Rough-Hewn Part 59

But she hadn't. As they pa.s.sed through the city walls and came out, just the two of them, under the wide sky he asked her about it, timidly; for he was horribly frightened and moved, now that he had her to himself.

And she said that she was sorry, she was very ignorant of English and American poetry, having been so little in an English-speaking country.

Neale sighed. No luck! She went on to suggest apologetically that she ought some time to go back to America and take a course in English Literature, or at least gather the books about her and read. "My old Cousin Hetty's front porch wouldn't be a bad place," she said thoughtfully.

"I'm going to see that front porch before so very long, you know," said Neale, springing one of his surprises, with a rapidly beating heart and an impa.s.sive face.

She darted one of her swallow-swift glances at him.

"Yes, you've persuaded me. I've persuaded myself. I'm not going to sell the Ashley property right away, not without going up to look at it at least. I've been thinking a great deal about what you said that first day. I've been thinking a great deal anyway--can't--can't we sit down somewhere?" He flung away any pretense of having a special place to show her. She too had apparently forgotten it. They sat down on the short gra.s.s, their backs against a low heap of stones, part of the ruins of a very ancient aqueduct. Far in the distance a flock of sheep roamed with a solitary shepherd leaning on his staff.

"You know--you know what we've been talking about, trying to find one's way, know what you were meant to do. Well, my guess about myself is that I'm a maker by birth, not a buyer or seller. The more I think of it the better it looks to me, like something I'd like to put my heart into doing as well as I could--taking raw material, you know, that's of no special value in itself and helping other men to make it worth more by adding work and intelligence to it. You know what somebody said about the ounce of iron that's of no use, and the hundred hair-springs the watchmaker makes out of it. I don't see why I didn't think of it at once when I knew Uncle Burton had left me the mill. But I'd never have thought of it if you hadn't helped me. It takes me so _long_ to get around to anything anyhow. And you are so quick! You see, I know a lot about the lumber-business, and quite a bit about saw mills, and I can get on fine with workmen. I _like_ them, and I _love_ working in the woods. And--and--" he brought out the second of his carefully planned points, "it would be a home too. You said it was a home. Everybody wants a home, Marise."

He sat silent, listening to the word as it echoed over their two homeless heads. And then he took his courage in his two hands and turned towards Marise. What he saw in her face so shocked and startled him that every carefully planned word dropped from his mind. He forgot everything except that the dark, set look was on her face and all that tragic sadness he could not forget.

"Marise, Marise--what is it?" he cried, frightened. What could he have said?

With her shoulders and eyebrows she made an ugly, dry little gesture of dismissing the subject, and said ironically, "What makes you so sure everybody wants a home?"

He stared at her stupidly, not able to think of anything to say, till she went on impatiently, irritably, "It's just sentimental to talk like that. I never heard you say a sentimental word before. You know what homes are like,--places where people either lie to each other or quarrel."

Neale was startled by the quivering, low-toned violence of her accent.

Why should she wince and shrink back as if he had struck on an intolerably sensitive bruise--at the word, _home_?

"Why, let me tell you about my home," he said eagerly to her, in answer to the tragic challenge he felt in her look, her tone. "I don't believe I ever told you about what my home was like; just the usual kind, of course, what any child has, I suppose, but--let me _tell_ you about it."

He began anywhere, the first thing that came into his mind, what the house was like, and where the library was, and how he liked his own room, and the security of it; his free play with little boys on the street that was his great world, and how he felt back of him, as a sure refuge from the uncertainties of that or any other great world, the certainties of what he found when he ran up the steps every afternoon, opened the door, his door, and stepped into his home, where he was sure of being loved and cared for, and yet not fettered or shut in. "Father and Mother always let me alone, let me grow."

He told of the meal-times and his boy's raging appet.i.te, and his mother's delight in it. He told of the evenings when Father and Mother sat reading together; of the free-flowing tide of trust and affection between his parents, changing with their changes, never the same, never different; trust and affection of which he had never been really conscious but which had always been the background of his life. He remembered even to his father's tone as he said, "Oh, Mary," and her instant, "Yes, dear, what is it?"

