The Silver Poppy Part 29

"I'm tired!" she murmured, locking her fingers behind her head. He noticed an unlooked-for fulness about the round, tower-like neck that seemed to sigh into the white breadth of the shoulders like a river into its sea.

"Cordelia, you _are_ tired," he repeated suddenly: and he moved as though to rise from his chair. A frightened look shot into her face.

She wondered for a moment if he would have the heart to leave her there, so soon, so unsatisfied, and without a sign. She dreaded the thought of the solitude that would come after he had gone, the thought of that last night of what she must soon call her old life.

"I wonder if you know how tired I am?" she murmured absently, pus.h.i.+ng back her sleeves and leaning forward with her elbows on the table.

"I wonder if you can imagine how heavily I'll sleep to-night, and how tired I shall get up, even, in the morning?"

He rose from his chair, and walking round to the side of the table where she sat, stood behind her without speaking. She could feel the caress of his hand on her thick hair.

"I feel as though I'd like to be mothered to-night by some one!" she murmured softly, as her eyelids drooped.

He still touched her hair, almost reverently, but that was all.

Then she turned to him with the smile of a tired child.

"Lift me up--I want you to lift me up, and carry me over to my couch!"

He lifted her in his arms as he might a child of three, and as he did so the memory of another night when he had first done the same thing rushed back through his mind; and without a word he carried her to the little j.a.panese couch beside her writing-desk of gold and mother-of-pearl. He found a rug and covered her feet.

She gazed up at him with lips that appeared to pout girlishly.

"Do you want to sleep now?" he asked gently, bending over her.

As he looked down at her in the silence that followed his words her mouth seemed to grow heavy. That fugitive, inscrutable something crept into her eyes once more; and all of a sudden his face grew deathly pale, and then flushed again.

"John!"

He turned and made three steps toward the door.

"John!" she cried after him, with a note of pain in the cry. She had flung off the rug, and was leaning on her elbow. He looked from where he stood, hesitating.

He went slowly back, and bent over her once more. Her pleading lips were perilously close to his.

"Must you go?" she asked, sinking back in her weariness, and raising two arms from which the loose silken sleeves fell back. The next moment a vibrant tremor of exaltation swept over her.

"Don't go! Don't go!" she murmured. "Don't leave me!"

The two white arms came together and folded over him and drew him in like wings.

Time and the world were nothing to her then; time and the world were shut out from him. It was the lingering, long-delayed capitulation of the more impetuous, profounder love she had held back from him, of the finer and softer self she had all but famished in the citadel of her grim aspirations. She no longer allured him, or cared to allure him; she had nothing to seek of him thereafter; she had only the ruins of her broken life to give him.

And he, too--he felt those first thin needles of bliss that crept and projected themselves over the quiet waters of friends.h.i.+p, and he knew that a power not himself was transforming those waters of change and unrest and ebb and flow into the impenetrable solidity of love itself.

CHAPTER XXVI

AUTUMN SUNLIGHT

There we watched those troubled eyes, And her laughing face grow wan; And the birds sought other skies, And she knew her year--was gone!

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Valley Princess."

This dog of a life--mongrel of joy and misery that it is!--"The Silver Poppy."

Cordelia had found, and with bewildered eyes was watching unfold, her first and only love. About the belated flowering of that tender and reluctant growth clung a touch of tragic bitter-sweetness; it seemed so poignantly ineffectual, so like the odorous second blossoming of orchards at the betraying breath of a St. Martin's summer.

Yet Cordelia's week in the little old French city on the St. Lawrence was, perhaps, the happiest week in all her life. It was not all pure happiness; it had its moments of pain--but it was enough. She felt within her some shy subliminal renewal, as silent yet as implacable as the insidious first workings of spring.

Through all the gray years that followed, her week of happiness remained a beautiful memory, colored with the quiet pa.s.sion of a pathetic struggle up toward the light of that impossible new world into which she seemed to glance for one fugitive moment. And that golden week of happiness had come, too, upon her so unlooked for, so unasked for! It had crept upon her like a quiet dream through broken and restless sleep.

And even she herself felt, at times, how it had transformed her--seeing, at the last, how nearly it had liberated from the gloomy walls of pride and egoism those phantasmal dead selves which clamored for air only in life's more exalted moments.

A pale wistfulness took possession of her, a quietness and gentleness of demeanor which was new and strange to her. More than once in their rambles about the quaint old city Hartley had surprised her looking at him out of troubled and tearful eyes, with an indefinite, dumb entreaty on her quivering under-lip. And each time he caught that pa.s.sing look it touched him and intangibly drew him closer to her. She felt the necessity of having him to lean upon, the want of his arm and voice and presence. And some pa.s.sionate dread of the solitude she felt ominously before her drove Cordelia still closer and still more desperately to his side.

This was not lost on Hartley himself. Those sorrowing eyes seemed to trumpet to the knight that lay dormant in him; and if he said little at the time, he nevertheless felt much. With the birth of this tenderer feeling came a newer and deeper trust in her, a less active quest of motive and meaning in all her acts. Though he knew, indeed, that she was still holding back something from him, he made no effort to wring a reluctant statement from her. He was willing to wait her time. She had given him much; the little he could and would not claim.

