Jalna (1927)/Chapter 16
Alayne found Eden in the summerhouse, a vine-smothered, spiderish retreat, with a very literary-looking pipe in his mouth, his arms folded across his chest, and a thoughtful frown indenting his brow.
"May I come?" she breathed, fearing to disturb him, yet unable to endure the separation any longer.
He smiled an assent, gripping the pipe between his teeth.
"Have you begun the—you know what?"
"I do not know what."
"The n-o-v-e-l," she spelled.
He shook his head. "No; but I've written a corking thing. Come in and hear."
"A poem! I am so glad you are really beginning to write again. It is the first, you know, since we have been married, and I was beginning to be afraid that instead of being an inspiration—"
"Well, listen to this and tell me whether I'm the better or worse for being married."
"Before you begin, Eden, I should just like to remark the way the sunlight coming in through those vines dapples your hair and cheek with gold."
"Yes, darling, and if you had been here all morning you might have remarked how the insect life took to me. They let themselves down from every corner and held a sort of county fair on me, judging spider stallions, fat ladybugs' race, and earwig baby show. In each case the first, second, third, and consolation prize was a bite of me."
"You poor lamb," said Alayne, settling herself on the bench beside him, her head on his shoulder. "How you suffer for your art!" She searched his face for the mark of a bite, and, really finding one on his temple, she kissed it tenderly.
"Now for the poem," he exclaimed. He read it, and it gained not a little from his mellow voice and expressive, mobile face. Alayne was somewhat disconcerted to find that she had no longer the power to regard his writing judicially. She now saw it colored by the atmosphere of Jalna, tempered by the contacts of their life together. She asked him to read it again, and this time she closed her eyes that she might not see him, but every line of his face and form was before her still, as though her gaze were fixed on him.
"It is splendid," she said, and she took it from him and read it to herself. She was convinced that it was splendid, but her conviction did not have the same austere clarity that it had carried when she was in New York and he an unknown young poet in Canada.
After that Eden spent each morning in the summerhouse, not seeming to mind the increasing dampness and chill as the autumn drew on. The Whiteoaks seemed to be able to endure an unconscionable amount of either heat or cold. Alayne began to be accustomed to these extremes of temperature, to an evening spent before the blistering heat of the drawing-room fire, and a retiring to a bedroom so chill that her fingers grew numb before she was undressed.
From the summerhouse issued a stream of graceful, carelessly buoyant lyrics like young birds. Indeed, Piers with brutal jocularity remarked to Renny that Eden was like a sparrow, hatching out an egg a day in his lousy nest under the vines.
It became the custom for Eden, Alayne, Ernest, and Nicholas to gather in the latter's room every afternoon to hear what Eden had composed that morning. The four became delightfully intimate in this way, and they frequently—Nicholas making his leg an excuse for this—had Rags bring their tea there. As Grandmother could not climb the stairs, Alayne felt joyously certain of no intrusions from her. The girl found almost past endurance the old lady's way of breaking her cake into her tea and eating it from a spoon with the most aggravating snortlings and gurglings. It was pleasant to pour the tea in Nicholas's room for the three men from an old blue Coalport teapot that wore a heathenish woolly "cozy"; and after tea Nicholas would limp to the piano and play from Mendelssohn, Mozart, or Liszt.
Alayne never forgot those afternoons, the late sunshine touching with a mellow glow the massive head and bent shoulders of Nicholas at the piano, Ernest shadowy in a dim corner with Sasha, Eden beside her, strong in his shapely youth. She grew to know the two elderly men as she knew no other member of Eden's family except poor young Finch. They seemed close to her; she grew to love them.
