Chapter VI: Part 6

He pushed the hair from her wet face. The fate of temperament and the deep tides of existence had them in merciless sweep.

“Clethera,” represented Honoré, “the rillation is not mix' bad with Jules and Melinda.”

Clethera let the assertion pass unchallenged.

“And this house, it pretty good house. You like it well as de hudder?”

“It have no loft,” responded Clethera, faintly, “but de chimney not smoke.”

“We not want de 'omesick some more, Clethera—eh? You t'ink de fools is all marry yet?”

Clethera laughed and raised her head from his arm, but not to look at him or box his ear. She looked through the open door at an oblong of little world, where the land was an amethyst strip betwixt lake and horizon. Across that beloved background she saw the future pass: hale, long years with Honoré; the piled up wood of winter fires; her own home; her children—the whole scheme of sweet and humble living.

“You t'ink, after all de folly we have see' in de family, Clethera, you can go de lenk—to get marry?”

“I go dat lenk for you, Honoré—but not for any hudder man.”

THE BLUE MAN

The lake was like a meadow full of running streams. Far off indeed it seemed frozen, with countless wind-paths traversing the ice, so level and motionless was the surface under a gray sky. But summer rioted in verdure over the cliffs to the very beaches. From the high greenery of the island could be heard the tink-tank of a bell where some cow sighed amid the delicious gloom.

East of the Giant's Stairway in a cove are two round rocks with young cedars springing from them. It is easy to scramble to the flat top of the first one and sit in open ambush undetected by passers. The world's majority is unobservant. Children with their nurses, lovers, bicyclists who have left their wheels behind, excursionists—fortunately headed towards this spot in their one available hour—an endless procession, tramp by on the rough, wave-lapped margin, never wearing it smooth.

Amused by the unconsciousness of the reviewed, I found myself unexpectedly classed with the world's majority. For on the east round rock, a few yards from my seat on the west round rock, behold a man had arranged himself, his back against the cedars, without attracting notice. While the gray weather lightened and wine-red streaks on the lake began to alternate with translucent greens, and I was watching mauve plumes spring from a distant steamer before her whistles could be heard, this nimble stranger must have found his own amusement in the blindness of people with eyes.

He was not quite a stranger. I had seen him the day before; and he was a man to be remembered on account of a peculiar blueness of the skin, in which, perhaps, some drug or chemical had left an unearthly haze over the natural flush of blood. It might have appeared the effect of sky lights and cliff shadows, if I had not seen the same blue face distinctly in Madame Clementine's house. He was standing in the middle of a room at the foot of the stairway as we passed his open door.

So unusual a personality was not out of place in a transplanted Parisian tenement. Madame Clementine was a Parisian; and her house, set around three sides of a quadrangle in which flowers overflowed their beds, was a bit of artisan Paris. The ground-floor consisted of various levels joined by steps and wide-jambed doors. The chambers, to which a box staircase led, wanted nothing except canopies over the beds.

“Alors I give de convenable beds,” said Madame Clementine, in mixed French and English, as she poked her mattresses. “Des bons lits! T'ree dollar one chambre, four dollar one chambre—” she suddenly spread her hands to include both—“seven dollar de tout ensemble!”

It was delightful to go with any friend who might be forced by crowded hotels to seek rooms in Madame Clementine's alley. The active, tiny Frenchwoman, who wore a black mob-cap everywhere except to mass, had reached present prosperity through past tribulation. Many years before she had followed a runaway husband across the sea. As she stepped upon the dock almost destitute the first person her eyes rested on was her husband standing well forward in the crowd, with a ham under his arm which he was carrying home to his family. He saw Clementine and dropped the ham to run. The same hour he took his new wife and disappeared from the island. The doubly deserted French-speaking woman found employment and friends; and by her thrift was now in the way of piling up what she considered a fortune.

The man on the rock near me was no doubt one of Madame Clementine's permanent lodgers. Tourists ranting over the island in a single day had not his repose. He met my discovering start with a dim smile and a bend of his head, which was bare. His features were large, and his mouth corners had the sweet, strong expression of a noble patience. What first impressed me seemed to be his blueness, and the blurredness of his eyes struggling to sight as Bartimeus' eyes might have struggled the instant before the Lord touched them.

Only Asiatics realize the power of odors. The sense of smell is lightly appreciated in the Western world. A fragrance might be compounded which would have absolute power over a human being. We get wafts of scent to which something in us irresistibly answers. A satisfying sweetness, fleeting as last year's wild flowers, filled the whole cove. I thought of dead Indian pipes, standing erect in pathetic dignity, the delicate scales on their stems unfurled, refusing to crumble and pass away; the ghosts of Indians.

The blue man parted his large lips and moved them several instants; then his voice followed, like the tardy note of a distant steamer that addresses the eye with its plume of steam before the whistle is heard. I felt a creepy thrill down my shoulders—that sound should break so slowly across the few yards separating us! “Are you also waiting, madame?”

I felt compelled to answer him as I would have answered no other person. “Yes; but for one who never comes.”

