CHAPTER VI MOONLIGHT

It was night and Pen with her indomitable carriage was trudging along the road that led straight back between the fields. Under her arm was the inevitable grass bag. Chin up and back very straight there was always a sort of challenge in Pen's gait. As a child she had been just the same, one of those adorable little fighters who conceal a heart as tender as love itself. There was a photograph of her at the age of three with a look wistful, proud, and astonished at meanness. She still had that look.

A fantastic tangle of wild grape, trumpet vine, elder bush and sassafras completely hid the rail fences and hemmed her in on either hand, and an occasional pointed cedar or seedling cherry rose against the night sky. The middle of the road and the screen of leafage on one side were drenched with moonlight. The moon dangled in the sky like a hanging lamp: one could see into the depths beyond her.

Pen walked along with her face up to the moon in an attitude of surrender. Her face was haggard with emotion. All day she was obliged to wear a mask, to weigh every word she uttered. What a relief it was at last to let go, to let the moon have its way with her, to bathe in her silver stream. Relief in a sense but hardly pleasure, for when she let go she was so defenseless, so quivering that the stream of beauty hurt her. It enervated her so, she was terrified lest she might not be able to gird herself up again.

For she knew her respite was only momentary. She longed for and dreaded what awaited her at the end of her walk. She couldn't give herself up to Don as she could to the moon. She had to put on another mask for him. A mask of cheer. He was her charge that she had to watch over and care for and beguile into contentment. The fact that he hotly resented being a charge on her did not make her task any easier. They had been getting on each other's nerves a good deal.

Ever and anon as she walked, she glanced over her shoulder uneasily aware that a man could follow her quite close under the dark side of the green tangle, without her being aware.

At the corner of the last field on the left she vaulted over the low bars. Inside a figure rose into the moonlight and a voice whispered her name:

"Pen!"

She was horribly startled. "drop down again!" she whispered sharply. "Don't come after me until I am half way across the field."

He obeyed sullenly. Pen walked on across the field with a sore heart. She had made him angry now. All day she lived for the moment of meeting and now it was spoiled.

She headed diagonally across the field to that point in the woods which was nearest his camp. She could walk but slowly because the ground was so rough, old corn land that had been allowed to go to grass with the hills unharrowed. She would not look back until she was nearly across. A man's figure was rising over the swell of the field behind her. Anxiety attacked her. Suppose it was not Don but somebody who had followed her down the road. What would Don do? She dreaded to hear the sounds of a struggle. Don could take care of himself of course, but it would be the end of their secret. So well had that secret been kept that not one of all the searchers at Broome's Point now suspected that Don was still on the estate.

Pen waited alongside the fence that bounded the far side of the field. It was Don, so her anxiety was relieved on that score. But he did not come to her. A few yards away he leaned back with his elbows on the top rail of the fence and gazed out across the moonlit field, making a perfect silhouette of masculine soreness.

"I brought you some supper," ventured Pen.

"Thanks," he said ungraciously.

"Won't you eat?"

"Not hungry, thanks."

"What's the matter?" she asked with a touch of defiance. She could not be meek, even with him.

"You spoke to me like a dog!" he burst out. "Down Fido!"

"I'm sorry," she murmured. "But you startled me so. You see I was thinking maybe someone was following me in the road."

"I just went a little way to meet you," he grumbled. "Nice welcome I got!"

Having said she was sorry, Pen could not humble herself further. She remained silent.

"I suppose you're thinking I'm a thankless beast," he went on presently.

"No," said Pen.

"Well I am!" he said. "I appreciate what you do for me. Good God, that's just the trouble. You heap favors on me! You've got me on the rack!"

They had been over this so often!

"Well, I'm sick of it, too," Pen burst out as bitterly as he. "You're always trying to make out that I do things for you just to make you feel inferior! I hate to be benevolent. I never am. But what else could I do under the circumstances? Or you? Why can't you take it for granted?"

"You mean you'd do as much for anybody?"

"Certainly."

This of course in his perfect inconsistency, hurt him worse than what had gone before. He dug his chin into his breast and relapsed into silence.

Pen yearned over him. She loved him so for his male roughness, his wrongheadedness, his school-boy pride. He was so absolutely different from herself, both weaker and stronger. It was circumstances which had given her the advantage over him; he was in a false position. She exulted in it a little however she might protest to the contrary. It is sweet to have the ascendancy, even in love. And she could dimly foresee other circumstances in which she would be most terribly at his mercy.

She made overtures. "I'm hungry," she said.

But the storm was still brewing in his breast. "A couple more days of this and I'll go clean off my head!" he said savagely.

