"You"ve one of those const.i.tutions which require air and light and sunshine," he answered.
"You"re quite right. I actually bleach in the shadow--like lettuce.
That"s why Aunt Paula always sends me away for a month every now and then to the quietest place proper for a well-brought-up young person."
His eyes shadowed as though they had caught that blasting shade in hers. From gossip about the Mountain House, later from her own admission, he knew who "Aunt Paula" was--"a spirit medium, or something," said the gossip; "a great teacher of a new philosophy,"
said Annette Markham.
Dr. Blake, partly because adventure had kept him over-young, held still his basic, youthful ideas about the proper environment for woman.
Whenever the name "Aunt Paula," softened with the accents of affection, proceeded from that low, contralto voice, it hurt the new thing, greater than any conventional idea, which was growing up in him. He even suspected, at such times, what might be the "something n.o.bler than nursing."
A big apple tree shaded the sidelines of the Mountain House tennis court. A bench fringed its trunk. Annette threw herself down, back against the bark. It was late afternoon. The other house-guests droned over bridge on the piazzas or walked in the far woods; they were alone out-of-doors. And Annette, always, until now, so chary of confidences, developed the true patient"s weakness and began to talk symptoms.
"It is curious the state I"m in before Aunt Paula sends me away," she said; "I was a nervous child, and though I"ve outgrown it, I still have attacks of nerve f.a.g or something like it. I can feel them coming on and so can she. You know we"ve been together so much that it"s like--like two bees in adjoining cells. The cell-wall has worn thin; we can almost touch. She knows it often before I do. She makes me go to bed early; often she puts me to sleep holding my hand, as she used to do when I was a little girl. But even sleep doesn"t much help. I come out of it with a kind of fright and heaviness. I have little memories of curious dreams and a queer sense, too, that I mustn"t remember what I"ve dreamed. I grow tired and heavy--I can always see it in my face.
Then Aunt Paula sends me away, and I become all right again--as I am now."
Blake did not express the impatient thought of his mind. He only said:
"A little sluggishness of the blood and a little congestion of the brain. I had such sleep once after I"d done too much work and fought too much heat in the Cavite Hospital. Only with me it took the form of nightmare--mostly, I was in process of being boloed."
"Yes, perhaps it was that"--her eyes deepened to their most faraway blue--"and perhaps it is something else. I think it may be. Aunt Paula thinks so, too, though she never says it."
What was the something? Did she stand again on the edge of revelation?
Events had gone past the time when he could wait patiently for her confidence, could approach it through tact. It was the moment not for snipping but for bold charging. And his blood ran hot.
"This something--won"t you tell me what it is? Why are you always so mysterious with me? Why--when I want to know everything about you?"
After he had said this, he knew that there was no going backward.
Doubts, fears, terrors of conventionalities, awe of his conservative, blood-proud mother in Paris--all flew to the winds.
Perhaps she caught something of this in his face, for she drew away a trifle and said:
"I might have told you long ago, but I wasn"t sure of your sympathy."
"I want you to be sure of my sympathy in all things."
"Ah, but your mind is between!" That phrase brought a shock to Dr.
Blake. At the only spiritualistic seance he had ever attended, a greasy affair in a hall bedroom, he had heard that very phrase. A picture of this woman, so clean and windblown of mind and soul, caught like a trapped fly in the web of the unclean and corrupt--it was that which quite whirled him off his feet.
"Between our hearts then, between our hearts!" he cried. "Oh, Annette, I love you!" His voice came out of him low and distinct, but all the power in the world vibrated behind it. "I have loved you always. You"ve been with me everywhere I went, because I was looking for you. I"ve seen a part of you in the best of every woman"--he pulled himself up, for neither by look nor gesture did she respond--"I"ve no right to be saying this--"
"If you have not," she answered, and a delicate blush ran over her skin, "no other man has!" She said it simply, but with a curious kind of pride.
He would have taken her hand on this, but the grave, direct gaze of her sapphirine eyes restrained him. It was not the look of a woman who gives herself, but rather that of a woman who grieves for the ungivable.
"Ah," she said, "if anyone"s to blame, it is I. I"ve brought it on myself! I"ve been weak--weak!"
"No," he said, "I brought it on--G.o.d brought it on--but what does that matter?
"It"s _here_. I can no more fight it than I can fight the sea."
Now her head dropped forward and her hands, with that gracefully uncertain motion which was like flower-stalks swayed by a breeze, had covered her face.
"I can"t speak if I look at you," she said, "and I must before you go further--I must tell you all about myself so that you will understand."
The confidence, long sought, was coming, he thought; and he thought also how little he cared for it now that he was pursuing a greater thing.
