She raised her heavy lids questioningly, dreamily.
"So I must be planted again, for I am exhausted. Ah, well, she is a kindly mother, is old nature, and I like to lie down in her arms."
A little brook flowed sluggishly about big tufts of meadow-gra.s.s. The late violets and swamp pinks sent up heavy odors, mixed with a strong earthy smell. They seemed to be in the midst of nature"s housekeeping and walked lightly as unannounced guests. They wandered on to an open patch in the woods and sat down, sinking into the dry, heated wood-moss. Thornton had no desire to talk; she, who had listened to him the other time, now took him in charge.
"You are so far away, here, in the heat and the earth; so far away from the world. One gets tired always trying to catch up, and always being tired."
As she talked he felt his limbs heavy in obedience to her words. His mind became tranquil as under the influence of a narcotic; it seemed such a little thing what he did over there in Camberton, and so far removed from the strong pulse that beat beneath his body deep down in the earth.
"Why are men so foolish," she whispered on. "We want really a few things only; quiet, rest, peace, tranquil bodies, and this great earth to shimmer and change forever." His eyes followed her face. Her skin was so transparent that each word seemed to make a dot of flashing color; her bosom gently moved in rhythm to her words, and her eyes with the heavy falling lids smiled at him in conspiracy with the mouth.
"But that is not all the story--repose!" his words sounded hollow, like a lesson he had learned by rote and propriety had obliged him to repeat.
"No!" her voice was lower yet than ever; "then comes love, and with love will flow in the pa.s.sion and energy of life!"
The words moved her body. What she said seemed to him intensely true for the moment. Again propriety offered protest.
"And the other things--success and reputation and the good that the world needs."
She moved her hands carelessly.
"You would not need them." There was great scorn in that _them_. They lay quietly for several minutes while the earth murmured about. She had drawn him pa.s.sively into her net. Like some parasitic growth she was taking her strength from him. But it was a new side to him, this yielding, and so in a few moments he remembered that hard, angular self that went about the week in his clothes. He jumped up.
"I must ride back."
She followed without protest. She seemed to swim beside him, happy in elemental, very simple thoughts, a thin color flushing over her face.
"We have been so happy. It has been such a long, full day. Will you ever come again?" They stood in the shadows on the lawn. He was minded to say, _no_, but as he took her hand the Ellwell carriage drove up the country road. After glancing at it she blanched. Ellwell got out of the carriage unsteadily, with his large handsome face flushed and distorted. He was half drunk, and in a great pa.s.sion. Seizing the carriage whip in one hand and taking the bridle of the horse by the other, he lashed the trembling beast for some seconds. Mrs. Ellwell slipped out of the rear seat and half ran into the house. Bradley got out of the carriage slowly, with a sneer on his face, and nodded to Thornton. He smiled, as if to say: "Badly jagged, old fool."
"Go, there is Pete with your horse!" Miss Ellwell whispered. He was about to put his foot in the stirrup, and get away from the uncomfortable scene, when old Ellwell turned toward him.
"Don"t let me scare you, young man," he said, with his regulation courtesy, the air of the old Ellwells. Thornton shook hands with him, noticing his bloodshot eyes, the puffy folds under the eyelids, the general bloat of an ill-regulated human animal. "Are you going before dinner?" Ellwell continued. Thornton murmured something about duties and engagements. Ellwell bowed and lifted his hat. Miss Ellwell advanced as if to say good-by, then stopped. Her face was sad.
Thornton"s horse wheeled impatiently. He grasped the saddle, and a moment later he was down the road out into the self-respecting fields and woods, where all had the sanctified peace of a starlight night.
"She did not like to ask me again, poor girl," he murmured.
V
Whether Jarvis Thornton would have yielded again of his own accord to the impulse to travel Four Corners-ward remained unsolved. He had on hand some experiments that he was undertaking for a paper which he had to deliver at the close of the month. His day of dissipation seemed to spur him on once more along the accustomed path, and only in the few lazy moments at the end of the day did his mind recur to the still meadows baked in the June sun, and to the woman who had tempted him into a dangerous world. One evening, when he was speculating luxuriously on that day of impulse, Roper Ellwell knocked at his door and entered.
Ellwell had never been there before. Jarvis Thornton had seen him from time to time at the A. o.; but a fast set, the Roper-Ellwell crowd, having made the club over into a drinking and poker-playing establishment, he had ceased to go there frequently. Ellwell was considerably battered, Thornton noticed, as he invited him, coolly, to take a seat and help himself to a cigar. He had come to pour himself out, and a dirty enough story there was to tell. He had been dropped from Camberton for general inadequacy; but that was the least of his troubles.
"I could go to the old man and tell him that," he explained, "his own record at Camberton wasn"t any too fine, and he has a grudge against the old place. I am in here for a lot of money, which he will have to stand. But----"
Thornton looked at him unsympathetically, without commenting on his story. Why should he be troubled with the Ellwell excesses in the fourth generation? He failed yet to see the point to all these confidences.
"Your break-up is fairly complete," he said at last, coldly. "Many go down here, make a slip and bark their shins, but you have used two years in doing for yourself altogether."