"How about me?" said Pen.

"You don't have to squat under the bushes all day."

"I have other troubles."

"I have things to bear that you don't know anything about. I have never spoken of it."

Instantly Pen, who had been feeling so pleasantly sure of herself, turned hot with jealousy. There was some other woman out in the world. Of course there would be! He was tormented because he couldn't communicate with her. Because he couldn't assure her of his innocence. How could she find out about her for sure?

"If you'd tell me what it is," she said, schooling her voice, "perhaps I could help."

"Not in this matter," he said with a bitter little laugh.

Then she was miserably sure. Nevertheless she persisted, as the nightingale is supposed to press her breast against a thorn. "I've often wondered why you don't allow me to write to some of your best friends. Those you can trust I mean. The letters could be worded in such a way that they'd mean nothing if they fell into the wrong hands."

"I've no one to write to," he said.

Pen thought: "Of course he wouldn't trust another woman to write to her," and was exquisitely unhappy.

"Any news?" Don asked gloomily.

"No," said Pen. She had previously determined not to raise his hopes by telling him about Blanche Paglar until something had come of it.

There was a long silence between them, and Pen became wretcheder and wretcheder. When she could stand it no longer she put the bag down beside the fence and said in an offhand tone:

"Well ... I must be getting back ... I'll come again to-morrow night."

She started to walk away with her sedate air, but a little quicker perhaps than would suggest perfect calmness.

Before she had taken three steps he came after her. Pen broke into a run. He overtook her. Ah! if he had only taken her in his arms! But he only circled about her, spreading out his arms to bar her way.

"Pen, Pen, don't leave me!" he said imploringly. "That would be the last straw! ... Don't leave me to brood over my own hatefulness."

The pain in his voice arrested her. She forgot her own pain. As in a flash she had a clairvoyant glimpse of what he must be going through day after day, the resolute young man compelled to skulk in the woods, while his name was bandied about with the stigma of murder upon it.

"I'm a fool!" she said with a shaky little laugh. "To get sore ... I won't go."

"Oh, Pen, you're so good to me!" he groaned. "I'm a stubborn brute, Pen, I can't thank you properly. But Pen, I feel as if you were heaping a load on me that I'd never be able to struggle from under! But I ought not to feel that way, Pen."

Ever since he had got hold of that little name he could scarcely address five words to her without using it, and every time he spoke it he caressed it. Pen was reassured.

"Don't worry about how you ought to feel," she murmured. "Much better for us to quarrel than to make pretenses to each other. Besides a lot of that talk about doing things for people and earning their gratitude is false. A person has really no right to put another person under a debt of gratitude."

"The truth is, I'm afraid of you," he grumbled.

It was delicious to her to have him softened and faltering like this. "I'm afraid of you, too," she confessed. "How silly we both are!"

For a moment or two they were wildly and unreasonably happy, standing there in the bland moonlight close together but not touching. His face was in the shadow but Pen could feel his eyes stabbing her out of the dark. Her own went down. They were like reeds shaken in the same gust. In that moment Pen knew that whatever bonds might be upon him out in the world, he was hers. Still he did not speak; he did not draw her to him. In the end she had to wrench herself away from the magnetic attraction of his body, or else she must have flung herself into his arms.

"Let's walk," she said hurriedly. "We're safe enough in this out-of-the-way corner. You must need exercise. We'll circle round the field. Over in the corner there's a path leading down to an arm of Back creek where Dad keeps his boat in the winter."

Don came down to earth with a sigh. He had a curious way, when his thoughts annoyed him, of shaking his head like a dog, to clear it. Without saying anything he tied the jute bag to an overhanging branch out of reach of four-footed prowlers, and came along with Pen.

They kept to the fence line, silent for the most part. Their breasts were oppressed by moonlight, that high, pure medium which nevertheless stirs us so poignantly. The moon herself is all very well in her way, a lovely lamp in the dark, but one can stare at the moon all night without being transported. One must turn one's back on the moon to experience her magic. It is the strange light she casts on the face of our mother Earth, and Earth's smile under moonlight, soft, subtle and infinitely suggestive, that thrill us, that disquiet us, that unlock our spirits. On the one hand as they walked the field lay spread with a bloomy, gossamer coverlet of moonlight; on the other hand the swelling tree masses rose in rich velvety blackness under a lazulite sky.

