 CHAPTER VIII. TOUCH IS THE SIGHT OF THE BODY. SIGHT IS THE TOUCH OF THE SOUL. CHARLES BLONK. Read us at length. Read this transcendent thing, neither angel nor human, alert with a lion's strength, gloomed with an eagle's wing, but still with the face of a woman. July kindled slowly but fiercely, like the heart of a furnace. The delicate edges of each nervous leaf on the famous Harmouth Elms curled and blackened. The much-graveled sidewalks burned the dignified feet of the professors on their patient way to lecture. The much-expanded cotton umbrella gloomed gracefully above their heads. The college boys fitted for biennial under the tutelage of the ice-cream vendor, and became the abject praise of the soda fountain and the lemonade boy. The yachting parties drew in their idle sails. Aunt Chloe's anxious watering-pot made no tours among the stifling flowers till the scorching sun had stooped. The blinds of the garden studio were closely drawn. At the front, hail soldiers dropped from the ranks with sunstroke, and the wounded died of thirst upon the field. It was the summer of battles—Faroaks, the Seven Days, Cedar Mountain, Bull Run, Harpers Ferry, and Teedham. Avis that summer seemed to herself to be turning her life through her fingers as we turned the pages of a book whose purpose we foreknew but whose construction is blind. Its action moved slowly and almost painfully, like the motion of superfluous details muffling the stir of events. She read on and on and on with fixed eyes, but with a sense of expectance difficult to explain or justify. By and by the text would be clear, by and by she should live in terse sentences. She had set herself with more patience than power resolutely to work, but she found the lips of her visions muttering in a foreign tongue. She sat entire days before an untouched canvas. She stared entire nights upon untappistry darkness. Her father found her one day, burning the sketches in her studio in a fever of self-despair. He said nothing except that he thought the sketches were promised to him, gave her a keen look, patted her cheek gently, and went away. He could not help her. He supposed that was the way the fine frenzy worked upon the feminine nature. Perhaps her mother would have known what to say to the child. If she must live this life she needed her mother. The professor had long since tabulated his daughter as a glittering syllogism whose premises were incorrect, though its conclusion was perversely attractive. And so, like a philosopher peacefully given her up, it must be admitted that Avis's pictures were better than her biscuit, and man did not live on bread alone. And sometimes, when he came out from the studio, a dimness like faint mist stirred far within his cavernous eyes. She would have been proud of this dark-eyed, deft-handed, undomestic girl. She had never wanted a boy. Beyond two or three really fine things done in Paris, the landscape which had attracted so much notice in London, a sketch or so in the spring exhibition, and Philip Ostrander's portrait, Avis had as yet done little towards giving form to her ideals, and more than one year of couture's golden probation was gone. Her return to America had been in itself one of those stimulating experiences whose immediate effect is a sedative one. The elemental loves of kin and country had been sterned in her to the finest fiber of their wide-reaching roots. She had come home to find that the afternoon's son and her father's study, on the picture of Sir William, thrilled her as no glory or story of Vatican, Petite, or Louvre had ever done. It meant more to her at first, just to go out into the garden and bury her face in the young grass, and listen to the squirrels scolding in the pear-trees, and the trustful call of the cows waiting for Jacobs down the field, then it seemed as if the fair young picture before her could ever mean. Eventually she was moved by the spring scents. The breath of the earth where the overturned loam lay moistly melting shades of brown together — amber, umber, sienna, madder, bitumen, and van dyke. With that tenderness which is so inexpressibly heightened by the gravity of the color, the aromatic odor of the early bonfires with whose smoke the languid air was blurred and blue. Then by the exhalation of small buds the elm and the grape that borrowed the mantle of the leaf, as wild things do that of the forest to escape detections, every sense in her quivered to homely and unobtrusive influences. It was a long time before she could look at a certain faded cricket in the parlor that her mother worked without the strange hot tears. She would not have exchanged the choirs of St. Peter's for the sound of the old chapel bell calling the students to evening prayers. And then, ah well, and then there had been that slip upon the lighthouse reef that had cost its own proportion of dumb days, and after that she had painted the portrait. And then it would have been impossible to forecast the precise personal effect of this war. Life, she thought, had pressed too near her, since she came home, for her to tell the world what it meant, clung too close and with too sweet insistence, like the friend who stops the mouth with kisses. All those studies which had stood with their faces to the wall while Ostrander had been in the studio, she would have liked to put out of the wide world if her father had not cared. She wanted a clean, cold, barren start, like a racer in a moor. There were some pleasant little things among them, too, a Florentine sunset, five poplars on the crest of a hill against a sky of dull metallic red, a neapolitan girl tossing her bambino into the air, a study of breakers under an advancing fog, the mist stalking in about a headland, licking up the deep undertones of a great green wave, figures, a man and a woman peering over the edge of a precipice under an intense tropical moon, a woman's head, the eyes quite turned away, a study from some Parisian model, unfinished. But Avis put them all back with their faces to the wall, sat an hour longer before her blank canvas, then laid down the charcoal's and went wearily out into the hot air. The sultry evening had settled upon the sultryer day. The college boys over on the green were singing army songs. The studio is too hot," said Aunt Chloe with conscientious sympathy. I wonder if it wouldn't help you to go down into the cellar and stir the ice-cream. I shall get to work to-morrow," said Avis, who never liked her studio to be under family discussion. But to-morrow Koi came over to take her to the chapel, where the women of Harmouth sat with hushed voices, rolling bandages and picking lint. The butchery of Bull Run had fallen upon the mangled land. This meant that it was August in the garden studio. Avis had meant to have a picture, had hoped to have a good picture, well under way by the time that the copper-colored sunlight struggled through the August murk upon the easel. She went up to her bedroom that night with dogged eyes. She had fallen into one of those syncopes of the imagination in which men have periled their souls to stimulated paralyzed inspiration. By any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine, the dumb artist courts the miracle of speech. Angel or devil, who is at the trouble of the torpid waters? Equally the soul makes haste, lest another should step down before her. Avis shut and locked the door of her bare old-fashioned room, looking about it with a kind of triumphant rebellion. She was a woman. Those four walls shut out the world from the refined license of her mood. She wanted nothing of it, the great unholy world in which seers struggled and sinned for their visions. Let them go fighting and airing on. God spoke in another way to women, in no earthquake, in no fire of the soul, but in still small voices. What would her escaping nature with her? Perhaps by and by, when all the house was still, she would go bounding down through the long grass, and dash herself full length upon the shore, and let one wave, just one, break its white heart upon her. Or she would push her little boat off from the beach, and row out alone a mile or two down by the harbour, till she was exhausted, and so calmed, by the wooing of the faint moonlit shores. The only thing she could think of that she wanted, out of all the intoxications that the round world held that summer night, would be a room full of hyacinths, rose hyacinths, and some one to play shumon in the sultry garden. Then by morning she might paint her picture. Was that what the work of women lacked? High stimulant, rough virtues, strong vices, all the great peril and power of exuberant exposed life. Dreamily across the current of her thought floated the pathetic sound of the boys' voices in the street, still and forever busy with those army songs. In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea. She turned from the window with an abrupt dejected motion. Who could make a picture till the war was over? Since he died to make men holy, sang on the boys, let us die to make men free. She stood for some moments quite still, in the middle of the room, her arms thrown down, and her fingers clasped together at the tips. Suddenly starting with a firm step and half-amused, half-curious lighting of the face, she unlocked a little French dressing-case that stood upon the bureau, and took from it a slender bottle, bearing the trademark of a house in the south of France, and the label Eau de Fleur d'Angers. She poured the liquid out, holding it to the light. Each drop was an amber bead, sluggish and sweet. Leave men their carousel, their fellowship, the heart's blood of the burning grape, in the veins of the buds that girls wear at their bridles runs a fire of flavor deep enough for us. The wine of a flower has carried many a pretty Parisian to an intrigue or a convent. Could it carry a Yankee girl to glory? So half- laughing, half-credulous, wholly excited, Avis swallowed a cautious dose of the innocent-looking liqueur, darkened her room, threw wide her blinds, and went to bed. In the course of perhaps ten minutes she experienced a slight swimming of the head. She bolstered herself high upon the square pillows, and threw her arms down by her side. She fell heavily, and she found it a task not quite worth the undertaking to stir them again from their places. A dull but not painful pressure set slowly in the brain, and a slight but not disagreeable ringing in the ears. The most distinct thought that she had was now a sense of relief that she could not hear the army songs. Suddenly the room began to reel. Then as if a titan had taken her by the feet and swung her through infinite space, she felt herself spin round and round. Suddenly all motion and all sound ceased. She sat up against the pillows. The world was still, cool, calm. If she had been foolish to try the