Rose of Dutcher's Coolly Part 49

"I don't rejoice. This thing which boys and girls find easy I find each year more difficult, quite equal to the revolution of the earth--perhaps the girl will save me from myself."

"She'll save you _for_ yourself, and you'll be happy."

"It is impossible to say," he said sombrely. "I have warned her fairly.

Once I should not have warned the woman of my choice. Am I gaining in humanity or losing? Please lower your head, I am going to tack."

The boat swung about like a sleeping gull, and the sail slowly filled, and the ripple at the prow began again.

After a little Mason went on in a calm, even voice:

"The world to me is not well governed and I hesitate about marriage, for it has the effect, in most cases, of perpetuating the human species, which is not as yet a n.o.ble business. I am torn by two minds. I don't appear to be torn by even one mind, but I am. I am convinced that Rose has imagination, which is in my eyes the chief thing in a wife. It enables her to idealize me"--there was a touch of his usual humor in that--"and fills me with alleged desire to possess her, but it is sad business for her, Isabel. When I think of her I am of the stature of a thief, crouching for concealment."

The two in the boat were no longer young. They had never been lovers, but they seemed to understand each other like man and wife.

"I am old in knowledge of the world--my life has ground away any charm I might have once possessed. For her sake I hope she will refuse."

She perceived he was at the end of his confidence, and she began speaking. "I promised you a story once," she began, "and I'm going to tell it now, and then we'll return to Rose."

She spoke in a low voice, with a little catching of the breath peculiar to her when deeply moved. It made her voice pulse out like the flow of heavy wine. She faced him in the shadow, but he knew she was not looking at him at all. Just how she began he didn't quite hear--perhaps she was a little incoherent.

"O those days when I was seventeen!" she went on. "Everything was magical. Every moonlit night thrilled me with its possibilities. I remember how the boys used to serenade me, and then--I was a mediaeval maiden at my barred window, and they were disguised knights seeking me in strange lands by their songs.

"You know what I mean. I tingled with the immense joy of it! They sang there in the moonlight, and I tip-toed to the window and peeped out and listened and listened with pictures and pictures tumbling in and out of my head.

"Of course it was only the inherited feminine rising up in me, as you would say--but it was beautiful. It just glorified that village street, making it the narrow way in a Spanish city."

There was silence again. Mason softly said: "Bend your head once more."

When the boat swung around and the faint moon and the lights of the town s.h.i.+fted, Isabel went on.

"One of the boys who came on those midnight serenadings became my hero--remember, I was only seventeen and he was twenty! We used to meet on the street--and oh! how it shook me. My heart fluttered so I could not speak, and at first I had to run past him. After a time I got composed enough to speak to him"--

Her voice choked with remembered pa.s.sion, but after a little pause she went on:

"All this, I know as well as you, is absurd"--

"It is very beautiful," he said. "Go on!"

"He was tall and straight, I remember, with brown hair. He was a workman of some kind. I know he used to show me his powerful hands and say he had tried to get the grime from them. They were splendid, heroic hands to me. I would have kissed them if I dared. It was all incredible folly, but I thought I was loving beneath my station, for I was a little grandee in the town. It pleased me to think I was stooping--defying the laws of my house. He never tried to see me at home--he was good and clean--I can see that now, for I remember just how his frank, clear eyes looked at me. He didn't talk much, he seemed content to just look at me."

"Well, that went on for weeks. He used to follow me to church, as the boys do in country towns, but I used to go to different places just to see if he would find out and be there to meet me at the door. He never offered to speak to me or take my arm, but he stood to see me go by. Do you know, if I go into a country church today, that scent of wilted flowers and linen and mingled perfumes almost makes me weep?"

"I understand."

Her voice was lower when she resumed.

"Well, then the dreadful, the incredible happened. He did not meet me any more, and just when I was wild with rage and humiliation came the news of his illness--and then I suffered. O G.o.d! how I suffered! I couldn't inquire about him--I couldn't see him. I had kept my secret so well that no one dreamed of my loving him so. The girls thought that he followed me and that I despised him, and when they jested about him I had to reply while my heart was being torn out of me. I spent hours in my room writhing, walking up and down, cursing in a girl's way myself and G.o.d--I was insane with it all."

She drew a long breath but it did not relieve her. Her voice was as tense as before when she spoke again. The helmsman leaned to listen, for he could hardly hear.

