Told in a French Garden Part 21

"No, Zeke, they don't!"

"Why speak to me in that tone, Dora? Don't do it!"

He looked over her head, as if to be sure of his hold on himself. He was ghastly white about his smooth-shaven, thick lips. Both hands were thrust deep into his reefer pockets.

"What's come to you, Zeke?" she asked nervously. His was not exactly the face one would see unmoved!

He answered her without looking at her. It was evident he did not dare just yet. "Nothing much, I reckon. I've been a bit down all day. I really don't know why, myself. I've had a queer presentiment, as if something were going to happen. As if something terrible were coming to me."

"Well, I'm sorry. You've no occasion to feel like that, I'm sure."

"All right, if you say so. What train shall we take?"

He stretched out one hand to take the small bag she carried.

She shrank back instinctively, and withdrew the bag. He must have felt rather than seen the movement, it was so slight.

His hand fell to his side.

Still, he persisted.

"I'm dead done up, Dora. I need my dinner, come on!"

"Then you'd better take the 6.00 train. You've just time," she said hurriedly.

"All right. Come on!"

He laid his hand on her shoulder with a gesture that was entreating.

It was the first time he had touched her. A frightened look came into her eyes. He did not see it, for he was still avoiding her face. It was as if he were afraid of reading something there he did not wish to know.

Her red lips had taken on a petulant expression--that of one who hated to be "stirred up." In a childish voice--which only thinly veiled an obstinate determination--she pouted: "I'm not going--yet."

The words were said almost under her breath, as if she were fearful of their effect on him, yet was determined to carry her point.

But the man only sighed deeply as he replied: "I thought your dancing lessons were over. I hoped I was no longer to spend my evenings alone.

Alone! Looking round at the things that are yours, and among which I feel so out of place, except when you are there to make me forget.

G.o.d! What d.a.m.nable evenings I've spent there--feeling as if you were slipping further and further out of my life--as if you were gone, and I had only the clothes you had worn, an odor about me somewhere to convince me that I had not dreamed you! Sometimes that faint, indistinct, evasive scent of you in the room has almost driven me out of my head. I wonder I haven't killed you before now--to be sure of you! I'm afraid of h.e.l.l, I suppose, or I should have."

The woman did not look at all alarmed. Indeed there was a light in her amber eyes that spoke of a kind of gratification in stirring this young giant like that--this huge fellow that could so easily crush her--but did not! She knew better why than he did--but she said nothing.

With his eyes still fixed on s.p.a.ce--after a pause--he went on: "I was fool enough to believe that that was all over, at last, that you had danced to your heart's content, and that we were to begin the old life--the life before that nonsense--over again. You were like my old Dora all day yesterday! The Dora I loved and courted and married back there in the woods. But I might have known it wasn't finished by the ache I had here," and he struck himself a blow over the heart with his clenched fist, "when I waked this morning, and by the weight I've carried here all day." And he drew a deep breath like one in pain.

The woman looked about as if apprehensive that even his pa.s.sionate undertone might have attracted attention, but only a man by the radiator seemed to have noticed, and he had the air of being not quite sober enough to understand.

There was a long pause.

The woman glanced nervously at the clock.

The man was again staring over her head.

It was quarter to six. Her precious minutes were flying. She must be rid of him!

"See here, Zeke, dear," she said, in desperation, speaking very rapidly under her breath--no fear but he would hear--"the truth is, that I'm not a bit better satisfied with our sordid kind of life than I was a year ago, when we first discussed it. I'm awfully sorry! You know that. But I can't change--and there is the whole truth! It's not your fault in one way--and yet in one way it is. G.o.d knows you have done everything you could, and more some ways than you ought. But, unluckily for you, gratifying me was not the way to mend the situation for yourself. It is cruel--but it is the truth! If a man wants to keep a woman of my disposition attached to him, he'd do far better to beat her than over-educate her, and teach her all the beauties of freedom.

He should keep her ignorant, rather than cultivate her imagination, and open up the wonders of the world to her. It's rough on chaps like you, that with all your cleverness you've no instinct to set you right on a point like this--but it is lucky for women like me--at times! You were determined to force all this out of me, so you may as well hear the whole brutal truth. I'm sick of our stupid ways of life--I have been sick of it for a long time. I've pa.s.sed all power to pretend any longer. I have learned that there is a great and beautiful world within the reach of women who are clever enough and brave enough to grasp at an opportunity, without looking forward or back. I want to walk boldly to this. I'm not afraid of the stepping-stones! This is really all your fault. When you married me, five years ago, I was only sixteen, and very much in love with you. Now, why didn't you make me do the housework and drudge as all the other women on the farms about yours did? I'd have done it then, and willingly, even to the washing and scrubbing. I had been working in a cotton mill. I didn't know anything better than to drudge. I thought that was a woman's lot. It didn't even seem terrible to me. But no--you set yourself to amuse me.