experiment upon so warm a day, she thought she was lightly punished. Her head was quite clear and strong. She got up and bathed her face and bare arms and neck. All her motions were free and full. Only a faint sickness remained. Nothing had happened. She drained a tumbler of ice water, and went back to bed. The moon had now set. Nothing had happened except that the darkness had become alive. That which she saw appeared at the remote wall of the room, a panorama extending from floor to ceiling, stirring slowly like a goblin tapestry which unseen hands rolled and unrolled. She roused herself, sitting with her hands clasped about her knees, giving as was her habit a more iron attention to these fictions of her own nature than to anything which those of others had made fact in the world. The Raphael Nordician could have taught her what she learned in one such self-articulate hour as this. The first thing which she saw was a huge earthen vase, standing by itself against the wall, raised a few inches from the floor, thus, and thus only, indicating to her eyes that it was not what we are used to call a reality. It was of an antique Egyptian mould, with which she must have been unconsciously familiar. But the pattern of its decoration was one perfectly unknown to her. Through a maze of lotus leaves Isis went seeking Osiris, the figures moving faintly before her eyes till they had adjusted themselves with what seemed a voluntary motion to their attitudes upon the clay. The figures were black, expressed by grey lights. The leaves were of an opaque green, without veining or shadow. A raised design of silver and steel surrounded the neck, lips, and pedestal of the jar. If it had been light enough she could have taken her pencil and accurately copied this design, which was very intricate, and which pleased her. At the mouth of the jar a bronze crocodile lurked, with four feet and jaws only raised above the edge, lolling like a tongue. This appearance, which lasted but a few moments, was the signal for a kaleidoscope of beautiful and soulless form disturbed before her, slowly and subtly, like the outer circle of a whirlpool into which she was to be drawn. Pottery, porcelain, furniture, drapery, sculpture, then flowers, fruits, a medley of still life, swept through strange half-revealed but wholly resplendent interiors which glided on indifferently, like languages that said, What has thou to do with us? Now and then, out of the splendid maze, a distinct effect seemed to pause, and poise itself, and woo her through the dark. An open hand, raised, and turned the wrist like a flower on its stem, held waterlilies drooping and dripping. A sunbeam, above an empty chair and a student's alcove, focused upon a child's shoe and a woman's ribbon. A skull ground a rose between its teeth. Bees, upon a patch of burning July sky, wooed a clover. In a pool in a cliff, a starfish defined the colours of a tangle of weeds and shells. In a thicket of wild briar a single rose-leaf had fallen upon a grey stone. Across which, and over the miniature clearing in the mimic forest, the tattered and infringed light lay. These passed. Avis nodded at them like the children in the visions in Hans Andersen's tales. It was all a kind of bric-a-brack. She had not the ceramic nature. Let them go. They were succeeded by an uplifting and sweeping on of perspective, by means of which great distances seemed to become measurable in the little room. Through them the generous moods of nature stirred, and earth turned herself about like a beautiful creature half awake. At first it was the cactus on the Campania which shot up against the dark, scarlet, blazing, having a pulsation like a heart. It towered heaven high, as if to the eyes of one who sat below its level, and low through, and far beyond it the sun had set, shrinking under a purple cloud. Then out of a cool green shadow faint outlines grew, sharpened, swept, and a world of ferns arose. She could see spiral buds uncoil delicately, like the opening life of a silent girl, and the fine frond sway and aspire. These too shot high as if she had been prone upon the ground among them, and on them the light lay low. From the gold to the cold every chromatic shade due to them was there. It was a melody in green. From this there slowly gathered itself and leaned towards her one titanic wave. It was a mid-ocean wave. It reared its full length from foot to head, the colors which are seen only at the ocean's core settled upon it. Not a shoal tint was in it. It was both the science and the art of a wave. It held both the passion and the intellect of the sea. Above its crest there was flung one human hand, and a strip of pearl-white sky. A medley of outlines followed, caravans crawling through a desert, sunsets behind palmettoes, twilight's in forests, wherein no man had been since the making of the world, a silver fog curling from a harbour pierced by the masts of anchored ships, wastes of snow, blue cold, and wan unbroken by human foot, defined by the loneliest of all horizons, the horizon of pines. Then one mountain peak swathed below in gloom, swiftly broken at the summit into glory, on which God made himself an awful rose of dawn. God Avis bowed her head before these things, and said, only the high priest enters in. When she raised her eyes they fell upon forms and faces grown gaunt with toil, an old man sowing sparse seed in a chill place, the lantern flash on a minor stooping face, the brow and smile of a starving child, sailors abandoned in a frozen sea, a group of factory women huddling in the wind, the poisoned face of a lead worker suddenly uplifted like a curse, two huge hands knotted with labour and haggard with famine, thrust groping out upon the dark. But her heart cried out, I am yet too happy, too young, too sheltered to understand, how dare I be the apostle of want and woe. Even with the word the vision changed, and slowly as she leaned to look, swiftly as her heart beat and gazing, there grew the outline of a face. It was a face dark, dim, brightening, blinding beneath a crown of thorns, but she dashed her hand across her eyes and said, I am unworthy. The night might have been now well worn on, and she was conscious only of that exhaustion of the nature which comes from a highly excited but impotent imagination. The repose of creation had failed to relieve the fever of vision. She was thinking so, dejectedly enough, listlessly looking in one corner of the room, where two or three slender bright hair-bells seemed to be springing from a cleft in a rock, when as she looked, a girl in the garb of a peasant stood stooping to pluck them. Instantly the room seemed to become full of women. Cleopatra was there, and Godiva, Aphrodite in St. Elizabeth, Ariadne and Esther, Helen and John Dark, and the Magdalene, Sappho and Cornelia, a motley company. These moved on solemnly and gave way to a silent army of the unknown. They swept before her in file and procession, in groups. They blushed at altars. They nailed in convents. They leered in the streets. They sang to their babes. They stooped and stitched in black attics. They trembled beneath summer moons. They starved in cellars. They fell by the blow of a man's hand. They sold their souls for bread. They dashed their lives out in swift streams. They wrung their hands in prayer. Which in turn these figures passed on and vanished in an expansive and perfectly defined color like a cloud, which for some moment she found without form and void to her. Slowly but surely at last, and with piercing vividness, this unfolded, and she saw in curt outlines like a story told in a few immortal words, this only. She saw a low, unclouded, eastern sky, fire to the horizon's rim, sand and sun, the infinite desert, a caravan departing, faint as a forgotten hope, midway what might be a camel, perished of thirst. In the foreground the sphinx, the great sphinx, restored. The mutilated face patiently took on the forms and the hues of life. The wide eyes met her own, the dumb lips parted, the solemn brow unbent, the riddle of ages whispered to her. The mystery of womanhood stood before her and said, Speak for me. Davis lay back upon her pillow with a sudden, long, sobbing sigh. She was very tired, but she had seen her picture. Tomorrow she could work. Up to this point there had been nothing unprecedented in the character of these fantasies, accepting in their number and variety. Her creative moods were always those of tense vision, amounting almost to optical illusion, failing of it only where the element of deception begins. But now when, exhausted and satisfied, she turned upon her pillow, nestling her cheek into her hand like a child, for sleep none came. Still before her closed eyes the panorama swept imperiously, but it had become a panorama of agonies. For a long time she perceived only the suffering of animals, an appalling vision of the especial anguish incident to dumb things. She saw the quiver of the deer under the teeth of the hound, the heartthrob of the pursued hare, the pathetic brow of a dying lioness, the reproach in the eye of a shot bird, a dog under vivisection licking the hand that tore him. Sharply without transition or preparation of the fancy, this changed to—oh heavens! What! Avis started with a cry that rang through and through the sleeping house, beating her hands against her eyes, as if she would beat out the very retina on which the shadow of such sight could fall. For now she was pursued by a vision of battles. Real music filled the room. Bright blood-streaked standards waved and sank and rose again. Human faces like a windstruck tide surged to and fro. Men reeled, threw up their arms and fell. The floor crawled with the dead and dying. Wounded faces huddled in corners, came and vanished on the ceiling, entered and re-entered through the door, gasped their life away upon the bed. The glazing eye, the whitening jaw, the clinching fingers, the ineffectual horse effort to breathe a broken name, all were there. Nothing was hidden, hinted or veiled. Nothing was spared her. Oh terror! Oh pity! Have mercy! Have mercy! Have mercy! Aunt Chloe came panting in, in an amazing wrapper that outdid the pansy gown, and shut the blinds before she struck the light. No good housekeeper would let in the mosquitoes, whatever the emergency. Nightmare, Avis! Or colic! I thought the blackberries were sour. Never mind. We will have a light directly. Why, what is this broken glass? Pieces of a bottle on the window sill? Are you hurt? Cut? I was sure I heard your voice. But fortunately it has not waked your father. Now, my dear. Aunt Chloe," said Avis, passing her hand blindly across her eyes, where is the military music? Music? There is no music. But those boys, they've capped it up till now, the worst for them. It'll be some business for the faculty to-morrow. I always thought