CHAPTER XXIV

INTO the wood, a wild, unbrageous tract of land lying back of the cottage, he strode, full of ponderous fears as to the outcome of his undertaking, and yet vaguely buoyed up by the natural beauty on all sides. Soon the town lay behind him; only the low hum of its traffic, the occasional clanging of a locomotive’s bell, the whistle of an engine at a factory, the clatter of a dray followed him. The reverent, almost peaceful thought was borne in upon him that the meandering, little-used path he was pursuing had been traversed many times by Dora. In that secluded and picturesque spot she had breathed in the inspiration which had lifted her far above those by whom she had been misunderstood and traduced. Along that path she and his child, perchance, had plucked flowers through the years in which he had shunned them—denied them before the world, whose good opinion he had coveted to his moral undoing.

Half a mile from the cottage the path began to descend to the river valley, a vast swampy tangle of dense undergrowth. Here in the marshes, impassable during the overflow of winter and spring, but now dank, cool, and seductive, were many nooks of indescribable beauty. Here moss-grown willows bowed over seeping, crystal pools and silently trickling water. There were the armies of cattails, the solitary clumps of broom-sedge, the banks of delicate ferns, and the pond-lilies which had formed the background of her pictures. There she had found the wild rose-bushes, the papaw, the sumac, and the mazes of grape and muscadine vines into the reproduction of which she had poured her crushed and yet awakening soul.

Presently he came upon her seated on a mossy bank, her closed sketch-book on her knee. She was not working, but, with the end of her pencil at her parted lips, she sat watching Lionel, whom he could see plucking flowers and colored leaves not far away.

“Now, don’t go any farther, darling boy!” he heard her call out, in tones the mellow sweetness of which shot through him like a delectable pain. “You might wander away, and then mother’s boy would be lost.”

Sheltered from her view by hanging vines and the lowering branches of a beech-tree, Galt peered out at her. How could he have been so blinded?—so densely unappreciative of her? Where in all his experience had he known a creature so beautiful in soul, mind, and body? And yet he had thrown her down and trampled on her and left her covered with the mire and slime of his own making. He smothered a groan of blended self-contempt and despair. Her mother had doubted his ever regaining her regard, and Mrs. Barry knew her best. The girl had been at his mercy once, and he had not hesitated to strike; now she had the upper hand. What would she do? How would she receive his proposal?—what would she say? Would her soulful eyes blaze under the fires of just retaliation? Would her magnetic voice ring with the contempt she must so long have felt?



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Noiselessly treading the dank, green moss which lay between him and her, he was close to her before she was aware of his presence. Then she glanced up and saw him; there was a fluttering, shrinking look in her long-lashed eyes, in which he read the hurried hope that the meeting was purely accidental; to his horror, he also read in the simple act of reaching for her hat, which lay by her side, that she intended to avoid any sort of intercourse with him.

With the agony of this fear sounding in his voice, he cried, imploringly: “Please don’t run away! I have been to your house to see you; your mother told me you were here.”

“But she wouldn’t,” Dora said, pale and surprised. “She knows that I don’t want to—to meet any one here. It isn’t fair, Kenneth—you know it isn’t! It is taking a mean, low advantage of me, after all that has happened. It is cowardly, and I won’t stand it. You will leave me instantly, or I shall go!”

“God forgive me, you are right, Dora!” he cried, in dismay. “But there is something I must say, and even your mother thought I might venture to see you.”

“If it is to offer me money for my boy, as you did in the contemptible letter I burned unanswered, soon after his birth, you will be wasting time,” she said, wrathful, in her cold, unrelenting beauty. “I can’t accept money, even for him, which was earned as the price of his mother’s public disgrace. He is mine, and he shall be mine to the end. I can work for him till he is old enough to work for me. We don’t need you—neither of us do, Kenneth.”

“I have made you angry,” he said, quivering from head to foot, his anguished eyes fixed on hers. “Listen, Dora. Last night I planned to kill myself to get out of the agony into which my awakened love for you and my new love for Lionel has drawn me. I was ready to do it, for to that moment I had no fear of God or eternity; but a change came over me. Hope dawned; I don’t know why, but it did, and I made a determination to spend the remainder of my life in your service, and in that of my child, for he is mine as much as he is yours.

“Then my new hope seemed to fairly set the world on fire. It was showered down from heaven like the forgiveness of God upon a blinded creature buried in the mire of sin. Ever since I sold my honor the night my ambition conquered me, I have been a cursed, isolated soul. It must have been the hand of God that led me back here to Stafford. I love Lionel with all my heart, and I know now, in spite of my contradictory conduct, that I have loved you all this time. Last night Wynn Dearing told me that it is your wish to go to Paris—you, your mother, and the child—and the thought came to me that if you would be my wife we could go and remain there a few years, and return here to spend the rest of our lives, and thus regain the happiness we’ve lost. Oh, don’t turn from me, Dora! You must, oh, you must give me a chance! God knows it is my duty, and you must not stand between me and that. I can wait for the return of your respect, even if it is for years. But give me a chance!”

She had turned her face from him, and he could not tell what effect his appeal had had upon her; but he saw that her soft, white fingers were clinched tightly on her knee. Suddenly she looked him squarely in the face.

“Oh, you make it so hard for me!” she said, gently. “I knew you were not a happy man. I saw the shadow of spiritual death in your countenance the day I met you at Dearing’s. Yes, the child is yours, as well as he is mine. God has made him a part of you, as he is a part of me. And he loves you, Kenneth, he loves you—and admires you above all men. Young as he is, it would actually pain him to be separated from you. And you are asking me to be your wife!” She shrugged her shoulders, her proud lip quivered, and she looked away. “You are asking me, and now!”