You brought me way up to town on a wedding journey. For the first time in my life I saw there idle women in the world, who wore soft clothes and were always dressed up. You bought me finery. I was clever and imitative. I pined for all the excitement and beauty of city life when we were back on the farm, in the life you loved. I cried for it, as a child cries for the moon. I never dreamed of getting it. And you surprised me by selling the farm, and coming nearer the town to live.

Just because I had an ear for music, and could pick out tunes on the old melodeon, I must have a piano and take lessons. Just because my music teacher happened to be French and I showed an apt.i.tude for studying, that must be gratified. Can you really blame me if I want to see more of the wide world that opened up to me? Did you really think French novels and music were likely to make a woman of my lively imagination content with her lot as wife of a mechanic--however clever?"

The man looked down at her as if stunned. Arguments of that sort were a bit above the reasoning of the simple masculine animal, who seemed to belong to that race which comprehends little of the complex emotions, and looks on love as the one inevitable pa.s.sion of life, and on marriage as its logical result and everlasting conclusion.

It was probable at this moment that he completed his alphabet in the great lesson of life--and spelled out painfully the awful truth, that not all the royal service of worship and love in a man's heart can hold a woman.

There was something akin to a sob in his throat as he replied: "You were so young--so pretty! I could not bear to think that you should soil your hands for me! I wanted to make up to you for all the hardships and sorrows of your childhood. I dreamed of being mother and father as well as husband to you. I thought it would make you happy to owe everything to me--as happy as it made me to give. I would willingly have carried you every step of your life, rather than you should have tired your feet. Is that a sin in a woman's eyes?"

A whimsical smile broke over the woman's face. It quivered on her red lips for just a breath, as if conscious how ill-timed it was. "I really like to tire my feet," she murmured, and she pointed the toe of her tiny boot, as if poised to dance, and looked down on it with evident admiration.

The man caught his breath sharply.

"It's that d.a.m.ned dancing that has upset you, Dora!"

"Sh! Don't swear! I do like dancing! I have always told you so. It was you who first admired it. It was you who let me learn."

"You were my wife! I thought that meant everything to you that it meant to me. I loved your beauty because it was yours; your pleasures because they gave you pleasure. All my ideas of right and wrong in marriage which I learned in my father's honest house bent to your desires and happiness."

She looked nervously at the clock. Ten minutes to six.

"Dora--for G.o.d's sake look at me! Dora--you're not leaving me?"

It was an almost inarticulate cry, as of a man who had foreseen his doom, and only protested from some unconquerable instinct to struggle!

She patted his clenched hand gently.

It was plainly evident that she hated the sight of suffering, and hated more not having her own way, and was possessed by a refined kind of cowardice.

"Don't make a row, there's a dear boy! It is like this: I am going over to New York, just for a few weeks. I would have told you yesterday, only I hated spoiling a nice day. It was a nice day?--with a scene. You'll find a nice long letter at home--it's a sweet one, too--telling you all about it. Don't take it too hard! I am going to earn fifty dollars a week--just fancy that--and don't blame me too much!"

He didn't seem to hear! He hung his head--the veins in his forehead swelled--there were actually tears in his eyes--and the mighty effort he made to restrain a sob was terrible--and six feet of American manhood, as fine a specimen of the animal as the soil can show, animated by a spirit which represented well the dignity of toil and self-respect, stood bowed down with ungovernable grief and shame before a merely ornamental bit of femininity.

Fate had simply perpetrated another of her ghastly pleasantries!

The woman was perplexed--naturally! But it was evidently the sight of her work, and not the work, itself, that pained her.

"Don't cut up so rough, Zeke, please don't," she went on. "I'm very fond of you--you know that--but I detest the odor of the shop, and it is so easy for us both to escape it."

He shrank as if she had struck him.

Instinctively he must have remembered the cotton mill from which he took her. A man rarely understands a woman's faculty for forgetting--that is to say, no man of his cla.s.s does.

"Doesn't it seem a bit selfish of you," she went on, "to object to my earning nearly three times what you can--and so easily--and prettily?"