Piers, when Meg told him of these meetings, was disgusted. They made him sick with their poetry and music. He pictured his two old uncles gloating imaginatively over Alayne's sleek young womanhood. Eden, he thought, was a good-for-nothing idler—a sponger. Meggie herself did not want to join the quartette in Uncle Nick's room. It was not the sort of thing she cared about. But she did rather resent the air of intimacy which was apparent between the uncles and Alayne, an intimacy which she had not achieved with the girl. Not that she had made any great effort to do so. Persistent effort, either mental or physical, was distasteful to Meg, yet she could, when occasion demanded, get her own way by merely exerting her power of passive stubbornness. But passive stubbornness will not win a friend, and as a matter of fact Meg did not greatly desire the love of Alayne. She rather liked her, though she found her hard to talk to,—"terribly different,"—and she told her grandmother that Alayne was a "typical American girl." "I won't have it," Grandmother had growled, getting very red, and Meg had hastened to add, "But she's very agreeable, Gran, and what a blessing it is that she has money!"
To be sure, there was no sign of an excess of wealth. Alayne dressed charmingly, but with extreme simplicity. She had shown no disposition to shower gifts upon the family, yet the family, with the exception of Renny and Piers, were convinced that she was a young woman of fortune. Piers did not believe it, simply because he did not want to believe it; Renny had cornered Eden soon after his return and had wrested from him the unromantic fact that he had married a girl of the slenderest means, and had come home for a visit while he "looked about him." And so strong was the patriarchal instinct in the eldest Whiteoak that Eden and Alayne might have lived on at Jalna for the rest of their lives without his doing more than order Eden to help Piers on the estate.
On one occasion Eden did spend a morning in the orchard grading apples, but Piers, examining the last of the consignment and finding the grading erratic, to say the least of it, had leaped in a fury into his Ford and rushed to the station, where he had spent the rest of the day in a railway car, wrenching the tops from barrels and regrading them. There had been a family row after this, with Renny and Pheasant on the side of Piers, and the rest of the family banded to protect Eden. They had the grace to wait till Alayne went to bed before beginning it. She had gone to her room early that night, feeling something electric in the air, and no sooner had her door closed than the storm burst forth below.
She had been brought up in an atmosphere of a home peaceful as a nest of doves, and this sudden transplanting into the noisy raillery and hawklike dissensions of the Whiteoaks bewildered her. Up in her room she quaked at the thought of her oddness among these people. When Eden came up an hour later he seemed exhilarated rather than depressed by the squall. He sat on the side of the bed, smoking endless cigarettes, and told her what this one had said and how he had squelched that one, and how Gran had thrown her velvet bag in Renny's face; and Alayne listened, languid in the reassurance of his love. He even sat down at his desk before he came to bed and wrote a wild and joyous poem about a gypsy girl, and came back to the bed and read it loudly and splendidly, and Nip, in Uncle Nick's room across the hall, started up a terrific yapping.
One of Eden's cigarette stubs had burned a hole in the quilt.
Lying awake long afterward, while Eden slept peacefully beside her, Alayne wondered if she could be the same girl who had labored over her father's book and paid decorous little visits to her aunts up the Hudson. She wondered, with a feeling of apprehension, when Eden was going to bestir himself to get a position. After the affair of the apples he spent more and more time in the summerhouse, for he had begun another long narrative poem. Proof sheets of his new book had arrived from New York, and they demanded their share of his time.
Alayne, who was supposed to be the inspiration of this fresh well-spring of poetry, found that during the fierce hours of composition the most helpful thing she could do for the young poet was to keep as far away from him as possible. She explored every field and grove of Jalna, followed the stream in all its turnings, and pressed her way through thicket and bramble to the deepest part of the ravine. She came to love the great unwieldy place, of which the only part kept in order was the farm run by Piers. Sometimes Finch or Wakefield accompanied her, but more often she was alone.
On one of the last days of autumn she came upon Pheasant, sitting with a book in the orchard. It was one of those days so still that the very moving of the sphere seemed audible. The sun was a faint blur of red in the hazy heaven, and in the north the smoke of a distant forest fire made a sullen gesture. This conflagration far away seemed to be consuming the very corpse of summer, which, being dead indeed, felt no pain in the final effacement.