Their two shadows soberly preceded them, always with a narrow space of moonlight between. Pen resented that little gap. She had forgotten about the supposed other woman, or if she remembered she no longer cared. She lived in the moment only; there was no more past, no future. She was in the grip of sensations that scarcely permitted her to breathe. Yet she had to conceal from him those sighs with which she sought to relieve her breast. Sometimes she fell behind a step just for the satisfaction of looking at him without his knowing, at the way his hair curled at the nape of his neck, at his flat, straight back, at the curious grace of his level walk. He was wearing an old pair of trousers and a shirt of khaki that she had brought him as being less conspicuous in the woods than his own white clothes. The thin garments betrayed his beauty to her.

The moon was high in the sky and their shadows were short at their feet. Pen beheld a curious thing. The dewy grass refracting the strong moonlight made a silvery nimbus around the heads of the two of them.

"Look!" she said with her shaky little laugh. "We've been canonized."

"Not me," he said. "They just let me walk under your halo."

Having circled round two sides of the field, they climbed over another pole gate and were swallowed up in the woods. Instantly the silence wrapped them as in a cloak, and the heavy air became charged with a curious significance. High over head they glimpsed the moon pacing with them over the tree-tops. She splashed the trunks fantastically, and occasionally lay down a bar of silver on the path, but for the most part the underworld was black, black, black; a crouching blackness that held its breath as if in preparation for a spring. The path was well-beaten but narrow. They had to walk in single file, Pen ahead.

"I'm glad you're here," murmured Pen.

"It's a fearsome sort of place," he said. "It was not like this the other night we walked through the woods."

"These woods have not been cut out," said Pen. "The old presences have never been disturbed."

Finally the path with a sharp turn brought them abruptly out under the open sky again. It was as if something had been lifted off their heads. They had come to a low bank at the head of a straight, narrow arm of water thrust into the heart of the pines. A great bird arose from below them and passed away like a shadow with a soft swishing of wings. The path ended in a shaky little wharf with a single plank laid upon it. They stepped gingerly out upon it hand in hand, and stood looking down the reach. The South wind passed high above their heads and the surface of the water was perfectly unruffled.

At the moment the moon was looking down the straight arm so squarely one might have said she had cleft the opening herself with her silver blade of light. Down at the end of the narrow arm they had the sense of a wider body of water running at right angles, a pearly, fairy-like strait. On the point which separated the two bodies of water stood a little white house gleaming wanly in the moonlight. In a window of the house, a curious note in that dreamy world of opal and pearl, shone an insistent yellow light.

"Surely real people can't live there," murmured Don.

"The worst kind, unfortunately," said Pen. "That's where the oystermen go to get drunk."

They retraced their steps up the bank. When they trod firm earth again, Pen repossessed herself of her hand.

"Where now?" asked Don.

"There's no place to go but back."

"Not yet," he pleaded. "Let's stay here awhile. There's plenty of time. There are no mosquitoes to-night."

An old skiff had been dragged up on top of the bank and turned over.

"Sit here," he urged.

Blaming herself for her weakness, she sat upon it with her hands in her lap. The moonlight was strong upon her. There was a wall of undergrowth at her back. Her face and hands stood out against it sharply. Don dropped to the ground at her feet.

"It's damp there," she objected.

"Can't see you when I sit beside you," he said. "I can from here. With only your face and hands showing out of your black dress you look like a spirit."

"A lost spirit!" she said with her little laugh.

"Oh Pen!" he said in distress. "Why should you be unhappy?"

"I hate the moon!" she said. "It makes a fool of me!"

His touch of sympathy unnerved her. That and the glamorous destructive light that would not let her breast be. The last of her defenses collapsed. In spite of herself the tears welled up in her eyes and brimmed over. She lowered her head to hide them, but he caught the sparkle of the drops as they fell. It electrified him. He scrambled to his knees.

"Pen! Pen!" he whispered brokenly.

She covered her face with her hands. He dragged them down, and crushed them under his own hands on her knees.

"Pen!" he gasped. "It breaks my heart to see you! What is the matter?"

She strained away from him. "Nothing!" she said crossly. "I'm not the sort that cries!"

"But you're crying now. I see your tears!"

"It's nothing. I'm just nervous. Don't notice me."

"Oh Pen, I love you so!" he groaned. "It kills me to see your tears!"

She looked at him with a kind of horror.

He dropped his head in her lap. "There it's out!" he groaned. "All evening I've been fighting against it. Every night I've been with you. I swore I wouldn't tell you. But here I am ... just like a baby. God knows I'll regret it to-morrow!"

"But why?" she gasped.

"Because it drives me wild to think of bringing unhappiness into your life. I'd sooner jump off the wharf yonder. It's unmanly to tell you now!"

"Blessed unmanliness!" whispered Pen, brooding over him.

Presently she jerked her head up as if she needed more air, more light. The moon shone in her wet face. It was transfigured.