Roper Ellwell hung his head.
"So the Dean said; and there"s something else." Jarvis Thornton ceased to smoke as he went on. "I am married; the old man will never stand that, and it will break up the mater and my sisters fearfully." In short, he had come to Thornton, with the confidence that an acquaintance with an older man inspires, to beg him to break the news to his people. Imbeciles gravitate to the strong.
"Why don"t you go yourself?" Thornton inquired, sick of the foolish affair. But one glance at the drooping, disjointed, miserable figure before him answered his question. He sat for some minutes debating the point with himself. He could make a conventional excuse, and play the man of the world, who did not involve himself with unpleasant people.
But his imagination presented the picture of the two sad women; their last hope knocked away by this cropping out of the family blight.
Perhaps he could put it to them in a better light than either Roper or his father. He saw again the girl"s face standing on the lawn in the summer twilight--a face that must be constantly sad.
"Well," he said, "is she a bad lot, the woman you have induced to share your future?"
Young Ellwell was too miserable to take fire at this brutality.
"No, she isn"t their sort though; she is a Swedish girl; she is a nurse in a hospital."
"You were forced to marry her?" the older man asked.
Ellwell nodded a.s.sent.
"And now she is making it uncomfortable for you."
"I am trying to find something to do," the young fellow protested.
"Then I won"t trouble them; but if I go down there the old man will fling me out of the house."
In short, Jarvis Thornton rose early the next morning, and before the sun had heated the road, was on his way to the Four Corners. There was not much that he could do, after all, in his pitiful errand; at least, for the mother. One more insult for her to accept, to be borne in stupid pa.s.sivity. But for the daughter who had to live, it would be a different question; and by the time he had reached Middleton, he had not made up his mind how the tale was to be told.
It was warm when he walked his horse over the gravelled drive at the Four Corners. Mrs. Ellwell and her elder daughter were sitting on the piazza sewing. Pete was washing carriages; the dogs were asleep in the gra.s.s. The place was quiet and in peace. The women received him cordially; a bright color spread over the girl"s face with a contented smile that seemed to speak intimately to him. He plunged into his business quickly, putting the case sympathetically before them. They listened without a word, the girl"s face trembling and twitching slightly. Ruby had joined them, and Thornton interrupted his story, but Mrs. Ellwell motioned him to go ahead. While he was talking he hunted about for some bit of light to throw on the situation at the end. "He wants to go away, and it might be best, if we can find something for him. I have an uncle in Minnesota on a railroad. He might find a little place to transplant him to." He stopped.
"You have an uncle in Minnesota," Mrs. Ellwell repeated, mechanically, her dry eyes staring idealess at him. "You are very, very kind." She rose and walked into the house.
"Fool," Ruby muttered; her dark face flamed up angrily. Thornton noticed how much she resembled her handsome father. She had more fire in her than Roper second. "I suppose he hadn"t pluck enough to come home with his own story. Father will be pretty mad. What did he _marry_ that woman for!"
"Well," Thornton answered, calmly. "Perhaps we can build on that, the fact that he _did_ marry her. That seems to me the most promising part of it."
The young girl cast a contemptuous glance at him and rustled into the house after her mother. Miss Ellwell had not uttered a word; her face was bent over her work; and he noticed a few suspicious spots on the dark linen cloth she was hemming. He turned his face away to the sunny lawn and the dark, full-leaved trees that lay beyond the road. A flock of sparrows were rowing in sharp tones among the leaves. The house-dog picked himself up lazily and walked over to Thornton, placing a wet muzzle on his trousers. The place was so peaceful, such a nest of an old Puritan! And here were the demons that the divine had warred against holding his home as their a.r.s.enal. When he permitted himself to turn his face to the girl at his side, she was grave and pale, and somehow exhausted. All the weariness of the struggle between flesh and will seated itself in her heavy-lidded, sad eyes.
"You must be a brave woman and help him," Thornton said, feeling the conventionality and silliness of any remark. "He mustn"t be hounded out of here like a dog, but made to feel that he can make a decent future." She nodded. "It isn"t the money," she said at last. "Though I can"t see where it will come from. Nor the marriage, but the perpetual disgrace. It goes on increasing. We are all bad, worn out; dear old grandpapa was the last good one. It is what you call a curse, a disintegration. Why struggle? If we could all go to sleep and sleep it off? There is nothing ahead, nothing ahead!"
"That is folly," Thornton explained. "We have all been held in thrall by this curse of heredity. It has been talked at us, and written at us, and proved to us, until it makes us cowards!"
She looked at him sadly.
""The sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth generation,"" she repeated.
"d.a.m.n!" He rose excitedly. "That is the most awful doctrine in the Bible, and we have believed it like sheep until we really make it true. When a weak man wants to go to thunder, he thinks of an uncle who was a drunkard, or a father who was a thief, and he goes and does likewise. Naturally! And now science comes along and says it isn"t so, or at any rate there is strong doubt about it. In a few years we may prove that it isn"t so and free mankind from that superst.i.tious curse."
The girl comprehended him but half. "Why, I think that old grandfather Roper must have been a very pa.s.sionate man, who fought against himself and conquered."