If he had spoken in the pure French of the Touraine country, which is said to be the best in France, free from Parisianisms, it would not have surprised me. But he spoke English, with the halting though clear enunciation of a Nova Scotian.

“You—you must have patience. I have—have seen you only seven summers on the island.”

“You have seen me these seven years past? But I never met you before!”

His mouth labored voicelessly before he declared, “I have been here thirty-five years.”

How could that be possible!—and never a hint drifting through the hotels of any blue man! Yet the intimate life of old inhabitants is not paraded before the overrunning army of a season. I felt vaguely flattered that this exclusive resident had hitherto noticed me and condescended at last to reveal himself.

The blue man had been here thirty-five years! He knew the childish joy of bruising the flesh of orange-colored toadstools and wading amid long pine-cones which strew the ground like fairy corn-cobs. The white birches were dear to him, and he trembled with eagerness at the first pipe sign, or at the discovery of blue gentians where the eastern forest stoops to the strand. And he knew the echo, shaking like gigantic organ music from one side of the world to the other.

In solitary trysts with wilderness depths and caves which transient sight-seers know nothing about I had often pleased myself thinking the Mishi-ne-macki-naw-go were somewhere around me. If twigs crackled or a sudden awe fell causelessly, I laughed—“That family of Indian ghosts is near. I wish they would show themselves!” For if they ever show themselves, they bring you the gift of prophecy. The Chippewas left tobacco and gunpowder about for them. My offering was to cover with moss the picnic papers, tins, and broken bottles, with which man who is vile defiles every prospect. Discovering such a queer islander as the blue man was almost equal to seeing the Mishi-ne-macki-naw-go.

Voices approached; and I watched his eyes come into his face as he leaned forward! From a blurr of lids they turned to beautiful clear balls shot through with yearning. Around the jut of rock appeared a bicycle girl, a golf girl, and a youth in knickers having his stockings laid in correct folds below the knee. They passed without noticing us. To see his looks dim and his eagerness relax was too painful. I watched the water ridging against the horizon like goldstone and changing swiftly to the blackest of greens. Distance folded into distance so that the remote drew near. He was certainly waiting for somebody, but it could not be that he had waited thirty-five years: thirty-five winters, whitening the ice-bound island; thirty-five summers, bringing all paradise except what he waited for.

Just as I glanced at the blue man again his lips began to move, and the peculiar tingle ran down my back, though I felt ashamed of it in his sweet presence.

“Madame, it will—it will comfort me if you permit me to talk to you.”

“I shall be very glad, sir, to hear whatever you have to tell.”

“I have—have waited here thirty-five years, and in all that time I have not spoken to any one!”

He said this quite candidly, closing his lips before his voice ceased to sound. The cedar sapling against which his head rested was not more real than the sincerity of that blue man's face. Some hermit soul, who had proved me by watching me seven years, was opening himself, and I felt the tears come in my eyes.

“Have you never heard of me, madame?”

“You forget, sir, that I do not even know your name.”

“My name is probably forgotten on the island now. I stopped here between steamers during your American Civil War. A passing boat put in to leave a young girl who had cholera. I saw her hair floating out of the litter.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed; “that is an island story.” The blue man was actually presenting credentials when he spoke of the cholera story. “She was taken care of on the island until she recovered; and she was the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Southern family trying to get home from her convent in France, but unable to run the blockade. The nun who brought her died on shipboard before she landed at Montreal, and she hoped to get through the lines by venturing down the lakes. Yes, indeed! Madame Clementine has told me that story.”

He listened, turning his head attentively and keeping his eyes half closed, and again worked his lips.

“Yes, yes. You know where she was taken care of?”

“It was at Madame Clementine's.”

“I myself took her there.”

“And have you been there ever since?”

He passed over the trivial question, and when his voice arrived it gushed without a stammer.

“I had a month of happiness. I have had thirty-five years of waiting. When this island binds you to any one you remain bound. Since that month with her I can do nothing but wait until she comes. I lost her, I don't know how. We were in this cove together. She sat on this rock and waited while I went up the cliff to gather ferns for her. When I returned she was gone. I searched the island for her. It kept on smiling as if there never had been such a person! Something happened which I do not understand, for she did not want to leave me. She disappeared as if the earth had swallowed her!”

I felt a rill of cold down my back like the jetting of the spring that spouted from its ferny tunnel farther eastward. Had he been thirty-five years on the island without ever hearing the Old Mission story about bones found in the cliff above us? Those who reached them by venturing down a pit as deep as a well, uncovered by winter storms, declared they were the remains of a woman's skeleton. I never saw the people who found them. It was an oft-repeated Mission story which had come down to me. An Indian girl was missed from the Mission school and never traced. It was believed she met her fate in this rock crevasse. The bones were blue, tinged by a clay in which they had lain. I tried to remember what became of the Southern girl who was put ashore, her hair flying from a litter. Distinct as her tradition remained, it ended abruptly. Even Madame Clementine forgot when and how she left the island after she ceased to be an object of solicitude, for many comers and goers trample the memory as well as the island.

