The One Woman Part 13

July broke the record of forty years for heat. Scores were prostrated daily and dead horses blocked traffic at almost every hour. A drought threatened the water-supply, and night brought no relief to the millions who sweltered in the tenements.

The babies began to die by thousands--more than two thousand a week on Manhattan. Island alone. The city's wagons raked the little black coffins up and dumped them into the Potters' Field, one on top of the other, like so many dead flies. Down every tenement-walled street the white ribbons fluttered their tragic story from cellar to attic. At night tired mothers walked the pavements, hot and radiating heat, till the sun rose again, carrying their sick babies, or crowded the housetops, fanning them as they lay on their pallets, pale and still, fighting with Death the grim, silent battle.

Kate Ransom finally gave her entire time to these children. She fitted up a hotel in the mountains of Pennsylvania and kept it full.

She chartered a steamer and took a thousand of them for a day up the Hudson as an experiment, and asked Gordon to go with them. They would have music, and a dinner spread under the trees of the park which stretched back from the water's edge into the towering hills.

He met them at the ferry slip from which the steamer sailed. Kate was already there, and the throng filled every inch of the floor s.p.a.ce. She was moving about among them, while they gazed at her in admiration no words in their vocabulary could express. Her face was flushed with excitement, and her violet eyes, wide open, were sparkling with pleasure.

The man's eyes lingered on the scene, feeling that, for all her magnificently human body, no angel ever made a fairer vision.

He was struck with the silence of these children. As he looked closer it was only too plain they were not children. They were only little wizen-faced men and women, who had never learned to laugh or smile or play; little pinched faces with weak eyes that had never seen G.o.d's green fields; little dirty ears that had been bruised with a thousand beastly noises, but had never heard the murmur of beautiful waters in the depths of a forest. His heart went out to them in a great yearning pity as he recalled his own enchanted childhood.

His voice was soft with tears as he greeted Kate.

"A more pathetic sight than this crowd of silent children old earth never saw. But the shining figure in the centre lights the shadows with a touch of divine beauty."

"It does break one's heart to see such children, doesn't it?" she answered, looking at them tenderly and ignoring his pointed tribute to her beauty.

"Are we all ready?" Gordon cried.

"If you are. Is Mrs. Gordon not coming?"

"No; I couldn't persuade her. She took our chicks to the seash.o.r.e."

As the boat moved swiftly up the great river in the fresh morning air and the breeze blowing down its channel strengthened, they sat together on the after deck and watched the dead souls of the little ones stir with life under the kiss of the wind and the caress of the music.

In the park they spread out in the whispering stillness of the woods. Nature breathed the sweet breath of her life into their hearts again and they began to twist their queer little faces and try to laugh. They called to one another and listened with mute wonder at the echo among the rock-ribbed hills. Gordon watched curiously in their faces the flash of the inherited memory of forest habits, choked and stunted and dormant in all city folks, and yet alive as long as the human heart beats. Within two hours they had grown noisy with play after a timid, clumsy fashion.

"Give them a week and they would learn to laugh!" Kate exclaimed.

But the man was now more interested in watching the woman than the children, as he saw her satin skin flush with pleasure and the creamy lace on her full bosom rise and fall.

They sat down on a rock beside a brook.

"What an inspiration to see this old yet ever new miracle of regeneration unfold under the magic touch of a woman's hand!"

"You mean a man's hand," she replied. "This would never have interested me except that you led me to see it."

"Then we've helped one another. I'm beginning to feel you are indispensable. I wonder if you, too, will leave us after awhile as so many pa.s.s on."

"No; this has become my very life," she soberly answered, looking down at the ground and then into his face with frank, open-eyed pleasure.

He was silent for several minutes and then softly laughed.

"What is it?" she cried.

"You could never guess."

She lifted her superb arms, showing bare to the elbow, and felt of the ma.s.s of auburn hair. "That load of red hay about to fall?"

"Don't be sacrilegious. No."

"Harness broken anywhere?" She felt of her belt, and ran her hands down the lines of her beautiful figure, eyeing him laughingly.

"I'll tell you," he said, sinking his voice to its lowest note of expressive feeling, while a whimsical smile played round the corners of his eyes. "Sitting here in the woods by your side on this glorious summer day, your eyes looked so blue in the creamy satin of your face, I suddenly thought I smelled the violets with which G.o.d mixed their colours."

"You think of such silly things," she said with mock severity.

"There's nothing silly about it. Beauty is an attribute of the divine. I worship it for its own sweet sake wherever I find it, in pearl or opal, dewdrop or flower, the stars, or a woman's face or form or eyes."

She lowered her head.

"Do you know the old legend of the opal?" he asked.

He took some stones from his pocket and held in the light an opal of rare l.u.s.ter.

"Isn't it beautiful?" she cried.

"And its story is as beautiful as its face. Listen: A sunbeam lingered under a leaf in the forest at sunset, loath to leave so fair a spot, until the moon suddenly rose. Enraptured with the shimmering beauty of a moonbeam, he stood entranced and trembling and could not go. In ecstasy they met, embraced and kissed. The sun sank and left him in her arms. The opal is the child of their love. In its fair face is forever mingled the silver of the rising moon and the golden glory of the sunset."

"I believe you made that up," she laughed.

"I wish I were poet enough."

"I had no idea you dreamed of such romantic nonsense."

"Yes, I dream many things. I had a funny dream about you the other night."

"Tell me what it was," she begged.

"I dare not."

"I thought you would dare anything."

"No; you see, dreams are such intimate, unconventional mysteries.

Dreams have no regard for law or custom The soul and the body seem equally free and without sin or shame. I have a curious feeling of awe about sleep and dreams. It's the surest evidence I have of immortality and the reality of a spiritual life. It is to me the prophecy of the ideal world, too, in which we will dare to live some day what we really are, without pretence or hypocrisy--live that deep secret inner life we try sometimes to hide from the eye of G.o.d."

"And you will not even give me a hint of this dream?"

"No. It was very foolish, but very charming and beautiful. It was in part a picture from that dream which made me laugh awhile ago about your eyes."

"I think it mean in you to tell me that much and no more."

"I would tell you if I dared. I may dare some day."

She was afraid to ask him after that, and yet something within cried for joy.

They rose, gathered the children for dinner, ands after three hours in the woods, returned to the city as the twilight softly fell over its ragged steel and granite sky-line.