Running Water Part 31

"I will take great care, Sylvia. Be sure of that," he answered. "Now that I have you, I will take great care," and leaning toward her, as she sat with her hands clasped upon her knees, he touched her hair with his lips very tenderly.

"Oh, Hilary, what will I do? Till you come back to me! What will I do?"

"I have thought of it, Sylvia. I thought this. It might be better if, for these months--they will not pa.s.s quickly, my dear, either for you or me.

They will be long slow months for both of us. That's the truth, my dear.

But since they must be got through, I thought it might be better if you went back to your mother."

Sylvia shook her head.

"It would be better," he urged, with a look toward the house.

"I can't do that. Afterward, in a year's time--when we are together, I should like very much for us both to go to her. But my mother forbade it when I went away from Chamonix. I was not to come whining back to her, those were her words. We parted altogether that night."

She spoke with an extreme simplicity. There was neither an appeal for pity nor a hint of any bitterness in her voice. But the words moved Chayne all the more on that account. He would be leaving a very lonely, friendless girl to battle through the months of his absence by herself; and to battle with what? He was not sure. But he had not taken so lightly the shadow on the ceiling and the opening door.

"If only you had come with me on that first day," he cried.

"I will have to-night to look back upon, my dear," she said. "That will be something. Oh, if I had not asked you to come back! If you had gone away and said nothing! What would I have done then? As it is, I will know that you are thinking of me--" and suddenly she turned to him, and held him away from her in a spasm of fear while her eyes searched his face.

But in a moment they melted and a smile made her lips beautiful. "Oh, yes, I can trust you," she said, and she nestled against him contentedly like a child.

For a little while they sat thus, and then her eyes sought the garden and the house at her feet. It seemed that the sinister plot was not, after all, to develop in that place of quiet and old peace without her for its witness. It seemed that she was to be kept by some fatality close-fettered to the task, the hopeless task, which she would now gladly have foregone. And she wondered whether, after all, she was in some way meant to watch the plot, perhaps, after all, to hinder it.

"Hilary," she said, "you remember that evening at the Chalet de Lognan?"

"Do I remember it?"

"You explained to me a law--that those who know must use their knowledge, if by using it they can save a soul, or save a life."

"Yes," he said, vaguely remembering that he had spoken in this strain.

"Well, I have been trying to obey that law. Do you understand? I want you to understand. For when I have been unkind, as I have been many times, it was, I think, because I was not obeying it with very much success. And I should like you to believe and know that. For when you are away, you will remember, in spite of yourself, the times when I was bitter."

Her words made clear to him many things which had perplexed him during these last weeks. Her friends.h.i.+p for Walter Hine became intelligible, and as though to leave him no shadow of doubt, she went on.

"You see, I knew the under side of things, and I seemed to see the opportunity to use the knowledge. So I tried to save"; and whether it was life or soul, or both, she did not say. She did not add that so far she had tried in vain; she did not mention the bottle of cocaine, or the dread which of late had so oppressed her. She was careful of her lover.

Since he had to go, since he needs must be absent, she would spare him anxieties and dark thoughts which he could do nothing to dispel. But even so, he obtained a clearer insight into the distress which she had suffered in that house, and the bravery with which she had borne it.

"Sylvia," he said, "I had no thought, no wish, that what I said should stay with you."

"Yet it did," she answered, "and I was thankful. I am thankful even now.

For though I would gladly give up all the struggle now, if I had you instead; since I have not you, I am thankful for the law. It was your voice which spoke it, it came from you. It will keep you near to me all through the black months until you come back. Oh, Hilary!" and the brave argument spoken to enhearten herself and him ended suddenly in a most wistful cry. Chayne caught her to him.

"Oh, Sylvia!" and he added: "The life is not yet saved!"

"Perhaps I am given to the summer," she answered, and then, with a whimsical change of humor, she laughed tenderly. "Oh, but I wish I wasn't. You will write? Letters will come from you."

"As often as possible, my dear. But they won't come often."

"Let them be long, then," she whispered, "very long," and she leaned her head against his shoulder.

"Lie close, my dear," said he. "Lie close!"

For a while longer they talked in low voices to one another, the words which lovers know and keep fragrant in their memories. The night, warm and clear, drew on toward morning, and the pa.s.sage of the hours was unremarked. For both of them there was a glory upon the moonlit land and sea which made of it a new world. And into this new world both walked for the first time--walked in their youth and hand in hand. Each for the first time knew the double pride of loving and being loved. In spite of their troubles they were not to be pitied, and they knew it. The gray morning light flooded the sky and turned the moon into a pale white disk.

"Lie close, my dear," said he. "It is not time."

In the trees in the garden below the blackbirds began to bustle amongst the leaves, and all at once their clear, sweet music thrilled upward to the lovers in the hollow of the down.

"Lie close, my dear," he repeated.

They watched the sun leap into the heavens and flash down the Channel in golden light.

"The night has gone," said Chayne.

"Nothing can take it from us while we live," answered Sylvia, very softly. She raised herself from her couch of leaves.

Then from one of the cottages in the tiny village a blue coil of smoke rose into the air.

"It is time," said Chayne, and they rose and hand in hand walked down the slope of the hill to the house. Sylvia unlatched the door noiselessly and went in. Chayne stepped in after her; and in the silent hall they took farewell of one another.

"Good-by, my dear," she whispered, with the tears in her eyes and in her voice, and she clung to him a little and so let him go. She held the door ajar until the sound of his footsteps had died away--and after that. For she fancied that she heard them still, since, she so deeply wished to hear them. Then with a breaking heart she went up the stairs to her room.

CHAPTER XXI

CHAYNE COMES TO CONCLUSIONS

"Six weeks ago I said good-by to the French Commission on the borders of a great lake in Africa. A month ago I was still walking to the rail head through the tangle of a forest's undergrowth," said Chayne, and he looked about the little restaurant in King Street, St. James', as though to make sure that the words he spoke were true. The bright lights, the red benches against the walls, the women in their delicate gowns of lace, and the jingle of harness in the streets without, made their appeal to one who for the best part of a year had lived within the dark walls of a forest. June had come round again, and Sylvia sat at his side.

"You shall tell me how these months have gone with you while we dine,"

said he. "Your letters told me nothing of your troubles."

"I did not mean them to," replied Sylvia.

"I guessed that, my dear. It was like you. Yet I would rather have known."

Only a few hours before he had stood upon the deck of the Channel packet and had seen the bows swing westward of Dover Castle and head toward the pier. Would Sylvia be there, he had wondered, as he watched the cl.u.s.ter of atoms on the quay, and in a little while he had seen her, standing quite alone, at the very end of the breakwater that she might catch the first glimpse of her lover. Others had traveled with them in the carriage to London and there had been no opportunity of speech. All that he knew was that she had been alone now for some weeks in the little house in Hobart Place.

"One thing I see," he said. "You are not as troubled as you were. The look of fear--that has gone from your eyes. Sylvia, I am glad!"

"There, were times," she answered--and as she thought upon them, terror once more leapt into her face--"times when I feared more than ever, when I needed you very much. But they are past now, Hilary," and her hand dropped for a moment upon his, and her eyes brightened with a smile. As they dined she told the story of those months.

"We returned to London very suddenly after you had gone away," she began.

"We were to have stayed through September. But my father said that business called him back, and I noticed that he was deeply troubled."