Pheasant was sitting with her back against the bole of a gnarled old apple tree, the apples of which had not been gathered but were lying scattered on the grass about her. The ciderish smell of their decay was more noticeable here than the acrid smell of smoke. The young girl had thrown down her book and, with head tilted back and eyes closed, was more than half asleep. Alayne stood beside her, looking down at her, but Pheasant did not stir, exposing her face to the gaze of the almost stranger with the wistful unconcern of those who slumber. It seemed to Alayne that she had never before really seen this child—for she was little more than a child. With her cropped brown head, softly parted lips, and childish hands with their limply upturned palms, she was a different being from the secretive, pale girl always on her guard, whom Alayne met at table and in the drawing-room at cards. Then she seemed quite able to take care of herself, even faintly hostile in her attitude. Now, in this relaxed and passive pose, she seemed to ask for compassion and tenderness.
As Alayne was about to turn away, Pheasant opened her eyes, and, finding Alayne's eyes looking down into them with an expression of friendliness, she smiled as though she could not help herself.
"Hullo," she said, with boyish brevity. "You caught me asleep."
"I hope I did not waken you."
"Oh, I was only cat-napping. This air makes you drowsy."
"May I sit down beside you?" Alayne asked, with a sudden desire to get better acquainted with the young girl.
"Of course." Her tone was indifferent, but not unfriendly. She picked up her hat, which was half full of mushrooms, and displayed them. "I was gathering these," she said, "for Piers's breakfast. He can eat this many all himself."
"But aren't you afraid you will pick poison ones? I should be."
Pheasant smiled scornfully. "I've been gathering mushrooms all my life. These are all alike. The orchard kind. Except this dear little pink one. I shall give it to Wake. It's got a funny smoky taste and he likes it." She twirled the pink mushroom in her slim brown fingers. "In the pine woods I get lots of morels. Piers likes them, too, only not so well. Piers thinks it's wonderful the way I can always find them. He has them for breakfast almost every morning."
Everything was in terms of Piers. Alayne asked:—
"What is your book? Not so interesting as the mushrooms?"
"It's very good. It belongs to Piers. One of Jules Verne's."
Alayne had hoped that they might talk about the book, but she had read nothing of Jules Verne. She asked instead:—
"Have you known Piers many years? I suppose you have, for you were neighbors, weren't you?"
Pheasant stiffened. She did not answer for a moment, but bent forward plucking at the coarse orchard grass. Then she said in a low voice, "I suppose Eden has told you about me."
"Nothing except that you were a neighbor's daughter."
"Come, now. Don't hedge. The others did, then. Meg—Gran—Uncle Nick?"
"No one," answered Alayne firmly, "has told me anything about you."
"Humph. They're a funny lot. I made sure they'd tell you first thing." She mused a moment, biting a blade of grass, and then added: "I suppose they didn't want to tell you anything so shocking. You're so frightfully proper, and all that."
"Am I?" returned Alayne, rather nettled.
"Well, aren't you?"
"I had not thought about it."
"It was one of the first things I noticed about you."
"I hope it hasn't turned you against me," said Alayne, lightly.
Pheasant reflected, and said she did not think so.
"Then what is it?" persisted Alayne, her tone still light, but her face becoming very serious.
Pheasant picked up one of the mis-shapen apples of the old tree and balanced it on her palm.
"Oh, you're different; that's the principal thing. You don't seem to know anything about real life."
Alayne could have laughed aloud at the answer, that this ignorant little country girl should doubt her experience of life. Yet it was true enough that she did not know life as they in this backwater knew it, where no outside contacts modified the pungent vitality of their relations with each other.
She sat a moment in thought and then she said, gently:—
"You are mistaken if you think that I should be easily upset by anything you would care to tell me. Not that I want to urge your confidence."
"Oh, it's not a matter of confidence," exclaimed Pheasant. "Everybody in the world knows it but you, and of course, you'll hear it sooner or later, so I may as well tell you."
She laid the apple on the grass, and, clasping her ankles in her brown hands, sat upright, with the air of a precocious child, and announced: "I'm illegitimate—what Gran in her old-fashioned way calls a bastard. There you are." A bright color dyed her cheeks, but she flung out the words with pathetic bravado.