He had not thought of it for years, he had never before thought consciously of it, had always taken it for granted as he took daylight, or his own good health. But there in that foreign land it all stood up before him, clear in its own quiet colors, visible to him for the first time against the other worlds he had been seeing and divining. He thought of foolish little gay things to tell her--he could not have guessed why they came into his mind--about the house smelling "trunky"

when it was time to go to West Adams, and Mother, who could never get the trunk packed, and Father's joking her about it. And the long trip over to the city; Father always waiting to let him see how the ferry-boat was tied up. And in the train how Father kissed Mother good-by and then Neale, and then Mother again, and put his cheek for an instant against hers. This time Neale looked back through the years straight into his father's face, proudly, and held his head high.

He found himself telling things that he himself had never thought of till then--his parents' tolerant patience with his boy's fits and starts, with his egotism and absurdities, with his periods of causeless and violent energy, his other periods of causeless, violent indolence.

And West Adams, he had always till this moment taken for granted the stability of that second home of his, that had been his father's before him, like a rock to which his tossing little boat was moored whenever he wished. Grandfather and Grandmother, plain old people--like Marise's old Cousin Hetty perhaps--grown as much alike as an old brother and sister, who still went off blue-berrying on the mountain together every summer.

And then, when he had needed his home no longer, the adventuring-forth of his father and mother, and his guessing for the first time how they had tamed their self-centered youth to be parents; the moment when he and Father stood together under the old maple-tree and understood each other so deeply, with no words, all the years of affection and trust rising up and standing there with them; and how Father and Mother had driven away as if for an Indian Summer honeymoon, Mother's face smiling through her tears. He told--yes, even that--how for an instant he had felt hurt and left out, and Mother had known it and come running back to say a last loving good-by to the little boy he had been.

Marise had not said a word as he brought this all up for her to see, nor did she when he had finished and was silent. But he could see that her hands, folded together in her lap, were shaking. He waited for her to speak. He knew there was something ominous in her silence, like gathering thunder. His heart was heavy with it. He was afraid of what might be coming. But he longed to have it come, to have it tear down the barrier between them.

"So that's what you have known--what every child has, you suppose!" she said pa.s.sionately, her voice quivering and breaking. She stopped herself abruptly. She could scarcely breathe, her agitation was so great. She knew what she would do if she opened her lips again. But she would die of suffocation if she did not speak. It rose within her like a devouring flood, all that old, ever-new bitterness; and beat her down.

She heard herself, in a desperate, stammering voice, telling him ...

_telling_ him!

The words that pa.s.sed her lips did not seem words but bleeding, living, tortured things. She was mortally sick and faint, but she could not stop. Once as in a flicker of lightning she knew what she was doing, and tried to stop--but she had torn it loose from those fibers that had grown so close and hard around it, she had wrenched it away--b.l.o.o.d.y and raw--it was too late to stop.

When she finished she leaned her face on her hands and was silent, feeling as though she had died. When she finally looked up at him she saw that the tears stood thick in his eyes. She had never dreamed that for good or ill one human being could feel so close to another. It was as though she could not tell whether those tears were his, or had come healingly into her own dry eyes.

She saw the anguish of his yearning sympathy--and yet what was it he said? Something she had not dreamed any one could say, "Oh, the poor little girl you were! Wasn't there _any one_ to help you to get it straight, to understand it?"

"Understand it!" she said harshly. "I understood it only too well."

He looked away from her, across the plain, and kept a thoughtful silence. Then he said, "I don't believe you understood it in the least.

Is it likely that any fourteen-year-old little girl could understand anything like that, anything that must have begun, had its real causes back before you were born--and why should you take the point of view of an ignorant old woman who certainly had the ignorant old woman's appet.i.te for scandal? You probably didn't even get straight what really happened then--it sounds fearfully mixed up, you know, as though there must be more than that to it. Let alone its _real_ meaning, its human meaning, that you couldn't possibly have understood at fourteen, if you had known all the facts--and there certainly were lots more facts than what you saw and what that old woman put into your head.