the objection to a university town was the students. So that was what waked you, was it? I don't see why your father doesn't put a stop to these midnight carousels. Army songs, indeed. I suppose the cats in the backyard think they're patriotic, and I had one in Vermont that used to start America, but he never got beyond the second bar. There, my dear. All right, now. Why, Avis? Before Avis, like any broken-hearted woman who was not going to paint a great picture to-morrow, had fallen back upon the pillows and crying, Auntie, Auntie, oh Auntie, let me cry a minute, lay shivering and sobbing in the chill dawn. Aunt Chloe and the professor sat in the study in the August sunset. Aunt Chloe had meant to take the first opportunity to recommend to the faculty a stricter regime of night-police for those boys, but she had forgotten all about the boys. For knitting work, blue stockings for a theological student destined for the Bulgarian field, lay idly on her broad, benevolent lap. Now and then the rare, honest tears of her Puritan race fell. It was too dark for Hagel to see them. Under the Bulgarian stocking lay the evening paper, folded with a particular crease indicative in Aunt Chloe's family that a newspaper was sacred from the waist-basket, and elected to go upon file in the left corner of the third shelf from the top in the little what-not in the study-alcove. What! asked the professor, bringing his more than commonly nervous pace to a halt. What by the way did Avis say to this? Nothing. Nothing at all. I should have thought, they were thrown so much together, that the young man's fate would have been something of a shock to her. Where is she? She's been in the studio all day, except a while when she would go rowing. I found her with a terrible headache this morning. What with the blackberries and the boys? I don't believe Avis has had a headache before since she had the measles. But directly after breakfast she dragged herself out into that hot summer-house, and there she's been. I carried her the paper. I thought she'd better read it herself. She thanked me and went on drawing. Oh, yes, she asked if I knew where he would naturally be carried. To his home in New Hampshire, I should suppose, said the professor, sadly. I believe there is an old father, or mother. I should have thought Avis would have been more touched by this. No doubt she feels it," said Aunt Chloe with a certain reserve. But you know when she is in that studio nothing is to be got out of her. True, said the professor, any close occupation indeed is literally a pre-occupation. The absorbed mind is inhospitable to intrusions. Sir William says, Are the faculty going to do anything? Interrupted Aunt Chloe, who seldom found Sir William as much to the point as might have been expected of a really intelligent-looking man who resembled her brother. What can be done? Not you may be right. There ought at least to be some formal action, some expression of sympathy. Now you remind me of it, I will just step over to the presidents and see if the matter has been broached. Poor fellow! Poor fellow! Tell Avis I'll be back in season to say good night," added the professor gently, coming back after he had closed the door. Aunt Chloe sat for a few minutes in the dark, still idly, thinking how long it was since she had seen Hegel so much moved. Then she rolled up the Bulgarian stocking, and went to put away the paper in its place, stopping only by the window to be sure that the marked passage lay folded on the top. The faint and now rapidly dying light enabled her to read with her common spectacles very clearly. Ostrander, Philip, Surgeon, in the lungs. It was perhaps a week after the battle of Bullrun, and Avis had found herself quite undisturbed at her work, left indeed in a rather exceptional solitude at which she wondered. She liked to see Coy now and then, missed her, as we missed the sunlight whose presence we are yet to absorbed, or too miserable to note. Harmath without Coy would have been like Harmath without the elms or the chapel-bell. She clung to Coy with the almost pathetic loyalty of a woman whose twenty-six years had given her no comradeship of a fibre against which her own could lean. In all her young and later friendships Avis had been used to bring, not to receive, the elements of support. Better than all chance in this some unconquerable instinct lay. In the relations of girlhood she had been marked for a certain sweet but unapproachable reserve. She kissed the girls politely, since it was expected of her, but in their indiscriminate caressing she found no part, no lot. Her nearest intimate could not recall an hour of weakness, of pain, or of excitement, which had surprised Avis into it. As for Coy, she would as soon have thought of petting the faculty as of offering any of these little feminine eccentricities as an expression of her feeling for Avis. Now Coy had never voluntarily stayed away from her for a fortnight before in all her life. When, therefore, she came into the studio one morning after this temporary defalcation, Avis turned the sphinx to the wall and received her with unusual warmth. "'Avis,' began Coy at once, "'you are pale—pale is the higher mathematics!' "'And you,' said Avis, closely scrutinizing her, standing at arm's length with both hands on her shoulders. "'You are as radiant as a Neapolitan rose.' "'So she said in a novel, I think,' said Coy. "'Be original, Avis, if you must be complimentary. You don't ask me either why I radiate. If you don't keep a cricket in your studio for me, I shall have to sit in your lap. And I've gained five pounds this summer. Well, the classical dictionary will do. It is quite as hospitable.' "'Avis.'" "'Very well, Coy. If you are like other women, which you know you never, never will be, as I've said in your defence a hundred times—but just to suppose it, as you might suppose you could make Parker House rolls, or a tatting collar, or any other shade of it with your nature is incapable—what I want to know is, if you liked a man—let me sharpen that crayon for you, I hate to sit doing nothing—if you liked a real, live, dreadful man, do you suppose you would be all summer finding it out?' "'Oh, Coy, ask me some conundrum with which my education has made me familiar. But what is it, Coy? Who is he? What have you come to tell me?' Avis laid down the crayon, pushed the sphinx a little away from her, and gently clasping her hands around Coy's neck, looked with a solemn tenderness at her. "'I said if there were,' nodded Coy perversely, "'you generalize from insufficient data, Avis—a mistake said to be common to women and reformers. But speaking of men, you know all about Mr. Ostrander. If you don't, I have a lovely bit of gossip for you—a kind of sev specimen, very rare. I like to gossip in harmeth, it is considered so unintellectual. I knew that there was some hope of Mr. Ostrander's recovery.' Avis removed her arms from Coy's neck, and took up her charcoal. "'Father said so this week. I have heard nothing else. You didn't know he was in harmeth?' "'In harmeth?' He was brought here last night. Coy, on the dictionary, waited with a pretty expectant look, perhaps to be questioned further. But Avis asked no questions. She replied that she had supposed him to be in New Hampshire, and finished sharpening the charcoal slowly. "'Guess now, Avis, were he staying? Just guess?' "'I never guessed anything in my life. Your superior women never can. Don't mind it, dear. It's a deficiency common to your class. Give it up!' At Mr. Stratford Allen's. "'Mr. Allen is very kind,' said Avis, after a momentary silence. "'And so,' said Coy, "'is Barbara. Very kind.' "'Barbara is a good-hearted girl,' urged Avis honestly. I don't like to hear women speak of one another in that tone, Coy.' Mr. Allen went on as far as Washington to bring him home,' proceeded Coy, ignoring the rebuke. Mr. Ostrander had no brother or father to depend upon, and Stratford Allen is always doing such things. He would let him go to those hot college rooms. And I believe, in point of fact, it was thought the mother was too old to be anything but a burden in a sick room. So New Hampshire was just put quietly out of the question. And here comes in the advantage of being your brother's housekeeper. All that Christian self-sacrifice and grateful patriotism can do, Barbara will see to it is done. You may depend. There hasn't been such a dainty bit of household art decoration as in harm at circles this many a day. Meanwhile poor Mr. Ostrander is still very ill, and greatly exhausted with the journey. Avis put away her charcoal, and rising hunted in her portfolio for a model of her sphinx, then for a blender, then for the chamois skin and chalk. After a little delay she sat down again, and began touching in the values of the sketch with a firm and conscientious hand. Now, she said gravely, since we cannot help Mr. Ostrander, you or I, what is it about that other man, Coy? Am I not fit, not enough like other women to hear? The point of the blender trembled a little against the sphinx's chin. And you haven't been to see me for a fortnight, Coy? Avis, said Coy with judicial solemnity, I have done the best I could by you. We weren't engaged till last night, and I haven't even told my mother yet. I'm going to make John do that. It is with falling in love as it is with religion. Your parents are the last people to know when you've been converted. At any rate, that's the way at our house. It's a family awkwardness we have. I'd rather be disinherited than tell my mother I loved a man. She married father because she respected him. I've heard her say so. So I poked John in at the front door this morning to have it well over with, and I ran out across lots and over here to you. It was mean, but unavoidable. John will have no trouble. He's precocious, patriotic, and pious, three harmonious peas. He got one very becoming scar in the army. He's several years too young to have been called to the central church. And there's been a revival already since he was settled. Mother will cry a little, and be as happy as a kind hearted old lady with a funeral to go to. And you, said Avis, laying down her work, and once more bringing the tips of her fingers together about Coy's neck. You are happy, Coy. There. Push, I see. It wasn't fair to make you look like that. Avis's sense of awe increased. It seemed to her a kind of rudeness for her to sit and watch this young transfigured face. She had almost a consciousness of indelicacy, as if she had usurped one of John Rose's new and sacred rites in having surprised Coy into the expression with which, half-kneeling with both arms about Avis's waist and her face uplifted, she regarded her. The two women sat for a little space in silence. Avis still with that delicate action of the hands which hovered about, but did not rest