THE COVENANT
She did not rebel or draw away, but there was that on her face, I say,
which left me only reverent. Her hand fell into mine. We sat there,
plighted, plighted in our rags and misery and want and solitude. Though
I should live twice the allotted span of man, never should I forget what
came into my soul that hour.
After a time I turned from her, and from the hills, and from the sky,
and looked about us at the poor belongings with which we were to begin
our world. All at once my eye fell upon one of our lighter robes, now
fairly white with much working. I drew it toward me, and with her still
leaning against my shoulder, I took up a charred stick, and so,
laboriously, I wrote upon the surface of the hide, these words of our
covenant:
"_I, John Cowles, take thee, Ellen Meriwether, to be my lawful, wedded
wife, in sickness, and in health, for better of for worse, till death do
us part._"
And I signed it; and made a seal after my name.
"Write," said I to her. "Write as I have written."
She took a fresh brand, blackened at the end, and in lesser characters
wrote slowly, letter by letter:
"_I, Ellen Meriwether, take thee, John Cowles, to be my lawful, wedded
husband_--" She paused, but I would not urge her, and it was moments
before she resumed--"_in sickness and in health, for better or for
worse_--" Again she paused, thinking, thinking--and so concluded, "_till
death do us part_."
"It means," she said to me, simply as a child, "until we have both gone
back into the flowers and the trees."
I took her hand in mine. Mayhap book and bell and organ peal and
vestured choir and high ceremony of the church may be more solemn; but
I, who speak the truth from this very knowledge, think it could not be.
"When you have signed that, Ellen," I said to her at last, "we two are
man and wife, now and forever, here and any place in the world. That is
a binding ceremony, and it endows you with your share of all my
property, small or large as that may be. It is a legal wedding, and it
holds us with all the powers the law can have. It is a contract."
"Do not talk to me of contracts," she said. "I am thinking of nothing
but our--wedding."
Still mystical, still enigma, still woman, she would have it that the
stars, the mountains---the witnesses--and not ourselves, made the
wedding. I left it so, sure of nothing so much as that, whatever her way
of thought might be, it was better than my own.
"But if I do not sign this?" she asked at length.
"Then we are not married."
She sighed and laid down the pen. "Then I shall not sign it--yet," she
said.
I caught up her hand as though I would write for her.
"No," she said, "it shall be only our engagement, our troth between us.
This will be our way. I have not yet been sufficiently wooed, John
Cowles!"
I looked into her eyes and it seemed to me I saw there something of the
same light I had seen when she was the masked coquette of the Army
ball--the yearning, the melancholy, the mysticism, the challenge, the
invitation and the doubting--ah, who shall say what there is in a
woman's eye! But I saw also what had been in her eyes each time I had
seen her since that hour. I left it so, knowing that her way would be
best.
"When we have escaped," she went on, "if ever we do escape, then this
will still be our troth, will it not, John Cowles?"
"Yes, and our marriage, when you have signed, now or any other time."
"But if you had ever signed words like these with any _other_ woman,
then it would not be our marriage nor our troth, would it, John Cowles?"
"No," I said. _And, then I felt my face grow ashy cold and pale in one
sudden breath!_
"But why do you look so sad?" she asked of me, suddenly. "Is it not well
to wait?"
"Yes, it is well to wait," I said. She was so absorbed that she did not
look at me closely at that instant.
Again she took up the charred stick in her little hand, and hesitated.
"See," she said, "I shall sign one letter of my name each week, until
all my name is written! Till that last letter we shall be engaged. After
the last letter, when I have signed it of my own free will, and clean,
and solemn--clean and solemn, John Cowles--then we will be--Oh, take me
home--take me to my father, John Cowles! This is a hard place for a girl
to be."
Suddenly she dropped her face into her hands, sobbing.
She hid her head on my breast, sore distressed now. She was glad that
she might now be more free, needing some manner of friend; but she was
still--what? Still woman! Poor Saxon I must have been had I not sworn to
love her fiercely and singly all my life. But yet--
I looked at the robe, now fallen loose upon the ground, and saw that she
had affixed one letter of her name and stopped. She smiled wanly. "Your
name would be shorter to sign a little at a time," she said; "but a girl
must have time. She must wait. And see," she said, "I have no ring. A
girl always has a ring."
This lack I could not solve, for I had none.
"Take mine," she said, removing the ring with the rose seal. "Put it on
the other finger--the--the right one."
I did so; and I kissed her. But yet--
She was weary and strained now. A pathetic droop came to the corners of
her mouth. The palm of her little hand turned up loosely, as though she
had been tired and now was resting. "We must wait," she said, as though
to herself.
But what of me that night? When I had taken my own house and bed beyond
a little thicket, that she might be alone, that night I found myself
breathing hard in terror and dread, gazing up at the stars in agony,
beating my hands on the ground at the thought of the ruin I had wrought,
the crime that I had done in gaining this I had sought.
I had written covenants before! I have said that I would tell simply the
truth in these pages, and this is the truth, the only extenuation I may
claim. The strength and sweetness of all this strange new life with her
had utterly wiped out my past, had put away, as though forever, the
world I once had known. Until the moment Ellen Meriwether began the
signing of her name, I swear I had forgotten that ever in the world was
another by name of Grace Sheraton! I may not be believed--I ought not to
be believed; but this is the truth and the truth by what measure my love
for Ellen Meriwether was bright and fixed, as much as my promise to the
other had been ill-advised and wrong.
A forsworn man, I lay there, thinking of her, sweet, simple, serious and
trusting, who had promised to love me, an utterly unworthy man, until we
two should go back into the flowers.
Far rather had I been beneath the sod that moment; for I knew, since I
loved Ellen Meriwether, _she must not complete the signing of her name
upon the scroll of our covenant!_