He reached it just in time to see her run like a deer across the sun-dappled grass, after a bright ball Meg had thrown to her, with an infantile aimlessness which precluded all possibility of its being caught. She made a graceful dart at it, picked it up, and came back under the trees, tossing it in the air, and catching it again with a deft turn of hand and wrist. She was flushed with the exercise, and, for the moment, almost radiant; she held her dress closely about her figure, her face was upturned and her eyes were uplifted, and she was as unconscious as Meg herself.
When she saw him she threw the ball to the children, and came forward to the window.
"Does Janey want me?" she asked.
"No. She is asleep."
"Do you want me?"
"I want to see you go on with your game."
"It is not my game," she answered, smiling. "It is Jack\'s and Meg\'s. Suppose you come and join them. It will fill them with rapture, and I shall like to look on."
When he came out she sat down under a tree leaning against the trunk, and watched him, her eyes following the swift flight of the ball high into the blue above them, as he flung it upward among the delighted clamor of the children. He had always excelled in sports and[Pg 196] feats of strength, and in this simple feat of throwing the ball his physical force and grace displayed themselves to decided advantage. The ball went up, as an arrow flies from the bow, hurtling through the air, until it was little more than a black speck to the eye. When it came back to earth he picked it up and threw it again, and each time it seemed to reach a greater height than the last.
"That is very fine," she said. "I like to see you do it."
"Why?" he asked, pausing.
"I like the force you put into it," she answered. "It scarcely seems like play."
"I did not know that," he said; "but I am afraid I am always in earnest. That is my misfortune."
"It is a great misfortune," she said. "Don\'t be in earnest," with a gesture as if she would sweep the suggestion away with her hand. "Go on with your game. Let us be like children, and play. Our holiday will be over soon enough, and we shall have to return to Washington and effete civilization."
"Is it a holiday?" he asked her.
"Yes," she answered. "Now that Janey is getting better I am deliberately taking a holiday. Nothing rests me so much as forgetting things."
"Are you forgetting things?" he asked.
"Yes," she replied, looking away; "everything."
Then the children demanded his attention, and he returned to his ball-throwing.
If she was taking a holiday with deliberate intention she did it well. In a few days Janey was well enough to be carried out and laid on one of the two hammocks swung beneath the trees, and then far the greater part of the day was spent in the open air. To Tredennis it seemed that Bertha made the most of every hour, whether she swung in her hammock with her face upturned to the trees, or sat reading, or talking as she worked with the decorous little basket, at which she had jeered, upon her knee.
[Pg 197]
He was often reminded in these days of what the professor had said of her tenderness for her children. It revealed itself in a hundred trifling ways, in her touch, in her voice, in her almost unconscious habit of caring for them, and, more than all, in a certain pretty, inconvenient fashion they had of getting close to her, and clinging about her, at all sorts of inopportune moments. Once when she had run to comfort Meg who had fallen down, and had come back to the hammock, carrying her in her arms, he was betrayed into speaking.
"I did not think,"—he began, and then he checked himself guiltily.
"You did not think?" she repeated.
He began to recognize his indiscretion.
"I beg your pardon," he said, "I was going to make a blunder."
She sat down in the hammock, with the child in her arms.
"You were going to say that you did not think I cared so much for my children," she said, gently. "Do you suppose I did not know that? Well, perhaps it was not a blunder. Perhaps it is only one of my pretences."
"Don\'t speak like that," he implored.
The next instant he saw that tears had risen in her eyes.
"No," she said. "I will not. Why should I? It is not true. I love them very much. However bad you are, I think you must love your children. Of course, my saying that I loved them might go for nothing; but don\'t you see," she went on with a pathetic thrill in her voice, "that they love me? They would not love me, if I did not care for them."
"I know that," he returned remorsefully. "It was only one of my blunders, as I said. But you have so bewildered me sometimes. When I first returned I could not understand you. It was as if I found myself face to face with a creature I had never seen before."
[Pg 198]
"You did," she said. "That was it. Perhaps I never was the creature you fancied me."
"Don\'t say that," he replied. "Since I have been here I have seen you as I used to dream of you, when I sat by the fire in my quarters in the long winter nights."
