Master of Men Part 3

He submitted himself to her care. After the agony of the last few hours the sound of her shrill, but not unpleasant, voice and her breathless anxiety on his behalf seemed almost grateful. He was hustled into dry clothes, and his feet and hands were rubbed into a state of glowing warmth. Fresh logs were thrown upon the fire, a kettle boiled, and some tea deftly prepared. From one of her parcels came bread and meat. He ate at her bidding. Outside the storm grew in violence.

She sat crouched almost at his feet, the firelight playing on her brown hair, her eyes wet with tears.

A clearer sense of what was happening came to him. He sat up suddenly.

"How did you come here?" he asked.

"I haven't a home," she said. "Mother died last Thursday, Nancy's taken the kids, father's in jail--he's got six months."

His old pity was revived. He smoothed her hair.

"Poor child!"

At his touch the sobs came. Her head drooped upon his knee.

"Nancy wouldn't have me in the house; her husband thinks he likes me, and I am afraid of him. I'd nowhere to sleep, so I walked out here, meaning to sleep in the woods. Don't turn me out, oh, don't! I'm all alone in the world, and I don't want to be like the others. Let me stay. I'll do everything for you. I won't speak when you don't want me to. You'll never know I'm here, except when you want anything done.

Oh, please, please be kind to me. If you don't, I shall go and drown myself. I've been miserable so long."

Her cry went to his heart, pierced even the dull lethargy of his own despair. The rain was dashing against the window. He glanced at the clock--it was nearly midnight.

"Poor little waif," he murmured, "and there are so many like you."

She crept, sobbing, into his arms; her hands were clasped around his neck. For her it was happiness immeasurable; for him, too, there was a certain solace in the thought that this lone creature loved him and was dependent upon him. He sat with wide-open eyes, gazing into the fire all the night long.

They were married the next day.

Through the weeks that followed things remained the same at Strone's cottage yet different. Everything was spotlessly clean, but somehow the atmosphere was altered. The chairs were ranged in order against the wall. There were enormities in the shape of woolen antimaca.s.sars, a flimsy curtain hung before the small window.

A table on which had lain a _Spectator_ and _Fortnightly Review_ was littered over now with copies of the _Young Ladies' Journal_, some cheap and highly colored sweets, an untidy workbasket.

In Strone himself the change was wonderful. Life had narrowed in upon him; he looked forward with a shudder, the past was as a sealed book.

Only some days there came little flashes of memory. He found himself suddenly recalling those wonderfully sweet days of his freedom, when every shadow of care seemed to pa.s.s away as he rode out from Gascester, when the wind and the sun and the song of the birds had been his companions. That was all over now. He climbed the steep hill with listless footsteps, no longer full of antic.i.p.ation of those long hours of exquisite solitude which had become so dear to him. Those days had gone by--forever.

Milly would be waiting at the door, would shower upon him caresses which long ago had palled, would chatter emptily, and dwell peevishly on the long day's solitude. He found himself thinking with a shiver of the interminable evening. There was no escape. If he went out she would follow him; if he read, she sulked. He groaned to himself as he turned the last corner and caught a glimpse of the gray smoke curling upward.

Then he stopped short in the middle of the lane. What little color the heat had brought into his cheeks died away. He looked wildly around, as though half inclined to leap the gray-stone wall and vanish in the tangled wilderness beyond. Yet there was nothing more alarming in the way than a smartly turned-out victoria descending the hill toward him, and, leaning back among the cushions, a tired-looking woman in a white dress and hat with pink roses. Almost at the same moment she saw him, and, leaning forward, she stopped the carriage. To his amazement she stepped lightly out, gave the man an order, and waited for him in the shade of a great oak tree which overhung the road.

He ground his teeth together and advanced to meet her steadily. She greeted him with her old quiet smile. She, too, he thought, was looking pale and listless.

"I'm so glad to see you. Do you mind resting your bicycle somewhere and coming into the shade? I will not keep you very long."

He obeyed her in silence. Words seemed difficult to him just then.

They stood in the shadow of the trees which hung over from the wood.

