Alden had put Rosemary aside as though
in a mental pigeon-hole. If vague thoughts of
her came now and then to trouble him, he showed no
sign of it. As weeks and months had sometimes
passed without a meeting, why should it be different
now? Moreover, he was busy, as she must know,
with the vineyard and school, and a guest.
He had ordered several books on the
subject of vine-culture, and was reading a great deal,
though a close observer might have noted long intervals
in which he took no heed of the book, but stared dreamily
into space. He saw Edith at the table, and in
the evenings, and occasionally at afternoon tea-a
pleasant custom which she and Madame never failed to
observe,-but she seemed to make it a point
not to trespass upon his daylight hours.
The apple blossoms had gone, blown
in fragrant drifts afar upon field and meadow.
The vineyard lay lazily upon its southern slope, basking
in the sun. Sometimes a wandering wind brought
a fresh scent of lusty leaves or a divine hint of
bloom.
The old-fashioned square piano, long
silent, was open now, and had been put in order.
In the evenings, after dinner, Edith would play, dreamily,
in the dusk or by the light of one candle. The
unshaded light, shining full upon her face, brought
out the delicacy of her profile and allured stray
gleams from the burnished masses of her hair.
In the soft shadows that fell around her, she sat
like St. Cecilia, unconscious of self, and of the
man who sat far back in a corner of the room, never
taking his eyes from her face.
Wistfulness was in every line of her
face and figure, from the small white-shod foot that
rested upon the pedal to the glorious hair that shimmered
and shone but still held its tangled lights safely
in its silken strands. The long line from shoulder
to wrist, the smooth, satiny texture of the rounded
arm, bare below the elbow, the delicate hands, so
beautifully cared-for, all seemed eloquent with yearning.
Alden, from his safe point of observation,
feasted his soul to the full. The ivory whiteness
of her neck shaded imperceptibly into the creamy lace
of her gown. Underneath her firm, well rounded
chin, on the left side, was a place that was almost
a dimple, but not quite. There was a real dimple
in her chin and another at each corner of her mouth,
where the full scarlet lips drooped a little from
sadness. Star-like, her brown eyes searched the
far shadows and sometimes the flicker of the candle
brought a dancing glint of gold into their depths.
And as always, like a halo, stray gleams hovered about
her head, bent slightly forward now and full into
the light, throwing into faint relief the short straight
nose, and the full, short upper lip.
Smiling, and wholly unconscious, it
was as though she pleaded with the instrument to give
her back some half-forgotten melody. Presently
the strings answered, shyly at first, then in full
soft chords that sang and crooned through the dusk.
Alden, in his remote corner, drew a long breath of
rapture. The ineffable sweetness of her pervaded
his house, not alone with the scent of violets, but
with the finer, more subtle fragrance of her personality.
She wore no jewels, except her wedding
ring-not even the big, blazing diamond
with which her husband had sealed their betrothal.
She had a string of pearls and a quaint, oriental
necklace set with jade, and sometimes she wore one
or two turquoises, or a great, pale sapphire set
in silver, but that was all. Out of the world
of glitter and sparkle, she had chosen these few things
that suited her, and was content.
From another corner came the sound
of slow, deep breathing. Outside the circle of
candlelight, Madame had fallen asleep in her chair.
The full June moon had shadowed the net curtain upon
the polished floor and laid upon it, in silhouette,
an arabesque of oak leaves. It touched Madame’s
silvered hair to almost unearthly beauty as she leaned
back with her eyes closed, and brought a memory of
violets and sun from the gold-tasselled amethyst that
hung on her breast. The small slender hands lay
quietly, one on either arm of her chair. A white
crepe shawl, heavy with Chinese embroidery, lay over
her shoulders,-a gift from Edith. A
Summer wind, like a playful child, stole into the room,
lifted the deep silk fringe of the shawl, made merry
with it for a moment, then tinkled the prisms on the
chandelier and ran away again.
The fairy-like sound of it, as though
it were a far, sweet bell, chimed in with Edith’s
dreamy chords and brought her to herself with a start.
She turned quickly, saw that Madame was asleep, and
stopped playing.
“Go on,” said Alden, in a low tone.
“Please do.”
“I mustn’t,” she
whispered, with her finger on her lips. “Your
mother is asleep and I don’t want to disturb
her.”
“Evidently you haven’t,” he laughed.
“Hush!” Edith’s
full, deep contralto took on an affected sternness.
“You mustn’t talk.”
“But I’ve got to,” he returned.
“Shall we go outdoors?”
“Yes, if you like.”
“Don’t you want a wrap of some sort?”
“Yes. Wait a moment, and I’ll get
it.”
“No-tell me where it is, and I’ll
go.”
“It’s only a white chiffon
scarf,” she said. “I think you’ll
find it hanging from the back of that low rocker,
near the dressing-table.”
He went up-stairs, silently and swiftly,
and paused, for a moment, at Edith’s door.
It seemed strange to have her permission to turn the
knob and go in. He hesitated upon the threshold,
then entered the sweet darkness which, to him, would
have meant Edith, had it been blown to him across
the wastes of Sahara.
