"Thanks for telling me about Rosie. It is as it should be--as will be best. Jim saved her. Nothing so good could ever happen to her as to marry him.
"As for me, there are two things, Lois, that I can truthfully affirm. I can declare them the more emphatically because I have had time to think them over--to think you over, and myself. If I ever had a doubt about them I haven"t now, because leisure and solitude have enabled me to see them clearly. The first is that I have given you my best; and the second, that I have given it without any restriction of which I have been aware. If there was anything I withheld from you, and which you think you should have had, I can only say that it was not of the nature of my best. What it was I make no attempt to say, nor would it do any good to try. Whatever it was, I wish neither to depreciate it nor to deny it. It was something that swept me--like the tornado of which one of your letters speaks--but it pa.s.sed. It pa.s.sed, leaving me tired and older--oh, very much older!--and with an intense desire to creep home.
As a physicist I know nothing of a carnal man and a spiritual man, so that I cannot enter into your a.n.a.lysis; but I do know that there are higher and lower promptings in the human heart, and that in my case the higher turn to you. As compared with you I"m only as the ship compared to the haven in which it would take refuge. The ship is good for something, but it needs a port."
Again he decided to leave his appeal suspended here, and on the next morning began his preparations for gradually turning homeward.
CHAPTER x.x.x
It was William Sweetapple, the gardener"s boy, who informed Lois that Claude had come back, throwing the information casually over his shoulder as he watered the lawn.
"Seen Mr. Claude to-day, "m."
"Oh no, you didn"t, Sweetapple," Lois contradicted. "Mr. Claude is in the West."
"He may be in the West now, "m, but he wasn"t at twenty-five minutes past two this afternoon."
Sudden fear brought Lois down a step or two of the portico, over the Corinthian pillars of which roses clambered in early July profusion. In white, with a broad-brimmed Winterhalter hat from which a floating green veil hung over her shoulders and down her back, her strong, slim figure seemed to have gained in fulfilment of herself even in the weeks that Thor had been away.
"Where did you see him, Sweetapple?--or think you saw him?"
Sweetapple turned the nozzle of the hose so as to develop a crown of spray with which he bedewed the roses of all colors grouped in a great central bed. "I didn"t think, "m. It was him."
"Well, where?"
"See him first going into the woods leading up to Duck Rock. That was when I was on my way to Lawyer Petley"s."
"Did you see him twice?"
"See him again as I come back. He was down in the road by that time--looking up toward old man Fay"s--Hadley B. Hobson"s place that is to be. Old man Fay"s got to quit. Family moved already. You knew that, didn"t you, "m?"
It was because Lois was really alarmed by this time that she said, "Oh, you must have been mistaken, Sweetapple!"
"Just as you say, "m," Sweetapple agreed; "but I see him; it was him."
She withdrew again, reseating herself in the shade of the semicircular open porch protecting the side-door, where she had been writing on a pad. Though so near the roadway, a high growth of shrubs screened her from all but the pa.s.sers up and down Willoughby"s Lane. At this time of year they were relatively few, many of the residents of County Street having already gone to the seaside or the mountains. Lois enjoyed the seclusion thus afforded her, and the tranquillity. The garden and her poorer neighbors gave an outlet to her need for physical activity, while in the solitude of the house and in that wider solitude created by the absence of all the Willoughbys and Mastermans something within her was being healed. It was being healed--but healed in a way that left her changed. The change was manifest in what she said when, with the pad on her knee again, she began to write.
"I am deeply moved, dear Thor, by your last letter from Colorado Springs, and would gladly say something adequate in response to it. When I can I will--if I ever can. As to that the decisive word must be with time. I cannot hurry it. I can give you no a.s.surance now. Now I feel--but why should I repeat it? An illusion once dispelled can rarely be brought back. Still less can you replace it by reality. What we are looking for is a subst.i.tute for love. You may have found it--but I have not. I can accept your definition of love as a giving out, a pouring forth, a desire to do and to contribute; but it is precisely here that I fail to respond to the test. There is something in me stagnated or dammed up. My heart feels like a well that has gone dry. I have nothing to yield. I understand what Rosie Fay said to me the day when I talked to her on Duck Rock: "I"m empty; I"ve given all I had to give." It was less blameworthy on her part than on mine, because she, poor little thing, had given so much and I so little. And yet my supply seems to be exhausted. It must have been thin and shallow to begin with. As I feel at present it would take a new creation to replenish it.
"With regard to my calling forth what is best in you, dear Thor--well, any one would do that or anything. You"re one of those who have nothing but the best to offer. Do you know what Uncle Sim said of you last night?--"Thor is always on the side of the angels--and, though he makes mistakes, they"ll rescue him." They will, dear Thor; I"m sure of it.
They may rescue us both--even if at present I don"t see how."
Having written this much, she paused to ask what she should say further.