He was still humbled over her knees. "This isn't the way I wanted to come to the woman I love," he said bitterly. "I've nothing to offer you ... less than nothing ..."

"Do you want to buy me or to love me," she murmured with soft reproach.

He scarcely heard her. "It is impossible for you to respect a man who is as dependent on you as a baby!"

Pen put her cheek in his hair. "Foolish one! What has respect to do with it?"

"You can only be sorry for me!"

Her hands turned over and found his face. "Foolish! Foolish! Foolish!" she murmured. "You must have got your idea of loving out of books! ... How selfish you are!"

He raised his head, struck by the word.

Her voice deepened. "Don't you understand how sweet it has been for me to work for you; to lie for you; to steal food out of the house? Why do you begrudge it to me? ... Oh, sometimes I could almost wish you had committed a murder so I could go with you and be disgraced with you!"

"Pen! ... Pen!" he cried amazed and full of delight. Then added quaintly in a voice of reproof: "You're talking wildly!"

Pen laughed deep in her throat. She slipped off the boat to the ground beside him, where she could wreathe her arms about him, and hide her face on his shoulder.

"You're only a man," she murmured laughing and passionate. "What do you know about love? ... Ah, but only let me love you and I will be content!"

"You'll see whether I can love or not," he said, piqued.

"Keep telling me," she murmured. "My ears are starving for it!"

"I can't tell you to order," he grumbled, manlike. "It must come of itself."

But she knew from the timbre of his voice, from his arms, from the adoring droop of his head, and was content.

He held her a little away from him that he might see her better. Pen yielded up her soul to him through her eyes.

"Good God! how beautiful you are!" he whispered sharply.

Their lips came together. They achieved forgetfulness.

Even lovers must come back to earth. Pen drew away from him. "The dawn will surprise us," she murmured.

He consulted his watch. "Only half-past two."

"We must go."

"Oh, no! no!"

"Well, we must begin to go," she amended. "I can't leave you quickly."

She sat on the ground as Diana must have sat, her legs folded against her, her waist curving to preserve her equilibrium, both round arms up and her fingers busy with her hair.

"How beautiful you are so," he murmured. "Don't move!"

She laughed. "Help me up," she commanded, extending him her hands.

As he pulled her to her feet he was for enfolding her again, but she put her hands up between them. "Not now! I want to get away from you a little."

"Pen!" he cried reproachfully.

She laughed. "Dearest! I just mean you have numbed me ... I must get away from you in order to realize you."

"You soon have enough of me," he grumbled.

"Somebody must be the first to stop."

"But you do love me, don't you?"

"Not always in the same way."

"You do! You do! I know it now!"

"Then why worry? ... Come, it's a long way back. We can talk as we go."

"But wait a minute, Pen. No, I won't touch you if you don't want me to ... I want to tell you something. Oh, if I could only tell you right! ... What this wonderful thing means to me!"

"Sh! Dearest! It can't be told. It simply can't!"

"But I must try."

"You're not sorry then that you told me?"

"No, by God! I don't deserve this ... but I'm not sorry. That was just childish pride ... If you really are the better man of the two I might as well make up my mind to it!"

Pen laughed. "But I'm not! ... Oh, my tongue is quicker than yours. I can tangle you all up in words. But you have a simplicity! I sit at your feet!"

"Pen!"

"Come on, I shouldn't have told you that! ... Come on, I feel as light as air, now!" She whirled around and gave his elbows a little squeeze. "Isn't it blessed to be relieved of that horrible constraint that lay on us." She was off ahead again. "I can say whatever I like to you now without thinking ... I expect I'll shock you sometimes. I'm no lady!"

"I guess I can stand it," he said grinning.

Pen had a hundred questions to ask as they went. The most trifling details of his childhood were important to her.

"Have you any photographs of yourself as a child?" she asked eagerly. "How I should love them!"

"All ages," he said lightly. Suddenly his voice became embittered. "I suppose they're in the hands of the police."

"We'll get them back!" said Pen confidently.

He stopped in the path. "Good God, Pen! What is before us? I had forgotten it!"

"You are going to clear yourself."

"But if I shouldn't be able to?"

"Whatever happens to you, I share it," she said quickly.

"But I've got to take care of you!"

Ignoring this, she resumed her questions. Gradually she drew him back into a lighter mood.

"Haven't you any brothers and sisters, Don?"

"No, I was an only child."

"I, too. It's unnatural. I mean to have four."

He pulled her to him. "Oh, my Pen!" he said a little hoarsely. "My heart almost stops beating at the thought!"

She freed herself. "Bear!" she said. "I didn't invite you to assist me in bringing up my family!"