"I am sorry," murmured Alayne, "but you do not suppose that that will affect my feelings for you, do you?"
"It does most people's." The answer came in a low husky voice, and she went on hurriedly: "My father was the only child of an English colonel. His parents doted on him. He was the delight of their old age. My mother was a common country girl and she left me on their doorstep with a note, exactly the way they do in books. They took me in and kept me, but it broke the old people's hearts. They died not long after. My father—"
"Did you live with him?" Alayne tried to make it easier for her by a tone of unconcern, but her eyes were filled with tears of pity for the child who in such quaint phraseology—"the delight of their old age," indeed—told of the tragedy of her birth.
"Yes, till I was married. He just endured me. But I expect the sight of me was a constant reminder—of what he'd lost, I mean."
"Lost?"
"Yes, Meg Whiteoak. He'd been engaged to her, and she broke it off when I appeared on the scene. That's why she has that glassy stare for me. All the Whiteoaks were against the marriage, of course. It was adding insult to injury, you see."
"Oh, my dear."
The significance of looks and chance phrases that had puzzled her became apparent. She was pierced by a vivid pain at the thought of all the unmerited suffering of Pheasant.
"You have had rather a hard time, but surely that is all over. Meg cannot go on blaming you for what is not your fault, and I think the others are fond of you."
"Oh, I don't know."
"I should be if you would let me." Her hand moved across the grass to Pheasant's. Their fingers intertwined.
"All right. But I warn you, I'm not a bit proper."
"Perhaps I am not so proper as you think." Their fingers were still warmly clutched. "By the way, why doesn't Piers like me? I feel that it will not be altogether simple to be your friend when he is so—well, distant."
"He is jealous of you—for my sake, I think. I just think that, mind you; he's never said so. But I think he finds it pretty beastly that you should be thought so much of and me so little, and that you should be made so welcome and me so unwelcome, when after all we're just two girls, except that you're rich and I'm poor, and you're legitimate and I'm up against the bar sinister, and Piers has always taken such an interest in the place and worked on it, and Eden only cares for poetry and having his own way."
Alayne was scarlet. Out of the tangle of words one phrase menaced her. She said, with a little gasp: "Whatever made you think I was rich? My dear child, I am poor—poor. My father was a college professor. You know they are poor enough, in all conscience."
"You may be what you call poor, but you're rich to us," answered Pheasant, sulkily.
"Now listen," continued Alayne, sternly. "My father left me five thousand dollars insurance, and a bungalow which I sold for fourteen thousand, which makes nineteen thousand dollars. That is absolutely all. So you see how rich I am."
"It sounds a lot," said Pheasant, stolidly, and their hands parted and they both industriously plucked at the grass.
The significance of other allusions was now made plain to Alayne. She frowned as she asked: "What put such an idea into your head, Pheasant? Surely the rest of the family are not suffering from that hallucination."
"We all thought you were frightfully well off. I don't know exactly how it came about—someone said—Gran said—no, Meg said it was—" She stopped short, suddenly pulled up by a tardy caution.
"Who said what?" insisted Alayne.
"I think it was Uncle Nick who said—"
"Said what?"
"That it was a good thing that Eden—oh, bother, I can't remember what he said. What does it matter, anyhow?"
Alayne had to subdue a feeling of helpless anger before she answered, quietly: "It does not matter. But I want you not to have the notion that I am rich. It is ridiculous. It puts me in a false position. You knew that I worked for my living before I married Eden. Why did you think I did that?"
"We knew it was publishing books. It didn't seem like work."
"My child, I was not publishing. I only read manuscripts for the publisher. Do you see the difference?"
Pheasant stared at her uncomprehendingly, and Alayne, moved by a sudden impulse, put her arm about her and kissed her. "How silly of me to mind! May we be friends, then?"
