Both were breathing rather fast and irregularly as they confronted each other.
“What is it you wish to say to me?” she asked.
“Couldn’t we walk in the woods and talk together like comrades who really care for our common friendship?”
Her dark eyes rested on him, curiously intent. And in them he read irrevocable distrust of man, and an abstract of him still more hopelessly profound.
She said: “I have my household duties. There is no reason why we should be idle together.... Even if we were on a different footing there is no particular reason why I should feel it necessary to entertain you.... You have made a matter of business very agreeable for me. But it remains entirely a matter of business. I — I should not wish to have it otherwise, Mr. Dean.”
He said steadily: “Don’t you care for any personal friendship between us?”
“I—” she caught her breath— “No,” she said, looking away from him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, quietly.
When he had gone away she went to the window and stood looking after him until he had entered the woods. And stood there motionless for a while even after his figure had disappeared.
Then she sat down on a rickety chair, her slim hands clasped, her dimpled elbows resting between her knees.
It seemed that after all there was nothing very pressing that demanded her attention, for she continued in the same attitude, motionless, her brown eyes fixed on nothing, until Aunty came slowly waddling into the kitchen, cocking an inquisitive eye.
“Plenty of trouble,” remarked the bird pleasantly.
V
He lay full length under a beech tree on the bank of the stream. The pool below was deep and quiet and no trout were spawning there.
Occasionally a mink slipped out from between two rocks and took a look at him and Dean stared back at the pointed, furry muzzle until its owner again withdrew to await a more favorable opportunity for piscatorial murder.
And Dean’s preoccupied gaze shifted elsewhere and he dreamed on, lying motionless there on the thick green carpet of the moss.
All at once, without either seeing or hearing her he was aware that she was very near him; and he turned his head and saw her standing behind him on the moss.
“I thought I’d come,” she said. He started to rise but she consigned him to his place, with a slight gesture and knelt down on the moss near him seating herself sideways.
“What I said about not caring for your friendship is not true. You know I do, anyway.”
“I didn’t know it.”
“Did you believe what T said?”
“I tried not to. I’ve been lying here thinking about it.”
“Think no more then,” she said very quietly: “I am glad to be friends with you.” She tossed a stick into the pool below with an odd finality of gesture as though finished with that subject: “What was it that you wished to tell me?” she asked.
He sat up, cross-legged, gathering his ankles into both hands.
“Tell me something first,” he said. “Do you mind if I pry into your affairs a little?”
She looked up as though startled; but he went on pleasantly: “It’s about the land you own;” and he saw the color subsiding in her cheeks and the brown eyes smile their relief.
“What do you wish to know?” she inquired.
“How many acres there are in your tract.”
“I think there are about three thousand acres,” she said; her straight brows knitting slightly in an effort to remember.
“What are the taxes?”
“They are very low. I pay them by selling fire-wood to a company in Sagamore City.”
“Have you an idea as to the value of your property?” he asked.
“No.”
“What does woodland bring an acre in this vicinity?”
“Very little.”
“Can’t you recollect any parcels being sold recently?”
She knitted her pretty brows in thought again; one slim finger rested musingly against her cheek.
“An old man,” she began, “sold twenty acres of young woods to the company at Sagamore City for one hundred dollars. Later he sold ten acres of land, on which grew marketable lumber, for one hundred, and fifty dollars. This happened last winter.... I know about it because his hands had been frozen and I had to write his letters to the lumber company.”
“Three thousand acres,” he said, “at fifteen dollars an acre makes your land worth forty-five thousand dollars.”
The girl laughed outright: “That is a very beautiful theory,” she said. “But if anybody offered me a dollar an acre — or half a dollar an acre, I should be only too happy. I offered to sell it all once for a thousand dollars, but nobody seemed to care to buy it.”
“Why not?”
“It is too far from the railroad. Besides only half of it bears marketable timber, and half of that timber is hard wood.”
He nodded: “Then, at prevailing prices your land ought to be worth—” he drew out his note book and pencil and made a few figures— “twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars.”
She nodded almost gaily: “Isn’t it wonderful,” she said, “how mathematics so often proves nothing?”
“It’s here in black and white according to prevailing prices in the metropolis of Anne’s Bridge,” he insisted, showing her the page in his note book.
“Wonderful, wonderful,” she exclaimed with smiling mockery. “I am wealthy and I never suspected it! There is only one slight matter to settle before I select my new gowns.”
“What is that?”
“Oh, merely to find a purchaser for my property. Be kind enough to attend to that detail and send me the check when convenient; I shall be very busy fitting gowns.”
They laughed for a moment; her brown eyes, care-free for the first time, were brilliant with mirth.
It was their beauty perhaps, or perhaps it was the news he was to reveal to her that excited him so that when he started to impart it he stammered and had to wait a moment.
Then he said: “There is a man in New York who desires to buy your property. He will offer you twenty-two thousand dollars for it.”