In the meanwhile, with the sense of something slipping between their fingers, and with a premonition of impending change hanging over both of them, they made the most of those pa.s.sing days. Mrs. Spaulding did not care to take part in their wanderings, and it was only during their hours at the hotel that the shadow of her presence fell between them.

More than one happy day they spent in visits to the Basilica, to the old Citadel fortress, to the ancient ruins of the Chateau Bigot in the valley of the St. Charles. They idled away a merry forenoon in search of the Golden Dog, and when that strange figure in gilt was found at last, on the northern facade of the post-office, Hartley put its still stranger rhyme into English for her. For many an hour, too, they rambled about the crooked little streets of the lower town, which Hartley declared to be wondrously like a second Dieppe or Amiens. And they went on long walks out upon the Plains of Abraham, and visited the tall shaft which marks the spot where Wolfe died victorious.

"How sad it seems," said Cordelia, "to die on the day, in the very hour, that life has grown most worth living!"

She gazed up at the ironical towering marble with musing eyes.

"But isn't it better it should come even in that last moment, than never at all?" Hartley asked, looking up to where her own eyes rested, and himself busy, for the moment, with his own thoughts.

"It may be!" said Cordelia, looking from the marble to the man. "It may be!" she repeated absently.

One day they went by train to the straggling little village of Ste. Anne de Beaupre, and together visited the Shrine, and drank a cupful of the miraculous waters from the Holy Spring. A pilgrimage had brought to the town that day a sadly picturesque army of life's unfortunates, so that both Cordelia and Hartley drew a breath of relief when the halt and the maimed had been left behind them and they had escaped from the pitiful tumult of ca.s.sock and crutch and wandered out into the cool quietness of the open country. There Cordelia, venturing inquisitively into one of the little whitewashed cottages, was smitten with a sudden vague sense of homesickness on hearing once more the familiar hum of a spinning-wheel; while to Hartley the softness of the mingled _patois_ of Brittany and Normandy, the sedate tranquillity of the clean little huddling riverside villages, and the crowded yet rambling rows of tiny cottages with wide eaves that drooped down over mullioned windows like tired lids over sleepy eyes, brought back from time to time many thoughts of his older Oxford. Cordelia listened, with wondering eyes and a strangely heavy heart, to his descriptions of that far-away English country, trying pa.s.sionately, yet vainly, to see it as she knew he beheld it in his own eyes.

"Some day I hope we shall see it," he said, wistfully. "We two, together!"

Then they were both charmed into silent wonder by the old-world quaintness of the rambling hillside road, and following it idly, they wandered on, enchanted into forgetfulness by the beauty of the blended tints of the autumnal maples and oaks, by the soft verdure of the terraced foot-hills, broken with little rifts of silver where flas.h.i.+ng streams fell musically down to the blue St. Lawrence, on which, here and there, they could catch glimpses of low-lying batteaux and drifting sails.

They had strolled happily on through the tiny village of Riviere des Chiens, pausing a moment before a towering line of Lombardy poplars that stood black against the setting sun, when the sound of broken weeping startled them both from their day-dreams. Hartley, in alarm, ran on ahead, and under a blighted thorn-tree, crouched amid the roadside goldenrod, he found a woman with a child clutched to her breast. Her gaunt body rocked back and forth as she sat there, and she neither looked up nor ceased her wailing when he bent over and touched her on the shoulder. He called to her in English, and then in French, but still she sat amid the dusty goldenrod, clutching the child to her breast.

"Is it dead?" asked Cordelia, in a frightened voice, trying to see into the m.u.f.fled face. "Oh, be careful! Do be careful! It may be something horrible--some horrible disease!"

Hartley had wakened the woman from her stupor, and in broken French, rich with the idiom of the seventeenth century, she was explaining in her dead voice that she had tried to make her way on foot to Ste. Anne, that if she once reached the shrine of the blessed saint she knew her boy would be saved. Two of them had died, of the black sickness; he was all she had left! And in a fresh paroxysm of grief she caught the sick child once more up to her bent body, and swayed back and forth with it in hopeless despair.

Hartley sent Cordelia hurriedly to the nearest farm-house, for a conveyance. Impatient at the delay while the _habitant_ harnessed his stocky little pony to a cart, he helped the woman to her feet, and taking the child in his own arms, started back for the village, not a mile distant. There he sent a messenger post-haste to Ste. Anne's, and an hour later the ponderous little wagon that did service as ambulance for the convent of the Franciscan Sisters at Beaupre was speeding homeward with both mother and child, and Hartley and Cordelia were waiting on the chilly little wind-swept platform for the Quebec train, intangibly detached from one another and mysteriously depressed in spirits. It was not until the warmth and lights of the hotel had shut out the night from them that either cared to talk. Then, of a sudden, Hartley found the woman at his side shaken with a pa.s.sionate burst of seemingly inconsequential weeping.

"Cordelia, what is it?" he cried, in startled wonder.

"Motherhood!" said Cordelia, inadequately, through her tears--"it--it is such an awful thing!"