Pheasant's body relaxed against her with the abandon of a child's. "It's lovely of you," she breathed, "not to mind about my—"
Alayne stopped her words with a kiss. "As though that were possible! And I hope Piers will feel less unfriendly to me when he knows everything."
Pheasant was watching over Alayne's shoulder two figures that were approaching along the orchard path.
"It's Renny," she said, "and Maurice. I wonder what they're up to. Renny's got an axe."
The men were talking and laughing rather loudly over some joke, and did not see the girls at once. Alayne sat up and stroked her hair.
"I'll bet it is some war joke," whispered Pheasant. "They're always at it when they're together." Pheasant took up an apple and rolled it in their direction. "Hullo, Maurice, why such hilarity?"
The two came up, Maurice removing his tweed cap. Renny, already bareheaded, nodded, the reminiscent grin fading from his face.
"Alayne," he said, "this is Maurice Vaughan, our nearest neighbor."
They shook hands, and Alayne, remembering having heard a reference to the fact that Vaughan drank a good deal, thought he showed it in his heavy eyes and relaxed mouth. He gave Pheasant a grudging smile, and then turned to Renny.
"Is this the tree?" he asked:
"Yes," returned Renny, surveying it critically. "What are you going to do?" asked Alayne.
"Cut it down. It's very old, and it's rotting. It must make room for a new one."
Alayne was filled with dismay. To her the old apple tree was beautiful, standing strong and yet twisted with age in the golden October sunshine. From it seemed to emanate the spirit of all the seasons the tree had known, with their scents of fragile apple blossoms and April rains, of moist orchard earth and mellowing fruit. A lifetime of experience was recorded on its rugged trunk, the bark of which enfolded it in mossy layers, where a myriad tiny insects had their being.
She asked, trying not to look too upset, for she was never certain when the Whiteoaks would be amused at what they thought soft-heartedness or affectation, "Must it come down? I was just thinking what a grand old tree it is. And it seems to have borne a good many apples."
"It's diseased," returned Renny. "Look at the shape of the apples. This orchard needs going over rather badly."
"But this is only one tree and it is such a beautiful shape."
"You must go over to the old orchard. You will find dozens like this there." He pulled off his coat and began to roll up the sleeves from his lean, muscular arms. Alayne fancied that an added energy was given to his movements by her opposition.
She said nothing more, but with a growing feeling of antagonism watched him pick up the axe and place the first blow against the stalwart trunk. She imagined the consternation among the insect life on the tree at that first shuddering shock, comparable to an earthquake on our own sphere. The tree itself stood with a detached air, only the slightest quiver stirring its glossy leaves. Another and another blow fell, and a wedge-shaped chip, fresh with sap, sprang out on to the grass. Renny swung the axe with ease, it and his arms moving in rhythmic accord. Another chip fell, and another, and the tree sent up a groaning sound, as the blows at last penetrated its vitals.
"Oh, oh! Let me get my things," cried Pheasant, and would have darted forward to rescue her hat and mushrooms had not Vaughan caught her by the wrist and jerked her out of the way.
It seemed that the dignity of the gnarled old tree would never be shaken. At each blow a shiver ran through its far-spreading branches and, one by one, the remaining apples fell, but for a long time the great trunk and massive primal limbs received the onslaughts of the axe with a sort of rugged disdain. At last, with a straining of its farthest roots, it crashed to the ground, creating a gust of air that was like the last fierce outgoing of breath from a dying man.
Renny stood, lean, red-faced, triumphant, his head moist with sweat. He glanced shrewdly at Alayne and then turned to Vaughan.
"A good job well done, eh, Maurice?" he asked. "Can you give me a cigarette?"
Vaughan produced a box, and Pheasant, without waiting to be asked, snatched one for herself and, with it between her lips, held up her face to Vaughan's for a light.
"There's a bold little baggage for you," remarked Renny to Alayne, with an odd look of embarrassment.
Pheasant blinked at Alayne through smoke. "Alayne knows I've been badly brought up."
"I think the result is delightful," said Alayne, but she disapproved of Pheasant at that moment.
