To Win the Love He Sought Part 42

"There is never any dullness," she said, "where that is!"

He was prepared for changes in her, but this sudden transition from a materialism almost gross was staggering. It was only a few weeks ago that he had watched in vain for a single sign of feeling in her face.

Now she was pale almost to the lips with emotion.

The next afternoon she called to him. He sprang up and found her standing in the open window dressed for walking. Even in his first rapid glance he saw a wonderful change in her appearance. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes bright. Once more she carried herself with the old lightsome grace. She called to him gaily.

"Come for a walk, Powers! I am going to take you somewhere."

He caught up his stick and hat, and followed her. Then he saw that the color in her cheeks was not wholly natural. She was nervous and excited.

"Why not inland, Eleanor?" he suggested. "Let us go to Turton Woods."

She seemed scarcely to have heard him. Already she was well on her way sh.o.r.eward.

He caught her up in a few strides. The tide had gone down, and they walked dry-footed along the road. Above their heads the larks were singing, and in their faces the freshening sea wind blew.

Her head was thrown back, her lips were parted. She drank in the breeze as though it were wine.

"This is the wind which Ulric and his men always loved," she murmured.

"A wind from the north to the sh.o.r.e. Can't you feel the sting of the Iceland snows?"

"Not I?" he answered, laughing. "To me it is soft and warm enough. But then, you know, I have no imagination."

"Powers," she said suddenly, "I want to ask you a question. Is there any fear of my going mad?"

He started violently.

"Certainly not!" he answered. "Why do you ask me such a question?"

"I know that I am not like other girls," she said wistfully. "I cannot remember my father, or my life in India, or the voyage. When I try to think about these things my head plays me such strange tricks. I cannot remember where I was, or what I was doing a year ago--but----"

"Go on. Tell me exactly how you feel," he said encouragingly. "It will help me to put you right."

"But behind all that," she continued hesitatingly, "I seem to remember many strange things--things which must have happened a long, long time ago. They are not things I have been told about, or read of! I can remember them. They must have happened to me. Powers, it makes me afraid."

He looked at her with ill-concealed excitement.

"It is the sea," she murmured, "which seems always to be reminding me of things."

She came a little closer to him. His heart beat fiercely. Her eyes sought his--the appeal of the weak to the strong. He crushed down his joy--yet it shone in his face, trembled in his tone.

"Shall I ever be like other girls?"

He took her hands in his. She yielded them readily, but they were cold as ice.

"I am perfectly sure of it," he declared. "You must trust in me and be patient."

She held his hands tightly as though wrung with a sudden emotion--an emotion which he realized was one of fear alone.

"Powers," she begged, "will you lock my door at night? Lock all the doors in the house."

"You have been walking in your sleep!" he said. "Tell me about it. You must tell me everything, Eleanor, if I am to succeed."

"Not in my sleep," she answered, in a low tone, "but at night, when everything is quiet, the sea calls and calls, and I cannot rest. I woke suddenly this morning at three o'clock, and I went out. Powers, as I walked and listened, the wind and the sea came to me like old friends. I remembered many strange things. I remembered people whose graves the sea has stolen from the land ages ago. I was back in those days myself, Powers. I sang their songs, my heart beat with their joys."

Powers was silent. It had come, then, after all--the great awakening. He looked at her with a curiosity almost reverent. His voice trembled.

"Tell me, of those days," he begged.

She shook her head impatiently.

"They came back to me then," she said, "in the twilight, when the whole world slept, and only the sea kept calling to me. Now they are blotted out. I am afraid to think of them. Powers, help me to forget."

For a moment his love was in the balance against that unconquerable thirst for knowledge which had seemed to him once the whole aim of life.

He must look, if only for a second, into that land beyond.

"Eleanor," he said thickly, "tell me what you remembered of those days.

Sing me that song. You need not be afraid. It is no sign of madness, this!"

She burst into tears, stretched out her hands--the impulsive gesture of a child, and the desire of his life became suddenly a faint thing beside his great love of her. He drew her tenderly to him.

"Eleanor," he whispered, "you know that I love you. Give yourself to me, to guard and to keep. You are the first woman who has ever come into my life. You will be the last. I will keep you from all harm. I will help you stifle those evil memories. You shall be my wife, and I will teach you that love is the greatest and the sweetest thing in the world."

He held her from him and looked anxiously into her face. There was scant comfort there for him.

"When you talk like that," she murmured, "I feel that I must be different from all other people. You expect something from me which I know nothing about. I do not feel toward you in the least like you say you feel toward me. Why is it?"

"It will come!" he declared confidently. "I am sure of it. In the future it must come."

She moved away and Powers watched her wistfully. She was thinner than he had ever known her, and of that wonderful fresh beauty which had taken London by storm there remained but few traces. Yet to him there came at that moment a wonderful impulse of love. The wistfulness which shone in her eyes, the wasted cheeks, the pallor of her once beautiful complexion, seemed in a sense to have spiritualized her. The child whose frank sensuousness had horrified him seemed to have pa.s.sed away.

Once more she was the girl whom he had met on the wet pavement of the city, brave and womanly, although in desperate straits--the woman who, however unexpectedly, had first found her way to his heart. Never, even in those days when her beauty had been unrivaled, and her train of admirers a constant source of embarra.s.sment, had she seemed to him more to be desired than at that moment.

As she walked she began to sing softly and to herself. He wondered at the strange chanting tune and at the time-forgotten words. And as she sang the color brightened her cheeks, and the wakening breezes blew the hair about her face.

A great sea-bird, disturbed by her voice, rose from the ditch below with a flapping of wings and drifted away seaward.

"It is only a bird," she said. "If you had seen as many of them as I have, you would not heed them. I have seen them in droves, when their wings darkened the sky, and I have heard them calling to one another down the north wind. Where have you lived all your life that you know nothing of these things?"

She laughed softly.

"Come and sit with me on the sand-hill there," she said, "and I will tell you about the sea."

He followed her. Almost to their feet the long waves made harsh music upon the shingle.

"Poor man," she said softly. "Listen, have you never heard this when the north wind blows?"

And again she sang that wonderful song. When her voice died away he shook his head.