"You know so little about me that I must begin far back--you don"t even know about my aunt--"
"I know something--what you"ve said, what Mrs. Cole at the Mountain House told me. She"s Mrs. Paula Markham--" his mind went on, "the great fakir of the spook doctors," but his lips stifled the phrase and said after a pause, "the great medium."
"I don"t like to hear her called that," said Annette. "In spite of what I"m going to tell you, I never saw but once the thing they call a medium. That was years ago--but the horrible sacrilege of it has never left me. She had a part of truth, and she was desecrating it by guesses and catch words--selling it for money! Aunt Paula is broader than I.
"It"s part of the truth," she said, "that woman is desecrating the work, but she"s serving in her way." I suppose so--but since then I"ve never liked to hear Aunt Paula called a medium."
She paused a second on this.
"If I were only sure of your sympathy!" A note of pleading fluttered in her voice.
"No thought of yours, however I regard it, but is sure of my sympathy--because it"s yours," he answered.
As though she had not heard, she went on.
"I was an orphan. I never knew my father and mother. The first things I remember are of the country--perhaps that is why I love the out-of-doors--the sky through my window, filled with huge, puffy, ice-cream clouds, a little new-born pig that somebody put in my bed one morning--daisy-fields like snow--and the darling peep-peep-peep of little bunches of yellow down that I was always trying to catch and never succeeding. I couldn"t say _chicken_. I always said _shicken_"
She paused. With that tenderness which every woman entertains for her own little girlhood, she smiled.
"I"ve told you of the five white birches. I was looking at them and naming them on my fingers the day that Aunt Paula came. My childhood ended there. I seemed to grow up all at once."
Blake muttered something inarticulate. But at her look of inquiry, he merely said. "Go on!"
"She isn"t really my aunt by blood,--Aunt Paula isn"t. You understand--my father and her husband were brothers. They all died--everybody died but just Aunt Paula and me. So she took me away with her. And after that it was always the dreadful noise and confusion of New York, with only my one doll--black Dinah--a rag-baby. I thought," she interrupted herself wistfully, "I"d send Dinah to you when I got back to New York. Would you like her?"
"Like her--like her! My--my--" But he swallowed his words. "Go on!" He commanded again.
"Afterwards came London and then India. Such education as I had, I got from governesses. I didn"t have very much as girls go in my--in my cla.s.s. I didn"t understand that then, any more than I understand why I wasn"t allowed to go to school or to play with other girls. There was a time when I rebelled frightfully at that. I can tell definitely just when it began. We were pa.s.sing a convent in the Bronx, and it was recess time. The sisters in their starched caps were sewing over by the fence, and the girls were playing--a ring game, "Go in and out the window"--I can hear it now. I crowded my little face against the pickets to watch, and two little girls who weren"t in the game pa.s.sed close to me. The nearest one--I "m sure I"d know her now if I saw her grown up. She was of about my own age, very dark, with the silkiest black hair and the longest black eyelashes that I ever saw. She had a dimple at one corner of her mouth. She wore on her arm a little bracelet with a gold heart dangling from it. I wasn"t allowed any jewelry; and it came into my mind that I"d like a gold bracelet like that, before it came that I"d like such a friend for my very ownest and dearest. The other girl, a red-haired minx who walked with her arm about _my_ girl"s waist--how jealous I was of her! I watched until Aunt Paula dragged me away. As I went, I shouted over my shoulder, "h.e.l.lo, little girl!" The little dark girl saw me, and shouted back, "h.e.l.lo!"
Dear little thing. I hope she"s grown up safe and very happy! She"ll never know what she meant to me!"
Her lips quivered again. Looking up into her face, Blake wondered for an instant at the sudden softness of her eyes. Then he realized that they were slowly filling with tears. He reached again to seize her hands.
"Oh, no, no--wait!" she said, weakly. After a pause, she resumed:
"That got up rebellion in me. All children have such periods, I"ve heard. I"m docile enough now. But before I was through with this one, Aunt Paula had to make my destiny clear to me--long before she meant to do so. And I grew to be resigned, and then glad, because it was a greater thing."
Here a rapid, inexplicable change crossed her face. From its firmness of health and strength, it fell toward the look of one "called"--
"I must go back again. Between Aunt Paula and me there was always a great sympathy. It"s hard to describe. Often we do not have to speak even of the most important things. When I come to know more about other people, I wondered at first why they needed to do so much talking.
Things have happened--things that I would not expect you to believe--"
She had kindled now, and she looked into his eyes like some sybil, divinely unconscious, preaching the unbelievable.
"I knew dimly, as a child knows, and accepts, that Aunt Paula had some wonderful mission and that it had to do with the other world--all you"re taught when they teach you to say your prayers. Little by little she made me understand. I grew up before I understood fully. The Guides--Aunt Paula"s--I have none as yet--had told her that I was a Light."