Pheasant chuckled. "Do you hear that, Maurice? Aren't you proud?"
"Perhaps Alayne doesn't realize that he is your happy parent," said Renny, taking the bull by the horns.
Vaughan gave Alayne a smile, half sheepish, half defiant, and wholly, she thought, unprepossessing. "I expect Mrs. Whiteoak has heard of all my evil doings," he said.
"I did not connect you two in my mind at all. I only heard to-day—a few minutes ago—that Pheasant had a father living. I had stupidly got the idea that she was an orphan."
"I expect Maurice wishes I were, sometimes," said Pheasant. "I don't mean that he wishes himself dead—"
"Why not?" asked Vaughan.
"Oh, because it's such fun being a man, even an ill-tempered one. I mean that he wishes he had no encumbrance in the shape of me."
"You encumber him no longer," said Renny. "You encumber me; isn't that so?"
"Will somebody please get my hat and book and mushrooms?" pleaded the young girl. "They're under the tree."
Renny began to draw aside the heavy branches, the upper ones of which were raised like arms in prayer. An acrid scent of crushed overripe apples rose from among them. His hands, when he had rescued the treasures, were covered by particles of bark and tiny terrified insects.
Vaughan turned toward home, and Pheasant ran after him, showing, now that they were separated, a demonstrative affection toward him that baffled Renny, who was not much given to speculation concerning the feelings of his fellows.
As for Alayne, her mind was puzzled more and more by these new connections who were everything that her parents and her small circle of intimates were not. Even while their conduct placed her past life on a plane of dignity and reticence, their warmth and vigor made that life seem tame and even colorless. The response of her nature to the shock of this change in her environment was a variety of moods to which she had never before been accustomed. She had sudden sensations of depression, tinged with foreboding, followed by unaccountable flights of gaiety, when she felt that something passionately beautiful was about to happen to her.
Renny, lighting a cigarette, looked at her gravely. "Do you know," he said, "I had no idea that you were so keen about that tree, or I should have left it as it was. Why didn't you make me understand?"
"I did not want to make too much fuss. I thought you would think I was silly. Any one who knew me at all well would have known how I felt about it. But then—you do not know me very well. I cannot blame you for that."
His gaze on her face became more intense. "I wish I did understand you. I'm better at understanding horses and dogs than women. I never understand them. Now, in this case, it wasn't till the tree was down and I saw your face that I knew what it meant to you. Upon my word, I wouldn't have taken anything—why, you looked positively tragic. You've no idea what a brute I feel." He gave a rueful cut at the fallen tree to emphasize his words.
"Oh, don't!" she exclaimed. "Don't hurt it again!"
He stood motionless among the broken branches, and she moved to his side. He attracted her. She wondered why she had never noticed before how striking he was. But then, she had never before seen him active among outdoor things. She had seen him rather indifferently riding his roan horse. In the house she had thought of him as rather morose and vigilant, though courteous when he was not irritated or excited by his family; and she had thought he held rather an inflated opinion of his own importance as head of the house. Now, axe in hand, with his narrow red head, his red foxlike face and piercing red-brown eyes, he seemed the very spirit of the woods and streams. Even his ears, she noticed, were pointed, and his hair grew in a point on his forehead.
He, having thrown down the axe at her words of entreaty, stood among the broken branches, motionless as a statue, with apparently a statue's serene detachment under inspection. He scarcely seemed to breathe.
One of those unaccountable soarings of the spirit to which she had of late been subject possessed her at this moment. Her whole being was moved by a strange exhilaration. The orchard, the surrounding fields, the autumn day, seemed but a painted background for the gesture of her own personality. She had moved to Renny's side. Now, from a desire scarcely understood by herself, to prove by the sense of touch that she was really she and he was no one more faunlike than Renny Whiteoak, she laid her hand on his arm. He did not move, but his eyes slid toward her face with an odd, speculative look in them. He was faintly hostile, she believed, because of her supersensitiveness about the tree. She smiled up at him, trying to show that she was not feeling childishly aggrieved, and trying at the same time to hide that haunting and wilful expectancy fluttering her nerves.
