Wayside Courtships Part 37

He thought: She will soon be a woman, with all the vague, unutterable longings and pa.s.sions of the woman. Her lithe body will be as beautiful as her soul, and the warm oval of her face will flash and flame with her expanding, struggling life. Her caged soul will struggle for light and companionship, blindly, vainly.

Life to her must remain a cruel fragment. Light and color she may not miss; but wifehood, maternity, the touch of baby lips to her breast--these her soul will grope for in dumb maternal desire. She must inhabit her dark and soundless cavern alone.

Again she touched the chieftain's hair and earrings, and let her hand drop down along his sleeve to his hard, brown hand. Then her hand fell to her side with a resigned action.

As she walked away, a sweet smile of pleasure and grat.i.tude flashed for an instant across the exquisite curving line of her lips, and then the sad and wistful repose of her face came back again as if her loneliness had only been lightened, not warmed.

The young man drew a long breath of pain keen as a physical hurt. The elderly gentleman said again, "Poor child!"

The Indian looked up again into the mighty dome soaring hundreds of feet above him, and wondered how those forms came to be set flying in mid-air, and his heart grew sad and wistful too, as if a realization of the power and majesty of the white man fell like a poisonous, fateful shadow over his people and himself.

II. A SHELTERED ONE.

The young man came in out of the cold dash of rain. The negro man received his outside garments and ushered him into the drawing-room, where a bright fire welcomed him like a smiling hostess.

He sat down with a sudden relaxation of his muscles. As he waited at his ease, his senses absorbed the light and warmth and beauty of the house.

It was familiar and yet it had a new meaning to him. A bird was singing somewhere in the upper chambers, caroling with a joyous note that seemed to harmonize with the warmth and color of the room in which the caller sat.

The young man stared at the fire, his head leaning on his hand. There were lines of gloomy thought in his face. There were marks of bitter struggle on his hands. His dress was strong and good, but not in the mode. He looked like a young lawyer, with his lean, dark face, smoothly shaven save for a little tuft on either cheek. His long hands were heavy-jointed with toil.

He listened to the bird singing and to the answering, chirping call of a girl's voice. His head drooped forward in deep reverie.

How beautiful her life is! his thought was. How absolutely without care or struggle! She knows no uncertainty such as I feel daily, hourly. She has never a doubt of daily food; the question of clothes has been a diversion for her, a worry of choice merely. Dirt, grime, she knows nothing of. Here she lives, sheltered in a glow of comfort and color, while I hang by my finger-ends over a bottomless pit. She sleeps and dreams while I fight. She is never weary, while I sink into my bed each night as if it were my grave. Every hand held out to her is a willing hand--if it is paid for, it is willing, for she has no enemies even among her servants. O G.o.d! If I could only reach such a place to rest for just a year--for just a month! But such security, such rest is out of my reach. I must toil and toil, and when at last I reach a place to pause and rest, I shall be old and brutalized and deadened, and my rest will be merely--sleep.

He looked once more about the lovely room. The ocean wind tore at the windows with wolfish claws, savage to enter.

"The world howling out there is as impotent to do her harm as is that wind at the window," the young man added.

The bird's song again joined itself to the gay voice of the girl, and then he heard quick footsteps on the stairs, and as he rose to greet her the room seemed to glow like the heart of a ruby.

They clasped hands and looked into each other's eyes a moment. He saw love and admiration in her face. She saw only friendliness and some dark, unsmiling mood in his.

They sat down and talked upon the fringe of personalities which he avoided. She fancied that she saw a personal sorrow in his face and she longed to comfort him. She longed to touch his vexed forehead with her fingers.

They talked on, of late books and coming music. He noticed how clear and sweet and intelligent were her eyes. Refinement was in the folds of her dress and in the faint perfume which exhaled from her drapery. The firm flesh of her arms appealed to him like the limbs of a child so beautiful and tender!

He saw in her face something wistful, restless. He tried to ignore it, to seem unconscious of the adoration he saw there, for it pained him. It affected him as a part of the general misdirection of affection and effort in the world.

She asked him about his plans. He told her of them. He grew stern and savage as he outlined the work which he had set himself to do. His hands spread and clutched, and his teeth set together involuntarily. "It is to be a fight," he said; "but I shall win. Bribery, blackmail, the press, and all other forces are against me, but I shall win."

He rose at length to a finer mood as he sketched the plan which he hoped to set in action.

She looked at him with expanding eyes and quickened breath. A globed light each soft eye seemed to him.

He spoke more freely of the struggle outside in order to make her feel her own sweet security--here where the grime of trade and the reek of politics never came.

At last he rose to go, smiling a little as if in apology for his dark mood. He looked down at her slender body robed so daintily in gray and white; she made him feel coa.r.s.e and rough.

Her eyes appealed to him, her glance was like a detaining hand. He felt it, and yet he said abruptly:

"Good night."

"You'll come to see me again!"

"Yes," he answered very simply and gravely.

And she, looking after him as he went down the street with head bent in thought, grew weak with a terrible weakness, a sort of hunger, and deep in her heart she cried out:

"Oh, the brave, splendid life _he_ leads out there in the world! Oh, the big, brave world!"

She clinched her pink hand.

"Oh, this terrible, humdrum woman's life! It kills me, it smothers me. I must do something. I must be something. I can't live here in this way--useless. I must get into the world."

And looking around the cushioned, glowing, beautiful room, she thought bitterly:

"This is being a woman. O G.o.d, I want to be free of four walls! I want to struggle like that."

And then she sat down before the fire and whispered very softly, "I want to fight in the world--with him."

III. A FAIR EXILE.

The train was ambling across the hot, russet plain. The wind, strong and warm and dry, sweeping up from the south, carried with it the subtle odor of September gra.s.s and gathered harvests. Out of the unfenced roads the dust arose in long lines like smoke from some hidden burning which the riven earth revealed. The fields were tenanted with thrashing crews, the men diminished by distance to pygmies, the long belt of the engine flapping and shining like a ribbon in the flaming sunlight.

The freight cars on the accommodation train jostled and rocked about and heaved up laterally, till they resembled a long line of awkward, frightened, galloping buffaloes. The one coach was scantily filled with pa.s.sengers, mainly poorly clothed farmers and their families.

A young man seated well back in the coach was looking dreamily out of the window, and the conductor, a keen-eyed young fellow, after pa.s.sing him several times, said in a friendly way:

"Going up to Boomtown, I imagine."

"Yes--if we ever get there."

"Oh, we'll get there. We won't have much more switching. We've only got an empty car or two to throw in at the junction."

"Well, I'm glad of that. I'm a little impatient because I've got a case coming up in court, and I'm not exactly fixed for it."

"Your name is Allen, I believe."

"Yes, J. H. Allen, of Sioux City."

"I thought so. I've heard you speak."

The young lawyer was a tall, slender, dark-eyed man, rather somber in appearance. He did not respond to the invitation in the conductor's voice.

"When do you reach the junction?"