THE GLADNESS THAT SINGS
"Well?" laughingly. "Don't you know me?"
Wayne Shandon, riding idly down a lane through the pines, had come
close before he saw her sitting with her back to a tree, her camera and
empty lunch basket lying beside her. He had left Big Bill and had come
on alone, passing around the head of the lake and following the trail
which Little Saxon's flying hoofs had made in the fresh sod. Now, as
with a quick hand upon Lady Lightfoot's reins he came to a stop, he
very promptly forgot all about Little Saxon.
The girl, leaving Gypsy tethered beyond a grove of firs, had found upon
the skirt of a densely wooded slope a spot that was like a corner of a
woodland fairyland, dim and dusky and sweet scented. The noontide was
warm with the rippling sunlight above, a down-filtering ray touched her
bare head and dropped flecks of gold in her braided hair.
Shandon, motionless for a little, did not speak nor did his expression
change except that it grew more frankly filled with admiration, with
sheer wonder at her loveliness.
"Really," she bantered, still laughingly, not to be confused by her old
playfellow's look. "I'm neither ghost, goblin nor evil spirit, nor
anything worse than just a girl, you know!"
"Are you . . . just a girl?" He raised his hand slowly, lifting his
hat. But not yet did he smile back into her smiling eyes. She had
never seen him so grave. "I don't know. You are not the same girl I
used to know."
"Why, Wayne," she retorted merrily. "It's only a year. You weren't
expecting wrinkles already, were you?"
The steadiness of his gaze made her wonder. His eyes clung to hers for
a long moment, left them to travel swiftly up and down the sweet young
body that was no longer the body of "just a girl," noted how
wonderfully the promise of girlhood had been fulfilled in budding
womanhood, came back to her hair and throat and smiling mouth, rested
again upon her eyes.
"You are not the same Wanda I used to know," he insisted soberly,
shaking his head at her. "Not the Wanda I used to play with at school,
to hunt birds' nests with, to steal apples for, to fight other boys
for. Who are you, you wonderful thing?"
"The same Wanda," she told him merrily. "And, if you please, not a
_thing_ at all."
"Do you remember," he went on quietly, still gently serious, "the day
when I whipped little Willie Thorp for you?"
"Yes," she answered lightly, yet not remembering all that he
remembered. "Of course. You--"
"You came and put both little fat, warm, sun-burned arms round me and
kissed me then, Wanda. Would you kiss me now?"
"You should have said that last night," she dimpled up at him. She
thought she knew him too well to take him seriously when he dropped
into one of his bantering moods, just trying perhaps to see if he could
drive a little flush of confusion into her cheeks. "I was so glad to
see you, I might have forgotten I had grown up. That we have grown
up," she said.
"I wish I had," he said abruptly, flinging his head up with the old
gesture she remembered so well. "Wanda, you are the most wonderful
girl-woman in the world! What has happened to you? What have you done
to yourself? What have you done to your eyes? Do you know, Miss Wanda
Leland--are you a little witch and do you do it on purpose?--that those
two eyes of yours can make madness in a man's soul?"
"Flatterer!" she countered brightly. "Have you been a whole year
making pretty speeches, and must you keep it up now because you've got
into the habit and since the pretty ladles of your travels are not here
and I am? Aren't you a little bit ashamed of yourself? Aren't you
afraid that you will create havoc by putting a lot of foolish ideas
into a country girl's head?"
He laughed at last, becoming suddenly the same old Red Reckless that he
had always been, and swung down lightly from the saddle. Dropping Lady
Lightfoot's reins to the ground he came to where Wanda sat and having
stood over her a moment looking down into the clear eyes which were
turned frankly up to him he made himself comfortable at her feet,
stretching luxuriously in the warm grass.
"It's great to be back, Wanda," he said musingly, with a deep sigh of
content. "You are going to squander a little of your precious time on
me, aren't you? I've been deucedly energetic all morning; now I'm just
brimful of sunshine and laziness. So lazy that I want just to smoke
and watch you and listen while you talk. You will have a whole lot to
tell me about all the things you've been doing while I was away."
[Illustration: "I want just to smoke and watch you and listen while you
talk."]
She gathered her knees into her clasped hands and smiled down upon the
flaming red hair. Before he made his cigarette she found herself
answering his questions, telling about her life during his absence.
As she talked she saw his face only now and then when he turned a
little to laugh up at her over some trifle that amused him. The story
of this year of her life as she told it was a simple, homely little
tale, a quiet pastoral of happy content. It had to do largely with
herself and her work, with her failures and successes. But she
mentioned both Garth and Sledge Hume.
"Hume?" said Shandon, looking up quickly, this time with no laughter in
his eyes. "Have you seen much of that man, Wanda?"
"A good deal. He and father and Garth seem to have some kind of
business together. Why?"
"Because I don't like him," he told her emphatically. "I don't like to
have you know a man like that."
She did not mention Hume again. She admitted frankly that she herself
disliked the man although she had tried to think well of him because he
was a friend of her father. Running on with the account of her winter
adventures, and laughing at the memory of an incident that had been
serious enough at the time, she told him how she had imperilled her
life in heedless pursuit of the snow-shoe rabbit. Her mood, gay for
the moment, was the sort to make light of things which had merely cast
a shadow and gone; it was as though from the very presence of Wayne she
had accepted his theory of life, the ability to live keenly, richly in
the present, to be oblivious with sealed eyes to the future, careless
with deaf ears to the mutterings of the past. She was talking freely,
spontaneously, laughing from the very joy of life and the morning and
another joy which she did not analyse, looking down at the sunlight
caught flaring in his hair. And he, vastly contented, listened and
laughed with her.