At first she supposed he was jesting, and she laughed again. Suddenly her face went pale as a wind-flower.
“I am entirely in earnest,” he said.
Her hands crept up to her sun-tanned throat; she sat there breathing rapidly and irregularly, her dark eyes still dilated and fixed on him.
“At present,” he said, “my client’s name could not be revealed. Other deals in this vicinity are pending. All transactions ought to be closed and titles taken within the next three or four months. Is that agreeable to you?”
She seemed bereft of speech.
“I wonder,” he said, whether you would empower me and trust me to carry through this deal for you? Would you?”
She was silent; he asked the question again and she looked up hastily and nodded.
“Will you trust me with it?”
“Yes — of course!”
“But you know nothing about me?” he insisted, smiling.
She sat with the left hand resting close against her breast, and he saw it rise and fall with her breathing.
“Have you really any faith in me?” he asked pleasantly.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I — don’t know.”
He bent forward, laughingly, drew her rigid little hand from her breast, and touched it lightly with his lips.
“Faith,” he said, “never really dies in any of us.... Once you said to me that there were those who had nothing to thank God for.... You spoke like a frightened and maltreated child. You are not very much more than a child, now.... And how in God’s name you have managed here all alone, I don’t know. But the end is in sight now.... Please don’t cry—”
She turned, flung her elbow against the silvery beech tree, and buried her face against her arm.
“It’s all right,” he said in a lo
w voice; “it’s absolutely all right.”
After a moment he added: “I must go to-morrow morning.”
If she understood she did not move. “I leave my dogs with you — on the chance of returning in October for the shooting. Anyway they are a guarantee that I shall return.... Shall we walk back to the house?”
After a moment she rose and stood with her arm resting across her eyes. He waited. Presently she moved her other hand, gropingly. He took it in his, drew it under his arm and covered it with his hands.
So, together, they walked back through the woods, her arm still covering her wet eyes.
He sat late that night in his room, sometimes thinking, sometimes packing up for his departure. He had said good-night to her, going to the kitchen for the purpose where she was busy in the candle-light.
So he was unprepared to encounter her in the star-light outside, nor was she prepared to see him there at such an hour, for her slim bare feet were thrust into tattered slippers and a shabby ulster covered her nightdress and her thick lustrous hair curled nearly to her waist making her seem about fifteen there under the pale glory of the stars.
“Couldn’t you sleep?” he asked, approaching her where she had halted by the stream.
“No; I am too happy.... Also sometimes I bathe at night in the pool down there.”
“In that case,” he said smilingly, “I shall yield the field to you and retire—”
“I have bathed,” she said, naively displaying a bath-towel and flinging it across a clothesline tied to the great elm.
Then she looked around at him. “Couldn’t you sleep, either?”
“I am not inclined that way.... What an enchanting night!”
They leaned against the giant elm; all around them in a circle drooped the boughs laden with leaves; the stream, star-brilliant, whispered and laughed at their feet.
A little breeze lifted her hair, stirring it fragrantly.
“It’s a very wonderful thing that this client of mine means to do,” he said as though half to himself. “He means to give Anne’s Bridge to the wilderness again — restore it to its own.... Every sign of decrepitude and decay is to vanish; those ruined houses are to go; the sandy fields are to be plowed and set with hundreds of thousands of young pines and hemlocks.... And around this wild reserve shall run a game-proof fence. Only this old yellow house shall remain of all the houses here; and it shall become, with its other new wings, a wonderful summer home for the master of the forest.”
He turned to her, laughingly: “I ought to envy the future master of this land.... But I don’t.... I wish him well.”
“I, too,” she said.
“I wish him happiness in that house.”
“I, too,” she said.
“Then it will surely happen to that fortunate man, — if you also desire his happiness.”
She said in a low voice: “I desire yours, also.... You have been so kind to me — it’s like a miracle — and no way to thank you—”
“My client wanted the place. No thanks are due me.”
“I did not mean for that.... I meant — your friendship.”
“Why should you thank me for what I could not withhold if you care to have it?”
But she only sighed lightly; and they turned away together toward the house.
In the hallway she paused, looked up at him, then laid her hand very quietly in his.
“Whatever comes to pass,” she said, “remember that I cared for your friendship.... And that I gave you mine — even before you asked for it....You didn’t know that, did you?”
“No.”
She smiled faintly:
“Good-night,” she said.
So he went to his room to sleep if he could; and sleep was kinder to him; for the sun was shining full in his eyes when he awoke.
At the breakfast table which she shared with him she seemed shy and serious by turns, scarcely responding to his gay sallies and lightly humorous view of things in general.
“If I don’t come back in October for the shooting,” he repeated, “I’ll come later anyway — to see the dogs.”
She nodded, caught the expression in his eyes, and blushed. And that left them both a little constrained and uncommunicative.
