
Decidedly his pace lagged. Then it stopped. He looked back. . . . He
went a little way back and stopped again. . . . Then he went on going
back without stopping.
His face was much clearer now.
Maria Angelina had climbed a mountain and descended a mountain; she had
wandered and struggled and scrambled for hours till she was faint with
exhaustion; she had been through the extremes of hope and despair and
shame and anger and heart-breaking indignation till it seemed as if her
spirit must break with her body.
For recovery she had had some scant hours of sleep and a portion of
food.
And now, instead of succumbing to the mortal weariness that should have
been upon her, instead of closing the big eyes that burned in her head,
she stood at the cabin door with uplifted face listening to the song of
a bird that she did not know.
Then she reentered the cabin; but not to sink into a chair, not to
release her bruised feet from the weight of her tiredness.
She cleared the table and piled the dishes in a huge pan upon the little
stove. Upon the stove she discovered water heated in a kettle and she
poured it, splashing, over the panful. She found three cloths of
incredible blackness drying upon a little string in a corner by the
stove, and after smiling very tenderly upon them she abandoned them in
favor of a clean hand towel.
She restored the washed dishes to their obvious places upon the shelves
and with a broom she battled with the dust upon the floor and drove it
out the open door. Then she swept up the hearth, singing as she swept,
and tidied the arrangement of books, bait and tobacco upon the mantel,
fingering them with shy curiosity.
"Maria Angelina!" said a voice at the doorway and Maria Angelina turned
with a catch at her heart.
It had taken Barry Elder a long time to retrace those steps of his.
Twice he had stopped in deep thought. Once he had pulled out a
leather folder from his pocket and after regarding its sheaf of
papers had sat down upon a stone and deliberately opened a long,
much-creased-from-handling letter. It was dated a week before and it was
headed York Harbor. It concluded with an invitation--and a question.
After reading that letter Barry remained sunk in thought for a time
longer than the reading had taken.
All of his past was in that letter--and a great deal of his future in
that invitation.
Then he went deeper into his pocketbook and took out a small photograph.
It was the one she had given him when he went to France--when she had
been willing to inspire but not to bless him. For a long time, soberly,
he gazed at the picture it disclosed, at the fair presentment of
delightful youth.
Never had he looked at that picture in just that way. He had known
longing before it, and he had known bitterness quite as misplaced and
quite as disproportionate.
It affected him now in neither way.
It was a beautiful picture--it was the picture of a beautiful young
woman. He acknowledged the beauty with generous appreciation. But he
felt no inclination to go on staring, moonstruck, upon it; neither did
he feel the impulse to thrust it hurriedly out of sight, as something
with power to rend.
It neither troubled him nor invited--though the girl was beautiful
enough, he continued to admit. So were her pearls--and neither were
genuine, thought Barry with more humor than a former adorer has any
right to feel.
Then he amended his thought. Something of her was real--the invitation
in that letter--the inclination that he had always known she felt. It
was just because it was a genuine impulse in her that he realized how
strong was the calculation in her that had always been able to keep the
errant inclination in check.
And even when he was going to war . . . She had envisaged her future so
shrewdly--either as wife or widow, he was certain, that she had given
the photograph and not her hand.
Later, Bob Martin became unavailable. And he, himself, acquired an
income.
It was not the income that tempted her, he was clearly aware, and he did
her and himself the justice to perceive that it was the inclination
which prompted the invitation--but the inclination could now feel itself
supported by an approving worldly conscience.
He wondered now at the long struggle of his senses. He wondered at the
death pangs of infatuation.
Once more he looked at the picture in a puzzled way as if to make sure
that the thing he felt--and the thing he didn't feel--were indubitably
real, and then he rose with a curious sense of lightness and yet
sobriety, and, straightening his shoulders as if a burden had fallen
from them, he retraced his steps towards the cabin.
At the doorway he paused, for he heard Maria Angelina singing. Then he
spoke her name.