upon Coy, as if she had become a holy object that she might not touch. There was something very noticeable in this reticent and reverent motion. She was thinking how far apart, all at once, and by one little word, she and this other woman, scarcely younger than herself, scarcely more full of unexpressed life, seemed to have been thrust. How natural! she said, rather wistfully. How natural it must seem to be so happy! It is as natural as life! said Coy, suddenly starting to her feet. So natural that I think John will expect me by this time. I'll tell you more about it all some other day. But there's really nothing to tell, Avis. He propounded the conundrum, and I gave it up. We just loved each other, and so we're going to be married. That's all! added Coy simply. It sounds a simple matter, as you put it. Said Avis, smiling in rather a lonely way. And I don't mean to make fun of John's revivals, said Coy, turning in the doorway. If there were more like John in the world there'd be less like—mother, perhaps. When he was in college, don't you know how he used to say he should have to be a minister to keep himself straight? It sounded mean, but it was only brave. And now there isn't a thread, not a shred of cant in him. To the bottom of his soul he means what he says, and says what he means when he tries to save a soul. John believes people have got to be saved. So I have given him a chance to try his hand on me. But I shall never be half good enough for him, never. When Coy had crossed the garden she came back, and putting her face in at the half-open door said, Avis, there's only one little matter that troubles me. Avis, uncovering the sphinx, looked interrogatively around. It is Barbara Allen's curls. End of Chapter 8 Chapter 9 OF THE STORY OF AVIS This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Elizabeth Klett. THE STORY OF AVIS BY ELIZABETH STEWART-FELPS Chapter 9 What's death? You'll love me yet. Browning. But for we did, and like the elements, that know not what nor why. Two Noble Kinsmen. Now and then a feature, an attitude, an accent, gets a mathematical hold of our imaginations as far removed as is possible from the aesthetic or magnetic way yet more imperious than either, like the pattern of the wallpaper in the room which is known some tragedy or ecstasy of our lives. We sit, enchained by a trick of speech and the man we hate, or the cut of the brow and the creature we despise, or the shadow under the lip of the stranger we neither expect nor care to meet again, or the glance of the friend in whose broken faith eternity could not tempt us to confide. These things happen as the comets march and counter-march by laws deeper than, though apparently subservient to, Caprice. Everything of this sort occurred to Philip Ostrander as he lay through the long September days in Stratford Allen's luxurious guest-room, wooing more slowly than might have been expected of his youth and health, and escaping soul to remain in a mutilated body. He had been very near death. Of this, though no one had told him so, he was fully aware. He had enlisted in a reckless temper, like, who can count how many other young men, to whom the war offered the quickest and most incisive row to a glorious solution of inglorious personal difficulties. Ostrander had the refracting, not the absorbing nature, in which ambition kindles under emotion, like the maple leaf, whose heart the autumn seeks earliest and earliest desserts. A keen passion like vanity, a strong one like love, or a subtle one like that of immediate personal assway, transfigure the resolve of such a nature, only so long as they may focus upon it. He would have felt himself humiliated to own to another man how impossible he had found it to dedicate to a science of which he believed himself to be enthusiastically appreciative, the life which a woman's foot had bruised. Yet he felt no more degradation in admitting this to himself than he did at admitting the beating of his heart. Perhaps we may say he made as little resistance to it. The position reserved for him in Harmouth College ceased to possess those elements of attraction which he considered conditions of success for himself in anything, as soon as he found himself compelled to undertake it in teeth of the precise experience, awaiting the man who has to adjust the hunger of a strong nature to the famine of a denied love. This, as he assumed, was the fault of his temperament. He yielded to it as he would to a distaste for a poem or a pie. The world was wide—a Harmouth professorship was not an undue part of it. One man would answer about as well as another to fill any mould, unless perhaps the chalices of life, and it could hardly be said that the veins of his nature throbbed with sacramental wine only a serviceable secular brand. It was indeed, he thought, indicative of a narrow, if not an arrogant fancy, to suppose that it made much difference in the end who undertook any given little portion of the work of his age. These youthful enthousiasms were interchangeable. If he were shot there would be one indifferent geologist less in the world, possibly one grieving woman more. He had moments in which he had dared believe that she would mourn for him. He found these inexpressibly and mystically sweet. Regret in a nature like hers might easily turn into tenderness when her beautiful fierce maidenhood was forever safe from its encroachment. Death would not be a costly price to pay for that subtle and constraining mastery of her soul, which repentant grief and virgin widowhood would give him. Nay, the barren chance of this seemed worth far bitterer than a soldier's fate. There would be a few robust physical pangs, more or less, perhaps the inevitable homesickness to be expected at first from entering an unknown life, the relief consequent upon leaving one, with which he was at present, thoroughly dissatisfied. Then the wide spaces and free chances of a spiritual economy in which to make his nature worthy of approach to hers, as by an instinct deeper than the reverent humility of newly awakened love, he felt that it was not likely to become in the conditions of this. For Ostrander believed in another life. Fifteen years ago an educated young man did not find it absolutely imperative to doubt the immortality of his own soul. He had, therefore, for it was thus that he loved this woman with all the strength and the weakness, with the heights and the depths of his nature, gone into the army, moved by a profound and intelligent hope that he might never come out of it. When, however, the shot struck, he had grappled with death as manfully as most life-sick young creatures do if given the chance, for as he fell, his major's horse toppled over on him. It was the struggle consequent on the effort to free himself from so hideous a death rather than the wound, not in itself deadly, which had made the nature of his peril. The pierced lung was badly bruised. Through the sultry days and cooling nights in which the first breath of autumn crept, his mind had stirred sluggishly towards the positions in which death had met it. His medical training told him that this was his most hopeful symptom, and one to be fostered. He yielded himself peacefully to the little eddies of a sick-room existence. He would have been glad to forget that the whole round world was not bounded by the daintily decorated, scented, and soothing spot in which his recovery met him. He would have been glad to forget that there was any other woman in the world than this excellent sister of a good fellow whose kingly hospitality was likely to save his life. He experienced a peculiar sense of relief in the presence of a simple, feminine nature lending itself to these delicate cares with which he felt himself surrounded unobtrusively, as he was with the pale, cool, pearl-tint of the walls, the select engravings, the luxurious knick-knacks of the toilet or the medicine-table, the exquisite service of his breakfast, or the pattern of ferns on the lace, to which the Venetian blinds lent a suffusive woodland tint. Awaking one morning, several days after his return to Harmouth, from the state of semi-conscious exhaustion into which the hot journey had thrown him, he had been made aware of a distinct and new sensation of optical pleasure. For the first time he perceived within the hazy lighting and shading of the room a soft outline upon which his eye wandered, rested, and remained, with the wide, blind impulse of a baby's on a sun-beam. It was the outline of a woman's neck. It was a delicate neck, of not too muscular nor yet too full a curve, of the sensitive fairness which accompanies umbered tints in the hair, eyes, and brow. The hair was brushed well up from it, lingering reluctantly in little rings, of which it was difficult to express the images of endearment that they presented involuntarily to the mind, as it is difficult to explain those which we receive from tendrils or from the shadow of tendrils upon a ripe leaf. Thrown high over a comb, two or three curls fell, leaning lightly and yielding with an almost imperceptible stir to the motions of the wearer's breath. The sick man's fancy had from that time found itself curiously, but not ungratefully, subject to the outline of those curls, pursuing it idly in his weakest hours with interest in his stronger ones, tracing the exact course of a lock that defied him like the pattern of an old lace. Watching for the resumption of certain broad lights or warm shadows that he saw yesterday, disappointed if they did not reappear, nervously fretful sometimes if he could not understand why, when she turned her head, one curl would fall, and another only nestle closer to its place. He now went then in putting them into imaginary order upon his finger. He once heard a celebrated beauty say, that if she could possess but one physical attraction, it should be that of pliant and abundant hair. Miss Barbara! he had said one day, Do you ever arrange your hair in any other way? Do you not like it? she answered, turning her neck slowly. She generally sat with her profile towards him. Amazingly. Does it have a nervous effect on you in any way? To see the curls fly, I mean. I can change it if it annoys you. It does not annoy me in the least, but I should like to see it changed, for once. He demanded, in the idly autocratic tone of the spoiled convalescent. Certainly, said Barbara, I will do it up plainly some day if you wish, I will try and remember it. But she never did, it chanced, remember it. Only there never was a better nurse than Barbara Allen, soft of step and quiet of dress, sure of the right word at the right time, yet mistress of long silences, never taxing a weak and wearied attention with chatter about her china, yet capable of bringing the English breakfast tea in a lotus leaf, and the ice water in a pond lily, competent