Part 59 (1/2)

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 ...