I
He had stood this gregarious flocking around just all he was going to,
Neale decided that morning, up under the ilex trees, exchanging
commonplaces with the two girls, unable to say or even to look what he
felt, because Eugenia was there. And he'd had plenty of Eugenia during
the last ten days.
What a nightmare those ten days had been to him! What a hideous
block-head he had been to let Marise slip away from him, even for a
time, before he had made a chance to see her, _really_ to see her, in a
quiet place where they could hear themselves think--with none of those
third and fourth persons hanging around. What had he been thinking of,
drifting along like a man in a dream, with no sense of time?
But that absence of hers had waked him up. Yes, it had waked him up! He
had not had one consecutive night's sleep since she had been gone,
starting up continually from a doze with his arms empty when he had
dreamed she was lying in them. How had he ever lived through that
suspense and uncertainty without losing his mind? He was very grateful
to Eugenia for having kept him from making an awful fool of himself and
getting into a blind mess of confusion. She had kept him in Rome by
telling him that Marise would be back any day. If it hadn't been for
that--where would _he_ have been? Looking for a needle in a haystack all
over Southern France, and Marise back in Rome.
Well, she was back and he had been too frightened not to have learned a
little sense. He'd manage a walk with her alone, just the two of them
before the day was out or--How could he?
How did you do anything? You just went and did it.
He went boldly to her room and knocked on the door. When Marise came to
open it, he said, "To celebrate your return, won't you let me show you
a specially lovely spot on the Campagna I've found? I've been taking
some long, solitary walks while you were away." He added firmly, "No,
not Miss Mills and Mr. Livingstone because they don't like to tramp, and
this is 'cross country."
There! It had been no harder than that. Why in the name of heaven hadn't
he thought of the simple, obvious way to get the thing done? He went
back to his room and sat down, staring at the wall, to wait till
afternoon came and to try to plan what he would say when it came. He
hoped a great deal that she had read Browning.
* * * * *
But she hadn't. As they passed through the city walls and came out, just
the two of them, under the wide sky he asked her about it, timidly; for
he was horribly frightened and moved, now that he had her to himself.
And she said that she was sorry, she was very ignorant of English and
American poetry, having been so little in an English-speaking country.
Neale sighed. No luck! She went on to suggest apologetically that she
ought some time to go back to America and take a course in English
Literature, or at least gather the books about her and read. "My old
Cousin Hetty's front porch wouldn't be a bad place," she said
thoughtfully.
"I'm going to see that front porch before so very long, you know," said
Neale, springing one of his surprises, with a rapidly beating heart and
an impassive face.
She darted one of her swallow-swift glances at him.
"Yes, you've persuaded me. I've persuaded myself. I'm not going to sell
the Ashley property right away, not without going up to look at it at
least. I've been thinking a great deal about what you said that first
day. I've been thinking a great deal anyway--can't--can't we sit down
somewhere?" He flung away any pretense of having a special place to show
her. She too had apparently forgotten it. They sat down on the short
grass, their backs against a low heap of stones, part of the ruins of a
very ancient aqueduct. Far in the distance a flock of sheep roamed with
a solitary shepherd leaning on his staff.
"You know--you know what we've been talking about, trying to find one's
way, know what you were meant to do. Well, my guess about myself is that
I'm a maker by birth, not a buyer or seller. The more I think of it the
better it looks to me, like something I'd like to put my heart into
doing as well as I could--taking raw material, you know, that's of no
special value in itself and helping other men to make it worth more by
adding work and intelligence to it. You know what somebody said about
the ounce of iron that's of no use, and the hundred hair-springs the
watchmaker makes out of it. I don't see why I didn't think of it at once
when I knew Uncle Burton had left me the mill. But I'd never have
thought of it if you hadn't helped me. It takes me so _long_ to get
around to anything anyhow. And you are so quick! You see, I know a lot
about the lumber-business, and quite a bit about saw mills, and I can
get on fine with workmen. I _like_ them, and I _love_ working in the
woods. And--and--" he brought out the second of his carefully planned
points, "it would be a home too. You said it was a home. Everybody wants
a home, Marise."
He sat silent, listening to the word as it echoed over their two
homeless heads. And then he took his courage in his two hands and turned
towards Marise. What he saw in her face so shocked and startled him that
every carefully planned word dropped from his mind. He forgot everything
except that the dark, set look was on her face and all that tragic
sadness he could not forget.
"Marise, Marise--what is it?" he cried, frightened. What could he have
said?
With her shoulders and eyebrows she made an ugly, dry little gesture of
dismissing the subject, and said ironically, "What makes you so sure
everybody wants a home?"
He stared at her stupidly, not able to think of anything to say, till
she went on impatiently, irritably, "It's just sentimental to talk like
that. I never heard you say a sentimental word before. You know what
homes are like,--places where people either lie to each other or
quarrel."