The next moment she found herself in his arms with his lips against hers, and all her sensations crushed for the moment into helpless surrender. She felt the steady thud of his heart, and against it the wild tapping of her own. At last he released her and said, with a rather whimsical grimace: "Did you mind so much? I'm awfully sorry. I suppose you think me more of a brute than ever now."
"Oh," she exclaimed quiveringly, "how could you do that? How could you think I would be willing—"
"I didn't think at all," he said. "I did it on the spur of the moment. You looked so—so—oh, I can't think of a word to describe how you looked."
"Please tell me. I wish to know," she said icily.
"Well—inviting, then."
"Do you mean consciously inviting?" There was a dangerous note in her voice.
"Don't be absurd! Unconsciously, of course. You simply made me forget myself. I'm sorry."
She was trembling all over.
"Perhaps," she said, courageously, "you were not much more to blame than I."
"My dear child—as though you could help the way you looked."
"Yes, but I went over to you, deliberately, when—oh, I cannot say it!" Yet, perversely, she wanted to say it.
"When you knew you were looking especially lovely—is that what you mean?"
"Not at all. It's no use—I cannot say it."
"Why make the effort? I'm willing to take all the blame. After all, a kiss isn't such a terrible thing, and I'm a relation. Men occasionally kiss their sisters-in-law. It will probably never happen again unless, as you say, you brazenly approach me when—what were you trying to say, Alayne? Now I come to think of it, I believe I have the right to know. It might save me more stabs of conscience."
"Oh, you make it all seem ridiculous. You make me feel very childish—very stupid."
He had seated himself on the fallen tree. Now he raised his eyes contritely to hers. "Look here. That's the last thing on earth I want to do. I'm only trying to get you not to take it too seriously, and I want all the blame."
Her earnest eyes now looked full into his, taking a great deal of courage, for his were sparkling, so full of interest in her, and at the same time so mocking.
"I see that I must tell you. It is this: I have had odd feelings lately of unrest, and a kind of anticipation, as though just around the corner some moving, thrilling experience were waiting for me. This sensation makes me reckless. I felt it just before I moved toward you, and, I think—I think—"
"You think I was playing up to you?"
"Not quite that. But I think you felt something unusual about me."
"I did, and I do. You're not like any woman I've ever known. Tell me, have you thought of me as—caring for you, thinking a good deal about you?"
"I thought you rather disliked me. But please let us forget about all this. I never want to think of it again."
"Of course not," he assented gravely.
With a stab of almost physical pain, she remembered that she had half unconsciously kissed him back again. Her face and neck were dyed crimson. With a little gasp she said: "Of the two I am the more to blame."
"Is this the New England conscience that I've heard so much about?" he asked, filled with amazement.
"I suppose so."
He regarded her with the same half-mocking, half-quizzical look in his eyes, but his voice deepened.
"Oh, my dear, you are a sweet thing! And to think that you are Eden's wife, and that I must never kiss you again!"
She could not meet his eyes now. She was afraid of him, and still more afraid of herself. She felt that the strange expectancy of mood that had swayed her during these weeks at Jalna was nothing but the premonition of this moment. She said, trying to take herself in hand:—
"I am going back to the house. I think I heard the stable clock strike. It must be dinner-time." She turned away and began to walk quickly over the rough orchard grass.
It was significant of the eldest Whiteoak that he made no attempt to follow her, but sat with his eyes on her retreating form, confident that she would look back at him. As he expected, she turned after a dozen paces and regarded him with dignity but with a certain childlike pleading in her voice.
"Will you promise never to think of me as I have been this morning?" she asked.
"Then I must promise never to think of you at all," he returned with composure.
"Then never think of me. I should prefer that."
"Come, Alayne, you know that's impossible."
"Well, promise to forget this morning."
"It is forgotten already."
But, hurrying away through the orchard, she felt that if he could forget as easily as that it would be more terrible to her than if he had brooded on it in his most secret thoughts.