to adjust the colour of the doily to the prevailing tint of one's supper, throwing an atmosphere of domestic frankness about a homeless man when her brother was in the room, just brushed in his absence by a poised reserve, perceptive of the precise moment when speech is astrain, and silence and oppression, and a song of shoe-burts, touched in the twilight, should stir like a spirit through the quiet house, full of those delicate and pictorial resources of which returning strength is least likely to become ungratefully critical. You have been so kind to me," said Ostrander, the day that he took his first step into the cool hall, and she drew out the white linen ottoman for him from the direct draught, and took the cricket at his feet, there being no other seat there for her. So kind, that it seems a sort of rudeness or affectation for me to express a gratitude that must only deepen with time. Stratford and I are so glad," said Barbara warmly, "'it is the only visible way we have open to us of doing our little share for the men who are imperiling their lives for us. The obligation is all on our side, Mr. Ostrander. And you have been such a delightfully romantic invalid. It has been like having a poem or a story alive in one's own house. How do you think we are going to get along on plain prose when you are gone?" "'Shall you miss me?' asked Ostrander, leaning back upon the white ottoman, and watching her dreamily. It was a graceful pose she had upon the cricket, and the low wind was busy with her hair. Barbara lifted her brown eyes, but they fell, and she said nothing. She was content to be watched like that. Why spoil an instant pleasure by talking?" "'So much,' continued Ostrander in a lower tone, clasping his hands behind his head, and bringing his lips together under his bright beard. I don't know, but it is worth a man's being shot to be first cured, and then missed, so." Now as Ostrander could have never sat with downcast eyes listening to his own voice, its effect could hardly have been a measurable thing with him, and then he was very grateful, and at that moment he was filled with the tender flood of returning life, and Barbara happened to be there. Tea to which, for the first time, Ostrander staggered down, was late that night. Barbara always waited tea for her brother. Stratford Allen, who had failed to develop that naturally superior manner to be expected of the businessman who is known to have endowed a university, came in with perhaps an unwonted touch of his habitual modest, sad reserve. When Barbara asked him why he was so late, he said he had been at the treasurer's office. "'Did you ask Professor Dobel about those German books for his department?' asked Barbara. "'Yes, I stopped at his house a moment,' said her brother, coming up to give his cordial hand to Ostrander. "'I think you'd better run over there to-morrow, Barbara. Miss Avis has got hurt rowing.' "'Oh! Much hurt! Mr. Ostrander, not on the draft, please. Take this chair.' "'Nothing serious, I hope, but a troublesome bruise. She was pulling her boat in through a heavy sea and brought her thumb between the rock and the bows, somehow. She made light of it, but it will cripple her for a while, I am afraid. Ostrander, how pleasant this is! Shall I help you to the very last huckleberry that was to be found in New England?' After tea, Ostrander said that he wished to try a step or two upon the piazza. Stratford objected, but Barbara said it was her rule that sick people, of anything beyond a common school's education, should be allowed to do as they liked. She came up to him with a rose-bud in one hand and his overcoat in another, his winter coat. Barbara's lightest sentiment had a sufficiently practical ballast. She pinned in the rose a plump, hot-house bud of a sturdy color. One long, sinuous curl fell over it. Ostrander drew his furred lapel over the flower with an exquisite motion which an artist or novelist would not have wasted upon anything less than a Madonna lily. With his peculiar tenderness of touch, and with his eyes fixed upon her, he folded it slowly against his heart. As if it had been a woman! thought Barbara with a discreet vagueness of imagination. Barbara had a high respect for a man who could receive a favour of hers with grace so princely. But she did not wish that she were that rose. Ostrander, still touching his coat with a certain gentleness, crept out into the rapidly chilling air. He had come out to try his strength. He meant to know for himself about that hurt hand. He crawled along with a suppressed fierceness when he found how weak he was. The fat rosebud slipped and fell. He did not see it, and stepped on it twice in crossing the piazza floor. It was impossible to have better intentions than Aunt Chloe's when any member of the family was by illness or otherwise thrown defencelessly upon them. When Avis had been for three days incapacitated for work by her little accident, Aunt Chloe resolutely took her sewing and went to find her. It was nonsense to be moping out there like a chilled blue jay. Avis must be entertained. The first condition of recovery, were it from a broken thumb or a broken head, Aunt Chloe held, was to be got out of one's self. And in the nature of things we find those people to be self-absorbed who are not occupied in our own particular forms of benevolence, precisely as we find those irreligious who are not of our own special faith. The main trouble with Avis, Aunt Chloe, reasoned, was that she did not go out of herself. What if she could not paint for a week or two? A soldier's box could be packed at all events a harmless soup-ticket could be distributed with any energetic left hand. It may be that Aunt Chloe's stout impulse, like that of many another outflowing heart, sometimes struck near to a truth than the richer but less objective fancy. But Avis, in the orchard, flung upon the short September grass with her rust skin and hawthorn, and Mrs. Jameson, and other resources not so immediately telling upon the needs of the age as the soup-tickets, responded to Aunt Chloe's sympathy with the assurance that she was not in pain, and fully occupied, and hoped to be at work again in at most a fortnight. I hope so, my dear, I'm sure," said Aunt Chloe, laboriously seating herself beside her, and unrolling a package of metaphysical shirts. For it must be very lonely having so few resources as you do. I came out because I thought it bad for you to be so much alone. Thank you, auntie," said Avis, in a sincere tone, closing her book. How odd all this is about Mr. Ostrander and Barbara! began Aunt Chloe, carefully fitting a gusset. Why was it that it always made Avis frantic to see Aunt Chloe fit gussets? It is the last thing I should have thought of! Should you have thought of it? Perhaps not, said Avis, but it is very natural. I hope for her sake it will prove a bona fide engagement! buzzed Aunt Chloe. It'll be so awkward for her otherwise. Though it isn't a choice I should have made for Mr. Ostrander, I sent him some nasturtiums this morning. Avis, let me see that hand once more. I don't understand why you should look so fagged out over it. A little hurt sometimes causes a good deal of pain, said Avis, rather wearily. She threw herself back upon the brown grass and closed her eyes while Aunt Chloe talked. It irked her, this enforced idleness, more than she could remember to have been irked by anything since she sat cutting out night-clothes with Aunt Chloe on the dining-room table at sixteen. Just now it seemed as imperative to be busy as action to the swimmer, and her efforts to exchange her palette for her books had been purposeless and spasmodic, like the motions of the sinking. She seldom read while she was at work, and could recall many a sket would have been ruined by the morning paper. She could not set the fire of creation to boiling the tea-kettle of acquisition. Especially had this experience proved untimely and unmerciful, there seemed to be great spaces in her nature into which she neither cared nor dared to look, and which the events of the summer had imperceptibly enlarged, like the boundaries of a conquering country. She found herself now with a kind of terror thrust into them against her will. My dear!" said Aunt Chloe with unwonted abruptness, folding the gusset, however, before she laid it down. I don't know, but there is a providence in this accident after all. I have been troubled about you for a long time. It is always a pity for a woman to become dependent upon any excitement outside of the sphere to which she must, of course, in the end adjust herself. And really, Avis, I don't see how you are going to marry in that studio. I do not wish to speak of such matters with any indelicate freedom," added Aunt Chloe with her old-fashioned womanly reserve, which Avis, in all her life, never remembered to have seen broken in this way before. But, of course, my dear, you will expect to marry! No," said Avis gently, with the perfectly hopeless feeling one has under the necessity of an explanation which kindliness demands, but which is sure to be only a deepening mystery to the auditor. No, auntie, I do not expect to marry. In a certain way," replied Aunt Chloe with grave hesitation, that is the way a woman should feel. I had refused your uncle twice before I thought of marriage. I am glad you preserve so much modesty about such matters. Young girls nowadays are generally so different. Of course, no lady will ever allow herself to become interested in a gentleman till he is positively sought her in marriage. Aunt Chloe rolled up her work as she uttered this first and great commandment upon which all the law and profits of womanhood hung, with the serene dignity which only an absolute inability to conceive of two sides to a question can give. What a lady ought not, that, of course, a lady never did. It was scarcely necessary to remind any niece of hers of that. But Aunt Chloe had almost a sense of immodesty in having spoken, as she had felt at her duty to do, to Avis. Marriage was not a thing for women to chatter about. But equally it was not the thing for women deliberately to put themselves beyond the reach of that honourable institution, which we must admit was ordained of Almighty God, and necessary to weak-minded man. And when a poor motherless girl had reached the age of twenty-six without any apparent appreciation of this fact, it was clearly the duty of somebody to remind her, with that delicacy belonging to the old time breeding, of the mistaken and undesirable position into which she was drifting. Not, said Aunt Chloe, hastening to a virtuous qualification of her unwonted indiscretion. Not that a maiden lady cannot live a very useful and unselfish life, my dear. I have known many instances. But I think you, Avis, would be happier in the married state, and so I thought