Part 16 (1/2)
”I am sorry, Mittie,” cried Louis, touched by her paleness and emotion, and attributing it entirely to wounded feeling, ”I am very sorry that I have been the indirect cause of giving you pain. It was certainly unintentional. Miss Thusa was in rather a savage mood this evening, I must acknowledge; but she is not malicious, Clinton. With all her eccentricities, she has some sterling virtues. If you could only see her inspired, and hear one of her _powerful_ tales!”
”If you ever induce him to go there a second time!” exclaimed Mittie, withdrawing herself from the arm with which he had encircled her waist, and giving him a glance from her dark, bright eyes, that might have scorched him, it was so intensely, dazzlingly angry.
”Believe me,” said Clinton, ”no inducement could tempt me again to a place a.s.sociated with painful remembrances in your mind.”
He had not seen the glance, for he was walking on the other side, and when she turned towards him, in answer to his soothing remark, the starry moon of night is not more darkly beautiful or resplendent than her face.
So he told her when Louis left them at the gate leading to their dwelling, and so he told her again when they were walking alone together in the star-bright night.
”Why do they talk to me of Helen?” said he, and his voice stole through the stilly air as gently as the falling dew. ”What can she be, in comparison with you? Little did I think Louis had another sister so transcendent, when I saw you standing on the rustic bridge, the most radiant vision that ever beamed on the eye of mortal. You remember that evening. All the sunbeams of Heaven gathered around _you_, the focus of the golden firmament.”
”Louis loves me not as he does Helen,” replied Mittie, her heart bounding with rapture at his glowing praises, ”no one does. Even you, who now profess to love me beyond all created beings, if Helen came, might be lured by _her_ attractions to forget all you have been breathing into my ears.”
”I confess I should like to see one whose attractions _you_ can fear.
She must be superlatively lovely.”
”She is not beautiful nor lovely, Clinton. No one ever called her so.
Fear! I never knew the sensation of fear. It is not fear that she could inspire, but a stronger, deeper pa.s.sion.”
He felt the arm tremble that was closely locked in his, and he could see her lip curl like a rose-leaf fluttering in the breeze.
”Speak, Mittie, and tell me what you mean. I can think of but one pa.s.sion now, and that the strongest and deepest that ever ruled the heart of man.”
”I cannot describe my meaning,” replied Mittie, pausing under a tree that shaded their path, and leaning against its trunk; ”but I can feel it. Till you came, I knew not what feeling was; I read of it in books.
It was the theme of many a fluent tongue, but all was cold and pa.s.sive _here_,” said she, pressing her hand on the throbbing heart that now ached with the intensity of its emotion. ”Everybody said I had no heart, and I believed them. You first taught me that there was a vital spark burning within it, and blew upon it with a breath of flame. I tell you, Clinton, you had better tamper with the lightning's chain than the pa.s.sions of this suddenly awakened heart. I tell you I am a dangerous being. There is a power within me that makes me tremble with its consciousness. I am a young girl, with no experience. I know nothing of the blandishments of art, and if I did I would scorn to exercise them.
You have told me a thousand times that you loved me and I have believed you. I would willingly die a thousand times for the rapture of hearing it once; but if I thought the being lived who could supplant me--if I thought you could ever prove false to me--”
Her eye flashed and her cheek glowed in the night-beams that, as Clinton said, made her their focus, so brightly were they reflected from her face. What Clinton said, it is unnecessary to repeat, for the language of pa.s.sion is commonplace, unless it flows from lips as fresh and unworldly and impulsive as Mittie's.
”Let me put a mark on this tree,” she said, stooping down and picking up a sharp fragment of rock at its base. ”If you ever forget what you have said to me this night, I will lead you to this spot, and show you the wounded bark--”
She began to carve her own initials, but he insisted upon subst.i.tuting his penknife and a.s.sisting her in the task, to which she consented. As they stood side by side, he guiding her hand, and his long, soft locks playing against her cheek, or mingling with her own, she surrendered herself to a feeling of unalloyed happiness, when all at once Miss Thusa's legend of the Black Knight, with the dark, far-flowing hair, and the maiden with the bleeding heart, came to her remembrance, and she involuntarily shuddered.
”Why am I ever recalling that wild legend?” thought she. ”I am getting to be as weak and superst.i.tious as Helen. Why, when it seems to me that the wing of an angel is fluttering against my cheek, should I remember that demon-sprite?”
Underneath her initials he carved his own, in larger, bolder characters.
”Would you believe it,” said she, in a light mocking tone, ”that I felt every stroke of your knife on that bark? Oh, you do not know how deep you cut! It seems that my life is infused into that tree, and that it is henceforth a part of myself.”
”Strange, romantic girl that you are! Supposing the lightning should strike it, think you that you would feel the shaft?”
”Yes, if it shattered the tablet that bears those united names. But the lightning does not often make a channel in the surface of the silver barked beech. There are loftier trees around. The stately oak and branching elm will be more likely to win the fiery crown of electricity than this.”
Mittie clasped her arms around the tree, and laid her cheek against the ciphers. The next moment she flitted away, ashamed of her enthusiasm, to hide her blushes and agitation in the solitude of her own chamber.
The next morning she found a wreath of roses round the tablet, and the next, and the next. So day after day the pa.s.sion of her heart was fed by love-gifts offered at that shrine, where, by the silver starlight, they had met, and ONE at least had wors.h.i.+ped.