Without a word he flung himself furiously from the room, and immediately afterwards they heard the heavy hall door bang behind him.
"Can I do anything for you, Christie?" asked her brother-in-law calmly.
"No, thank you--unless--I think I would like a drink of water, please."
He brought her up a goblet filled with wine; her hand did not even tremble as she took it. As for Joe, a demon arose in his soul as he noticed she kept her wrists covered.
"Do you think he will come back?" she said.
"Oh, yes, of course; he"ll be all right in the morning. Now go to bed like a good little girl, and--and, I say, Christie, you can call me if you want anything; I"ll be right here, you know."
"Thank you, Joe; you are kind--and good."
He returned then to his apartment. His pipe was out, but he picked up a newspaper instead, threw himself into an armchair, and in a half-hour was in the land of dreams.
When Charlie came home in the morning, after a six-mile walk into the country and back again, his foolish anger was dead and buried.
Logan"s "Poor old Charlie" did not ring so distinctly in his ears.
Mrs. Stuart"s horrified expression had faded considerably from his recollection. He thought only of that surprisingly tall, dark girl, whose eyes looked like coals, whose voice pierced him like a flint-tipped arrow. Ah, well, they would never quarrel again like that, he told himself. She loved him so, and would forgive him after he had talked quietly to her, and told her what an a.s.s he was. She was simple-minded and awfully ignorant to pitch those old Indian laws at him in her fury, but he could not blame her; oh, no, he could not for one moment blame her. He had been terribly severe and unreasonable, and the horrid McDonald temper had got the better of him; and he loved her so. Oh! He loved her so! She would surely feel that, and forgive him, and-- He went straight to his wife"s room.
The blue velvet evening dress lay on the chair into which he had thrown himself when he doomed his life"s happiness by those two words, "G.o.d knows." A bunch of dead daffodils and her slippers were on the floor, everything--but Christie.
He went to his brother"s bedroom door.
"Joe," he called, rapping nervously thereon; "Joe, wake up; where"s Christie, d"you know?"
"Good Lord, no," gasped that youth, springing out of his armchair and opening the door. As he did so a note fell from off the handle.
Charlie"s face blanched to his very hair while Joe read aloud, his voice weakening at every word:--
"DEAR OLD JOE,--I went into your room at daylight to get that picture of the Post on your bookshelves. I hope you do not mind, but I kissed your hair while your slept; it was so curly, and yellow, and soft, just like his. Good-bye, Joe.
"CHRISTIE."
And when Joe looked into his brother"s face and saw the anguish settle in those laughing blue eyes, the despair that drove the dimples away from that almost girlish mouth; when he realized that this boy was but four-and-twenty years old, and that all his future was perhaps darkened and shadowed for ever, a great, deep sorrow arose in his heart, and he forgot all things, all but the agony that rang up through the voice of the fair, handsome lad as he staggered forward, crying, "Oh! Joe--what shall I do--what shall I do!"
It was months and months before he found her, but during all that time he had never known a hopeless moment; discouraged he often was, but despondent, never. The sunniness of his ever-boyish heart radiated with warmth that would have flooded a much deeper gloom than that which settled within his eager young life. Suffer? ah! yes, he suffered, not with locked teeth and stony stoicism, not with the masterful self-command, the reserve, the conquered bitterness of the still-water sort of nature, that is supposed to run to such depths.
He tried to be bright, and his sweet old boyish self. He would laugh sometimes in a pitiful, pathetic fashion. He took to petting dogs, looking into their large, solemn eyes with his wistful, questioning blue ones; he would kiss them, as women sometimes do, and call them "dear old fellow," in tones that had tears; and once in the course of his travels while at a little way-station, he discovered a huge St. Bernard imprisoned by some mischance in an empty freight car; the animal was nearly dead from starvation, and it seemed to salve his own sick heart to rescue back the dog"s life. n.o.body claimed the big starving creature, the train hands knew nothing of its owner, and gladly handed it over to its deliverer. "Hudson," he called it, and afterwards when Joe McDonald would relate the story of his brother"s life he invariably terminated it with, "And I really believe that big lumbering brute saved him." From what, he was never to say.
But all things end, and he heard of her at last. She had never returned to the Post, as he at first thought she would, but had gone to the little town of B----, in Ontario, where she was making her living at embroidery and plain sewing.
The September sun had set redly when at last he reached the outskirts of the town, opened up the wicket gate, and walked up the weedy, unkept path leading to the cottage where she lodged.
Even through the twilight, he could see her there, leaning on the rail of the verandah--oddly enough she had about her shoulders the scarlet velvet cloak she wore when he had flung himself so madly from the room that night.
The moment the lad saw her his heart swelled with a sudden heat, burning moisture leapt into his eyes, and clogged his long, boyish lashes. He bounded up the steps--"Christie," he said, and the word scorched his lips like audible flame.
She turned to him, and for a second stood magnetized by his pa.s.sionately wistful face; her peculiar grayish eyes seemed to drink the very life of his unquenchable love, though the tears that suddenly sprang into his seemed to absorb every pulse in his body through those hungry, pleading eyes of his that had, oh! so often been blinded by her kisses when once her whole world lay in their blue depths.
"You will come back to me, Christie, my wife? My wife, you will let me love you again?"
