The White Riband Part 7

"'Tisn't man as can judge her, 'tis only G.o.d Almighty!" cried an old minister, aghast.

"Look at the maid, how she stands.... Her own conscience judges her, I should say!"

"She's no word to excuse herself, simmingly."

"That's because she do know nothing can excuse what she's done...."

And, indeed, Loveday stood without speech. Perhaps in all that buzz of murmuring she heard the voice of her own conscience at last, for she made no effort to defend herself, or, perhaps, even at that hour, she heard nothing but the dread whisper of defeat. She stood before Flora Le Pett.i.t like a wilted rose whose petals hang limply, about to fall, fronting a bloom that spreads its glowing leaves in the full flush of noon. The one girl was triumphant in her beauty and her una.s.sailable position, every flounce out-curved in freshness; the other drooped at brow and hem, her slender neck downbent, her sash-ends pendant as broken tendrils after rain upon her heavily hanging skirts.

All she was heard to murmur, and that very low, was a halting sentence about her white sash: "But you said--you said you'd dance with me if I got my sash ..." or some such words, but only Miss Le Pett.i.t caught all the muttered syllables, and she never spoke of them, save with a petulant reluctance to Mr. Constantine when he questioned her afterwards.

"Girl," said the Mayor sharply, "is it true?'

"Yes," said Loveday.

"True!" cried Cherry, "I know 'tes true. I remember noticing that green mark on the riband when the wreath was laid on the grave. Ah, she'm a wicked piece, she is. She tormented my poor Primrose in life and she's robbed her in death. You aren't safe in your grave from she."

Everyone was speaking against Loveday in rightful indignation by now, and the good wives expressed the opinion that she should be well whipped. Loveday turned suddenly to Miss Le Pett.i.t. There were those there--notably Mr. Constantine, that observant philosopher--who said afterwards she seemed for one instant to be going to break into impa.s.sioned speech. She did half hold out her hands. The ends of the white sash, disregarded, fluttered from them as she did so. But Miss Le Pett.i.t, shocked in all her sensibilities by this vulgar scene, turned away.

"Surely," said she, "there has been enough time wasted already. Can we not begin the dance, Mr. Mayor?"

At a sign from the Mayor the band struck up into the tune that was to echo all day through every head and, perhaps, afterwards, through a few kindly hearts.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Music]

played the band, and, still whispering together with excitement, the dancers fell into place.

"_John the beau was walking home_, _When he met with Sally Dover_, _He kissed her once, he kissed her twice_, _And he kissed her three times over_."

It seemed to Loveday that the whole world was dancing. The faces of the crowd, the bobbing ringlets, swelling skirts, the bright eyes and bright instruments, the houses that peered at her with their polished panes, all danced in a mad haze of mingled light and blackness. Sun, moon and stars joined in, heads and feet whirled so madly that none could have said which was upper-most. Creation was a-dancing, and she alone stood to be mocked at in a reeling world. This was the merry measure she had striven to join! She must have been mad indeed!

Turning blindly, she ran through the crowd that gave at her approach, and all day the dancing went on without her. The flutter of her blasphemous sash did not profane the sunlight in the streets of Bugletown, nor pollute with its pa.s.sing the houses of the good wives.

Like a swallow's wing, it had but flashed across the ordered ways and was gone.

Yet Loveday's ambition was, after all, fulfilled that day. For she danced--and danced a measure she could not have trod without the white satin sash.... Good folk in Bugletown footed it down the cobbled streets, and through paved kitchens; Loveday danced a finer step on insubstantial ether, into realms more vast. Were those realms dark for her, thus violated by her enforced entry of them? Who can say, save those folk of Bugletown who knew that to her first crime she had added a second even greater?

They found her next day in the wood; the wind had risen, and blew against her skirts, so that her feet moved gently as though yet tracing their phantom paces upon the airy floors. Her head, like a snapped lily, lay forwards and a little to one side, so that her pale cheek rested against the taut white satin of the riband from which she hung. The wind blew the languid meshes of her hair softly, kissing her once, kissing her twice, and kissing her three times over.

EPILOGUE

Epilogue

Such is the shocking tale of Loveday Strick, a girl who gave her life for a piece of finery. Is it not small wonder that Miss Le Pett.i.t lamented the sad lack of proportion in the affair?

All for a length of white satin riband....

And yet, there were two people who thought a little differently from the rest of Loveday's world on the subject. They were an odd couple to think alike in anything--it seemed as though even after her death Loveday's violent unsuitability must persist as a legacy. They were the refined and polished Mr. Constantine and old Madgy the midwife, a person whom, naturally, he had never met till the day after the Flora, when his philosophic curiosity drew him to search for the lost girl in company with a band of villagers. It was Madgy who led them to the wood, sure that there was what they sought. Mr. Constantine and Madgy stood looking at the pale girl when she had been laid upon last year's leaves at their feet. One of the men would have taken the riband from her, with some vague notion of returning it, though whether to the graveyard or to the Manor he could not have told. Mr. Constantine and Madgy put out each a hand to check him.

"Leave it her," said Mr. Constantine curtly.

"Ay," answered Madgy, speaking freely as was her wont, for she was, alas, no respecter of persons, "it was more than a white riband to the maid, for all that the fools say."

Mr. Constantine nodded. He too saw in that length of satin, now soiled and crumpled, more than a white riband. He saw pa.s.sion in it--pa.s.sion of hope, of ambition, of love, of adoration, of despair. Not a piece of finery had ended Loveday's stormy course, but a symbol of life itself, with more in its stained warp and woof than many lives hold in three-score years and ten. Like religion, this riband held every experience. Primrose had known mating and childbearing, anxiety and content and jealousy and death; Mr. Constantine had, in his wandering life of the gentleman of leisure, experienced his moments of keen enjoyment, his tender and romantic interludes; Miss Le Pett.i.t would know decorous wooing, prosperity, pain of giving birth as she duly presented her husband with an heir, sorrow as she saw her chestnut curls greying and her eye gathering the puckers of advancing years around its fading blue. Yet none of these would know as much as Loveday had known in the short life they all thought so wasted and so incomplete, would feel as much as she had felt--the whole pageant of pa.s.sion symbolised by this insensate strip of satin. She alone had known ecstasy in her brief mad dance across their sylvan stage.

Madgy folded the riband across the half-open eyes and wound the ends about the discoloured throat. And thus it was when Loveday was buried in unconsecrated ground, but with the thing she had desired most in life, striven for, sinned for, and finally attained, still with her. Of whom, after all, could a richer epitaph be written?

THE END.

_By the Same Author_

THE MILKY WAY

BEGGARS ON HORSEBACK

SECRET BREAD

THE SWORD OF DEBORAH

THE HAPPY BRIDE