The Mettle of the Pasture Part 19

They were not talking; and her eyes had a look of strained expectancy. As soon as she saw him, she rose and held out her hand to Professor Hardage; then without speaking and still without looking at him, she placed the tips of her fingers on the elbow of his sleeve. As they walked away, she renewed her request in a low voice: "Take me where we shall be undisturbed."

They left the rooms. It was an interval between the dances: the verandas were crowded. They pa.s.sed out into the yard. Along the cool paths, college boys and college girls strolled by in couples, not caring who listened to their words and with that laughter of youth, the whole meaning of which is never realized save by those who hear it after they have lost it. Older couples sat here and there in quiet nooks--with talk not meant to be heard and with occasional laughter so different.

They moved on, seeking greater privacy. Marguerite's lamps were burnt out--brief flames as measured by human pa.s.sion. But overhead burnt the million torches of the stars. How brief all human pa.s.sion measured by that long, long light!

He stopped at last:

"Here?"

She placed herself as far as possible from him.

The seat was at the terminus of a path in the wildest part of Marguerite's garden. Overhead against the trunk of a tree a solitary lantern was flickering fitfully. It soon went out. The dazzling lights of the ballroom, glimmering through boughs and vines, shot a few rays into their faces. Music, languorous, torturing the heart, swelled and died on the air, mingled with the murmurings of eager voices. Close around them in the darkness was the heavy fragrance of perishing blossoms--earth dials of yesterday; close around them the clean sweetness of fresh ones--breath of the coming morn. It was an hour when the heart, surrounded by what can live no more and by what never before has lived, grows faint and sick with yearnings for its own past and forlorn with the inevitableness of change--the cruelty of all change.

For a while silence lasted. He waited for her to speak; she tried repeatedly to do so. At length with apparent fear that he might misunderstand, she interposed an agitated command:

"Do not say anything."

A few minutes later she began to speak to him, still struggling for her self-control.

"I do not forget that to-night I have been acting a part, and that I have asked you to act a part with me. I have walked with you and I have talked with you, and I am with you now to create an impression that is false; to pretend before those who see us that nothing is changed. I do not forget that I have been doing this thing which is unworthy of me. But it is the first time--try not to believe it to be my character. I am compelled to tell you that it is one of the humiliations you have forced upon me."

"I have understood this," he said hastily, breaking the silence she had imposed upon him.

"Then let it pa.s.s," she cried nervously. "It is enough that I have been obliged to observe my own hypocrisies, and that I have asked you to countenance and to conceal them."

He offered no response. And in a little while she went on:

"I ought to tell you one thing more. Last week I made all my arrangements to go away at once, for the summer, for a long time.

I did not expect to see you again. Two or three times I started to the station. I have stayed until now because it seemed best after all to speak to you once more. This is my reason for being here to-night; and it is the only apology I can offer to myself or to you for what I am doing."

There was a sad and bitter vehemence in her words; she quivered with pa.s.sion.

"Isabel," he said more urgently, "there is nothing I am not prepared to tell you."

When she spoke again, it was with difficulty and everything seemed to hang upon her question:

"Does any one else know?"

His reply was immediate:

"No one else knows."

"Have you every reason to believe this?"

"I have every reason to believe this."

"You kept your secret well," she said with mournful irony. "You reserved it for the one person whom it could most injure: my privilege is too great!"

"It is true," he said.

She turned and looked at him. She felt the depth of conviction with which he spoke, yet it hurt her. She liked his dignity and his self-control, and would not have had them less; yet she gathered fresh bitterness from the fact that he did not lose them.

But to her each moment disclosed its new and uncontrollable emotions; as words came, her mind quickly filled again with the things she could not say. She now went on:

"I am forced to ask these questions, although I have no right to ask them and certainly I have no wish. I have wanted to know whether I could carry out the plan that has seemed to me best for each of us. If others shared your secret, I could not do this. I am going away--I am going in the morning. I shall remain away a long time. Since we have been seen together here to-night as usual, no one suspects now that for us everything has become nothing. While I am away, no one can have the means of finding this out. Before I return, there will be changes--there may be many changes. If we meet with indifference then, it will be thought that we have become indifferent, one of us, or both of us: I suppose it will be thought to be you. There will be comment, comment that will be hard to stand; but this will be the quietest way to end everything--as far as anything can ever be ended."