She lowered her parasol and seemed for a moment intent upon studying the pattern of the filmy lace. The man's heart beat out like a sledge hammer. Yet he stood there, slowly mastering his emotion, and it was the woman who found speech so difficult.

"I am going to tell you something," she said at last, "which a few days ago I was very sure that I would never tell you."

She pauses. He remains speechless, his eyes fastened upon her.

"Go on."

"One afternoon when you were away I had a fancy to look at your cottage. I came--and found someone there. I questioned the girl. She was a friend of yours, she said. She was confused; what she said seemed incapable of bearing more than one interpretation. I accepted the inference--and that afternoon there was plain speaking--on the lawn."

He was no longer steady on his feet, and in his ears was the rushing of strange sounds, trees and sky were mixed up together.

"You believed--that?" he gasped.

"I judged you," she answered, "by the standard of a world which I believed to be lower than yours. Remember, too, that in many ways I knew so little of you. Different cla.s.ses of society regard the same thing from such different points of view. Yes, I judged you. I want your forgiveness."

He looked at her wildly.

"What infernal sophistry," he cried. "What is sin in your world is sin in mine!"

"Mind," she continued drearily, "I do not say that even without this I could have answered you differently."

"Don't you know why I came," she said at last impulsively--"It is because you are a man--because you have power and a great future. I want you to rouse yourself--I want you to make a stir in the world.

This is what I have come to say to you--to preach a very simple doctrine. Make the best of things. There is room for you in great places, Enoch Strone. This generation is empty of strong men. Fill your life with ambitions and remember all those wonderful dreams of yours. Strive to realize them. Tell Milly about them; let her know each day how you are getting on. Come out of the crowd, Enoch, and let me feel that I have known one man in my life, at least, who was strong enough to climb to the hilltop with another's burden upon his shoulders."

Under the spell of her words his apathy and indifference gave way.

Life was there in her face--in her voice. He listened to her with kindling eyes, conscious that the old pa.s.sion for life was moving once more in his veins--conscious, too, with a certain sense of wonder at the transformation, that this woman, who was pleading with him so earnestly, stood revealed in a wholly new light. The delicate vein of mockery, which sometimes gave to her most serious sayings an air of insincerity, as though conversation were a mere juggling with words, seemed to have pa.s.sed away. She spoke without languor or weariness, and her words touched his heart--stirred his brain.

The man in him leaped up, vigorous and eager. He faced her with glowing eyes.

"If the burden had been twice as heavy," he cried, "I would bear it cheerfully now. Forever--"

He stopped short. Some instinct told him that any further words were unnecessary. As she had spoken and looked, so would she remain to him forever. So he called her carriage, and once more her fingers rested in his great work-hardened hand.

"Good-bye," she said, "and good fortune."

When he reached the cottage Milly brought tea out to him, waited upon him breathlessly. The terrible gloom which had oppressed her so much had pa.s.sed away. He was dressed in new and well-fitting clothes. Even to her untrained eye there was a wonderful change in his bearing and demeanor.

"Milly," he said, "would you like to live in London?"

The thought was like paradise. She strove to contain herself.

"With you, Enoch--anywhere."

"With me, certainly," he answered. "We shall go there next week.

You will be able to have a decent house and servants. Dobell's are opening a London branch, and I shall have to manage it. I ought to have told you some of these things before. I had no right to keep them to myself. You will never be poor again, Milly. It seems as though we were going to be very rich."

"Enoch! Enoch!"

He smiled at the excitement which baffled speech.

Later he walked out by himself, crossed the field, and entered the deep, cool shade of the wood. It was significant that he pa.s.sed the spot where he had first met Milly with a little shudder, and hurried away, as though even the memory of that night pursued him. All the while a subtle sense of excitement was in his veins, mingled with a strange, haunting sadness. For him the life in quiet places was over.

This was his farewell pilgrimage. Henceforth his place was in the stress of life, in the great pa.s.sion-riven heart of the world. His days of contemplation were over. There had come Milly, and he very well knew that the old life here, where the singing of every wind, the music of the birds, thrilled him with early memories, was impossible.