"Then one day he died--O that awful day! I sat in my room with the curtains down. I couldn't endure the sunlight. I pretended to be sick. I was numb with agony and yet I could do nothing. I couldn't even send a rose to lay on his coffin. I couldn't even speak his name. I could only lie there like a prisoner gagged and on the rack--to suffer--suffer!"

The shadow of the sail covered the woman like a mantle. It was as if the man listening had turned away his face from her sacred pa.s.sion. She was more composed when she spoke again:

"Well, it wore itself out after a time. I got hungry and ate once more, though I did not suppose I ever should. I came down to the family a week later, a puzzle to them. They never thought to connect my illness with the death of an obscure machinist, and then in the same way I crept gradually back into society--back into the busy life of a popular young girl. But there was one place where no one ever entered. I never told any one of this before. I tried to tell Dr. Sanborn about it once, but I felt he might not understand; I tell you because--because you can understand and because you may be influenced by it and understand your wife when she comes to you. These days come to many women at seventeen and, though we can't spare them out of our lives, it doesn't mean disloyalty to our present ideals. I think you understand?"

"Very well indeed," he said. "I have such memories myself."

"Then I resolved to be a physician. I felt that he would not have died if he had been treated properly; the connection was obscure but powerful enough to consecrate me to the healing profession. Then I met Dr.

Sanborn. I love him and I couldn't live without him, but there is that figure back there--to have him and all that he means go out of my life would take part of my heart away." Her voice had appeal in it.

"You understand me? It was all clean and innocent, but it was my first pa.s.sion and I can't spare it. Rose may have such a memory. It has nothing to do with today, with her present ideals. It is not disloyalty--it is--"

"The love of love," said Mason. "I thank you for your trust in me. Rose is what she is, not what she has been." And then in perfect stillness the boat swung around and drifted toward the sh.o.r.e, where a ruby lantern was swinging. Isabel turned and her voice was tremulous with earnestness.

"Warren, Rose loves you--not as she loved when a girl, but as a woman loves. I think I understand your hesitancy--and I say you are wrong. You need her and you will do her good. You will develop her."

"She will suffer through me."

"That is a part of development."

The boat was nearing the wharf and Sanborn's hearty voice came from the sh.o.r.e:

"See here! Isn't it pretty late for a pair of rheumatic old folks to be out sailing? It's 9:30 o'clock."

"The breeze failed us," Isabel answered, as Mason took her hand to help her ash.o.r.e.

"And the night was so beautiful," said Mason. Before she loosed his hand Isabel shook it hard and now Mason understood. He mailed the letter that night, and Rose held his future in her hand.

CHAPTER XXV

ROSE RECEIVES A LETTER

Rose went directly from that storm to the repose and apparent peace of the country, and it helped her to make a great discovery. She found every familiar thing had taken on a peculiar value--a literary and artistic value. It was all so reposeful, so secure. A red barn set against a gray-green wooded hillside was no longer commonplace. "How pretty!" she thought; "I never noticed that before."

A little girl wrapped in a shawl was watching cattle in the field; a dog sat near, his back to the misty drizzle. Rose saw it and put herself in the place of that child, chilled and blue of hand, with unfallen tears upon her cheeks.

A crow flying by with ringing, rough cry made her blood leap. Some cattle streamed up a lane and over a hill; their legs moving invisibly gave them a gliding motion like a vast centipede. Some mysterious charm seemed imparted to everything she saw, and, as the familiar lines of the hills began to loom against the sky, she became intolerably eager to see her father and the farm. She hoped it would be a sunny day, but it was raining heavily when she got out at the station.

He was there, the dear, sweet, old face smiling, almost tearful. He had an umbrella and couldn't return her hug; but he put his arm about her and hurried her to the carriage, and in a few moments they were spattering up the familiar road.

Instantly it seemed as if she had never been away. She was a little girl again; the horses shook their heads, impatient at the rain; the pools in the road were green as liquid emerald, and were dimpled by the pelting drops. The wheels flung segments of mud into the air, but the horses drove ahead sullenly, almost desperately, unmindful of the splash and splatter of mud and water.

Rose took keen delight in it all. She had been shut away from nature so long, it seemed good to get back into even the stern mood of a May storm. The great, reeling ma.s.ses of gray cloud delighted her, and the ringing cry of frogs seemed delicious orchestration. Everything was fresh, clean, almost harsh. How arid and artificial the city life seemed in the freshness of green fields!