Nor was she less inclined to reticence when at last he had harnessed the horse, hooked up the wagon, piled in his luggage, and taken the reins from her listless hands.
“Perhaps you don’t think I know how to drive,” he said. “Let me inform you that I can drive one nag in front of another or two nags in front of two others, or a spike! Have you any increased respect and admiration for me now?”
She glanced at him sideways, and folded her slim hands in her lap.
Down the sandy road and into the autumn tinted woods they drove. Rabbits hopped ahead or scuttled out of sight; a big cock-grouse, dusting, straightened up from his agreeable wallow, craned his neck at them, then rose on thundering wings and burst away through the leafy thickets.
“I wonder,” remarked Dean, “whether the Emma is still on duty.”
She looked up and laughed: “The Emma,” she replied, “has been on duty ever since I was, a little girl.”
“Was she just as irrational and irresponsible in those days?”
“Every bit, I believe.”
“She reminds me of a hen,” he concluded, disgustedly, giving the reins a shake; and the fat, sleek horse, surprised, broke into a partial trot. The accelerated pace, however, was only temporary; Dean glanced at his watch.
“As the fishing season is closed the train may be on time,” he said sarcastically.
She laughed again and shook her head: “It never is. They say that when the engineer gets lonesome he stops the Emma and goes back to the baggage car for a game of checkers.”
“Is that really true?” he demanded, appalled.
The girl threw back her head and laughed. And her sunbonnet fell on her shoulders, framing her cheeks and throat. And, at that, a thrill shot through him and his heart seemed to cease beating for a second; — so long ago, it seemed to him, since the same incident had first revealed to him this young girl’s loveliness.
Her laughter rippled and died out; and, still smiling, she turned her head away.
“Did you believe such nonsense?” she murmured.
To him her sun-tanned profile seemed as delicate as though chiselled from palest ivory, tinted with carmine where the lips rested, sensitively upon one another. As he watched her a shadow fell across her face, quenching the lingering gaiety; she drew a deeper breath, almost a sigh, as though tired. And, after a moment:
“Of what were you thinking?” he asked in a low voice.
She turned toward him with the directness of a child:
“I was thinking that you are going away,” she said seriously.
“Are you sorry?”
“Yes, I am sorry.... And I was thinking, too, about this client of yours who is going to take away from you and me the woods and streams, which we care for.”
“Do you care for them? I thought it made you happy to know that you were about to escape them forever.”
“Yes, — I have felt that way.... I suppose your coming made a difference. Before you came it seemed at times as though I should die of solitude and silence.... I thought I hated it all — all! — forest, stream, those still blue hills, and the wide wilderness of sky beyond — but it seems different now,” she added with an unconscious sigh.
“These August days have been happy ones for me,” he said, watching her.
She nodded:
“I was happy, also. You thought I was not. But I was. Why, it is the most wonderful of any thing that has ever happened to me—” she turned toward him impulsively;— “think what it has meant to me, Mr. Dean! — the daily companionship of a man like you. Just to see you — the way you move about — and to hear a cultivated voice again — and feel in my heart the warmth of your courtesy and kindness—”
He said: “I had no idea that I meant much to you. W
hat you say makes me very happy and proud.”
“You have been kinder than you know,” she murmured, looking away from him— “kinder than anybody in the world.... I wanted you to know this — before you went away.... And if I seemed indifferent — at times — or inattentive, or — unresponsive — it was not really so.... I am — that way — in appearance. But I am not reticent or sullen by nature. I am appreciative — and grateful — for kindness.... There is nothing in the world to compare to kindness. And when such a man as you shows it to such a — to me,—” she turned and looked up at him, and a tremulous smile touched her lips;— “then,” she said, “as you say there is truly a reason for thanking God who — who has not until now been very c-considerate toward me.”
“What has this God done to you?” he asked gravely.
“He — abandoned me.”
“Nobody should say such a thing.”
“Christ said it.”
He bent his troubled eyes on her in silence. After a while she said: “Even Christ found pain hard to bear.... And if I have ever said that I did not believe in him, it is not true. I do believe... now.... But I don’t know what I shall come to believe — if I may not see you — sometimes — so that you can remind me that God exists — as you once reminded me there in the woods.”
He said unsteadily: “Could you care for me — enough to be — my wife?”
For a moment she stared at him in a stunned way, then her face grew white as death.
“Could you care for me, that way?” he asked again.
She turned unconsciously like a trapped creature seeking escape, then sat trembling on the seat.
He did not touch her. After a while she doubled forward, covering her white face with her slender weather-stained hands.
Two hours later they drove up in sight of the single track.
He carried his luggage to the edge of the cross-ties, then returned slowly to where she was seated, her young head bowed in her hands.
For a while she stood by the wagon in silence. The fat horse switched his tail and snatched at leaves. It seemed to grow very still on the forest edge.
Then, from far in the north, came a long-drawn sound, distant, shrill, petulant. The Emma was on her way.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 743
