Part 34

Meta Beggs would be back soon; she would require an answer to her resolve ... all or nothing. The heat, chilled by the night and loneliness, faded a little from his blood. She demanded a great deal--a man could never return. He bitterly cursed his indecision. He became aware of a pervading weariness, a stiffness from his prolonged contact with the earth, and he rose, moved about. His legs were as rigid, as painful, as an old man's; he had been leaning on his elbow, and the arm was dead to the fingers. The nerves pricked and jerked in infinitesimal, fiery agonies. He swung his arms, stamped his feet, aiding his stagnating circulation. The frogs ceased their complaint abruptly; the concerted jangle of voices in the grove rose and fell. The replenished fires poured their energy over the broad bottoms of the sap kettles.

The night faded.

The change, at first, was imperceptible: as always the easterly mountains grow visible against a lighter sky. The foliage of the maples, stripped of the looping stars, took the form of individual branches brightening from black to green. There was a stir of dim figures about the impatient horses. Meta Beggs came swiftly to him. He could see her face plainly now, and was surprised at its strained, anxious expression. Her hand closed upon his arm, she drew him to her:

"Which?" she whispered.

"I don't know," he dully replied.

"Save me," she implored; "take me away." She whispered maddeningly in his ear, summoning the lust within him, the clamor in his brain, the throbbing in his throat, his wrists. He shut his eyes, and, when he opened them, the dawn had arrived. It forced her from him. Her gown changed to vivid red; about her throat the graceful pearls were faintly iridescent.

"I don't know," he repeated wearily.

Over her shoulder he saw a buggy approaching across the grass. It was disconcertingly familiar, until he recognized, beyond any doubt, that it was his own. Sim, he assured himself, had learned of his presence at the sap-boiling, and, in passing, had stopped to fetch him home. But there was no man in the buggy ... only two women. Meta Beggs, intercepting his intent gaze, turned and followed it to its goal ... Gordon saw now that Mrs. Caley was driving, and by her side ... Lettice! Lettice--riding over the rough field, over the dark stony roads, when now, so soon ... in her condition ... it was insanity. Simeon Caley's wife should never have allowed it.

The horse, stolidly walking over the sod, stopped before them. Mrs. Caley held a rein in either hand, her head, framed in a rusty black bonnet and strings, was as dark, as immobile as iron. Lettice gathered her shawl tightly about her shoulders; she had on a white waist and her head was bare. She descended clumsily from the buggy and walked slowly up to Gordon. Her face was older than he had ever seen it, and pinched; in one hand she grasped a small pasteboard box.

XVIII

Gordon Makimmon made one step toward her. Lettice held the box in an extended hand:

"Gordon," she asked, "what was this for? It was in the clothes press last evening: it couldn't have been there long. You see--it's a little jewellery box from the post-office; here is the name on the lid. Somehow, Gordon, finding it upset me; I couldn't stop 'til I'd seen you and asked you about it. Somehow there didn't seem to be any time to lose. I asked for you last night in the village, but everybody had gone to the sap-boiling ... I sat up all night ... waiting ... I couldn't wait any longer, Gordon, somehow. I had to come out and find you, and everybody had gone to the sap-boiling, and--"

"Why, Lettice," he stammered, more disconcerted by the sudden loss of youth from her countenance than by her words; "it wasn't--wasn't much."

"What was it, Gordon?" she insisted.

Suddenly he was unable to lie to her. Her questioning eyes held a quality that dispelled petty and casual subterfuges. The evasion which he summoned to his lips perished silently.

"A string of pearls," he muttered.

"Why did you crush the pretty box if they were for--for me or for your sister, if it was to be a surprise? I can't understand--"

"It, it was--"

"Who were they for, Gordon?"

A blundering panic swept over him; Lettice was more strange than familiar; she was unnatural; her hair didn't shine in the sunlight streaming into the shallow, green basin; in the midst of the warm efflorescence she seemed remote, chill.

"For her," he moved his head toward Meta Beggs.

She withdrew her burning gaze from Gordon Makimmon and turned to the school-teacher.

"For Miss Beggs," she repeated, "why ... why, that's bad, Gordon. You're married to me; I'm your wife. Miss Beggs oughtn't ... she isn't anything to you."

Meta Beggs stood motionless, silent, her red cotton dress drawing and wrinkling over her rounded shoulders and hips. The necklace hung gracefully about the slender column of her throat.

The two women standing in the foreground of Gordon Makimmon's vision, of his existence, summed up all the eternal contrast, the struggle, in the feminine heart. And they summed up the duplicity, the weakness, the sensual and egotistical desires, the power and vanity and vain-longing, of men.

Meta Beggs was the mask, smooth and sterile, of the hunger for adornment, for gold bands and jewels and perfume, for goffered linen and draperies of silk and scarlet. She was the naked idler stained with antimony in the clay courts of Sumeria; the Paphian with painted feet loitering on the roofs of Memphis while the blocks of red sandstone floated sluggishly down the Nile for the pyramid of Khufu the King; she was the flushed voluptuousness relaxed in the scented spray of pagan baths; the woman with piled and white-powdered hair in a gold shift of Louis XIV; the prostitute with a pinched waist and great flowered sleeves of the Maison Doree. She was as old as the first vice, as the first lust budding like a black blossom in the morbidity of men successful, satiated.

She was old, but Lettice was older.

Lettice was more ancient than men walking cunning and erect, than the lithe life of sun-heated tangles, than the vital principle of flowering plants fertilized by the unerring chance of vagrant insects and airs.