How still it was! Only the cheery
piping of a cricket broke the exquisite peace of the
room; only a patch of moonlight, upon the polished
floor, illumined the scented dusk. He struck a
match, and lighted one of the candles upon the dressing-table.
The place was eloquent of her, as
though she had just gone out. The carved ivory
toilet articles-he could have guessed that
she would not have silver ones,-the crystal
puff box, with a gold top ornamented only by a monogram;
no, it was not a monogram either, but interlaced initials
trailing diagonally across it; the mirror, a carelessly
crumpled handkerchief, and a gold thimble-he
picked up each article with a delightful sense of
intimacy.
Face down upon the dressing-table
was a photograph, framed in dull green leather.
That, too, he took up without stopping to question
the propriety of it. A man’s face smiled
back at him, a young, happy face, full of comradeship
and the joy of life for its own sake.
This, then, was her husband!
Alden’s heart grew hot with resentment at the
man who had made Edith miserable. He had put those
sad lines under her eyes, that showed so plainly sometimes
when she was tired, made her sweet mouth droop at
the corners, and filled her whole personality with
the wistfulness that struck at his heart, like the
wistfulness of a little child.
This man, with the jovial countenance,
and doubtless genial ways, had the right to stand
at her dressing-table, if he chose, and speculate
upon the various uses of all the daintiness that was
spread before him. He had the right and cared
nothing for it, while the man who did care, stood
there shamefaced, all at once feeling himself an intruder
in a sacred place.
He put the photograph back, face down,
as it had been, took the scarf, put out the light,
and went back down-stairs. He stopped for a moment
in the hall to wonder what this was that assailed him
so strangely, this passionate bitterness against the
other man, this longing to shelter Edith from whatever
might make her unhappy.
The living-room was dark. In
her moonlit corner, Madame still slept. From
where he stood, he could see the dainty little lavender-clad
figure enwrapped in its white shawl. There was
no sign of Edith in the room, so he went out upon
the veranda, guessing that he should find her there.
She had taken out two chairs-a
favourite rocker of her own, and the straight-backed,
deep chair in which Alden usually sat when he was
reading. The chairs faced each other, with a little
distance between them. Edith sat in hers, rocking,
with her hands crossed behind her head, and her little
white feet stretched out in front of her.
Without speaking, Alden went back
for a footstool. Then he turned Edith, chair
and all, toward the moonlight, slipped the footstool
under her feet, laid the fluttering length of chiffon
over her shoulders, and brought his own chair farther
forward.
“Why,” she laughed, as
he sat down, “do you presume to change my arrangements?”
“Because I want to see your face.”
“Didn’t it occur to you that I might want
to see yours?”
“Not especially.”
“My son,” she said, in
her most matronly manner, “kindly remember that
a woman past her first youth always prefers to sit
with her back toward the light.”
“I’m older than you are,” he reminded
her, “so don’t be patronising.”
“In years only,” she returned.
“In worldly wisdom and experience and all the
things that count, I’m almost as old as your
mother is. Sometimes,” she added, bitterly,
“I feel as though I were a thousand.”
A shadow crossed his face, but, as
his figure loomed darkly against the moon, Edith did
not see it. The caressing glamour of the light
revealed the sad sweetness of her mouth, but presently
her lips curved upward in a forced smile.
“Why is it?” she asked, “that moonlight
makes one think?”
“I didn’t know it did,”
he replied. “I thought it was supposed to
have quite the opposite effect.”
“It doesn’t with me.
In the sun, I’m sane, and have control of myself,
but nights like this drive me almost mad sometimes.”
“Why?” he asked gently, leaning toward
her.
“Oh, I don’t know,”
she sighed. “There’s so much I might
have that I haven’t.” Then she added,
suddenly: “What did you think of my husband’s
picture?”
The end of the chiffon scarf rose
to meet a passing breeze, then fell back against the
softness of her arm. A great grey-winged night
moth fluttered past them. From the high bough
of a distant maple came the frightened twitter of
little birds, wakeful in the night, and the soft,
murmurous voice of the brooding mother, soothing them.
“How did you know?” asked Alden, slowly.
“Oh, I just knew. You were
looking at my dressing-table first, and you picked
up the picture without thinking. Then, as soon
as you knew who it was, you put it down, found the
scarf, and came out.”
“Do you love him?”
“No. That is, I don’t
think I do. But-oh,” she added,
with a sharp indrawing of her breath, “how I
did love him!”
“And he-” Alden went on.
“Does he love you?”
“I suppose so, in his way.
As much as he is capable of caring for anything except
himself, he cares for me.”
She rose and walked restlessly along
the veranda, the man following her with his eyes,
until she reached the latticed end, where a climbing
crimson rose, in full bloom, breathed the fragrance
of some far Persian garden. Reaching up, she
picked one, on a long, slender stem.
Alden appeared beside her, with his
knife in his hand. “Shall I take off the
thorns for you?”
“No, I’m used to thorns.
Besides, the wise ones are those who accept things
as they are.” She thrust the stem into her
belt, found a pin from somewhere, and pinned the flower
itself upon the creamy lace of her gown.