Had his love followed him up the green tangled height and sunk so swiftly to her death that it was accomplished without noise or outcry? To this hour only a few inhabitants locate the treacherous spot. He could not hide, even at Madame Clementine's, from all the talk of a community. This unreasonable tryst of thirty-five years raised for the first time doubts of his sanity. A woman might have kept such a tryst; but a man consoles himself.

Passers had been less frequent than usual, but again there was a crunch of approaching feet. Again he leaned forward, and the sparks in his eyes enlarged, and faded, as two fat women wobbled over the unsteady stones, exclaiming and balancing themselves, oblivious to the blue man and me.

“It is four o'clock,” said one, pausing to look at her watch. “This air gives one such an appetite I shall never be able to wait for dinner.”

“When the girls come in from golf at five we will have some tea,” said the other.

Returning beach gadders passed us. Some of them noticed me with a start, but the blue man, wrapped in rigid privacy, with his head sunk on his breast, still evaded curious eyes.

I began to see that his clothes were by no means new, though they suited the wearer with a kind of masculine elegance. The blue man's head had so entirely dominated my attention that the cut of his coat and his pointed collar and neckerchief seemed to appear for the first time.

He turned his face to me once more, but before our brief talk could be resumed another woman came around the jut of cliff, so light-footed that she did not make as much noise on the stones as the fat women could still be heard making while they floundered eastward, their backs towards us. The blue man had impressed me as being of middle age. But I felt mistaken; he changed so completely. Springing from the rock like a boy, his eyes glorified, his lips quivering, he met with open arms the woman who had come around the jut of the Giant's Stairway. At first glance I thought her a slim old woman with the kind of hair which looks either blond or gray. But the maturity glided into sinuous girlishness, yielding to her lover, and her hair shook loose, floating over his shoulder.

I dropped my eyes. I heard a pebble stir under their feet. The tinkle of water falling down its ferny tunnel could be guessed at; and the beauty of the world stabbed one with such keenness that the stab brought tears.

We have all had our dreams of flying; or floating high or low, lying extended on the air at will. By what process of association I do not know, the perfect naturalness and satisfaction of flying recurred to me. I was cleansed from all doubt of ultimate good. The meeting of the blue man and the woman with floating hair seemed to be what the island had awaited for thirty-five years.

The miracle of impossible happiness had been worked for him. It confused me like a dazzle of fireworks. I turned my back and bowed my head, waiting for him to speak again or to leave me out, as he saw fit.

Extreme joy may be very silent in those who have waited long, for I did not hear a cry or a spoken word. Presently I dared to look, and was not surprised to find myself alone. The evergreen-clothed amphitheatre behind had many paths which would instantly hide climbers from view. The blue man and the woman with floating hair knew these heights well. I thought of the pitfall, and sat watching with back-tilted head, anxious to warn them if they stirred foliage near where that fatal trap was said to lurk. But the steep forest gave no sign or sound from its mossy depths.

I sat still a long time in a trance of the senses, like that which follows a drama whose spell you would not break. Masts and cross-trees of ships were banded by ribbons of smoke blowing back from the steamers which towed them in lines up or down the straits.

Towards sunset there was a faint blush above the steel-blue waters, which at their edge reflected the blush. Then mist closed in. The sky became ribbed with horizontal bars, so that the earth was pent like a heart within the hollow of some vast skeleton.

I was about to climb down from my rock when two young men passed by, the first strollers I had noticed since the blue man's exit. They rapped stones out of the way with their canes, and pushed the caps back from their youthful faces, talking rapidly in excitement.

“When did it happen?”

“About four o'clock. You were off at the golf links.”

“Was she killed instantly?”

“I think so. I think she never knew what hurt her after seeing the horses plunge and the carriage go over. I was walking my wheel down-hill just behind and I didn't hear her scream. The driver said he lost the brake; and he's a pretty spectacle now, for he landed on his head. It was that beautiful old lady with the fly-away hair that we saw arrive from this morning's boat while we were sitting out smoking, you remember.”

“Not that one!”

“That was the woman. Had a black maid with her. She's a Southerner. I looked on the register.”

The other young fellow whistled.

“I'm glad I was at the links and didn't see it. She was a stunning woman.”

Dusk stalked grimly down from eastern heights and blurred the water earlier than on rose-colored evenings, making the home-returning walker shiver through evergreen glooms along shore. The lights of the sleepy Old Mission had never seemed so pleasant, though the house was full of talk about that day's accident at the other side of the island.

I slipped out before the early boat left next morning, driven by undefined anxieties towards Madame Clementine's alley. There is a childish credulity which clings to imaginative people through life. I had accepted the blue man and the woman with floating hair in the way which they chose to present themselves. But I began to feel like one who sees a distinctly focused picture shimmering to a dissolving view. The intrusion of an accident to a stranger at another hotel continued this morning, for as I took the long way around the bay before turning back to Clementine's alley I met the open island hearse, looking like a relic of provincial France, and in it was a coffin, and behind it moved a carriage in which a black maid sat weeping.