"And, anyhow--oh, Marise, no matter _what_ it was, it has nothing to do with your life _now_! Why do you let it mean so much to you? Just think how long ago it happened! It hasn't a thing to do with _you_. How can it?"

She flushed a deep, shamed red, and asked in a whisper, "You don't think that I ... that I would be like that?"

He cried out furiously, "No, no, _no_! What an idea! It's nothing to you--nothing, I tell you. It's been nothing to you for years. You ought to have stopped thinking of it ever so long ago. Everybody starts all over again. You're yourself. You don't have to keep carrying that around with you. It doesn't belong to you. Let it fall. Leave it here!" he commanded abruptly, springing to his feet and holding out his hand to help her rise. "Leave it here! And walk off into your own life."

She stood up beside him now, so giddy with a strange new lightness that she laid her hand on his arm to steady herself.

At her touch he flushed hot with the desire to put his arms about her and hold her pa.s.sionately close. The desire was so intense that he had for an instant the hallucination that he had done it, that she leaned her head against his breast. But he had been so harrowed by sympathy for her poor bruised heart, had been so touched by the revelation of the delicacy and fineness of fiber which had but served to deepen the dreadful, unhealed hurt with which she had lived helplessly, he was so moved by her white, drawn face, lifted to his own with a childlike faith in what he said, he was so wrung with his thankfulness to see on that pale face a sensitive reflection of his own certainty ... oh, now was no time to burst out on her with the flame of his pa.s.sion, now when she was so weak, so defenseless. He put aside his pa.s.sion with a strong hand, resolutely.

Looking at him, she saw his face flush darkly with his desire, and felt herself as safe from a touch as though she looked down on him from a high tower. Had she ever felt safe before?

She leaned on his arm like a convalescent. She walked off beside him quietly, into her own life.

The walk back to the city walls was as full of a comforting, silent sense of each other's presence as though they had lived their lives together.

Once in a while they spoke together as simply and naturally as children, of small, everyday things, of little changes he would need to make in his house, an old cistern to be drained and filled in, the half-rotten maple which darkened the living-room cut down to let the sunlight in.

In one of the quiet silences, full to the brim with their nearness to each other, Neale remembered what he had meant to do with this afternoon, what he had so self-consciously planned to say. The thought made him abashed and humble. How infinitely deeper life was than you could ever know till you began to live. He had thought he loved Marise as much as a man could love a woman. He saw that he had only begun to guess what love could be, that it is a tie between two struggling human beings, as well as between a man and a woman, and that it is not to be had without effort and growth. It was something that would take all there was in him to live up to.

As he walked beside her, he was dedicating all there was in him to loving her.

II

She was tired, heavenly tired, when she reached her room that late afternoon. She had not been tired like that since she was a little girl; relaxed, abandoned before the soft-footed advance of sleep. She could scarcely think coherently enough to remember to send word that she would not appear at dinner, before she was undressed and in her bed. There was nothing in her mind but this exquisite fatigue, from which presently, even now, as she thought of it, sleep would drift her away. She laid her tired head on the pillow with a long breath. Some weak tears gathered in her eyes and ran slowly down, but they were sweet tears, not bitter. And so she fell asleep.

It was late, when she woke, well on into the next day, and the room was filled with the crystal clarity of daylight. As she opened her eyes, she was thinking as though it were the continuation of a dream, that if she ever had children she would ... she would take _care_ of them! She would learn how always to be close to them, so that she would be there, ready to help them when.... She wouldn't leave them helplessly to think that the evil was in life itself and not in coa.r.s.e and evil minds. She wouldn't leave them for years to think that the poor, mean joking of sn.i.g.g.e.ring servants is all there is to life and love. She would stand up for them, look out for them! Marise stood fiercely on her guard for them now, up in arms against what threatened them.

It had never before in her life, not even fleetingly, not once, occurred to her that she might ever have children. She knew now that she wanted them. That was the second step into her own life.