“It’s just over your heart,”
he said. “Is your heart a rose too?”
“As far as thorns go, yes.”
She leaned back against one of the
white columns of the porch. She was facing the
moonlight, but the lattice and the rose shaded her
with fragrant dusk.
“Father and Mother planted this
rose,” Alden said, “the day they were
married.”
“How lovely,” she answered,
without emotion. “But to think that the
rose has outlived one and probably will outlive the
other!”
“Mother says she hopes it will.
She wants to leave it here for me and my problematical
children. The tribal sense runs rampant in Mother.”
“When are you and Miss Starr
going to be married?” asked Edith, idly.
Alden started. “How did
you know?” he demanded, roughly, possessing
himself of her hands. “Who told you-Mother,
or-Miss Starr?”
“Neither,” replied Edith,
coldly, releasing herself. “I-just
knew. I beg your pardon,” she added, hastily.
“Of course it’s none of my affair.”
“But it is,” he said,
under his breath. Then, coming closer, he took
her hands again. “Look here, Edith, there’s
something between you and me-do you know
it?”
“How do you mean?” She
tried to speak lightly, but her face was pale.
“You know very well what I mean.
How do you know what I think, what I do, what I am?
And the nights-no, don’t try to get
away from me-from that first night when
I woke at four and knew you were crying, to that other
night when you knew it was I who was awake with you,
and all the nights since when the tide of time has
turned between three and four! I’ve known
your thoughts, your hopes, your dreams, as you’ve
known mine!
“And the next day,” he
went on, “when you avoid me even with your eyes;
when you try to hide with laughter and light words
your consciousness of the fact that the night before
you and I have met somewhere, in some mysterious way,
and known each other as though we were face to face!
Can you be miserable, and I not know it? Can
I be tormented by a thousand doubts, and you not know
it? Could you be ill, or troubled, or even perplexed,
and I not know, though the whole world lay between
us? Answer me!”
Edith’s face was very white
and her lips almost refused to move. “Oh,
Boy,” she whispered, brokenly. “What
does it mean?”
“This,” he answered, imperiously.
“It means this-and now!”
He took her into his arms, crushing
her to him so tightly that she almost cried out with
the delicious pain of it. In the rose-scented
shadow, his mouth found hers.
Time and space were no more.
At the portal of the lips, soul met soul. The
shaded veranda, and even the house itself faded away.
Only this new-born ecstasy lived, like a flaming star
suddenly come to earth.
Madame stirred in her sleep.
Then she called, drowsily: “Alden!
Edith!” No one answered, because no one heard.
She got up, smothering a yawn behind her hand, wondered
that there were no lights, waited a moment, heard
nothing, and came to the window.
The moon flooded the earth with enchantment-a
silvery ocean of light breaking upon earth-bound shores.
A path of it lay along the veranda-opal
and tourmaline and pearl, sharply turned aside by the
shadow of the rose.
Madame drew her breath quickly.
There they stood, partly in the dusk and partly in
the light, close in each other’s arms, with the
misty silver lying lovingly upon Edith’s hair.
She sank back into a chair, remembering,
with vague terror, the vision she had seen in the
crystal ball. So, then, it was true, as she might
have known. Sorely troubled, and with her heart
aching for them both, she crept up-stairs.
“Boy,” whispered Edith,
shrinking from him. “Oh, Boy! The whole
world lies between you and me!”
His only answer was to hold her closer
still, to turn her mouth again to his. “Not
to-night,” he breathed, with his lips on hers.
“God has given us to-night!”
White and shaken, but with her eyes
shining like stars, at last she broke away from him.
She turned toward the house, but he caught her and
held her back.
“Say it,” he pleaded. “Say
you love me!”
“I do,” she whispered. “Oh,
have pity, and let me go!”
“And I,” he answered,
with his face illumined, “love you with all my
heart and soul and strength and will-with
every fibre of my being, for now and for ever.
I am yours absolutely, while earth holds me, and even
beyond that.”
Edith looked up quickly, half afraid.
His eyes were glowing with strange, sweet fires.
“Say it!” he commanded. “Tell
me you are mine!”
“I am,” she breathed.
“God knows I am, but no-I had forgotten
for the moment!”
She broke into wild sobbing, and he
put his arm around her with infinite tenderness.
“Hush,” he said, as one might speak to
a child. “What has been does not matter-nothing
matters now but this. In all the ways of Heaven,
you are mine-mine for always, by divine
right!”
“Yes,” she said, simply,
and lifted her tear-stained face to his.
He kissed her again, not with passion,
but with that same indescribable tenderness.
Neither said a word. They went into the house
together, he found her candle, lighted it, and gave
it to her.
She took it from him, smiling, though
her hands trembled. Back in the shadow he watched
her as she ascended, with a look of exaltation upon
her face. Crimson petals were falling all around
her, and he saw the stain of the rose upon her white
gown, where he had crushed it against her heart.
Neither slept, until the tide of the
night began to turn. Swiftly, to her, through
the throbbing, living darkness, came a question and
a call.
“Mine?”
Back surged the unmistakable answer:
“Thine.” Then, to both, came dreamless
peace.