Neale was startled by the quivering, low-toned violence of her accent.
Why should she wince and shrink back as if he had struck on an
intolerably sensitive bruise--at the word, _home_?
"Why, let me tell you about my home," he said eagerly to her, in answer
to the tragic challenge he felt in her look, her tone. "I don't believe
I ever told you about what my home was like; just the usual kind, of
course, what any child has, I suppose, but--let me _tell_ you about it."
He began anywhere, the first thing that came into his mind, what the
house was like, and where the library was, and how he liked his own
room, and the security of it; his free play with little boys on the
street that was his great world, and how he felt back of him, as a sure
refuge from the uncertainties of that or any other great world, the
certainties of what he found when he ran up the steps every afternoon,
opened the door, his door, and stepped into his home, where he was sure
of being loved and cared for, and yet not fettered or shut in. "Father
and Mother always let me alone, let me grow."
He told of the meal-times and his boy's raging appetite, and his
mother's delight in it. He told of the evenings when Father and Mother
sat reading together; of the free-flowing tide of trust and affection
between his parents, changing with their changes, never the same, never
different; trust and affection of which he had never been really
conscious but which had always been the background of his life. He
remembered even to his father's tone as he said, "Oh, Mary," and her
instant, "Yes, dear, what is it?"
He had not thought of it for years, he had never before thought
consciously of it, had always taken it for granted as he took daylight,
or his own good health. But there in that foreign land it all stood up
before him, clear in its own quiet colors, visible to him for the first
time against the other worlds he had been seeing and divining. He
thought of foolish little gay things to tell her--he could not have
guessed why they came into his mind--about the house smelling "trunky"
when it was time to go to West Adams, and Mother, who could never get
the trunk packed, and Father's joking her about it. And the long trip
over to the city; Father always waiting to let him see how the
ferry-boat was tied up. And in the train how Father kissed Mother
good-by and then Neale, and then Mother again, and put his cheek for an
instant against hers. This time Neale looked back through the years
straight into his father's face, proudly, and held his head high.
He found himself telling things that he himself had never thought of
till then--his parents' tolerant patience with his boy's fits and
starts, with his egotism and absurdities, with his periods of causeless
and violent energy, his other periods of causeless, violent indolence.
And West Adams, he had always till this moment taken for granted the
stability of that second home of his, that had been his father's before
him, like a rock to which his tossing little boat was moored whenever he
wished. Grandfather and Grandmother, plain old people--like Marise's old
Cousin Hetty perhaps--grown as much alike as an old brother and sister,
who still went off blue-berrying on the mountain together every summer.
And then, when he had needed his home no longer, the adventuring-forth
of his father and mother, and his guessing for the first time how they
had tamed their self-centered youth to be parents; the moment when he
and Father stood together under the old maple-tree and understood each
other so deeply, with no words, all the years of affection and trust
rising up and standing there with them; and how Father and Mother had
driven away as if for an Indian Summer honeymoon, Mother's face smiling
through her tears. He told--yes, even that--how for an instant he had
felt hurt and left out, and Mother had known it and come running back to
say a last loving good-by to the little boy he had been.
* * * * *
Marise had not said a word as he brought this all up for her to see, nor
did she when he had finished and was silent. But he could see that her
hands, folded together in her lap, were shaking. He waited for her to
speak. He knew there was something ominous in her silence, like
gathering thunder. His heart was heavy with it. He was afraid of what
might be coming. But he longed to have it come, to have it tear down
the barrier between them.
* * * * *
"So that's what you have known--what every child has, you suppose!" she
said passionately, her voice quivering and breaking. She stopped herself
abruptly. She could scarcely breathe, her agitation was so great. She
knew what she would do if she opened her lips again. But she would die
of suffocation if she did not speak. It rose within her like a devouring
flood, all that old, ever-new bitterness; and beat her down.
She heard herself, in a desperate, stammering voice, telling him ...
_telling_ him!
The words that passed her lips did not seem words but bleeding, living,
tortured things. She was mortally sick and faint, but she could not
stop. Once as in a flicker of lightning she knew what she was doing, and
tried to stop--but she had torn it loose from those fibers that had
grown so close and hard around it, she had wrenched it away--bloody and
raw--it was too late to stop.
When she finished she leaned her face on her hands and was silent,
feeling as though she had died. When she finally looked up at him she
saw that the tears stood thick in his eyes. She had never dreamed that
for good or ill one human being could feel so close to another. It was
as though she could not tell whether those tears were his, or had come
healingly into her own dry eyes.
She saw the anguish of his yearning sympathy--and yet what was it he
said? Something she had not dreamed any one could say, "Oh, the poor
little girl you were! Wasn't there _any one_ to help you to get it
straight, to understand it?"