Madame Clementine came out to her palings and picked some of her nasturtiums for me. In her mixed language she talked excitedly about the accident; nothing equals the islander's zest for sensation after his winter trance when the summer world comes to him.

“When I heard it,” I confessed, “I thought of the friend of your blue gentleman. The description was so like her. But I saw her myself on the beach by the Giant's Stairway after four o'clock yesterday.”

Madame Clementine contracted her short face in puzzled wrinkles.

“There is one gentleman of red head,” she responded, “but none of blue—pas du tout.”

“You must know whom I mean—the lodger who has been with you thirty-five years.”

She looked at me as at one who has either been tricked or is attempting trickery.

“I don't know his name—but you certainly understand! The man I saw in that room at the foot of the stairs when you were showing my friend and me the chambers day before yesterday.”

“There was nobody. De room at de foot of de stair is empty all season. Tout de suite I put in some young lady that arrive this night.”

“Madame Clementine, I saw a man with a blue skin on the beach yesterday—” I stopped. He had not told me he lodged with her. That was my own deduction. “I saw him the day before in this house. Don't you know any such person? He has been on the island since that young lady was brought to your house with the cholera so long ago. He brought her to you.”

A flicker of recollection appeared on Clementine's face.

“That man is gone, madame; it is many years. And he was not blue at all. He was English Jersey man, of Halifax.”

“Did you never hear of any blue man on the island, Clementine?”

“I hear of blue bones found beyond Point de Mission.”

“But that skeleton found in the hole near the Giant's Stairway was a woman's skeleton.”

“Me loes!” exclaimed Madame Clementine, miscalling her English as she always did in excitement. “Me handle de big bones, moi-même! Me loes what de doctor who found him say!”

“I was told it was an Indian girl.”

“You have hear lies, madame. Me loes there was a blue man found beyond Point de Mission.”

“But who was it that I saw in your house?”

“He is not in my house!” declared Madame Clementine. “No blue man is ever in my house!” She crossed herself.

There is a sensation like having a slide pulled from one's head; the shock passes in the fraction of a second. Sunshine, and rioting nasturtiums, the whole natural world, including Clementine's puzzled brown face, were no more distinct to-day than the blue man and the woman with floating hair had been yesterday.

I had seen a man who shot down to instant death in the pit under the Giant's Stairway thirty-five years ago. I had seen a woman, who, perhaps, once thought herself intentionally and strangely deserted, seek and meet him after she had been killed at four o'clock!

This experience, set down in my note-book and repeated to no one, remains associated with the Old World scent of ginger. For I remember hearing Clementine say through a buzzing, “You come in, madame—you must have de hot wine and jahjah!”

THE INDIAN ON THE TRAIL

Maurice Barrett sat waiting in the old lime-kiln built by the British in the war of 1812—a white ruin like much-scattered marble, which stands bowered in trees on a high part of the island. He had, to the amusement of the commissioner, hired this place for a summer study, and paid a carpenter to put a temporary roof over it, with skylight, and to make a door which could be fastened. Here on the uneven floor of stone were set his desk, his chair, and a bench on which he could stretch himself to think when undertaking to make up arrears in literary work. But the days were becoming nothing but trysts with her for whom he waited.

First came the heavenly morning walk and the opening of his study, then the short half-hour of labor, which ravelled off to delicious suspense. He caught through trees the hint of a shirt-waist which might be any girl's, then the long exquisite outline which could be nobody's in the world but hers, her face under its sailor hat, the blown blond hair, the blue eyes. Then her little hands met his out-stretched hands at the door, and her whole violet-breathing self yielded to his arms.

They sat down on the bench, still in awe of each other and of the swift miracle of their love and engagement. Maurice had passed his fiftieth year, so clean from dissipation, so full of vitality and the beauty of a long race of strong men, that he did not look forty, and in all out-door activities rivalled the boys in their early twenties. He was an expert mountain-climber and explorer of regions from which he brought his own literary material; inured to fatigue, patient in hardship, and resourceful in danger. Money and reputation and the power which attends them he had wrung from fate as his right, and felt himself fit to match with the best blood in the world—except hers.

Yet she was only his social equal, and had grown up next door, while his unsatisfied nature searched the universe for its mate—a wild sweetbrier-rose of a child, pink and golden, breathing a daring, fragrant personality. He hearkened back to some recognition of her charm from the day she ran out bareheaded and slim-legged on her father's lawn and turned on the hose for her play. Yet he barely missed her when she went to an Eastern school, and only thrilled vaguely when she came back like one of Gibson's pictures, carrying herself with stateliness. There was something in her blue eyes not to be found in any other blue eyes. He was housed with her family in the same hotel at the island before he completely understood the magnitude of what had befallen him.

“I am awfully set up because you have chosen me,” she admitted at first. He liked to have her proud as of a conquest, and he was conscious of that general favor which stamped him a good match, even for a girl half his age.

“How much have you done this morning?” she inquired, looking at his desk.

“Enough to tide over the time until you came. Determination and execution are not one with me now.” Her hands were cold, and he warmed them against his face.

“It was during your married life that determination and execution were one?”