I would take an opportunity to caution you a little. You seem to be so absorbed in that painting, that somebody must think for you. And now Coy has gone, and Barbara will follow, you will be left very much alone. I cannot deny that I feel some anxiety for your future. Thank you, auntie," said Avis again. A dull sense of disturbance mingled with her surprise at Aunt Chloe's unprecedented expression of feeling. She was glad when the last gusset was rolled away, and Julia called to ask if she should scald over the marmalade. She wandered away restlessly when Aunt Chloe had gone through the orchard over the meadow across the field. She crushed the crisp grass idly. The brown butterflies circled over her head, and the grasshoppers rose and fell in their short autumn riot, which lends almost a pathos to a creature that is alternately repulsive and absurd, as the throb of any ephemeral life must do in its last delight. Avis watched them with a sudden, fierce envy. They would die of the bitter frost, but they had leapt to the summer sun. She stopped, from a feeling too ill-defined to be called a purpose, perhaps hardly conscious enough to be named an impulse, at the spot where she had last seen and spoken with Philip Ostrander. It was broad, white September noon. The narrow shadow crept crouching against the feet of the stone wall. The direct touch of the sun fell gratefully, for the morning had been chill. There was a rising, but as yet unagitated wind, which appealed to but did not stir the purple heart of the sea morning glories that sprang from the sand across the wall. The water had the superlative and unmated meaning of a September sea. The near waves broke weedless and kindling, clean to the heart's core, like a nature burnt wholly with a consecrated passion. All the colours of the tide and of the shore compelled attention, as if one must create a vocabulary to express them, as if one struggled to say, a blazing brown, a joyous grey, a restless green, a reticent red, a something never seen before. In every tint there was a subtle contradiction. The life and death of the year wrestled upon the face of the water. The whole harbour looked to avis like some large soul, in which a conflict, old as time, and young as hope, and eternal as nature, and sad as fate, was impending. By and by the harbour, too, must freeze. A pace or two down the wall, two little stunted spruces grew, sparse, wind-beaten things, shivering away from the sea with the touching action of all trees upon an easterly shore. Avis, stepping along to help herself up by the assistance of their shrinking branches, climbed the stone wall, and stood for a moment between them, looking across the cliff and down. In her full lie the length there, a perfect panel against the sky and sea, she was still standing, when she heard her name spoken under breath, and immediately the speaker added, Do not move, I pray you. Do not even turn your head, just this moment. Neither starting nor stirring, without comment or inquiry, she obeyed. Perhaps her breath came with some swiftness, for she seemed to sway a very little in standing. In her pale straw-coloured summer dress she looked like a delicate flame, slender and ascending against the sky. Still without turning she gently said, That is long enough, I think, Mr. Ostrander. Is it? Are you tired? Ah, well, I am selfish. I would have kept you there much longer. Well then, if you must, shall I help you down?" Then she turned, slowly like a statue on its pivot she circled towards him between the dark lines of the two trees, and slowly opened her grave eyes upon his face. Perhaps she was not thinking that he would be so sorely changed. It was so long since she had seen him. This had been heavy between them, and the shadow of death had overhung. In all the strain of this summer she had thrust herself back upon her own quiveringly poised imagination. A terrible companion. Upon the battlefield, beneath the shot, within the blazing hospital, upon the scorching journey, and at the door of death, she had followed him as one follows afar off, exchanging the terror of that which is, for the horror of that which may be. Her mind had not been at any time laggard in its apprehension of the fact that he lay at a stone's throw from her, grappling with life, and that another woman rendered him the tender offices of friendship and of compassion. But her pictorial instinct, cruelly loyal to her thus far, had failed her at last. This face, this, which he lifted to her now, haggard and gray, tense with that enforced patience, so foreign to a man, that a woman instinctively gauges the extent of his physical suffering by his acquisition of it. Against this her saddest vision had not fortified her. Astronomy happened upon a beautiful and significant phrase when it gave us energy of position, and meant us to understand by it that certain separated bodies are far apart, with great spaces to travel to reach each other. At that one moment the energy of position between these two seemed in a measurable thing. Perhaps because she had just obeyed him in standing still to be looked at, had turned a little coldly. Where she stood high upon the wall, her health and youth and colour seemed to cut themselves like articulate words before his eyes. He upon the side of the ascending field crawled weakly towards her. He was shattered as a broken column. For that moment they looked steadily and silently upon one another. Then slowly, furtively, as an unacknowledged motive or rebel fancy, there crept over her face a change. It was the marvellous and magnificent change wrought upon a woman's face only by that compassion which steals a regent to the palace where love the king has been dethroned. Nothing is more beautiful, because nothing is more womanly, than that subsistence of the muscles, that quiver of the nerves, that kindling of colour, and luminous entreaty of the eye. The young man held his breath before it, stirred with a perfectly new and daring hope. He felt that, had he come to her again in the power of his manhood, he might again have gone as he came. It was his physical ruin and helplessness which appealed to the strength in her. He would have died to see that lip of hers tremble so, for him. Now he saw it, and lived. He had exchanged nothing but a shot long and lifelong feebleness, for heaven. He drew a weak step near to her, and held out his arms. She wavered for an instant. The morning glory behind her, across the wall, wavered as much in the now rising wind. Then with a low and articulate cry, she stretched both hands down towards him. He took them, and she slid down from the wall and stood beside him. She did not offer to remove her hands. He thought she was unconscious of his touch, for she had not yet taken that broken, piteous look from his face. Oh! she said indistinctly. I did not think. I did not know. You did not know I was so changed. He gently took her hurt right hand by the wrist as he spoke, holding it like a drooping water lily by the stem. There! I must have hurt you. I was cruel, but I was dazzled. Poor little hand! There is a great deal of suffering in a little hurt like this. A bruise is so much worse than a cut. In hearts or hands. I have had the cut. You have almost drawn the life-blood out of my soul, I think. But you—you have been bruised. A wild flash of descent or protest shot across her eyes, but the quiver of her lip increased. All this time, he went on in the pathetic accent which mortal illness leaves lingering so long upon a man's voice. You have sent me no word, no sign. She silently shook her head. Her eyelids looked heavily, as if a distinct effort only prevented them from drooping. You never expressed to me the commonest sympathies of friendship. Imperfectly, she said, no. I lay, pretty weak, watching, day after day, thinking perhaps you would come or speak one little word. I went down into the valley of the shadow of death without you. You never extended a finger-touch to help me. I never did. You did not dare. Then her eyelids fell, then her quivering lip melted, then her whole face broke and blazed. She snatched away both hands and covered it. Let me hear you say it. He demanded with a kind of solemn authority, which seemed for the moment to be that of one who dealt with a divine, not human, passion. You dared not. I dared not. Let me know why not. Because you did not ask me to. Scarlet behind her shielding hands, she flung out the words. He took one blind step towards her. If I had asked you, would you have come? Did you care? Did you want to come when I was suffering to me? Oh, every day, every hour, there was not a minute for so many cruel weeks. It was so hard. Oh, don't think I am crying. It's only that I cannot get my breath. And I couldn't go. I was afraid. You were afraid you loved me, he cried. You are afraid of it now. As long as he lived, Ostrander saw in dreams the expression of exquisite pain with which she dragged her hands away from her face and met his eye. She seemed like a creature whose throbbing heart was torn out of her live body. If this be love, she slowly said, I am afraid I love you now. He staggered. He was still so weak. He staggered, and putting out one hand upon her shoulder sank slowly to the ground. Oh! she cried, I have hurt you. No. Oh no! Hush! You have healed me. I am well. Only let me rest a minute till my breath comes. He leaned panting against the wall, under the scant shade of the storm-tormented spruce. Oh! I have hurt you!" She repeated, kneeling beside him. What can I say? Is there anything that I can do? She had melted into a gentleness under which she felt his head spin giddily. There was a suppressed, appealing accent in her voice which she had never heard. It was faint as the first golden outline of land to one long in mid-ocean. He put his head back and closed his eyes. He would not, for life's sake, just then have seen more than that mistily throbbing boundary. It was as much as he could bear. If this was her pity, what would her tenderness be? When he had grown a little stronger, he turned and silently looked at her. Already upon her rested that indefinable change on the hither side of which, when once it has touched her, all time cannot put a woman's face. In yielding her confession, she seemed already to have yielded some impalpable portion of her personality. In the words of the old story of chivalry, her soul had gone out of her. Her blinding consciousness of having taken the first step in a road which led to some indefined but imperative surrender of her nature had an effect upon her incalculable to one familiar only with a simpler type of woman. She did not look subdued, only startled. And when he reverently extended his thin hand again towards her, she shrank with widening, fear-stricken eyes. Just then Ostrander thought her beautiful terror