She gave a singular little gasp, and shook her head. "Don"t, oh!
don"t," he cried piteously. "You will come to me, dear? it is all such a bitter mistake--I did not understand. Oh! Christie, I did not understand, and you"ll forgive me, and love me again, won"t you--won"t you?"
"No," said the girl with quick, indrawn breath.
He dashed the back of his hand across his wet eyelids. His lips were growing numb, and he bungled over the monosyllable "Why?"
"I do not like you," she answered quietly.
"G.o.d! Oh! G.o.d, what is there left?"
She did not appear to hear the heart-break in his voice; she stood like one wrapped in sombre thought; no blaze, no tear, nothing in her eyes; no hardness, no tenderness about her mouth. The wind was blowing her cloak aside, and the only visible human life in her whole body was once when he spoke the muscles of her brown arm seemed to contract.
"But, darling, you are mine--_mine_--we are husband and wife! Oh, heaven, you _must_ love me, and you _must_ come to me again."
"You cannot _make_ me come," said the icy voice, "neither church, nor law, nor even"--and the vice softened--"nor even love can make a slave of a red girl."
"Heaven forbid it," he faltered. "No, Christie, I will never claim you without your love. What reunion would that be? But oh, Christie, you are lying to me, you are lying to yourself, you are lying to heaven."
She did not move. If only he could touch her he felt as sure of her yielding as he felt sure there was a hereafter. The memory of the times when he had but to lay his hand on her hair to call a most pa.s.sionate response from her filled his heart with a torture that choked all words before they reached his lips; at the thought of those days he forgot she was unapproachable, forgot how forbidding were her eyes, how stony her lips. Flinging himself forward, his knee on the chair at her side, his face pressed hardly in the folds of the cloak on her shoulder, he clasped his arms about her with a boyish petulance, saying, "Christie, Christie, my little girl wife, I love you, I love you, and you are killing me."
She quivered from head to foot as his fair, wavy hair brushed her neck, his despairing face sank lower until his cheek, hot as fire, rested on the cool, olive flesh of her arm. A warm moisture oozed up through her skin, and as he felt its glow he looked up. Her teeth, white and cold, were locked over her under lip, and her eyes were as gray stones.
Not murderers alone know the agony of a death sentence.
"Is it all useless? all useless, dear?" he said, with lips starving for hers.
"All useless," she repeated. "I have no love for you now. You forfeited me and my heart months ago, when you said _those two words_."
His arms fell away from her wearily, he arose mechanically, he placed his little gray checked cap on the back of his yellow curls, the old-time laughter was dead in the blue eyes that now looked scared and haunted, the boyishness and the dimples crept away for ever from the lips that quivered like a child"s; he turned from her, but she had looked once into his face as the Law Giver must have looked at the land of Canaan outspread at his feet. She watched him go down the long path and through the picket gate, she watched the big yellowish dog that had waited for him lumber up on to its feet--stretch--then follow him. She was conscious of but two things, the vengeful lie in her soul, and a little s.p.a.ce on her arm that his wet lashes had brushed.
It was hours afterwards when he reached his room. He had said nothing, done nothing--what use were words or deeds? Old Jimmy Robinson was right; she had "balked" sure enough.
What a bare, hotelish room it was! He tossed off his coat and sat for ten minutes looking blankly at the sputtering gas jet. Then his whole life, desolate as a desert, loomed up before him with appalling distinctness. Throwing himself on the floor beside his bed, with clasped hands and arms outstretched on the white counterpane, he sobbed. "Oh! G.o.d, dear G.o.d, I thought you loved me; I thought you"d let me have her again, but you must be tired of me, tired of loving me too. I"ve nothing left now, nothing! it doesn"t seem that I even have you to-night."
He lifted his face then, for his dog, big and clumsy and yellow, was licking at his sleeve.
The Envoy Extraordinary
There had been a great deal of trouble in the Norris family, and for weeks old Bill Norris had gone about scowling as blackly as a thunder-cloud, speaking to no one but his wife and daughter, and oftentimes muttering inaudible things that, however, had the tone of invective; and accompanied, as these mutterings were, with a menacing shake of his burley head, old Bill finally grew to be an acquaintance few desired.
Mrs. Norris showed equal, though not similar, signs of mental disturbance; for, womanlike, she clothed her worry in placidity and silence. Her kindly face became drawn and lined; she laughed less frequently. She never went "neighboring" or "buggy-riding" with old Bill now. But the trim farmhouse was just as spotless, just as beautifully kept, the cooking just as wholesome and homelike, the linen as white, the garden as green, the chickens as fat, the geese as noisy, as in the days when her eyes were less grave and her lips unknown to sighs. And what was it all about but the simple matter of a marriage--Sam"s marriage? Sam, the big, genial, curly-headed only son of the house of Norris, who saw fit to take unto himself as a life partner tiny, delicate, college-bred Della Kennedy, who taught school over on the Sixth Concession, and knew more about making muslin shirtwaists than cooking for the threshers, could quote from all the mental and moral philosophers, could wrestle with French and Latin verbs, and had memorized half the things Tennyson and Emerson had ever written, but could not milk a cow or churn up a week"s supply of b.u.t.ter if the executioner stood ready with his axe to chop off her pretty yellow mop of a head in case she failed.
How old Billy stormed when Sam started "keeping company" with her!