Should she speak of his coming home? No. Since the address he had given her indicated that he was on his way, it was best that he should take the responsibility of his own return. Should she tell him that Sweetapple thought he had seen Claude? No. It would alarm him without doing any good. If Claude was back, he was back--besides which, Sweetapple might be wrong. So she signed her name with her usual significant abruptness, sealing the envelope and addressing it.
Her hesitation came in putting on the stamp. Somehow the letter seemed too cold to send. She didn"t want to be cold--only to be sincere.
Sincerity during these weeks of solitude had become a sort of obsession.
She couldn"t tell him that she had forgiven him as long as resentment lingered in her heart, and yet she was anxious not to wound him more than she could help. Wounding him she wounded herself more deeply, for in spite of everything his pain was hers.
Slowly she tore the letter open again, to a sunset chorus of birds of whose song she had just become conscious. From tree to tree they fluted to one another and answered back, now with a reckless, pa.s.sionate warble, now with a long, liquid love-note. It was the voice of the rich world that lay around her--a world of flowers and lawns, and meadows and upland woods, and cool, deep shades and mellowing light. But it was also the voice that had accompanied her into the enchanted land on that winter"s day when Thor had kissed her wrist. The day seemed now immeasurably far away in time, and the enchanted land had been left behind her; but the voice was still there, fluting, calling, reminding, entreating, with an insistence that almost made her weep.
She wrote hurriedly in postscript: "If there was ever anything I could do for you, dear Thor, perhaps what I used to feel would come back to me. If it only would! If I could only be great and generous and inexacting as you would be! I want to be, Thor darling; I long to be; but I am like a person paralyzed, whose limbs no longer answer to his will. I pray for recovery and restoration--but will it ever come?"
As encouragement to Thor she was no more satisfied with this than with what she had said earlier, but it expressed all she could allow herself to say. Anything more would have permitted him to infer such things as he had permitted her to infer, an accident that must have no repet.i.tion.
She ended the note definitely, getting it ready for the post.
She was still engaged in doing so when, the crunching of footsteps causing her to lift her head, she saw Claude. Having come round to the side portico on a hint from William Sweetapple, he stood at a little distance, smiling. He was smiling, but as a dead man might smile. Lois could neither rise nor speak, from awe. Claude himself could neither speak nor advance. He stood like a specter--but a specter who has been in h.e.l.l. The very smile was that of the specter who has no right to come out of h.e.l.l, and yet has come.
Lois was not precisely troubled; she was terrified. If Claude had only spoken a word or taken a step forward it would have broken the spell that held her dazed and dumb. But he did nothing. He only stood and smiled--that awful smile which expressed more anguish than any rictus of pain. He stood just as he came into sight, on turning the corner of the house, with the many colors of the rose-bed at his left hand. It was exactly like this, she had always imagined, that disembodied spirits or astral forms made their appearances to portend death.
She got possession of her faculties at last. "Claude!" She could just whisper it.
He continued to smile as he advanced and came up the steps; but it was not till he was actually beside her that he said, in a voice which might also have been that of a dead man, "You didn"t expect me, did you?"
She remembered afterward that they neither shook hands nor exchanged any of the usual forms of greeting, but at the minute it didn"t seem natural that they should. Her own tone was as strained as his as she answered, awesomely: "No. Sit down, Claude. When did you come?"
Throwing his hat on the floor, he dropped wearily into a deck-chair and closed his eyes. With the sharp profile grown extraordinarily white and thin, the dead-man expression terrified her again. She wished he would raise his head and look at her--look more like life. All he did was to open his eyes heavily, as he replied, "Got back yesterday."
It was less from interest than from the desire to get on the plane of actual things that she asked, "Where are you staying?"
"Slept at the house last night. Old Maggs, the caretaker, has the key, so I made him let me in."
"But are you going to stay any time?"
"Might as well. Don"t see why not."
There was so much to say and so much she was afraid to say that she hardly knew with what to begin. "Weren"t you," she ventured, timidly--"weren"t you having a good time?"
His answer as he lay back with eyes closed again was another of his smiles, only dimmer now with a faint bitter-sweetness. She knew it was like asking a man if his pain is better when it is killing him.
Nevertheless, the ground of common, practical things was the only one to keep to, so she went on: "But you won"t like sleeping at the house every night--with no one in it. Don"t you want to come here?"
He shook his head. "No, thanks. Mrs. Maggs will make my bed and give me breakfast. That"s all I need. Get the rest of my meals in town."
"But you"ll stay to dinner now, won"t you?"
He lifted himself up in his chair at last, his face taking on its first look of life. "Thor be there?"
"Why, no. Thor"s away--in the West. Didn"t you know?"
He started nervously. "Away in the West? Not looking for me?"
She tried to smile. "Of course not. He went to attend the medical congress in Minneapolis. He"s on his way home now."
"When do you expect him?"
"Oh, not at once. I don"t know when. He"s taking his time."