"You've got to have some assistance," he said wickedly.

She changed the subject. "I suppose you've been in love dozens of times," she said.

"Not like this. Flirtations."

"Oh, the last time is always the only time," she said mockingly.

"Well, how about yourself?" he parried.

"Not a flirtation!" said Pen ruefully. "Not the least little bit of a one. Only dreams."

"The men were afraid of you," said Don sagely. "It takes courage to make up to a girl like you."

"Conceit!" said Pen ... "Tell me about your flirtations."

"I forget," he said warily.

"Well, the first one. You couldn't forget that."

"No, I don't mean to tell you," he said coolly. He groped for his words. "You're the only woman who ever mattered a damn to me. If you don't know that now, you will know it ... And it isn't that I want to make myself out any better than I am. Pretty poor average sort ... But I won't tell you. I have a feeling that you're the sort to bedevil me into telling you things with a laugh, and then store them up and brood over them and magnify them."

Pen sent him a curious glance through her lashes. "Good gracious! You're cleverer than I thought!" she said in a tone divided between mockery and pique.

By the time they got out of the woods the moon had traveled a good bit towards the West. Now it almost hung over the taller splotch of black that marked the trees surrounding the big house.

Don said: "Every night as soon as it grows dark I come out of my hole and lean on the fence and watch the house and wonder what you are doing inside. Why is it I never see a light in any of the windows facing this way?"

"It just happens that none of those rooms are used," Pen said. "In the main house the back drawing-room and the guest room have windows facing this way, and in the kitchen wing there is the back kitchen and two servants' rooms upstairs.... After this every night I'll put a light in one of the servants' rooms to tell you all is well. And when it goes out you'll know I'm starting. And if it goes out and comes on again you'll know I'm prevented from coming."

"That would be bad news," he said.

"We might get up a regular code of signals," Pen went on. "Suppose there was danger, and I couldn't come to warn you. Suppose I wanted to tell you to change your camp."

"We'd have to fix on some spot beforehand so you would know where to find me."

"That's the difficulty. I don't know any place safer than this. What place would be safe if they took it into their heads to search the woods? ... There is a safe place though, that I have thought of."

"Where's that?"

"In the house itself."

"What!" he exclaimed.

"If I could once get you inside we could snap our fingers at them."

"How about the servants?"

"I wouldn't tell them. Aunt Maria never goes upstairs. I tend to the upstairs myself. The third floor of the house is never visited at all."

"Oh Pen, I couldn't!"

"Why not?" she demanded.

"To hide behind your skirts like that!"

"I thought you were going to drop that nonsense."

"It dies hard!" he groaned.

"Well, if you're so reluctant to come to my house where I could see you as much as I wanted," she said sorely, "I won't ask you unless I am forced to ... But if it should be necessary ... Listen! ... I'll put a light in each of the rooms over the kitchen. If you see two lights shining this way you are to hide all your things as well as you can, and come to the house."

"Where would I meet you?"

"I won't meet you outside. It would double the risk for the two of us to try to get into the house together. Listen! Make your way over the fields without going near the road. Give the negro cabin a wide berth. When you are abreast of the big house strike for the evergreen hedge that bounds that side of the grounds. You'll find a gap in it, broken by the wind. You know how the porch runs around three sides of the main building. At the end of the porch on that side there's a rough clump of mock orange bushes. Behind the bushes you'll find a way into the cellar. That's how I go and come. I'll be waiting for you in the cellar. Or if I'm not there wait till I come."

"Oh Pen, I hate skulking!"

"I love it!" said Pen. "If I know I'm in the right. It's an adventure!"

They came to the tree where they had left the grass bag hanging.

"Well..." began Pen.

Don swung her around inside his arm. "Oh my Pen, how can I let you go to-night?" he groaned.

"Ah, don't kiss me any more," she pleaded. "I don't want to be drowned again. I want to know I'm loving you."

"But I must before I lose you!"

She laid restraining hands on his arms. "Listen, dear," she murmured. "There's something I want to tell you. From the very bottom of my heart it comes. I love you so much you can make me your slave if you want. But you should have pity on me. You should help me to keep myself separate. For both our sakes. If sometimes I seem perverse and tricksy to you it is only because of the desperate need I have to keep something of myself back. If I become swallowed up in you as most women do in their men you'll tire of me. I'll lose my flavor for you. Let me give myself to you a mouthful at a time. Don't swallow me whole!"

He but dimly understood her. "I'll try!" he said between a laugh and a groan. "You funny darling child! ... But how can I keep from kissing you?"

"I don't want you always to keep from it," Pen said.