of him more precious than her love. He did not press any expression of his feeling upon her, and they sat quite still, and the live noon pulsated about them. Presently she said tremulously, "'You are so weak, and you walked across this long field. How will you ever get back? I am troubled that you came.' "'I can go anywhere,' said Ostrander in an intoxicated tone. "'Do anything. I can go the world over, for you will go with me.' He turned to her, leaning his head upon one one hand on which the sunlight drew out the veins. She turned away. She could not just then say the word which would darken sun, moon, and stars in the face of a man who looked like that. Her own grew tense and pinched. "'But still, as you say,' said Ostrander, whether willfully or not unconscious of this movement, "'I am not yet very strong. Indulge me. Let me hear you say once more—I'll not ask for it, but once today—that you are afraid you love me.' "'Oh, I am afraid I love you—there—hush!' She sprang to her feet, putting her finger on her own lips. And can you not love me without being afraid?' She shook her head, her eyes beginning to wander from side to side. "'But why?' "'I do not know. I am made so, defiantly. Let me go. Let us go now—home—somewhere. Oh, I forget—I am cruel.' She broke into a penitent tenderness. "'Are you rested? Can you walk so far yet? Can you go?' One moment. Ostrander rose feebly and stood beside her. His startling pallor burned as marble does if thrust into the full sun, as if it were lighted, not from without, but from within. He folded his arms with the resolute action of a man who thinks that is the safest thing to do with them, before he said, "'You will not leave me, I think, to-day, like this. I am almost too sick a man yet to be left, so.' "'Do you appeal to my pity?' She flashed, drawing a step back. "'No. I appeal to your love.' The scorching color slowly rose, lighted, sped, fired her face, brow, and neck. When he saw it, he knew that he had never seen her blush before. She seemed to stand imprisoned by that blush, as if it had been a physical paralysis or pain. "'My love,' she said under her breath, "'My love, do you know to what you are appealing?' "'Cardly, yet,' said Ostrander deliriously, "'I am not strong enough to know to-day. I only ask that you will give me the right to know another day, to-morrow, when you will. Is it too much to ask?' She made as if she would have spoken some impetuous word, but a glance at him restrained her. He was trembling heavily, and his breath had visibly shortened. He looked very ill. Her heart leapt with the deep maternal yearning over suffering that is more elemental in women than the yearning of maiden or of wife. Had he spoken no word of that other love to her, she could have gathered his faint face in her arms, and brooded over it with leaning cheek and sobbing voice. But this other, this encroaching, appalling love which she felt in herself, has yet only as the presence of a vague organic dread. For this nature gave her no speech nor language but the instinct of flight. Yet flight now would be either coquetry or cruelty, and of both she was incapable. "'I will see you,' she said after a moment's grave silence. "'Yes. I will see you again.'" Ostrander was sensitively conscious that her transparent honesty could not rest even from her compassion a distinct mortgage to his now blinding hope. But he felt himself as physically unequal to enduring just then any possible depression of that hope, as he was to yielding any larger allowance of the scant breath with which he must compass that widening distance across the dizzy field. He paused, however, to say with a certain authority, "'You understand what I asked in asking that we may talk of this, that we may talk of our love, again.'" "'Yes.' "'And you distinctly grant that we may speak of it, so.'" She said, "'If you stand another moment, you cannot crawl home. I shall stand till you grant what I ask.' "'Oh, I grant it. Come. How shall I—how can I help you over this rough ground? I wish I were a man.' "'I am sorry not to sympathize with any wish of yours,' said Ostrander, breaking into a boyish laugh as they turned, striking down into the brown, stubbly field. "'And now, if you'll permit me, just a hand upon your shoulder, it shall be a light one, and I shall get along famously. I am already stronger than I was.' She lent him her strong, young shoulder simply and readily, and he leaning upon it with radiant eyes, they passed over the conscious meadows in the white September noon. CHAPTER X Are there not two points in the adventure of the diver? One, when a beggar he prepares to plunge. One, when a prince he rises with his pearl. Festus, I plunge. Festus, I wait to you when you rise. Browning's Paracelsus There now began in Avus a memorable conflict, which only a woman, and of women perhaps only a few, can articulately understand. Ostrander felt that it was only accelerated, but did not believe that it was in any other sense affected by the state of extreme exhaustion into which that morning by the shore had plunged him. He had struggled up through the orchard and the garden, and as far as the studio, where he sank upon the steps. The professor and Aunt Chloe came out and got him into the house, and he lay for the rest of the day upon the study-sofa, sorely spent. Nothing would have suited Aunt Chloe better than to keep him beneath her motherly wing. She had small secret respect for Barbara Allen's nursing. What could a girl with red curls know about gunshot wounds? And she understood that Mr. Ostrander had been kept too long in a dark room. Men like flowers waxed strong in the light of heaven. Undoubtedly Barbara could play opera music for him downstairs, but meanwhile who was to rub the poor fellow's feet, or exert an authoritative influence in the question of wet or dry heat in an attack of pain? And now that he had really gone back to the college, too soon as it had clearly proved, she could surely take him in hand without any discourtesy to the Allen's. Aunt Chloe's hospitality expressed itself with the touch of dignity, which, though it makes acceptance easy, leaves denial graceful. She did not press the matter when Ostrander, growing stronger with the heavily cooling evening, said only that it was best for him to go, and he returned to his old quarters, upon which he held some lean by courtesy until his health should admit of a definite settlement of his relation to the university. Davis was in her room when his carriage drove up, and did not come down. She had presented herself through the day only so much as was necessary to prevent remark. She hovered about him distantly. In her eyes smouldered a dangerous light. When once they had been left for a few minutes alone together, as the afternoon shadow was stooping to the study floor, she had fanned him conscientiously to be sure, but she had not broken by a breath the expressive silence which had settled like a third personality between them. He did not watch her, but lay with closed eyes. He perceived the shining of her slender wrist, the faint scent from her dress and hair. When Aunt Chloe came in, she felt his pulse anxiously, and said she had given him too large a dose of the elderberry wine. For that next day he left her to herself, and for yet another he stood afar off from a struggle upon which he felt it unshivalric to urge, more than need inevitably be, the appeal of his physical wreck and disordered future. Upon the third day he came, leaning upon John Rose's arm. Rose had found him down the street, crawling along home. But John Rose had an appointment with the lady, and would not come in. Aunt Chloe stood in the hall with her bonnet on. She was going to a very special female prayer meeting, of which, far be it for me to speak skeptically, appointed to further the discontinuance of the war. And the professor would not return from the lecture-room till after the Alpha Delta Phi dinner, which would be a late and dyspeptic affair. Aunt Chloe thought the parlor too damp for Mr. Ostrander, and would send Avis into the study. He went in, and awaited her with such nerve as he could command. He would not have turned his transparent hand over either way upon his chance. He waited what seemed in immeasurable, and really was rather a cruel time. Then at last she came in, down the long, sunlit, home-like room, between the rows of books. He was shocked to see the traces of a sleepless and joyless struggle that she bore. He met her with some indistinct, impetuous word of endearment, and drew her beside him upon the old mahogany sofa. "'You suffer?' he cried, with the helpless bewilderment of the strongest man before the nature of a strong woman. "'I would make you so happy, and I have made you miserable. Why do you suffer?' He held her fast now by the delicate crossed wrists. She lifted her tender face. "'I suffer,' she said, "'because I love you.' "'Oh! Is that all?' "'I never loved any other man. I did not know what it was like.' She gently drew her hands away, and folded them one into the other. "'And what is it like? Can you tell me?' One might have said of Ostrander's voice at that moment what was said once and said perfectly of music, that it was love in search of a word. "'It is like death,' said the woman slowly, with a deepening shade on every feature. "'Then,' said the young man lightly, "'I am ready to die.' But he was sorry to have made her smile so, for her smile did not encourage him. "'It is civil war,' she said. Covered by a momentary stinging sense of having retraced his own footsteps, he leaped on. "'Do you remember that you were to give me an answer, that you were to talk with me of our future to-day?' "'Yes.' "'And I may know, now, what it is you have to say to me.' "'Mr. Ostrander, in all my life, since I was a little girl, I have never known one hour in which I expected, like other women, to marry.' "'You could not be like other women,' he murmured. But she waved his words away with her bruised hand. "'I don't think you understand what that means. I never could conceive of myself as expecting it. I cannot now. I do not wish to marry any man. It seems to me a perfectly unnatural thing that any man should look me in the face and ask me to be his wife. It always did. And that a man of your superior intelligence should actually expect it is really incomprehensible to me.' She pelted these words at him over her shoulder. Ostrander heard them too anxiously to smile. It was the irrational outcry of a creature rasped and wrung by the friction of her own nature upon itself. Only a woman terrified by the serried advance of a mighty love upon an able and discomfited resistance could have spoken those words in that way. But only a few men in the world would have instinctively understood this. Ostrander was not one of these few. It seemed to