The song stopped. Maria Angelina turned towards him a face of flushed
surprise. He discovered her quaintly with a jar of pickled frogs in her
hand.
"Maria Angelina, what are you doing?"
"But these, Signor--what are these?"
"These? Oh--not for food, Maria Angelina--even in my most desperate
moments. . . . Maria Angelina, are you going to marry him?"
She did not drop the frogs. Very carefully she put them back but with a
shaking hand. All the rosy sparkle was swept out of her. Her eyes were
averted. She looked suddenly harassed, stubborn, almost furtive.
No quick denial came springing from her.
"I do not know," she told him painfully.
"You do not know?"
There was something in the young man's voice that made her glance rise
to his.
"Oh, it is not that I care for him!" said Maria Angelina ingenuously.
"Then why think of marrying him?"
"It may be--needful."
"Not after this story," Barry Elder, insisted.
"It is not that--now." She forced herself to meet his combative look.
"It is because of--Julietta."
"Julietta! . . . Who the deuce is Julietta?"
"Oh, she is my sister, my older sister. I told you about her last
night," Maria Angelina reminded him. "She is the one I love so much.
. . . And she is not pretty, at all--she is anything _but_ pretty,
though she is so good and dear--yet she will never marry unless she has
a large dower. And there is nothing in her life if she does not marry.
And there is no money for a large dower, but only for a little bit for
her and a little bit for me. So they sent me on this visit to America,
for here the men do not ask dowers and what was saved on me would help
Julietta--and now----"
Borne headlong on her flood of revelation Maria Angelina could not stop
to watch the change in Barry Elder's face. And she was utterly
unprepared for the immense vehemence of the exclamation which cut into
her consciousness with such startling effect that she stopped and gasped
and swallowed uncertainly before finishing in an altered key, "And so I
must marry in America--for Julietta's dower----"
In an odd voice Barry offered, "You think it your duty--because Byrd is
so rich----?"
"I know it is my duty," she gave back, goaded to desperation, "but--but,
oh, it is like that cake of yours, Signor--of a nothingness to me
within!"
Very abruptly Barry turned from her; he drove his hands deep into his
pocket and strode across the room and back. He brought up directly in
front of her.
"Maria Angelina," he said softly, "how old are you?"
"Eighteen."
"How many men have you known?"
"You, first, Signor, then the others here."
"But you did care for him," he said. "You kissed him."
Her eyes dropped, her cheeks flamed and he saw her lips quiver--those
soft, sensitive lips of hers which seemed to breathe such tender warmth
and perfume like the warmth and perfume of a flower. But through the
shine of tears her eyes came back to his.
"No, Signor, it was he who kissed me--and without my consent! I did not
kiss him--never, never, never!"
"Is there such a difference?"
"But there is all the difference----"
"Maria Angelina, you are sure that to kiss a man yourself, to kiss him
deliberately, unmistakably upon the lips, is a final seal and ultimate
surrender, and that if you do not marry a man you have so kissed you
would be no better than a worthless deceiver, an outrageous flirt, an
abandoned trifler----"
She looked at him amazedly.
His eyes were oddly dancing, his lips were curved in a boyish smile,
infinitely merry, infinitely tender; the wind was blowing back the curly
locks of hair from his face, giving it the look of a victorious runner,
arrived at some swift goal.
Back of him, through the open door of the cabin, the green and gold of
the forest shone in translucent brightness.
"But yes--that is true----" she stammered, not daring to trust that rush
of happiness, that sweet and secret singing of her blood.
"Then, Maria Angelina," said he gayly yet adoringly, "Maria Angelina,
you little darling of the gods, come here instantly and kiss me. . . .
For I am never going to let you go again."
THE END
[Transcriber's Note: A missing period was added on page 150, after the
words "then shrank back", and a missing quotation mark was added on page
195, at the paragraph beginning "And Francisco". No other corrections
were made to the original text.]
End of Project Gutenberg's The Innocent Adventuress, by Mary Hastings Bradley