The Prairie Child Part 27

"That's what I love about you," averred Peter.

"What you love about me?" I demanded.

"Yes," he said with his patient old smile, "your imperishable youthfulness, your eternal never-ending eternity-defying golden-tinted girlishness!"

A flute began to play in my heart. And I knew that like Ulysses's men I would have to close my ears to it. But it's easier to row past an island than to run away from your own heart.

"I know it's a lie, Peter, but I love you for saying it. It makes me want to hug you, and it makes me want to pirouette, if I wasn't on horseback. It makes my heart sing. But it's only the singing of one lonely little chickadee in the middle of a terribly big pile of ruins.

For that's all my life can be now, just a hopeless smash-up. And you're cut out for something better than a wrecking-car for the rest of your days."

"No, no," protested Peter. "It's _you_ who've got to save _me_."

"Save you?" I echoed.

"You've got to give me something to live for, or I'll just rust away in the ditch and never get back to the rails again."

"Peter!" I cried.

"What?" he asked.

"You're not playing fair. You're trying to make me pity you."

"Well, don't you?" demanded Peter.

"I would if I saw you sacrificing your life for a woman with a crazy-quilt past."

"I'm not thinking of the past," a.s.serted Peter, "I'm thinking of the future."

"That's just it," I tried to explain. "I'll have to face that future with a clouded name. I'll be a divorced woman. Ugh! I always thought of divorced women as something you wouldn't quite care to sit next to at table. I hate divorce."

"I'm a Quaker myself," acknowledged Peter. "But I occasionally think of what Cobbett once said: 'I don't much like weasels. Yet I hate rats. Therefore I say success to the weasels!'"

"I don't see what weasels have to do with it," I complained.

"Putting one's house in order again may sometimes be as beneficent as surgery," contended Peter.

"And sometimes as painful," I added.

"Yet there's no mistake like not cleaning up old mistakes."

"But I hate it," I told him. "It all seems so--so cheap."

"On the contrary," corrected Peter, "it's rather costly." He pulled up across my path and made me come to a stop. "My dear," he said, very solemn again, "I know the stuff you're made of. I know you've got to climb to the light by a path of your own choosing. And you have to see the light with your own eyes. But I'm willing to wait. I _have_ waited, a very long time. But there's one fact you've got to face: I love you too much ever to dream of giving you up."

I don't think either of us moved for a full moment. The flute was singing so loud in my heart that I was afraid of myself. And, woman-like, I backed away from the thing I wanted.

"It's not _me_, Peter, I must remember now. It's my bairns. I've two bairns to bring up."

"I've got the three of you to bring up," maintained Peter. And that made us both sit silent for another moment or two.

"It's not that simple," I finally said, though Peter smiled guardedly at my ghost of a smile.

"It would be if you cared for me as much as d.i.n.kie does," he said with quite unnecessary solemnity.

"Oh, Peter, I do, I do," I cried out as the memory of all I owed him surged mistily through my mind. "But a gray hair is something you can't joke away. And I've got five of them, right here over my left ear. I found them, months ago. And they're there to stay!"

"How about my bald spot?" demanded my oppressor and my deliverer rolled into one.

"What's a bald spot compared to a bob-cat of a temper like mine?" I challenged, remembering how I'd once heard a revolver-hammer snap in my husband's face.

"But it's your spirit I like," maintained the unruffled Peter.

"You wouldn't always," I reminded him.

Yet he merely looked at me with his trust-me-and-test-me expression.

"I'll chance it!" he said, after a quite contented moment or two of meditative silence.

"But don't you see," I went forlornly arguing on, "it mustn't be a chance. That's something people of our age can never afford to take."

And Peter, at that, for some reason I couldn't fathom, began to wag his head. He did it slowly and lugubriously, like a man who inspects a road he has no liking for. But at the same time, apparently, he was finding it hard to tuck away a small smile of triumph.

"Then we must never see each other again," he solemnly a.s.serted.

"Peter!" I cried.

"I must go away, at once," he meditatively observed.

"_Peter!_" I said again, with the flute turning into a pair of ice-tongs that clamped into the corners of my heart.

"Far, far away," he continued as he studiously avoided my eye. "For there will be safety now only in flight."

"Safety from what?" I demanded.

"From you," retorted Peter.

"But what will happen to _me_, if you do that?" I heard my own voice asking as Buntie started to paw the prairie-floor and I did my level best to fight down the black waves of desolation that were half-drowning me. "What'll there be to hold me up, when you're the only man in all this world who can keep my barrel of happiness from going slap-bang to pieces? What----?"

"_Verboten!_" interrupted Peter. But that solemn-soft smile of his gathered me in and covered me, very much as the rumpled feathers of a mother-bird cover her young, her crazily twittering and crazily wandering young who never know their own mind.

"What'll happen to me," I went desperately on, "when you're the only man alive who understands this crazy old heart of mine, when you've taught me to hitch the last of my hope on the one unselfish man I've ever known?"

This seemed to trouble Peter. But only remotely, as the lack of grammar in the Lord's Prayer might affect a Holy Roller. He insisted, above all things, on being judicial.

"Then I'll have to come back, I suppose," he finally admitted, "for d.i.n.kie's sake."

"Why for d.i.n.kie's sake?" I asked.