Golden Stories Part 33

"Fate--call the power what you will"--she met the disclaimer that puckered the corners of his mouth--"fate brought us together. It was the response to my longing for such a friendship!"

"It was the Yellow Cat!"

"The Yellow Cat plus fate! While I sat there by your fire I recognized you for that friend!"

Far below over the tree tops cloud shadows and sunlight were playing some wonderful game of follow-my-leader; a hawk hung poised on tilting wings; and on the veil of mist that was the spirit of the brook where it cast itself from the ledge curved the arch of a rainbow. The man pointed to the augury.

"You might try me," he said, and they shook hands on the compact, laughing half shamefacedly at their own solemnity.

"As woman to woman," he offered.

"Let it be rather as man to man," she shrugged.

"As you like--as women we should have to begin by explaining ourselves."

"Precisely, and men companion each other on impersonal grounds."

"Then it is a man's friendship?"

"Better still," she mused, "we'll pattern it after the ideals of the disembodied! We'll make this summer, you and I together, a gem from the heart of life--I will have it so!"

So it came about that like two children they played together, worked, walked, or read and talked by the open fire when cold storms came. Every morning she came over the wood-road that led by winding ways from her valley, and at sunset she went back over the trail alone. He might go as far as the outlook half way over the mountain where the path begins to go down, but no farther; as for any fear, she seemed to know nothing of its workings, and the revolver she wore in a case that hung from her belt was a mere convention.

One morning she came with eyes dancing--it was to be an especial day--a fete--and the G.o.ds had smiled on her planning and given them perfect weather. Never such sunshine, such crystal air, such high-hung clouds!

Breakfast over, they hurried about the miniature housework, and packed the kit for a long day's tramp. Then they started forth, the cat following, tail aloft. Beyond a dim peak, where the clove opens southward, by the side of a tiny lake they lunched and took their noonday rest. She watched the smoke curl up from his pipe where he lay at peace with the scheme of things.

"Do you know, Man, dear," she said, "I am glad I don't in the least guess who you are! I have no doubt you write the most delightful stories in the world--but never put me in one, please!"

He took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at her long before he replied.

"Woman, dear," he said, "I have put you in a place--your own place--and it is not in my novels!"

She scrambled to her feet laughing.

"It's very well to make stories, but it is really more diverting to live them! Come, I must lead you now with your eyes shut tight to my surprise!"

So hand in hand they went along a smooth green wood-road until she stopped him.

"Look," she cried, "now look!"

Straight away till the road narrowed to a point of light against the sky where the mountain dipped down, banks of mountain laurel rose on either side in giant hedges of rose and white, while high above them waved the elms and beeches of the forest.

"It is the gardening of the G.o.ds!"

"It is my own treasure-trove! I found it last year and I have been waiting to bring you to it on my fete--what you call birthday! And now wish me some beautiful thing--it may come true! There is a superst.i.tion in my country--but I shall not tell you--unless the wish comes true!"

He broke off a spray of the waxen buds and crowned her solemnly where she stood.

"I have already wished for you--the most beautiful thing in the world!"

She shook her head, sorrowful. "Man, dear, the only thing in all the world I still want is the impossible!"

"Only the impossible is worth while--and I have wished!"

She shook her head again, laughing a little ruefully. "It could not arrive--my impossible--and yet you almost tempt me to hope!"

"Anything--everything may arrive! You once thought that such a friendship as this of ours could not, and lo, we have achieved it!"

"I wonder"--her eyes seemed fixed on some far prospect, a world beyond the flowery way--"I wonder if we have! And I wonder why you have never made a guess about my world when you have at least let me get a peep now and then into yours?"

"I don't care a rap about your 'world,'" he smiled into her eyes, "while I have you!"

"No curiosity about my--my profession?"

"Not a bit--though it was clear enough from the first that it was the stage!"

She made an odd little outcry at his powers of divination.

"Then I must look it--before the footlights from my birth! Since you are so clever, Mr. Man, will you also be merciful when you come to weigh me in those scales you try to hide beneath the garment of your kindness?

Think, when you judge me, what it is for a woman never to be herself--always to have to play a part!"

He reached and took her hand suddenly, drawing her to him with a movement that was almost rough.

"This is no play acting--this is real! No footlights--no audience--only you and me in all this world!"

But she drew away, insistently aloof. She would have none of his caresses.

"This, too," she said, as she moved apart and stood waiting for him to follow, "is a part of the play--I do not deceive myself! When I go back to my world--my trade, I shall remember this little time that you and I have s.n.a.t.c.hed from the grudging grasp of life as an act--a scene only!

It's a perfect pastoral, Man, dear, but unreal--absurdly unreal--and we know it ourselves while we play the game!"

Down through the flower-bordered vista the cat went stalking his prey, his sinuous body a tawny streak winding along the green path. These trivial humans, with their subtle attractions and compunctions, were as though they never had been when the chase was on--the real business and purpose of life!

For the rest of the time they were together they avoided the personal.

Each felt the threat in the air and tacitly averted it. For that one perfect day there should be no past, no future, nothing but the golden present.

Swinging in his breeze-rocked hammock between door and window the man lay awake through the long watches of the night, thinking, thinking, while his heart sang. Toward dawn he fell into a deep sleep from which he was only awakened by the cat springing up to lick his face in reminder of breakfast.

It was when he came back from his plunge in the pool that he first noticed a paper pinned to his door-post. Within its folds his doom was penned!

"Even you, dear Man, could not wish me the impossible! That superst.i.tion of my country is that to come true it must be the first wish of your fete day--and by one who loves you! Alas, my old servant had already wished--that he might get me started for home to-day! Clever Friedrich--for he had also packed! When you read this I shall be far on my way. You could never find me though you searched the earth--but you will never try! It is well as it is, for you see--it was not friendship after all!"

And yet there was a sequel. During the following year there dropped to the man in his hard-pressed literary life, one of those errant plums from the political tree that now and then find their way to the right basket. He was named for an excellent diplomatic post. His friends congratulated him and talked a good deal about "material" and opportunities for "unique local color;" his wife chattered unceasingly about gowns and social details, while he armed himself, with the listless reticence that was become habit, to face new responsibilities and rather flavorless experiences. He had so withdrawn himself of late to the inner creative life that he moved in a kind of phantasmagoria of outer unrealities. It was the nearest to a comfortable adjustment for the mis-mating of such a marriage as his, but it was not the best of preparations for the discharge of public duties, and he walked toward his new future with reluctant feet, abstractedly. In some such mood as this, his mind bent on a problem of arrangement of fiction puppets, seeing "men as trees walking," he found himself one day making his bows at a court function. Along the line of royal highnesses and grand d.u.c.h.esses with his wife he moved, himself a string-pulled puppet, until--but who, in heaven's name is this?

For one mad moment, as he looked into her eyes, he thought the tightened cord he sometimes felt tugging at his tired brain had snapped, and the images of sight and memory gone hopelessly confused. She stood near the end of the line with the princesses of secondary rank, and the jewels in her hair were not more scintillant than her eyes as he bent over her hand. She went a little pale, but she greeted him bravely, and when they found themselves un.o.bserved for a moment she spoke to him in her soft, careful English:

"You recognized me, you remember, for a play actor, and now you are come from the world's end to see me perform on my tiny stage! Alas, dear critic, since my last excursion, I am no longer letter perfect in my part!"