“Decidedly. For that was my plodding age. Sometimes when I am tingling with impatience here I look back in wonder on the dogged drive of those days. Work is an unhappy man's best friend. I have no concealments from you, Lily. You know I never loved my wife—not this way—though I made her happy; I did my duty. She told me when she died that I had made her happy. People cannot help their limitations.”

“Do you love me?” she asked, her lips close to his ear.

“I am you! Your blood flows through my veins. I feel you rush through me. You don't know what it is to love like that, do you?”

She shook her head.

“When you are out of my sight I do not live; I simply wait. What is the weird power in you that creates such gigantic passion?”

“The power is all in your imagination. You simply don't know me. You think I am a prize. Why, I—flirt—and I've—kissed men!”

He laughed. “You would be a queer girl, at your age, if you hadn't—kissed men—a little. Whatever your terrible past has been, it has made you the infinite darling that you are!”

She moved her eyes to watch the leaves twinkling in front of the lime-kiln.

“I must go,” she said.

“‘I must go'!” he mocked. “You are no sooner here than—'I must go'!”

“I can't be with you all the time. You don't care for appearances, so I have to.”

“Appearances are nothing. This is the only real thing in the universe.”

“But I really must go.” She lifted her wilful chin and sat still. They stared at each other in the silence of lovers. Though the girl's face was without a line, she was more skilled in the play of love than he.

“Indeed I must go. Your eyes are half shut, like a gentian.”

“When you are living intensely you don't look at the world through wide-open eyes,” said Maurice. “I never let myself go before. Repression has been the law of my life. Think of it! In a long lifetime I have loved but two persons—the woman I told you of, and you. Twenty years ago I found out what life meant. For the first time, I knew! But I was already married. I took that beautiful love by the throat and choked it down. Afterwards, when I was free, the woman I first loved was married. How long I have had to wait for you to bloom, lotus flower! This is living! All the other years were preparation.”

“Do you never see her?” inquired the girl.

“Who? That first one? I have avoided her.”

“She loved you?”

“With the blameless passion that we both at first thought was the most perfect friendship.”

“Wouldn't you marry her now if she were free?”

“No. It is ended. We have grown apart in renunciation for twenty years. I am not one that changes easily, you see. You have taken what I could not withhold from you, and it is yours. I am in your power.”

They heard a great steamer blowing upon the strait. Its voice reverberated through the woods. The girl's beautiful face was full of a tender wistfulness, half maternal. Neither jealousy nor pique marred its exquisite sympathy. It was such an expression as an untamed wood-nymph might have worn, contemplating the life of man.

“Don't be sad,” she breathed.

Vague terror shot through Maurice's gaze.

“That is a strange thing for you to say to me, Lily. Is it all you can say—when I love you so?”

“I was thinking of the other woman. Did she suffer?”

“At any rate, she has the whole world now—beauty, talent, wealth, social prestige. She is one of the most successful women in this country.”

“Do I know her name?”

“Quite well. She has been a person of consequence since you were a child.”

“I couldn't capture the whole world,” mused Lily. Maurice kissed her small fingers.

“Some one else will put it in your lap, to keep or throw away as you choose.”

The hurried tink-tank of an approaching cow-bell suggested passers. Then a whir of wheels could be heard through tangled wilderness. The girl met his lips with a lingering which trembled through all his body, and withdrew herself.

“Now I am going. Are you coming down the trail with me?”

Maurice shut the lime-kiln door, and crossed with her a grassy avenue to find among birches the ravelled ends of a path called the White Islander's Trail. You may know it first by a triangle of roots at the foot of an oak. Thence a thread, barely visible to expert eyes, winds to some mossy dead pines and crosses a rotten log. There it becomes a trail cleaving the heights, and plunging boldly up and down evergreen glooms to a road parallel with the cliff. Once, when the island was freshly drenched in rain, Lily breathed deeply, gazing down the tunnel floored with rock and pine-needles, a flask of incense. “It is like the violins!”

In that seclusion of heaven Maurice could draw her slim shape to him, for the way is so narrow that two are obliged to walk close. They parted near the wider entrance, where a stamp reared itself against the open sky, bearing a stick like a bow, and having the appearance of a crouching figure.

“There is the Indian on the trail,” said Lily. “You must go back now.”

“He looks so formidable,” said Maurice; “especially in twilight, and, except at noon, it is always twilight here. But when you reach him he is nothing but a stump.”

“He is more than a stump,” she insisted. “He is a real Indian, and some day will get up and take a scalp! It gives me a shiver every time I come in sight of him crouched on the trail!”

“Do you know,” complained her lover, “that you haven't told me once to-day?”

“Well—I do.”

“How much?”

“Oh—a little!”

“A little will not do!”

“Then—a great deal.”

“I want all—all!”

Her eyes wandered towards the Indian on the trail, and the bow of her mouth was bent in a tantalizing curve.

“I have told you I love you. Why doesn't that satisfy you?”

“It isn't enough!”

“Perhaps I can't satisfy you. I love you all I can.”

“All you can?”

“Yes. Maybe I can't love you as much as you want me to. I am shallow!”

