"To save you from just this, Amalia. To save you from the touch of my hand--this is the crime I have fought against."
"No. To love is not crime."
"To dare to love--with the curse on my head that I feel as Cain felt it--is crime. In the Eye he saw it always--as I--I--see it. To touch you--it is like bringing the crime and curse on you, and through your beautiful love making you suffer for it. See, Amalia? It was all I could do to go out of your life and say nothing." His voice trembled and his hand quivered as it rested on her hair. "I sat here to fight it. My heart--my heart that I have not yet learned to conquer--was pulling me back to you. I was faint and old. I could walk no farther until the fight was won. Oh, Amalia--Amalia! Leave me alone, with the curse on my head! It is not yours."
"No, and it is not yours. You have repent. I do not believe that poem my mother is thinking so great. It is the terror of the ancient ones, but to-day, no more. Take this. It is for you I bring it. I have wear it always on my bosom, wear it now on yours."
She quickly unclasped from her neck a threadlike chain of gold, and drew from her bosom a small ivory crucifix, to which it was attached.
Reaching up, she clasped it around his neck, and thrust the cross in his bosom. Then, thinking he meant to protest, she seized his hands and held them, and her words came with the impetuous rush of her thoughts.
"No charm will help, Amalia. I killed my friend."
"Ah, no, "Arry King! Take this of me. It is not as you think for one charm I give it. No. It is for the love of Christ--that you remember and think of it. For that I wear it. For that I give it to you. If you have repent, and have the Christ in your heart, so are you high--lifted above the sin, and if they take you--if they put the iron on your hands--Ah, I know, it is there you go to give yourself up,--if they keep you forever in the prison, still forever are you free. If they put you to the death to be satisfied of the law, then quickly are you alive in Paradise with Christ. Listen, it is for the love that you give yourself up--for the sorrowfulness in your heart that you have killed your friend? Is not? Yes. So is good.
See. Look to the hills, the high mountains, all far around us?
They are beautiful. They are yours. G.o.d gives you. And the sky--so clear--and the bright sun and the spring life and the singing of the birds? All are yours--G.o.d gives. And the love in your heart--for me?
G.o.d gives, yes, and for the one you have hurt? Yes. G.o.d gives it.
And for the Christ who so loves you? Yes. So is the love the great life of G.o.d in you. It is yours. Listen. Go with the love in your heart--for me,--it will not hurt. It will be sweet to me. I carry no curse for you, as you say. It is gone. If I see you again in this world--as may be--is joy--great joy. If I see you no more here, yet in Paradise I will see you, and there also it will be joy, for it is the love that is all of life, and all of eternity, and lives--lives!"
Again he held her to his heart in a long embrace, and, when at last he walked down the trail into the desert, he still felt her tears on his cheek, her kisses on his lips, and her heart against his own.
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER XXVI
THE LITTLE SCHOOL-TEACHER
On a warm day in May, a day which opens the crab-apple blossoms and sets the bees humming, and the children longing for a chance to pull off shoes and stockings and go wading in the brook; on such a day the door of the little schoolhouse stood open and the sunlight lay in a long patch across the floor toward the "teacher"s desk," and the breeze came in and tossed a stray curl about her forehead, and the children turned their heads often to look at the round clock on the wall, watching for the slowly moving hands to point to the hour of four.
It was a mixed school. Children of all ages were there, from naughty little Johnnie Cole of five to Mary Burt and Hilton Le Moyne of seventeen and nineteen, who were in algebra and the sixth reader. It was well known by the rest of the children why Hilton Le Moyne lingered in the school this year all through May and June, instead of leaving in April, as usual, to help his uncle on the farm. It was "Teacher." He was in love with her, and always waited after school, hoping for a chance to walk home with her.
Poor boy! Black haired, red cheeked, and big hearted, he knew his love was hopeless, for he was younger than she--not so much; but there was Tom Howard who was also in love with her, and he had a span of sorrel horses which he had raised and broken himself, and they were his own, and he could come at any time--when she would let him--and take her out riding.
Ah, that was something to aspire to! Such a team as that, and "Teacher" to sit by his side and drive out with him, all in her pretty flat hat with a pink rose on it and green ribbons flying, and her green parasol over her head--sitting so easily--just leaning forward a bit and turning and laughing at what he was saying, and all the town seeing her with him, and his harness shining and new, making the team look as splendid as the best livery in town, and his buggy all painted so bright and new--well! The time would come when he too would have such an outfit. It would. And Teacher would see that Tom Howard was not the only one who could drive up after her in such style.
Little Teacher was tired to-day. The children had been restless and noisy, and her heart had been heavy with a great disappointment. She had been carefully saving her small salary that she might go when school closed and take a course at the "Art Inst.i.tute" in "Technique."
For a long time she had clung to the idea that she would become an ill.u.s.trator, and a great man had told her father that "with a little instruction in technique" his daughter had "a fortune at the tips of her fingers." Only technique! Yes, if she could get it!
Father could help her, of course, only father was a painter in oils and not an ill.u.s.trator--and then--he was so driven, always, and father and mother both thought it would be best for her to take the course of study recommended by the great man. So it was decided, for there was Martha married and settled in her home not far away from the Inst.i.tute, and Teacher could live with her and study. Ah, the long-coveted chance almost within her reach! Then--one difficulty after another intervened, beginning with a great fire in the fall which swept away Martha"s home and all they had acc.u.mulated, together with her husband"s school, rendering it necessary for the young couple to go back to Leauvite for the winter.
