Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard Part 32

It was not her boy. It was a man, middle-aged, rough and weatherbeaten, but pallid under his red-and-tan. His hair was grizzled. And his face was rough with a growth of grizzled hair. His whole body lurched heavily and helplessly in a fork of the tree, and one arm hung limp.

His eyes were half-shut.

But they were not quite shut. He was not unconscious. And under the drooping lids he was watching her.

For a few minutes they sat gazing at each other in silence. She had her breath to get. She thought it would never come back.

The man spoke first.

"Well, you made a job of it," he said.

She didn't answer.

"But you don't know much about the water, do you?"

"I've never seen the sea till to-day," said Helen slowly.

He laughed a little. "I expect you've seen enough of it to-day. But where do you live, then, that you've never seen the sea? In the middle of the earth?"

"No," said Helen, "I live in a mill."

His eyelids flickered. "Do you? Yes, of course you do. I might have guessed it."

"How should you guess it?"

"By your blue dress," said the man. Then he fainted.

She sat there miserably, waiting, ready to prop him if he fell. She did not know what else to do. Before very long he opened his eyes.

"Did I go off again?" he asked.

She nodded.

"Yes. Well, it's time to be making a move. I dare say I can now you're here. What's your name?"

"Helen."

"Well, Helen, we'd better put that rope to some use. Will that tree at the other end hold?"

"Yes."

"Then just you untie yourself and we'll get aboard and haul ourselves home."

She unfastened the rope from her body, and helped him down to her makeshift boat.

"You take the paddle," he said. "My arm's damaged. But I can pull on the rope with the other."

"Are you sure? Are you all right? What's your name?"

"Yes, I can manage. My name's Peter. This would have been a lark thirty years ago, wouldn't it? It's rather a lark now."

She nodded vaguely, wondering what she would do if he fell off the log in mid-water.

"Suppose you faint again?"

"Don't look for trouble," said the man. "Push off, now."

Pulling and paddling they got to the bank. He took her helping-hand up it, and she saw by his movements that he was very feeble. He leaned on her as they went back to the mill; they walked without speaking.

When they reached the door Peter said, "It's twenty years since I was here, but I expect you don't remember."

"Oh, yes," said Helen, "I remember."

"Do you now?" said Peter. "It's funny you should remember."

And with that he did faint again. And this time when he recovered he was in a fever. His staying-power was gone.

She put him to bed and nursed him. She sat day and night in his room, doing by instinct what was right and needful. At first he lay either unconscious or delirious. She listened to his incoherent speech in a sort of agony, as though it might contain some clue to a riddle; and sat with her pa.s.sionate eyes brooding on his countenance, as though in that too might lie the answer. But if there was one, neither his words nor his face revealed it. "When he wakes," she whispered to herself, "he'll tell me. How can there be barriers between us any more?"

After three days he came to himself. She was sitting by the window preparing sheep's-wool for her spindle. She bent over her task, using the last of the light, which fell upon her head. She did not know that he was conscious, or had been watching her, until he spoke.

"Your hair used to be quite brown, didn't it?" he said. "Nut-brown."

She started and turned to him, and a faint flush stained her cheeks.

"Ah, you're not pleased," said Peter with a slight grin. "None of us like getting old, do we?"

Helen put by the question. "You're yourself again."

"Doing my best," said he. "How long is it?"

"Three days."

"As much as that? I could have sworn it was only yesterday. Well, time pa.s.ses."

He said no more, and fell into a doze. Helen was as grateful for this as she could have been for anything just then. She couldn't have gone on talking. She was stunned with misgivings. How could he ever have thought her hair was brown? Couldn't he see even now that it had once been as black as jet? She put her hand up to her head, and unpinned a coil of her heavy hair, and spread it over her breast and looked at it.

Yes, the silver was there, too much and too soon. But there was less silver than black. It was still time's st.i.tchery, not his fabric. The man who was not her boy need never have seen her before to know that once her hair had been black. This was worse than forgetfulness in him; it was misremembrance. She pulled at the silver hairs pa.s.sionately as though she would pluck them out and make him see her as she had been.

But soon she stopped her futile effort to uncount the years. "I am foolish," she whispered to herself, and coiled her lock again and bound it in its place. "There are other ways of making him remember.

Presently when he wakes again I will talk to him. I will remind him of everything, yes, and I'll tell him everything. I WON'T be afraid." She waited with longing his next consciousness.

But to her woe she found herself defeated. While he slept she was able, as when he had been delirious or absent, to create the occasion and the talk between them. She dropped all fears, and in frank tenderness brought him her twenty years of dreams. And in her thought he accepted and answered them. But when he woke and spoke to her from the bed, she knew at once that the man who lay there was not the man with whom she had been speaking. His personality fenced with hers; it had barriers she could not pa.s.s. She dared not try, for dread of his indifference or his smiles.

"What made you stick on in this place?" he asked her.

"I don't know," said Helen. "Places hold one, don't they?"

"None ever held me. I couldn't have been content to stay the best half of my life in one spot. But I suppose women are different."

"You speak as though all women were the same."