“For God's sake, don't say you are shallow! There is deep under deep in you! I couldn't have staked my life on you, I couldn't have loved you, if there hadn't been! Say I have only touched the surface yet, but don't say you are shallow!”

The girl shook her head.

“There isn't enough of me. Do you know,” she exclaimed, whimsically, “that's the Indian on the trail! You'll never feel quite sure of me, will you?”

Maurice's lips moved. “You are my own!”

She kept him at bay with her eyes, though they filled slowly with tears.

“I am a child of the devil!” exclaimed Lily, with vehemence. “I give people trouble and make them suffer!”

“She classes me with 'people'!” Maurice thought. He said, “Have I ever blamed you for anything?”

“No.”

“Then don't blame yourself. I will simply take what you can give me. That is all I could take. Forgive me for loving you too much. I will try to love you less.”

“No,” the girl demurred. “I don't want you to do that.”

“I am very unreasonable,” he said, humbly. “But the rest of the world is a shadow. You are my one reality. There is nothing in the universe but you.”

She brushed her eyes fiercely. “I mustn't cry. I'll have to explain it if I do, and the lids will be red all day.”

The man felt internally seared, as by burning lava, with the conviction that he had staked his all late in life on what could never be really his. She would diffuse herself through many. He was concentrated in her. His passion had its lips burned shut.

“I am Providence's favorite bag-holder,” was his bitter thought. “The game is never for me.”

“Good-bye,” said Lily.

“Good-bye,” said Maurice.

“Are you coming into the casino to-night?”

“If you will be there.”

“I have promised a lot of dances. Good-bye. Go back and work.”

“Yes, I must work,” said Maurice.

She gave him a defiant, radiant smile, and ran towards the Indian on the trail. He turned in the opposite direction, and tramped the woods until nightfall.

At first he mocked himself. “Oh yes, she loves me! I'm glad, at any rate, that she loves me! There will be enough to moisten my lips with; and if I thirst for an ocean that is not her fault.”

Why had a woman been made who could inspire such passion without returning it? He reminded himself that she was of a later, a gayer, lighter, less strenuous generation than his own. Thousands of men had waded blood for a principle and a lost cause in his day. In hers the gigantic republic stood up a menace to nations. The struggle for existence was over before she was born. Yet women seemed more in earnest now than ever before. He said to himself, “I have always picked out natures as fatal to me as a death-warrant, and fastened my life to them.”

The thought stabbed him that perhaps his wife, whom he had believed satisfied, had carried such hopeless anguish as he now carried. Tardy remorse for what he could not help gave him the feeling of a murderer. And since he knew himself how little may be given under the bond of marriage, he could not look forward and say, “My love will yet be mine!”

He would, indeed, have society on his side; and children—he drew his breath hard at that. Her ways with children were divine. He had often watched her instinctive mothering of, and drawing them around her. And it should be much to him that he might look at and touch her. There was life in her mere presence.

He felt the curse of the artistic temperament, which creates in man the exquisite sensitiveness of woman.

Taking the longest and hardest path home around the eastern beach, Maurice turned once on impulse, parted a screen of birches, and stepped into an amphitheatre of the cliff, moss-clothed and cedar-walled. It sloped downward in three terraces. A balcony or high parapet of stone hung on one side, a rock low and broad stood in the centre, and an unmistakable chair of rock, cushioned with vividly green-branched moss, waited an occupant. Maurice sat down, wondering if any other human being, perplexed and tortured, had ever domiciled there for a brief time. Slim alder-trees and maples were clasped in moss to their waists. The spacious open was darkened by dense shade overhead. Bois Blanc was plainly in view from the beach. But the eastern islands stretched a line of foliage in growing dusk. Maurice felt the cooling benediction of the place. This world is such a good world to be happy in, if you have the happiness.

When the light faded he went on, climbing low headlands which jutted into the water, and sliding down on the other side; so that he reached the hotel physically exhausted, and had his dinner sent to his room. But a vitality constantly renewing itself swept away every trace of his hard day when he entered the gayly lighted casino.

He no longer danced, not because dancing ceased to delight him, but because the serious business of life had left no room for it. He walked along the waxed floor, avoiding the circling procession of waltzers, and bowing to a bank of pretty faces, but thinking his own thought, in growing bitterness: “They who live blameless lives are the fools of fate. If I had it to do over again, I would take what I wanted in spite of everything, and let the consequences fall where they would!” Looking up, he met in the eyes the woman of his early love.

She was holding court, for a person of such consequence became the centre of the caravansary from the instant of her arrival; and she gave him her hand with the conventional frankness and self-command that set her apart from the weak. Once more he knew she was a woman to be worshipped, whose presence rebuked the baseness he had just thought.

“Perhaps it was she who kept me from being worse,” Maurice recognized in a flash; “not I myself!”

“Why, Mrs. Carstang, I didn't know you were here!” he spoke, with warmth around the heart.

“We came at noon.”

“And I was in the woods all day.” Maurice greeted the red-cheeked, elderly Mr. Carstang, whom, according to half the world, his wife doted upon, and according to the other half, she simply endured. At any rate, he looked pleased with his lot.