“Yes, Dora, to be my wife before the world, as you have been in God’s sight all these years. I am willing to crawl in the dust at your feet. You are far above me. You were that when I blindly deserted you, and I can never be worthy of your forgiveness, but I would die for a chance to serve you.”

“How sad it all is!” she sighed, her glance on the ground. “What a mere blown-about straw I have been! What a grim thing for a proud woman to decide! You deserted me once to save a paltry sum of money—a worldly ambition; you want me back to save your soul—that expresses it, Kenneth. But I can’t consent. I am simply human—and a woman. My pride won’t let me—the pride that every woman has who holds herself erect. You sold yourself once, and you are now asking me to do the same. Your price was a successful railroad and the plaudits of a few people—the price paid to me would be the future welfare of my child. I am expected to salve the wounds of a torn and mangled womanhood with the realization that I am providing for my boy. There is no pain keener than the fear that one’s offspring may suffer what we ourselves have been through, and I’d give my soul to see Lionel happy in the time to come, but I can’t bring it about in the way you ask. I simply can’t! I loved you, Kenneth, before that unspeakable cloud fell between us, but I was only a girl then, and during all the years that have passed since I have given you no place at all in my heart. We are, in fact, meeting to-day as strangers.”

“I know. I know it is true so far as it touches you,” he said, with a deep sigh, “for your love died with your respect for me, but my love has never died, Dora. I smothered it for a time, in my mad ambition, but there was no act of yours to weaken it, and so it lived and grew till it has overpowered me. I love you now, strange as it may sound to you, ten thousand times more than I ever did. You may turn from me with a shudder and as a thing to be loathed; but I shall never cease to watch over you and strive to protect you.”

“I can’t say any more,” she said, as she tied the tape round her portfolio and gathered up her pencils. “I don’t want to pain you; but I can’t do what you ask, even—even for Lionel’s sake. He and I and his granny may go to Paris some day, but we don’t want you with us, Kenneth. I want to leave absolutely everything behind. You must be dead to us; there is no other way—no other possible way.”

He turned his fixed gaze away, that she might not see the look of agony which had overspread his face. She sat still and silent for several minutes; then he saw her draw herself up excitedly, look about anxiously, and rise to her feet.

“Oh, where is Lionel?” she cried. “He was there in the bushes when you came. Oh, he may have wandered off and be lost! There are some very dangerous places along the river-bank!”

“I see him! Don’t be alarmed!” Galt said, indicating a spot beyond a clump of bushes. “He’s all right; I’ll bring him to you.”

“Thank you,” she said, coldly, and she sank back rigidly on the grass.

He returned a moment later with Lionel in his arms. She could see, as she swept them with a hurried glance, that Galt was pressing the child close against his breast with a look of despair in his white face. Reaching Dora, Galt was lowering the child to the ground when Lionel clung tightly round his neck, pressing his little hand against his cheek.

“What is the matter?” Lionel asked, anxiously. “Mamma, he can’t talk. He tries, but he can’t; he is trembling all over; he is about to cry. What is the matter with him?”

Reaching up, and without a word, Dora took the child into her arms, and, holding him across her lap as if he had been an infant, she bent over his face to kiss him. Presently she looked up at Galt, and her proud lip trembled as she said:

“Oh, Kenneth, fate is handling us strangely. I spoke harshly just now, for I can see that you are suffering. I wish I could be less human. After all my dreams, I am of the earth, earthy. I am no higher than a worm of this soil, after all the heights I thought I had climbed. But I can’t help myself. I could never forget. I might try throughout eternity, but I’d never, never forget—forget that I offered myself wholly, body and soul, and that you refused to—to take me when I was in trouble. It may be sinful to look at it so, but I simply can’t see it otherwise. You must really go now. Good-bye!”

“Good-bye,” he echoed, in his throat. “I am going away to-morrow, and I promise never to intrude myself upon either of you again.”

“‘Good-bye?’—you said ‘good-bye!’” Lionel suddenly sat up in his mother’s lap and stared from his great, startled eyes, his beautiful mouth puckered up and quivering.

“Yes, I have to go away,” Galt faltered, his glance averted. “I only came to spend a short time at Stafford.”

“But you told me you never would go away from me,” the child persisted. “Don’t you remember the day I fell and hurt my knee, and you washed it and put the medicine on it? Don’t you remember you kissed me, and hugged me, and wanted me to kiss you, and said if I’d promise to be your little boy you would always stay with me? How can I be your little boy if—if you go off?”

The eyes of the mother and father met in the strangest stare that ever passed between two mortal creatures.

“I can always love you if I can’t be with you,” Galt faltered, conscious of the emptiness of his words. “I can always love you and think what a plucky little boy you are, and—and—” His voice trailed away into nothingness. A sob rose in his throat and choked him.

“But I want you to stay!” The child was crying now, with his chubby hands to his eyes. Suddenly Dora, with a desperate movement, pressed him to her breast.

“You must not play on his feelings that way!” she cried, fiercely, casting a significant glance toward the town. “Go, please!”

He bowed low, a look of death on his face. She pressed the head of the sobbing child to her breast, and firmly held it there with her beautiful white hand. “Good-bye,” she said, with the dignity and calmness of an offended queen. “Good-bye—forever!”

He turned and moved away. A few paces from her, before the trees had obscured her from his sight, he looked back and saw her with Lionel in her arms. Her exquisite face was pressed consolingly against the golden head. She was whispering to the child and rocking back and forth, as if he were a babe on her breast.