"Whatever you wish! I leave it all to you."

She did not pause to heed his words:

"This will spare me the linking of my name with yours any further just now; it will spare me all that I should suffer if the matter which estranges us should be discovered and be discussed. It will save me hereafter, perhaps, from being pointed out as a woman who so trusted and was so deceived. It may shield my life altogether from some notoriety: I could be grateful for that!"

She was thinking of her family name, and of the many proud eyes that were turned upon her in the present and out of the past.

There was a sting for her in the remembrance and the sting pa.s.sed into her concluding words:

"I do not forget that when I ask you to do all this, I, who am not given to practising deception, am asking you to go on practising yours. I am urging you to shirk the consequences of your wrong-doing--to enjoy in the world an untarnished name after you have tarnished your life. Do not think I forget that! Still I beg you to do as I say. This is another of the humiliations you have led me to: that although I am separated from you by all that once united us, I must remain partner with you in the concealment of a thing that would ruin you if it were known."

She turned to him as though she experienced full relief through her hard and cruel words:

"Do I understand, then, that this is to be buried away by you--and by me--from the knowledge of the world?"

"No one else has any right to know it. I have told you that."

"Then that is all!"

She gave a quick dismissal to the subject, so putting an end to the interview.

She started to rise from her seat; but impulses, new at the instant, checked her: all the past checked her, all that she was herself and all that he had been to her.

Perhaps what at each moment had angered her most was the fact that she was speaking, not he. She knew him to be of the blood of silent men and to have inherited their silence. This very trait of his had rendered a.s.sociation with him so endearing. Love had been so divinely apart from speech, either his or her own: most intimate for having been most mute. But she knew also that he was capable of speech, full and strong and quick enough upon occasion; and her heart had cried out that in a lifetime this was the one hour when he should not have given way to her or allowed her to say a word--when he should have borne her down with uncontrollable pleading.

It was her own work that confronted her and she did not recognize it. She had exhausted resources to convince him of her determination to cast him off at once; to render it plain that further parley would to her be further insult. She had made him feel this on the night of his confession; in the note of direct repulse she sent him by the hand of a servant in her own house the following afternoon; by returning to him everything that he had ever given her; by her refusal to acknowledge his presence this evening beyond laying upon him a command; and by every word that she had just spoken. And in all this she had thought only of what she suffered, not of what he must be suffering.

Perhaps some late instantaneous recognition of this flashed upon her as she started to leave him--as she looked at him sitting there, his face turned toward her in stoical acceptance of his fate. There was something in the controlled strength of it that touched her newly. She may have realized that if he had not been silent, if he had argued, defended himself, pleaded, she would have risen and walked back to the house without a word. It turned her nature toward him a little, that he placed too high a value upon her dismissal of him not to believe it irrevocable.

Yet it hurt her: she was but one woman in the world; could the thought of this have made it easier for him to let her go away now without a protest?

The air of the summer night grew unbearable for sweetness about her. The faint music of the ballroom had no pity for her. There young eyes found joy in answering eyes, pa.s.sed on and found joy in others and in others. Palm met palm and then palms as soft and then palms yet softer. Some minutes before, the laughter of Marguerite in the shrubbery quite close by had startled Isabel.

She had distinguished a voice. Now Marguerite's laughter reached her again--and there was a different voice with hers. Change!

change! one put away, the place so perfectly filled by another.

A white moth of the night wandered into Rowan's face searching its features; then it flitted over to her and searched hers, its wings fanning and clinging to her lips; and then it pa.s.sed on, pursuing amid mistakes and inconstancies its life-quest lasting through a few darknesses.

Fear suddenly reached down into her heart and drew up one question; and she asked that question in a voice low and cold and guarded:

"Sometime, when you ask another woman to marry you, will you think it your duty to tell her?"

"I will never ask any other woman."

"I did not inquire for your intention; I asked what you would believe to be your duty."