While Maurice stood talking with Mrs. Carstang, the new grief and the old strangely neutralized each other. It was as if they met and grappled, and he had numb peace. The woman of his first love made him proud of that early bond. She was more than she had been then. But Lily moved past him with a smile. Her dancing was visible music. It had a penetrating grace—hers, and no other person's in the world. The floating of a slim nymph down a forest avenue, now separating from her partner, and now joining him at caprice, it rushed through Maurice like some recollection of the Golden Age, when he had stood imprisoned in a tree. There was little opportunity to do anything but watch her, for she was more in demand than any other girl in the casino. Hop nights were her unconscious ovations. He took a kind of aching delight in her dancing. For while it gratified an artist to the core, it separated her from her lover and gave her to other men.

Next morning he waited for her in the study with a restlessness which would not let him sit still. More than once he went as far as the oak-tree to watch for a glimmer. But when Lily finally appeared at the door he pretended to be very busy with papers on his desk, and looked up, saying, “Oh!”

The morning was chill, and she seemed a fair Russian in fur-edged cloth as she put her cold fingers teasingly against his neck.

“Are you working hard?”

“Trying to. I am behind.”

“But if there is a good wind this afternoon you are not to forget the Carstangs' sail They will be here only a day or two, and you mustn't neglect them. Mrs. Carstang told me if I saw you first to invite you.”

Maurice met the girl's smiling eyes, and the ice of her hand went through him.

“Isn't Mrs. Carstang lovely! As soon as I saw you come in last night, I knew she was—the other woman.”

“You didn't look at me.”

“I can see with my eyelashes. Do you know, I have often thought I should love her if I were a man!”

There was not a trace of jealousy in Lily's gentle and perfect manner.

“You resemble her,” said Maurice. “You have the blond head, and the same features—only a little more delicate.”

“I have been in her parlor all morning,” said Lily. “We talked about you. I am certain, Maurice, Mrs. Carstang is in her heart still faithful to you.”

That she should thrust the old love on him as a kind of solace seemed the cruelest of all. There was no cognizance of anything except this one maddening girl. She absorbed him. She wrung the strength of his manhood from him as tribute, such tribute as everybody paid her, even Mrs. Carstang. He sat like a rock, tranced by the strong control which he kept over himself.

“I must go,” said Lily. She had not sat down at all. Maurice shuffled his papers.

“Good-bye,” she spoke.

“Good-bye,” he answered.

She did not ask, “Are you coming down the trail with me?” but ebbed softly away, the swish of her silken petticoat subsiding on the grassy avenue.

Her lover stretched his arms across the desk and sobbed upon them with heart-broken gasps.

“It is killing me! It is killing me! And there is no escape. If I took my life my disembodied ghost would follow her, less able to make itself felt than now! I cannot live without her, and she is not for me—not for me!”

He cursed the necessity which drove him out with the sailing party, and the prodigal waste of life on neutral, trivial doings which cannot be called living. He could see Lily with every pore of his body, and grew faint keeping down a wild beast in him which desired to toss overboard the men who crowded around her. She was more deliciously droll than any comédienne, full of music and wit, the kind of spirit that rises flood-tide with occasion. He was himself hilarious also during this experience of sailing with two queens surrounded by courtiers and playing the deep game of fascination, as if men were created for the amusement of their lighter moments. Lily's defiant, inscrutable eyes mocked him. But Mrs. Carstang gave him sweet friendship, and he sat by her with the unchanging loyalty of a devotee to an altar from which the sacrament has been removed.

Next morning Lily did not come to the lime-kiln. Maurice worked furiously all day, and corrected proof in his room at night, though tableaux were shown in the casino, both Mrs. Carstang and Lily being head and front of the undertaking.

The second day Lily did not come to the lime-kiln. But he saw her pass along the grassy avenue in front of his study with Mrs. Carstang, a man on each side of them. They waved their hands to him.

Maurice sat with his head on his desk all the afternoon, beaten and broken-hearted. He told himself he was a poltroon; that he was losing his manhood; that the one he loved despised him, and did well to despise him; that a man of his age who gave way to such weakness must be entering senility. The habit of rectitude would cover him like armor, and proclaim him still of a chivalry to which he felt recreant. But it came upon him like revelation that many a man had died of what doctors had called disease, when the report to the health-officer should have read: “This man loved a woman with a great passion, and she slew him.”

The sigh of the woods around, and the sunlight searching for him through his door, were lonelier than illimitable space. It was what the natives call a “real Mackinac day,” with infinite splendor of sky and water.

Maurice heard the rustle of woman's clothes, and stood up as Lily came through the white waste of stones. She stopped and gazed at him with large hunted eyes, and submitted to his taking and kissing her hands. It was so blessed to have her at all that half his trouble fled before her. They sat down together on the bench.

Much of his life Maurice had been in the attitude of judging whether other people pleased him or not. Lily reversed this habit of mind, and made him humbly solicitous to know whether he pleased her or not. He silently thanked God for the mere privilege of having her near him. Passionate selfishness was chastened out of him. One can say much behind the lips and make no sound at all.

