IV
“It will be dreadful,” sighed she; “for we have to stay a whole week longer, and I shall come here every afternoon. And there will be only ghosts in the woods, and I shall be very lonely.”
“Dear,” said I, “is it not something to have been happy? It has been such a wonderful summer; and come what may, nothing can rob us now of its least golden moment. And it is only for a little.”
“You will come back?” said she, half-doubtingly.
“Yes,” I said. “You wonderful, elfin creature, I shall undoubtedly come back—to your real home, and claim you there. Only I don’t believe you do live in Aberlin—you probably live in some great, gnarled oak hereabouts; and at night its bark uncloses to set you free, and you and your sisters dance out the satyrs’ hearts in the moonlight. Oh, I know, Marian! I simply know you are a dryad—a wonderful, laughing, clear-eyed dryad strayed out of the golden age.”
“What a boy it is!” she said. “No, I am only a really and truly girl, dear—a rather frightened girl, with very little disposition to laughter, just now. For you are going away—Oh, my dear, you have meant so much to me! The world is so different since you have come, and I am so happy and so miserable that—that I am afraid.” An infinitesimal handkerchief went upward to two great, sparkling eyes, and dabbed at them.
“Dear!” said I. And this remark appeared to meet the requirements of the situation.
There was a silence now. We sat in the same spot where I had first encountered Marian Winwood. Only this was an autumnal forest that glowed with many gem-like hues about us; and already the damp odour of decaying leaves was heavy in the air. It was like the Tosti thing translated out of marine terms into a woodland analogue. The summer was ended; but As the Coming of Dawn was practically complete.
It was not the book that I had planned, but a far greater one which was scarcely mine. There was no word written as yet. But for two months I had viewed life through Marian Winwood’s eyes; day by day, my half-formed, tentative ideas had been laid before her with elaborate fortuitousness, to be approved, or altered, or rejected, just as she decreed; until at last they had been welded into a perfect whole that was a Book, bit by bit, we had planned it, I and she; and, as I dreamed of it as it would be in print, my brain was fired with exultation, and I defied my doubt and I swore that the Book, for which I had pawned a certain portion of my self-respect, was worth—and triply worth—the price which had been paid. … This was in Marian’s absence.
“Dear!” said she. …
Her eyes were filled with a tender and unutterable confidence that thrilled me like physical cold. “Marian,” said I, simply, “I shall never come back.”
The eyes widened a trifle, but she did not seem to comprehend.
“Have you not wondered,” said I, “that I have never kissed you, except as if you were a very holy relic or a cousin or something of that sort?”
“Yes,” she answered. Her voice was quite emotionless.
“And yet—yet—” I sprang to my feet. “Dear God, how I have longed! Yesterday, only yesterday, as I read to you from the verses I had made to other women, those women that are colourless shadows by the side of your vivid beauty—and you listened wonderingly and said the proper things and then lapsed into dainty boredom—how I longed to take you in my arms, and to quicken your calm blood a little with another sort of kissing. You knew—you must have known! Last night, for instance—”
“Last night,” she said, very simply, “I thought—And I hoped you would.”
“What a confession for a nicely brought up girl! Well! I didn’t. And afterward, all night, I tossed in sick, fevered dreams of you. I am mad for love of you. And so, once in a while I kiss your hand. Dear God, your hand!” My voice quavered, effectively.
“Yes,” said she; “still, I remember—”
“I have struggled; and I have conquered this madness—for a madness it is. We can laugh together and be excellent friends; and we can never, never be anything more. Well! we have laughed, have we not, dear, a whole summer through? Now comes the ending. Ah, I have seen you puzzling over my meaning before this. You never understood me thoroughly; but it is always safe to laugh.”
She smiled; and I remember now it was rather as Mona Lisa smiles.
“For we can laugh together—that is all. We are not mates. You were born to be the wife of a strong man and the mother of his sturdy children; and you and your sort will inherit the earth and make the laws for us weaklings who dream and scribble and paint. We are not mates. But you have been very kind to me, Marian dear. So I thank you and say goodbye; and I pray that I may never see you after today.”
There was a sub-tang of veracity in my deprecation of an unasked-for artistic temperament; the thing is very often a nuisance, and was just then a barrier which I perceived plainly; and with equal plainness I perceived the pettier motives that now caused me to point it out as