Then, in the midst of the recital of her last winter's mishap which she
strove to make as unimportant as she now considered it, she looked down
at Wayne Shandon and suddenly broke off in the middle of a word. He
had dropped his cigarette, the hand that she could see had shut tight
into a whitened fist, the colour of a second ago had seeped out of his
bronzed cheek. As she stopped, wondering, he sprang to his feet and
towered over her.
"Wanda!" he cried, and his voice was as unfamiliar in her ears as the
view of his drawn face in her eyes.
"Wayne!" she said curiously, staring at him, startled and a little
afraid of she knew not what. "Wayne! What is it?"
"What is it?" Shandon's voice had dropped lower, was so hoarse that it
did not seem Wayne Shandon's voice at all. "It is just this--"
He broke off as sharply as she had done and moving swiftly as though
driven by some great compelling force which dominated him he stooped
and swept her up into his arms. She felt the tightening muscles as he
drew her close, closer to him; felt a little tremor running through his
whole body; heard the beating of his heart; was drawn nearer to him
than she had ever been drawn to a man in her life; realised for the
first time in a flutter of many sweeping emotions how superbly big and
powerful the man was, how almost god-like in the beauty of his muscular
manhood . . . and then she knew nothing but the wonderful fact that he
had kissed her full upon her quivering red mouth.
"My God, Wanda, how I love you!" he exclaimed with sudden wild,
unleashed vehemence. "Do you hear me?" He was holding her a little
away from him, his arms still shaking about her shoulders, his voice
frightening her with the vibrant fierceness that had leaped into it,
the love in his eyes glowing like fire. "I love you so that I'd go
through Hell to have you, to have you for mine, all mine! So that I
might fight a man for daring to look at you, that I might kill a man
for harming you! Wanda, girl, I tell you that I love you! Do you
understand? Do you know what that means? What love means? When a man
loves a woman as I do?"
Always a man of impulse, a man who through years of habit had grown to
act swiftly in little things and big things alike, Wayne Shandon flung
into impassioned words the emotions which swept through his soul and
brain. The sight of Wanda Leland, grown into the sweet, pure beauty of
early womanhood, had stirred him to the depths. Her casual mention of
other men, Garth, and Sledge Hume, had displeased him so vaguely that
he had not fully understood or cared why. And then the light allusion
to the danger of death in which she had stood had been the spark in the
powder train of his love, his words exploded from the seething
consciousness newly awakened, fires long smouldering unsuspected in his
heart burst forth in a mighty conflagration of emotion.
Throughout his whole being there was a strange, new, throbbing
buoyancy, the gladness that sings, the joy that sparkles. The elixir
of life had been set suddenly before him. He did not taste and put it
away as some men do; he did not sip sparingly and temperately; but he
drank deeply and swiftly so that the wine of love tingled through his
blood, made his brain reel and his heart grow hot. It intoxicated his
soul and his senses with a rare, glorious intoxication.
He tossed his head back, holding her still a little further from him,
and looked into her eyes. His own had changed now, changed utterly in
their eloquent speech. They had been fierce, now they grew wonderfully
tender. They had been clear and bright and eager; and now they were
misty. The first flame of love had leaped through his blood; now an
infinite yearning, as gentle as tears, rose from his heart. Love had
clamoured, now love was whispering. Love had been insistent; now it
pleaded. It had been masterful; now it knelt.
"You love me--_like that_?"
The tumult in the man's soul had awakened conflicting emotions under
the troubled, tremulous breasts. She looked at him with wide, clear
eyes, wondering. A miracle, the old, eternal, primal miracle, had
entered her life. She had looked down, laughingly, on a careless boy;
she had been gripped mightily in the arms of a being new to her, a man
who loved. From the clear blue of her life's sky there had leaped out
a flash of lightning that filled the universe with its light and heat.
They had been two gay loitering children; now she saw the man shaken in
the gust of his passion.
"You love me--_like that_?"
"God forgive me, yes!"
His voice was steady now but low, scarcely louder than her awed
whisper. He dropped his arms, letting them fall lingeringly, and
stooping a little, touched her forehead with his lips.
"And," he said with a reverence which stirred her more than his rude
embrace had done, "I love you like this, dear."
More often than not the story of one's life is a smooth running tale,
the day's page turning gently, going on with the unfinished sentence of
yesterday, the end of each little chapter guessed before it has been
read. But there are times when the leaves no longer turn slowly but
are caught in a sudden gust that sends them fluttering like dead leaves
in a September gale; when life no longer loiters, but leaps when the
unseen end of the chapter is a mystery, when the letters on the page
are shining gold or fiery red.
Such a time had come into Wanda Leland's life. In one swift moment she
had risen to a pinnacle, she had looked down upon the level lowlands
from the heights. The monotony of the commonplace receded and was
lost; the aspect of life upon which she looked was wonderful and new.
There had been a change within her. She was no longer the Wanda Leland
she had been a moment ago, the Wanda Leland she had been throughout the
years of her life. Nor would she ever be exactly that same Wanda
Leland again.
Revelation had been lightning, two-tongued. It showed her herself; it
explained, it touched with light, it made distinct the shadowy things
that had long lain in her breast. And it showed her Wayne Shandon as
she had never seen him.
For years they had been playfellows, frank, almost boyish, both of
them. Now her heart was beating wildly from the very touch of him.
Had she always loved him? Had he always loved her? Was this
wonderful, new thing, love, without beginning as it surely was without
end?
She looked wonderingly into his eyes. Her own, like his, were clear,
bright one moment, starry with a dimness as of unshed tears the next.
Tenderness, like a mist, filled them.
"I love you, Wayne," she said, her voice low, trembling just a little,
but clear. "I want you all mine as you want me. So that if you went
up to Heaven or down to Hell I could go with you."
"Wanda!" he said. "_Wanda_."
She smiled a little at him and put out her two hands.