Part 72

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"Who told you? What brought you, Flood?" the girl asked, her chin in her long, white hands, her head turned from the easel to him, a book in her lap, the sun breaking through the leaves upon her hat, touching the Titian hair with splendor.

"Fate brought me, and didn't tell me," he answered, with a whimsical quirk of the mouth and his trouble lurking behind the sea-deep eyes.

"Wouldn't you have come if you knew I was here?" she urged, archly.

"Not for two thousand dollars," he answered, the look of trouble deepening in his eyes, but his lips were smiling. He had a quaint sense of humor, and at his last gasp would have noted the ridiculous thing. And surely it was a droll malignity of Fate to bring him here to her whom, in this moment of all moments in his life, he wished far away. Fate meant to try him to the uttermost. This hurdle of trial was high, indeed.

"Two thousand dollars--nothing less?" she inquired, gayly. "You are too specific for a real lover."

"Fate fixed the amount," he added, dryly.

"Fate--you talk so much of Fate," she replied, gravely, and her eyes looked into the distance. "You make me think of it, too, and I don't want to do so. I don't want to feel helpless, to be the child of Accident and Destiny."

"Oh, you get the same thing in the 'fore-ordination' that old Minister M'Gregor preaches every Sunday. 'Be elect or be damned,' he says to us all. Names aren't important; but, anyhow, it was Fate that led me here."

"Are you sure it wasn't me?" she asked, softly. "Are you sure I wasn't calling you, and you had to come?"

"Well, it was en route, anyhow; and you are always calling, if I must tell you," he laughed. Suddenly he became grave. "I hear you call me in the night sometimes, and I start up and say 'Yes, Di!' out of my sleep. It's a queer hallucination. I've got you on the brain, certainly."

"It seems to vex you--certainly," she said, opening the book that lay in her lap, "and your eyes trouble me to-day. They've got a look that used to be in them, Flood, before--before you promised; and another look I don't understand and don't like. I suppose it's always so. The real business of life is trying to understand each other."

"You have wonderful thoughts for one that's had so little chance," he said. "That's because you're a genius, I suppose. Teaching can't give that sort of thing--the insight."

"What is the matter, Flood?" she asked, suddenly, again, her breast heaving, her delicate, rounded fingers interlacing. "I heard a man say once that you were 'as deep as the sea.' He did not mean it kindly, but I do. You are in trouble, and I want to share it if I can. Where were you going when you came across me here?"

"To see old Busby, the quack-doctor up there," he answered, nodding toward a shrubbed and wooded hillock behind them.

"Old Busby!" she rejoined, in amazement. "What do you want with him--not medicine of that old quack, that dreadful man?"

"He cures people sometimes. A good many out here owe him more than they'll ever pay him."

"Is he as rich an old miser as they say?"

"He doesn't look rich, does he?" was the enigmatical answer.

"Does any one know his real history? He didn't come from nowhere. He must have had friends once. Some one must once have cared for him, though he seems such a monster now."

"Yet he cures people sometimes," he rejoined, abstractedly. "Probably there's some good underneath. I'm going to try and see."

"What is it? What is your business with him? Won't you tell me? Is it so secret?"

"I want him to help me in a case I've got in hand. A client of mine is in trouble--you mustn't ask about it; and he can help, I think--I think so." He got to his feet. "I must be going, Di," he added. Suddenly a flush swept over his face, and he reached out and took both her hands. "Oh, you are a million times too good for me!" he said. "But if all goes well, I'll do my best to make you forget it."

"Wait--wait one moment," she answered. "Before you go I want you to hear what I've been reading over and over to myself just now. It is from a book I got from Quebec, called When Time Shall Pass. It is a story of two like you and me. The man is writing to the woman, and it has things that you have said to me--in a different way."

"No, I don't talk like a book, but I know a star in a dark night when I see it," he answered, with a catch in his throat.

"Hush!" she said, catching his hand in hers as she read, while all around them the sounds of summer--the distant clack of a reaper, the crack of a whip, the locusts droning, the whir of a young partridge, the squeak of a chipmunk--were tuned to the harmony of the moment and her voice:

"'Night and the sombre silence, oh, my love, and one star shining! First, warm, velvety sleep, and then this quick, quiet waking to your voice which seems to call me. Is it--is it you that calls? Do you sometimes, even in your dreams, speak to me? Far beneath unconsciousness is there the summons of your spirit to me?... I like to think so. I like to think that this thing which has come to us is deeper, greater than we are. Sometimes day and night there flash before my eyes--my mind's eyes--pictures of you and me in places unfamiliar, landscapes never before seen, activities uncomprehended and unknown, bright, alluring glimpses of some second being, some possible, maybe never-to-be-realized future, alas! Yet these swift-moving shutters of the soul, or imagination, or reality--who shall say which?--give me a joy never before felt in life. If I am not a better man for this love of mine for you, I am more than I was, and shall be more than I am. Much of my life in the past was mean and small, so much that I have said and done has been unworthy--my love for you is too sharp a light for my gross imperfections of the past! Come what will, be what must, I stake my life, my heart, my soul on you--that beautiful, beloved face; those deep eyes in which my being is drowned; those lucid, perfect hands that have bound me to the mast of your destiny. I cannot go back, I must go forward: now I must keep on loving you or be shipwrecked. I did not know that this was in me, this tide of love, this current of devotion. Destiny plays me beyond my ken, beyond my dreams. "O Cithoeron!" Turn from me now--or never, O my love! Loose me from the mast, and let the storm and wave wash me out into the sea of your forgetfulness now--or never!... But keep me, keep me, if your love is great enough, if I bring you any light or joy; for I am yours to my uttermost note of life.'"

"He knew!--he knew!" Rawley said, catching her wrists in his hands and drawing her to him. "If I could write, that's what I should have said to you, beautiful and beloved. How mean and small and ugly my life was till you made me over! I was a bad lot."