A Woman's Will Part 45

She laughed again; he looked at her, smiling brightly himself.

"It is good together, _n'est-ce pas_?" he said, putting his hand upon her arm as they turned back upon their steps. There was in his eyes the happy look that dispelled every trace of the usual shadow on his face.

"We are again those same children," he went on, "children that the same toy amuses both. What pleasures you always makes joy for me also."

Something came up in her throat as she listened. It might have been a choke, but she was so positive that it was only Genoa that she swallowed it at once and looked in the opposite direction. He had kept his hand upon her arm, and now he bent his head a little and said, his voice lowering:

"I think--"

The dusk was gathering heavily. The Siegesthor loomed blackly great against the lights of the city beyond. It was no longer quiet about them, but the hum and buzz of all the bees swarming home was in the air, on the pavement, along the trolley wires.

"I think,"--he said, his fingers closing about her arm,--"I think that we might be always very happy together."

She looked up quickly, and then down yet more quickly.

"Why do you speak that way when you know that I am going so soon?"

"Let us turn here," he said eagerly; "by here it will be quiet. Do walk so," he added pleadingly, as she hesitated, "we have not long to be together. _Il faut me gater un peu._ There is but a week left for us."

She started.

"A week! If we sail the nineteenth we need not leave here until the fourteenth surely."

"But your cousin will leave on the eighth."

She looked up at him, and by the light of a street lamp which they were just pa.s.sing, he saw the great tears starting in her eyes, tears of helplessness, the tears of a woman who feels and cannot speak. It was a very quiet little street, that into which they had turned, with lines of monotonous gray houses on either side, and certainly no better place for tears was ever invented. Rosina's appeared to know a good thing when they saw it, and rolled heavily downward, thus proving in their pa.s.sage the sincerity of both her nature and her color. Her companion drew her hand within his own, pressing her fingers hard and fast. He did not say one word, and finally she wiped her eyes, smiled through the mist that hung upon her lashes, and said with simple directness:

"I don't want to go."

"I know."

"But they want me to, and I must."

There was another long silence, and then he said:

"You would not stay for me?"

His voice was wonderfully soft and persuasive, and for a single instant she admitted the possibility into her mental future; but the instant after it found itself driven violently forth again.

"No, no," she cried, forcibly, "I will not--I cannot. I _never_ want another husband."

He hesitated one step in his gait and then went on as before.

"I do not say that all would be as you wished," he said slowly, with pauses between, "or that I would live only to joy your life. That would be very untrue. To be with you this week I put aside as it would not be right for me to put aside again. These days I have throw away because I will not say all in my after life that I did not try." He stopped and his voice changed strangely. "I must try with all my strength," he continued, drawing each breath as if in great pain; "I must, because to me with my work it is what does not trouble, what gives me sympathy, that is the most large of all. I have never marry because I know that so well. How could I ever do my work if a single discord is there to fret--fret--fret? As well ask me to play in concert on an untuned instrument. To my ear the untune is agony; to my music, a discord in my day is death to what would have been written that day. It is so that I have come to expect to never marry. My music must be first, and how can I risk--" he stopped his speech and his steps. She tried to move on but he held her still. "But," he said, very low but with an accent the intensity of which cut into her very heart, "but now I know that better work would be if you were there; I should have greater force; I should--I--if you loved--"

He trailed his speech helplessly, faltered, and was silent. The night had come heavily down and they learned the fact by the discovery that they could no longer look into the eyes of one another. The quiet little street had led them down to the borders of the Englischergarten, and its forest rose up before them. He led her straight towards it.

"It will be wet," he said, in reply to the resistance in her arm; "but we must be alone until I have finished all that I will to say. The trees about us are best; we do not want cabs and streets just now."

She felt blindly, miserably wretched.

"I don't want to be married again," she declared in a voice that was thick with more tears; and then she gathered her skirt well into her hand and they plunged together into the darkness beyond.

The park was dusk with night's downfall and heavily misted by the day's rain. Its paths, usually like hard gray cement, were a slippery mosaic of clay and brown leaves, and on either hand arose a stockade-like effect of tree-trunks knowing no light beyond. Wind there was none to rustle the leaves, nor sound of bird or beast. An utter and complete silence echoed the footfalls of these two who had come into the solitude, to the end that they might search there for a solution of themselves.

At the first forking of their way, Rosina said timidly:

"We must not go too far; it is so lonely, I am afraid."

Von Ibn stopped short, drew one of her arms behind his back, caught her firmly to his bosom, and approached his face so close to hers that his breath came and went against her lips.

"Are you frightened?" he asked.

"No," she said, wrapt in a sort of awe at the wonder of her own sensations, "I have the utmost faith in you."

He loosed her instantly, and walked a little way off for a moment.

"I felt that you wished not," he said, bitterly, "and so I held myself back. _Mon Dieu_, how good I am to you,--how cruel to myself,--and no thanks."

Her heart was wrung.

"Oh, let us go back and go home," she cried; "all this is of no use. It makes me glad to go away, because I see now that for me to go will be better for you."

"And for you?" he asked, returning to her side.

"I said 'for you,'" she answered gently.

"Then not at all for you too?"--he laid his hand insistently upon her arm,--"not at all for you too?" he repeated.

She was silent.

"It was there in Lucerne," he went on presently; "I knew it at first--the first time I see you; and when I found that it wasyou who had sent for me--I--I dared to hope that you too felt something, even then, even so at the very first. Have you never known that feeling?"--he exclaimed, his breath rising pa.s.sionately, "has such storm never swept within you?--and you have no other life for a while but its longing,--no sleep but the stupid fatigue when one cannot think more? What has my existence been since that day on the Quai by the Vierwaldstattersee?--_Je ne peux rien faire!_--To the world I am dead.--There is perhaps no future for me because I have learned to love and have not learned to be loved."

His voice broke utterly; he loosed her arm, walked apart once more, and was once more silent.

Then her agitation suddenly found voice and to her own intense horror she heard herself laughing--laughing a loud hysterical laughter, that resounded hideously and was beyond her own control.

"You are amused," he exclaimed, and his mood took on a justifiable tone of outraged anger; "you laugh. You have made me like this and now you laugh. If you were suffering and I had made you so, I should be ashamed and sorry; but a woman laughs. You are as that other," he continued, impetuously, "and it will be the same some time after. When she had made me wild, then she laughed. When I heard her laugh, I grew quite cold, I cared no more, never more. Then, when I cared no more, she learned to care, she grew to love, she wrote me many letters, she became most miserable; but for me nothing mattered. Because I could not care more."

Her laughter continued spasmodically in spite of her struggles to check it. But between the paroxysms she gasped:

"I never tried--to make you love me. I never wanted you to come where I did--"

"But now that I am all yours," he interrupted, "now that nothing is left for me, but you--" He paused. "What will I do now?" he added, asking the question with a simplicity at once boyish and heartrending.

She was silent; her laughter had ceased. He came close to her and took her hand again within his own. And then in the darkness beside him he suddenly heard the bursting misery of her sobs.

"You weep," he cried.

"No," she whispered faintly, "no."