his dizzy eyes that her face receded as she spoke, growing larger but dimmer with every word. I never said this before. She added, with the rapid incisive utterance of one who is expressing what is so long familiar and so long suppressed as to have become a functional part of the being and to exhale involuntarily like the breath. I never cared enough for any one to try to explain it. But I must tell you, I had rather not be happy than to be happy at such a cost as marriage demands of women. Ah! Then you own that you would, that you COULD be happy. He hastened to entrap her in her sweet admission. She gave him one transcendent look, as if she had given him some matchless wine never before unsealed for human lips, his head grew light. But then there fell a swift and great withdrawal upon her, and her face gathered itself together like a garrison, while she said, I told you something about this long ago, before you went into the army, that day by the shore. But I could not explain it then, for I could not explain myself then. Every thing that I felt then has intensified, with my feeling for you has deepened, this other feeling, the more I care for you the more I shrink from what you ask. Let us talk of this quietly now, and reasonably, said Ostrander in his low, vibrant way. I will urge nothing upon you. Only let us reason about it. Urge is not to be treated with such personal irreverence or rebellion, I think. It is really the best plan Almighty God could contrive for us. It is His will that men and women should love one another, and loving, marry. But I do not see it to be His will for me, urged Abus. He has set two natures in me, warring against each other. He has made me a law unto myself. He made me so. How can I help that? I do not say, heaven knows, that I am better, or greater, or truer than other women, when I say it is quite right for other women to become wives, and not for me. I only say, if that is what a woman is made for, I am not like that, I am different. And God did it." There was a solemn but yet submissive arraignment in these words, and in the tone with which they were uttered, to which, at that moment, Ostrander found no ready lover's argument of a texture large enough to be laid against them. "'Even if I had no work, no life of my own,' she continued less calmly. I think it would be the same, though I cannot tell. But I have my work, and I have my life. I was not made to yield these to any man. I was not made to absorb them in his work and his life. And I should do it, if I married him. I should care so much—too much—for what happened to him. After Ostrander, if I were a man, I would not stoop to ask such a sacrifice of any woman. "'And I stoop to ask for no more than I give,' he said, with a haughty humility. "'I will take from you only what I can yield to you—the love of a life. I do not want your work or your individuality. I refuse to accept any such sacrifice from the woman I love. You are perfectly right. A man ought to be above it. Let me be that man!' Ostrander uttered this daring sentiment as ardently as if he had ever thought of it before, and as sincerely as if it had been the watchword of his life. He felt himself at that moment in the radiation of a great truth that blazed from her ringing voice and her entrenched beauty. He seemed to himself to be the discoverer of a new type of womanhood, to which, as we do in the presence of all ideals, he instinctively brought his own nature to the rapid test. He would have scorned himself if his manhood had not wrung responsive to it. He ventured solemnly to say, "'Only let us love, and live, and work together. Your genius shall be more tenderly my pride than my little talents can possibly be yours. I shall feel more care for your stored future than you ought to feel for my wrecked one. Try me, if you will, trust me, if you can. I do not say that I am worthy, but you shall make me so. If I did not believe you could make me so, before God I would go out from your presence to-day, and never seek it again.' He spoke in an agitation now that extended itself like the air they breathed to her. She rose and walked across the study floor two or three times, with something of her father's attitude, the long, nervous step softened to a sinuous grace in her clinging dress. "'I wish I had a different past and a different future to offer you,' pleaded Ostrander, throwing one weak arm up over his head restlessly. But the one has at least been clean, I believe, and the other must be. What God and yourself will will it?' She stopped her rapid walk and looked at him standing in the middle of the floor, and in what seemed a half-unconscious tone as if she had not been listening to his last words, she said, "'I have wondered sometimes if there were such a man in the world. I always knew, whispering, how I should feel. I knew it would be all over with me when I found him.' Still softly. "'Oh, how pale you are. All this excitement is so wrong for you. I should be so glad to see you happy, to help you to get well. Oh, I think I could make you happy. I would try. There is nothing I would not do, would not suffer.' With a swift motion she stirred towards him, saw him reach his arms out dumbly, wavered and turned. Then, "'Oh, no, no, no,' she cried, "'help me to say no, come another time. I must think—I must take time, because—' "'Because what?' he demanded, sorely shaken by the prolongation of this strain. "'Because I care too much for you to make you miserable. Everything would be so hard for you. Don't think it is that I care so much about myself. I could bear it—to grow poor and sick and worn out and never to paint and to have to sew so much. When do you look at me? Oh, you were so pale. I could bear it all. But I can't forget how it would be, and the coffee won't be right. And men mined such things, you would mind. You would be sorry we had done it. It is not right for us to marry. Don't let me do what is not right. You should see. You should be merciful to yourself and me.' She seemed to slip and slide before his still-extended hands like a wraith, and he heard the door opened and close, and the afternoon sun bent placidly upon the rows of books, upon the portrait of Sir William, upon the decorous mahogany sofa, and the dull figure on the carpet where she had stood. He took his hat and crawled away in the bright sunshine. Avis upstairs held her hands upon her ears as if she were trying to shut out the sound of her own words, and the professor sat at the alpha-delta-fi dinner, sat discussing representative perception with that New York clergyman who had written so intelligent a review of the identity of identity and non-identity, and Aunt Chloe at the prayer meeting poured out her good soul for the benefit of the country. He did not seek to see her after this, but wrote to her several times, expressing more fully both the burden of his love and the reason of his hope, crystallizing calmly all a lover's sublime conviction of the practicability of his wishes. He had no answers, but he wrote bravely on. Perhaps a fortnight passed in this way. All this while, Ostrander had said nothing of his health. One day Coy came in and said, "'Poor Mr. Ostrander! He doesn't seem to get up. John goes over there almost every day. He doesn't walk out now, hasn't for a week, and the Allens take him to ride. But I hear his chum is very good to him, and he won't go anywhere else. And John says he can't see why he doesn't gain. John is very good to him, and John says—but Avis did not seem to be granting her usual tender attention to what John said, and Coy changed the subject to bias ruffles. It was when Ostrander was lying alone in the dusk on his college lounge the next day that a little note was brought to him, the first he had ever received from her. With shaking fingers he struck a light, and read in her large defined hand this only. "'My dear Mr. Ostrander, I should like to see you, if you are strong enough to drive to my father's house. Do not come till you are quite able. I have nothing to say that cannot be said as well at one time as another. You're sincerely,' Avis dobel. His chum came in at that moment, and Ostrander, who had not ventured into the evening air for weeks, fiercely demanded a carriage and his overcoat, and got them. He usually got what he sought in that reverberating tone. And were almost as pliable as women to the quality of Philip Ostrander's voice. As luck would have it, there was a faculty meeting in the study, and a city relief society in the parlours. He asked distinctly for Miss Avis, and was bidden into the long empty dining-room. There was faint fire-light in the Franklin Stove, and the moon, which was full, looked in over Aunt Chloe's ivies. There was heliotrope in the room somewhere, but it could not be seen. She came before the lights not knowing how it was, and stopped in the doorway, uncertain. He was standing at the other end of the room. It seemed as if he leaned against a column of straight moonlight. His height and pallor were thus both emphasized. Avis looking in through the darkened room, leaning forward a little, hesitating, thought of the harbour-light, oddly enough, and of the birds. The lamps came in while they were standing so. The servant went out and closed the door. Avis had on something scarlet over a thick white dress that blazed out with the lighting of the room. She spoke first, and said gravely, Mr. Ostrander, I have decided. Oh, do not decide, yet. It is quite necessary. I have tried your patience over much. I have decided, and I pray you pardon me for the lateness of the decision, and for all the trouble I have been to you, and all the pain, but I have decided that I cannot resign my profession as an artist. He was hastening impetuously to remind her that they had both decided she need resign nothing when he perceived a tender merriment that he had never seen before, dawning far within her eyes. His voice and face sprang towards her, but she motioned him back. And I forgot to tell you that I hate, with a fervent hatred, to keep house. I did not ask you to be my housekeeper. And suddenly serious, I make very sour bread. You will bring me," he said reverently, the bread of life. He looked so wasted, standing trembling there, with his hand upon the long table, that his words seemed less the rhapsody of love than the cry of famine, and the reply which in the telling has almost a touch of the ludicrous in the solemn saying was almost sublime. Come! he said feebly, I am starving, come! Slowly at first, with her head bent, as if she resisted some opposing pressure, then swiftly, as if she had been drawn by irresistible forces, then blindly, like the bird to the lighthouse, she passed the length of the silent room, and put both hands and palms pressed together as if they had been manacled into his. End of chapter 10