"Understand it!" she said harshly. "I understood it only too well."
He looked away from her, across the plain, and kept a thoughtful
silence. Then he said, "I don't believe you understood it in the least.
Is it likely that any fourteen-year-old little girl could understand
anything like that, anything that must have begun, had its real causes
back before you were born--and why should you take the point of view of
an ignorant old woman who certainly had the ignorant old woman's
appetite for scandal? You probably didn't even get straight what really
happened then--it sounds fearfully mixed up, you know, as though there
must be more than that to it. Let alone its _real_ meaning, its human
meaning, that you couldn't possibly have understood at fourteen, if you
had known all the facts--and there certainly were lots more facts than
what you saw and what that old woman put into your head.
"And, anyhow--oh, Marise, no matter _what_ it was, it has nothing to do
with your life _now_! Why do you let it mean so much to you? Just think
how long ago it happened! It hasn't a thing to do with _you_. How can
it?"
She flushed a deep, shamed red, and asked in a whisper, "You don't think
that I ... that I would be like that?"
He cried out furiously, "No, no, _no_! What an idea! It's nothing to
you--nothing, I tell you. It's been nothing to you for years. You ought
to have stopped thinking of it ever so long ago. Everybody starts all
over again. You're yourself. You don't have to keep carrying that around
with you. It doesn't belong to you. Let it fall. Leave it here!" he
commanded abruptly, springing to his feet and holding out his hand to
help her rise. "Leave it here! And walk off into your own life."
She stood up beside him now, so giddy with a strange new lightness that
she laid her hand on his arm to steady herself.
At her touch he flushed hot with the desire to put his arms about her
and hold her passionately close. The desire was so intense that he had
for an instant the hallucination that he had done it, that she leaned
her head against his breast. But he had been so harrowed by sympathy for
her poor bruised heart, had been so touched by the revelation of the
delicacy and fineness of fiber which had but served to deepen the
dreadful, unhealed hurt with which she had lived helplessly, he was so
moved by her white, drawn face, lifted to his own with a childlike faith
in what he said, he was so wrung with his thankfulness to see on that
pale face a sensitive reflection of his own certainty ... oh, now was no
time to burst out on her with the flame of his passion, now when she
was so weak, so defenseless. He put aside his passion with a strong
hand, resolutely.
Looking at him, she saw his face flush darkly with his desire, and felt
herself as safe from a touch as though she looked down on him from a
high tower. Had she ever felt safe before?
She leaned on his arm like a convalescent. She walked off beside him
quietly, into her own life.
* * * * *
The walk back to the city walls was as full of a comforting, silent
sense of each other's presence as though they had lived their lives
together.
Once in a while they spoke together as simply and naturally as children,
of small, everyday things, of little changes he would need to make in
his house, an old cistern to be drained and filled in, the half-rotten
maple which darkened the living-room cut down to let the sunlight in.
* * * * *
In one of the quiet silences, full to the brim with their nearness to
each other, Neale remembered what he had meant to do with this
afternoon, what he had so self-consciously planned to say. The thought
made him abashed and humble. How infinitely deeper life was than you
could ever know till you began to live. He had thought he loved Marise
as much as a man could love a woman. He saw that he had only begun to
guess what love could be, that it is a tie between two struggling human
beings, as well as between a man and a woman, and that it is not to be
had without effort and growth. It was something that would take all
there was in him to live up to.
As he walked beside her, he was dedicating all there was in him to
loving her.
II
She was tired, heavenly tired, when she reached her room that late
afternoon. She had not been tired like that since she was a little girl;
relaxed, abandoned before the soft-footed advance of sleep. She could
scarcely think coherently enough to remember to send word that she would
not appear at dinner, before she was undressed and in her bed. There was
nothing in her mind but this exquisite fatigue, from which presently,
even now, as she thought of it, sleep would drift her away. She laid her
tired head on the pillow with a long breath. Some weak tears gathered in
her eyes and ran slowly down, but they were sweet tears, not bitter. And
so she fell asleep.
It was late, when she woke, well on into the next day, and the room was
filled with the crystal clarity of daylight. As she opened her eyes, she
was thinking as though it were the continuation of a dream, that if she
ever had children she would ... she would take _care_ of them! She would
learn how always to be close to them, so that she would be there, ready
to help them when.... She wouldn't leave them helplessly to think that
the evil was in life itself and not in coarse and evil minds. She
wouldn't leave them for years to think that the poor, mean joking of
sniggering servants is all there is to life and love. She would stand up
for them, look out for them! Marise stood fiercely on her guard for them
now, up in arms against what threatened them.
It had never before in her life, not even fleetingly, not once, occurred
to her that she might ever have children. She knew now that she wanted
them. That was the second step into her own life.