Part 20 (1/2)

Once more he began to talk,--of nature, of the farm, of how it was the real way to live, as we were meant to. One couldn't, of course, cut off the city altogether. There were concerts and things. And the companions.h.i.+p of old friends. Even at that it would be lonely. They had felt it already. That was why it was such a marvelous thing to have her here. She made a different world of it. Just as she had made what seemed like a home out of that old apple house. No one could do that but a woman, of course ...

She was no longer irritated by this. She barely listened, beyond noting his circuitous but certain approach to the point of asking her, once more, to marry him.

Her body seemed drugged with the loveliness of the night, with fatigue, with him, with the immediacy of him,--but her mind was racing as it does in dreams.

Nature was not, of course, the gentle sentimentalist Graham was talking about, but one did get something out of close communion with her. A sense of fundamentals. She was a--simplifier of ideas. Plain and straightforward even in her enchantments. That moon they were waiting for.... Already she was looking down upon a pair of lovers, somewhere,--a thousand pairs!--with her bland unseeing face. And later to-night, long after she had risen on them, upon a thousand more.

Of lovers? Well perhaps not. Not if one insisted upon the poets'

descriptions. But good enough for nature's simple purposes. Answering to a desire, faint or imperious, that would lead them to put on her harness.

Take on her work.

Anthony March had never put on a harness. A rebel. And for the price of his rebellion never had heard his music, except in his head. Clear torment they could be, he had told her, those unheard melodies. Somehow she could understand that. There was an unheard music in her. An unfulfilled destiny, at all events, which was growing clamorous as the echo of the boy's pa.s.sion-if it were but an echo-pulsed in her throat, drew her body down by insensible relaxations closer upon his.

The moon came up and they watched it, silent. The air grew heavy. The call of a screech-owl made all the sound there was. She s.h.i.+vered and he drew her, unresisting, tighter still. Then he bent down and kissed her.

He said, presently, in a strained voice, ”You know what I have been asking. Does that mean yes?”

She did not speak. The moon was up above the trees, yellow now. She remembered a great broad voice, singing:

”Low hangs the moon. It rose late.

It is lagging-O I think it is heavy with love, with love”

With a pa.s.sion that had broken away at last, the boy's hands took possession of her. He kissed her mouth, hotly, and then again; drew back gasping and stared into her small pale face with burning eyes. Her head turned a little away from him.

”... Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me My mate back again if you only would, For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.

O rising stars!...”

The languor was gone. She s.h.i.+vered and sat erect, he watching her in an agony of apprehension. She looked slowly round at him.

”You haven't answered!” His voice broke over that into a sob. ”Will you marry me, Mary?”

”I don't know,” she said dully, like one struggling out of a dream. ”I will if I can. I meant to for a while, I think. But ...”

He leaped to the ground and stood facing her with clenched hands. ”I ought to be shot,” he said. ”I'm not fit to touch you--a white thing like you. I didn't mean to. Not like that. I meant ...”

She stared for an instant, totally at a loss for the meaning--the mere direction of what he was trying to say. Then, slipping down from the branch, she took him by the arms. ”Don't!” she cried rather wildly.

”Don't talk like that! That's the last impossibility. Listen. I'm going to tell you why.”

But he was not listening for what it might be. He was still morosely preoccupied with his own crime. He had been a beast! He had bruised, once more, the white petals of a flower!

It was not that her courage failed. She saw he wouldn't believe. That he couldn't be made to believe. It was no use. If he looked at her any longer like that, she would laugh.

She buried her face in her arms and sobbed.

He rose to this crisis handsomely, waited without a word until she was quiet and then suggested that they go and find Rush and Sylvia. And until they were upon the point of joining the other pair nothing more was said that had any bearing on what had happened in the apple tree. But in that last moment he made a mute appeal for a chance to say another word.

He reminded her that she had said she would marry him if she could. This was enough for him. More than he deserved. He was going back to the beginning to try to build anew what his loss of self-control had wrecked.