“If I drench her with my love and she does not know it,” thought Maurice, “it cannot annoy her. Let me take what she is willing to give, and ask no more.”

“The Carstangs are gone,” said Lily.

“Yes; I bade them good-bye this morning before I came to the lime-kiln.”

“You don't say you regret their going.”

“I never seek Mrs. Carstang.”

He sat holding the girl's hands and never swerving a glance from her face, which was weirdly pallid—the face of her spirit. He felt himself enveloped and possessed by her, his will subject to her will. He said within himself, voicelessly: “I love you. I love the firm chin, the wilful lower lip, and the Cupid's bow of the upper lip. I love the oval of your cheeks, the curve of your ears, the etched eyebrows, and all the little curls on your temples. I love the proud nose and most beautiful forehead. Every blond hair n that dear head is mine! Its upward tilt on the long throat is adorable! Have you any gesture or personal trait which does not thrill me? But best of all, because through them you yourself look at me, revealing more than you think, I adore your blue eyes.”

“What are you thinking?” demanded Lily.

“Of a man who lay face downward far out in the desert, and had not a drop of water to moisten his lips.”

“Is he in your story?”

“Yes, he is in my story.”

“I thought perhaps you didn't want me to come here any more,” she said.

“You didn't think so!” flashed Maurice.

“But you turned your cheek to me the last time I was here. You were too busy to do more than speak.”

Voicelessly he said: “I lay under your feet, my life, my love! You walked on me and never knew it.” Aloud he answered; “Was I so detestable? Forgive me. I am trying to learn self-control.”

“You are all self-control! If you have feeling, you manage very well to conceal it.”

“God grant it!” he said, in silence, behind his lips. “For the touch of your hand is rapture. My God! how hard it is to love so much and be still!” Aloud he said, “Don't you know the great mass of human beings are obliged to conceal their feelings because they have not the gift of expression?”

“Yes, I know,” answered Lily, defiantly.

“But that can never be said of you,” Maurice went on. “For you are so richly endowed with expression that your problem is how to mask it.”

“Are you coming down the trail with me? It is sunset, and time to shut the study for the day.”

He prepared at once to leave his den, and they went out together on the trail, lingering step by step. Though it was the heart of the island summer, the maples still had tender pink leaves at the extremities of branches; and the trail looked wild and fresh as if that hour tunnelled through the wilderness. Sunset tried to penetrate western stretches with level shafts, but none reached the darkening path where twilight already purpled the hollows.

The night coolness was like respite after burning pain. Maurice wondered how close he might draw this changeful girl to him without again losing her. He had compared her to a wild sweetbrier-rose. She was a hundred-leaved rose, hiding innumerable natures in her depths.

They passed the dead pines, crossed the rotten log, and came silently within sight of the Indian on the trail, but neither of them noted it. The Indian stood stencilled against a background of primrose light, his bow magnified.

It was here that Maurice felt the slight elastic body sag upon his arm.

“I am tired,” said Lily. “I have been working so hard to amuse your friends!”

“Would that I were my friends!” responded Maurice. He said, silently: “I love you! I wonder if I shall ever learn to love you less?”

The unspoken appeal of her swaying figure put him off his guard, and he found himself holding her, the very depths of his passion rushing out with the force of lava.

“It is you I want!—the you that is not any other person on earth or in the universe! Whatever it is—the identity—the spirit—that is you—the you that was mated with me in other lives—that I have sought—will seek—must have, whatever the price in time and anguish!—understand!—there is nobody but you!”

Tears oozed from under her closed lids. She lay in his arms passive, as in a half-swoon.

“You do the talking,” she breathed. “I do the loving!”

Without opening her eyes she met him with her perfect mouth, and gave herself to him in a kiss. He understood a spirit so passionately reticent that it denied to itself its own inward motions. The wilfulness of a solitary exalted nature melted in that kiss. All the soft curves of her face concealed and belied the woman who opened her wild blue eyes and looked at him, passionately adoring, fierce for her own, yet doubtful of fate.

“If I let you know that I loved you all I do, you would tire of me!”

“How can you say I could ever tire of you?”

“I know it! When you are not quite sure of me, you love me best!”

Maurice laughed against her lips. “You said that was the Indian on the trail—my never being quite sure of you! Will you take an oath with me?”

“Yes.”

“This is the oath: I swear before God that I love you more than any one else on earth; more than any one else in the universe.”

She repeated: “I swear before God that I love you more than any one else on earth; more than any one else in the universe!”

Maurice held her blond head against his breast, quivering through flesh and spirit. That was the moment of life. What was conquering the dense resistance of material things, or coming off victor in bouts with men? The moment of life is when the infinite sea opens before the lover.

The heart of the island held them like the heart of Allah. The pines sang around them.

“We must go on,” spoke Lily. “It is so dark we can't see the Indian on the trail.”

“There isn't any Indian on the trail now,” laughed Maurice. “You can never frighten me with him again.”

THE END

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│ retained, with the exception of apparent typographical errors │
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