"Never mind, Betty, dear," Martha had encouraged her. "We"ll return in the spring and start again, and you can take the course just the same."
But now a general financial stringency prevailed all over the country.
"It always seems, when there"s a "financial stringency," that portraits and paintings are the things people economize on first of all," said Betty.
"Naturally," said Mary Ballard. "When people need food and clothing--they want them, and not pictures. We"ll just have to wait, dear."
"Yes, we"ll have to wait, Mary." Saucy Betty had a way of calling her mother "Mary." "Your dress is shabby, and you need a new bonnet; I noticed it in church,--you"d never speak of that, though. You"d wear your winter"s bonnet all summer."
Yes, Betty must see to it, even if it took every bit of the fund, that mother and Janey were suitably dressed. "Never mind, Mary, I"ll catch up some day. You needn"t look sorry. I"m all right about my own clothes, for Martha gave me a rose for my hat, and the new ribbons make it so pretty,--and my green parasol is as good as new for all I"ve had it three years, and--"
Betty stopped abruptly. Three years!--was it so long since that parasol was new--and she was so happy--and Richard came home--? The family were seated on the piazza as they were wont to be in the evening, and Betty walked quietly into the house, and up to her room.
Bertrand Ballard sighed, and his wife reached out and took his hand in hers. "She"s never been the same since," he said.
"Her character has deepened and she"s fine and sweet--"
"Yes, yes. I have three hundred dollars owing me for the Delong portrait. If I had it, she should have her course. I"ll make another effort to collect it."
"I would, Bertrand."
Julien Thurbyfil and his wife walked down the flower-bordered path side by side to the gate and stood leaning over it in silence.
Practical Martha was the first to break it.
"There will be just as much need for preparatory schools now as there was before the fire, Julien."
"Yes, dear, yes."
"And, meanwhile, we are glad of this sweet haven to come to, aren"t we? And it won"t be long before things are so you can begin again."
"Yes, dear, and then we"ll make it up to Betty, won"t we?"
But Julien was distraught and somber, in spite of brave words. He had not inherited Mary Ballard"s way of looking at things, nor his father-in-law"s buoyancy.
All that night Betty lay wakeful and thinking--thinking as she had many, many a time during the last three years, trying to make plans whereby she might adjust her thoughts to a life of loneliness, as she had decided in her romantic heart was all she would take. How could there be anything else for her since that terrible night when Richard had come to her and confessed his guilt--his love and his renunciation! Was she not sharing it all with him wherever he might be, and whatever he was doing? Oh, where was he? Did he ever think of her and know she was always thinking of him? Did he know she prayed for him, and was the thought a comfort to him? Surely Peter was the happier of the two, for he was not a sorrowing criminal, wandering the earth, hiding and repenting. So all her thoughts went out to Richard, and no wonder she was a weary little wight at the end of the school day.
Four o"clock, and the children went hurrying away, all but Hilton Le Moyne, who lingered awhile at his desk, and then reluctantly departed, seeing Teacher did not look up from her papers except to give him a nod and a fugitive little smile of absent-minded courtesy. Left thus alone, Betty lifted the lid of her desk and put away the school register and the carefully marked papers to be given out the next day, and took from a small portfolio a packet of closely written sheets.
These she untied and looked over, tossing them rapidly aside one after another until she found the one for which she searched.
It was a short poem, hastily written with lead pencil, and much crumpled and worn, as if it had been carried about. Now she straightened the torn edges and smoothed it out and began scanning the lines, counting off on her fingers the rhythmic beats; she copied the verses carefully on a fresh white sheet of paper and laid them aside; then, shoving the whole heap of written papers from her, she selected another fresh sheet and began anew, writing and scanning and writing again.
Steadily she worked while an hour slipped by. A great b.u.mblebee flew in at one window and boomed past her head and out at the other window, and a bluebird perched for an instant on the window ledge and was off again. She saw the bee and the bird and paused awhile, gazing with dreamy eyes through the high, uncurtained window at drifting clouds already taking on the tint of the declining sun; then she stretched her arms across her wide desk, and putting her head down on them, was soon fast asleep. Tired little Teacher!
The breeze freshened and tumbled her hair and fanned her flushed cheek, and it did more than that; for, as the drifting clouds betokened, the weather was changing, and now a gust of wind caught at her papers and took some of them out of the window, tossing and whirling them hither and thither. Some were carried along the wayside and lost utterly. One fluttered high over the tree tops and out across the meadow, and then suddenly ceased its flight and drifted slowly down like a dried leaf, past the face of a young man who sat on a stone, moodily gazing in the meadow brook. He reached out a long arm and caught it as it fluttered by, just in time to save it from annihilation in the water.
For a moment he held the sc.r.a.p of paper absently between his fingers, then glancing down at it he spied faintly written, half-obliterated verses and read them; then, with awakened interest, he read them again, smoothing the torn bit of paper out on his knee. The place where he sat was well screened from the road by a huge ba.s.swood tree, which spread great limbs quite across the stream, and swept both its banks with drooping branches and broad leaves. Now he held the sc.r.a.p on his open palm and studied it closely and thoughtfully. It was the worn piece from which Betty had copied the verses.
"Oh, send me a thought on the winds that blow.
On the wing of a bird send a thought to me; For the way is so long that I may not know, And there are no paths on the troubled sea.
"Out of the darkness I saw you go,-- Into the shadows where sorrows be,-- Wounded and bleeding, and sad and slow,-- Into the darkness away from me.