"Did you ever think of me like that?" she said slowly, and with surprise in her face.
He had not thought of what he was revealing, and he did not think of it now.
"I never forgot you," he said. "Never."
"It seems very strange—to hear that now," she said. "I never dreamed of your thinking of me—afterwards. You seemed to take so little notice of me."
"It is my good fortune," he said, with a touch of bitterness, "that I never seem to take notice of anything."
"I suppose," she went on, "that you remembered me because you were lonely at first, and there was no one else to think of."
"Perhaps that was it," he answered.
"After all," she said, "it was natural—only I never thought"—
"It was as natural that you should forget as that I should remember," he said.
Her face had been slightly averted, and she turned it toward him.
"But I did not forget," she said.
"You did not?"
"No. At first, it is true, I scarcely seemed to have time for anything, but to be happy and enjoy the days, as they went by. Oh! what bright days they were, and how far away they seem! Perhaps, if I had known that they would come to an end really, I might have tried to make them pass more slowly."
"They went slowly for me," he said. "I was glad when they were over."
"Were you so very lonely!" she asked.
"Yes."
[Pg 199]
"Would it have pleased you, if I had written to you when papa did?"
"Did you ever think of doing it?" he asked.
The expression dawning in her eyes was a curious one—there was a suggestion of dread in it.
"Once," she replied. "I began a letter to you. It was on a dull day, when I was restless and unhappy for the first time in my life; and suddenly I thought of you, and I felt as if I should like to speak to you again,—and I began the letter."
"But you did not finish it."
"No. I only wrote a few lines, and then stopped. I said to myself that it was not likely that you had remembered me in the way I had remembered you, so I laid my letter aside. I saw it only a few days ago among some old papers in my trunk."
"You have it yet?"
"I did not know that I had it, until I saw it the other day. It seems strange that it should have lain hidden all these years, and then have come to light. I laid it away thinking I might find courage to finish it sometime. There are only a few lines, but they prove that my memory was not so bad as you thought."
He had been lying on the grass a few feet away from her. As she talked he had looked not at her, but at the bits of blue sky showing through the interlacing greenness of the trees above him. Now he suddenly half rose and leaned upon his elbow.
"Will you give it to me?" he said.
"Do you want it? It is only a yellow scrap of paper."
"I think it belongs to me," he said. "I have a right to it."
She got up without a word and went toward the house, leading Meg by the hand. Tredennis watched her retreating figure in silence until she went in at the door. His face set, and his lips pressed together, then he flung himself backward and lay at full length again, seeing only the bright green of the leaves and the bits[Pg 200] of intense blue between. It was well that he was alone. His sense of impotent anguish was more than he had strength to bear, and it wrung a cry from him.
"My God!" he said; "my God!" He was still lying so when Bertha returned. She had not been away many minutes, and she came back alone with the unfinished letter in her hand.
He took it from her without comment, and looked at it. The faint odor of heliotrope he knew so well floated up to him as he bent over the paper. As she had said, there were only a few lines, and she had evidently been dissatisfied with them, and irresolute about them, for several words were erased as if with girlish impatience. At the head of the page was written first: Dear Philip, and then Dear Captain Tredennis, and there were two or three different opening sentences. As he read each one through the erasures, he thought he understood the innocent, unconscious appeal in it, and he seemed to see the girl-face bending above it, changing from eagerness to uncertainty, and from uncertainty to the timidity which had made her despair.
"I wish you had finished it," he said.
"I wish I had," she answered, and then she added vaguely, "if it would have pleased you."
He folded it, and put it in his breast-pocket and laid down once more, and it was not referred to again.
It seemed to Tredennis, at least, that there never before had been such a day as the one which followed. After a night of rain the intense heat subsided, leaving freshness of verdure, skies of the deepest, clearest blue, and a balmy, luxurious sweetness in the air, deliciously pungent with the odors of cedar and pine.
When he came down in the morning, and entered the breakfast room, he found it empty. The sunlight streamed through the lattice-work of vines, and the cloth was laid, with the pretty blue cups and saucers in waiting; but Bertha was not there, and, fancying she had risen later than usual, he went out into the open air.
[Pg 201]
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