Hallie Erminie Rives

“ Could it ever again be to her that magical shore she had first seen from a ship's deck, with hills which the cherry-trees made fairy tapestries of green-rose, and mountains creased of purple velvet and veined with gold? The great white phantom lifting above them—would it henceforth be but a bulk of ice and stone, no longer the shrine of the Goddess-of-Radiant-Flower-Bloom? The sky—would it ever again seem the same violet arch that had bent over a Tokyo garden of musk flowers and moonlight? Would the world never seem beautiful to her again? ”

“ Sweet emotions shot through her breast.
“Love me, no matter what comes, Esther, love me.”
He too felt some hurting power bound through his blood, and wrestle with his reserve—his equilibrium.
His low voice, his soft eyes, held her; not a tone, not a look but it caressed her.
The soft shadows, the limpid waters, the open air—with it altogether he felt a strange softening.
“You never said sweet words straight from your heart to me before.”
“Why words? Instinct, nature, tells us when a thing is true. That great silent power often stands between the soul and what it loves. ”

“ The rose scent had grown stronger; it was almost, in that heavy air, as if he were breasting an etherial sea of attar. He felt as if he were treading on a path of rose-leaves, down which the increasing melody flowed crimsonly to him, calling, calling.
He stopped stock-still. He had been skirting a close-cropped hedge of box. This had ended abruptly and he was looking straight up a bar of green-yellow radiance from a double doorway. The latter opened on a porch and the light, flung across this, drenched an arbor of climbing roses, making it stand out a mass of woven rubies set in emerald. ”

“ THE FEAST OF RAMAZAN
A cool breeze slipped ahead of the dawn. It blew dim the calm Greek stars, stirred the intricate branches of olive-trees inlaid in the rose-pearl façade of sky, bowed the tall, coral-lipped oleanders lining the rivulets, and crisped the soft wash of the gulf-tide. It lifted the strong bronze curls on the brow of a sleeping man who lay on the sea-beach covered with a goatskin.
George Gordon woke and looked about him: at the pallid, ripple-ridged dunes, the murmuring clusters of reeds; at the dead fire on which a kid had roasted the night before ”

“ Matted honeysuckle, that opened as if by magic in the dewless, stirless night, arched above a garden gate, wherefrom, with hasty thrift, tall lilacs framed a girl in wreathen bloom.
From the moment the gleam of that sweet face of hers touched him, the world, he felt, would lose its luster if Cherokee did not smile on him, and him alone, of all the world of men.
All the wealth, fashion and talent of the rest of women in their totality, were of no more meaning to him than the floating of motes in the great sunbeam of his love for this girl. ”

“ Barbara ran down the garden path as if pursued. She stepped into the carriage blindly. The Fox-Woman! Votary of the Fox-God, at whose candle-lighted shrine she had refused tribute!
This, then, was the end. It came to her like the striking of a great bell. To-morrow the streets would lie as vivid in the sunlight, the buglers would march as blithely, the bent pines would wave, the lotos-pads in the moat glisten, the gorgeous geisha flash by: she alone would know that the sun had died in the blue heaven! ”

“ This was a spacious level meadow into which debouched the ravine on whose rim he had stood with Shirley on that unforgettable day. But its stake-and-ridered fence enclosed now no mere stretch of ill-kept sward. Busy scythes, rollers and grass-cutters from the Country Club had smoothed and shaven a rectangle in its center till it lay like a carpet of crushed green velvet, set in an expanse of life-everlasting and pale budding goldenrod.
He halted his car at the end of the field and snapped a leash in the bulldog’s collar. ”

“ Esther lifted a solemn face to him.
“It seems to me that a marriage without love would crush all that was sweetest and finest in a woman’s nature. Marriage for love is the dearest gift to any soul—it is the highest ideal of God’s world.” She was in one of her intense moods.
“But if it be for anything else?” He encouraged her to go on.
“It’s a desecration. Love is not only the holiest thing in the life of a woman, but it’s life itself for the man. It makes him whatever he becomes. The righteous altar-vow is a delight and to obey is the cry of the heart if it speaks the words with the lips.” ”

“ Echo!" he whispered. "You have had my love, you have it now. You could have my life, if I could give it—every day, every drop of my blood, would not be enough to pay the price of what you must bear! But it is out of my power. I thought I could save you, my darling! But I can't.... I can't.... If I might only suffer alone, and you never know!"
He lifted his head with a start. A thought had darted to his mind like an impinging ray of light. Why should she ever know? Why should any one know—if Craig died? Only Craig who had known him in the past, had recognised him as Harry Sevier. ”

“ It shook to its depths the mystic peace that had come to him on the deck of the Hercules after that [421] last parting. It was as though all the old craving, the bitterness, the cruciate longing of his love rose at once to a combat under which the whole mind of the man bent and writhed in anguish.
Gordon’s face, as it stared out from the torch-flare across the gloomy gulf, showed to the man who waited near-by no sign of the struggle that wrung his soul, and that, passing at length, left him blanched and exhausted like one from whose veins a burning fever has ebbed suddenly. ”

“ In the car, as the train fled through the glory of the sunset, Barbara closed her eyes, the longer to keep the impression of that eager gaze: the lithe, muscular poise of the strong frame, the parted lips, the brown hair curling under the peak of the cloth cap. She tried to imagine him on his backward journey. Now the trolley had passed the rice-fields, now he was striding along the shore road toward Kamakura, where the great bronze Buddha was lifting its face of dreamless calm. Now, perhaps, he was turning back toward the deepening blur of the green island. ”

“ The first shock of Glenn Andrews’ absence was a bitter trial to Esther, who grieved unreasoningly. His going seemed like the end of the world. It was over, those rare, dear days of smiles and tears, of trifling quarrels and sweet reconciliations. She wondered how she had ever thought the sky was so blue, the grass so green.
Through all of her desolation, however, ran the thought that he wished nothing so much as for her to advance in her art.
Would she let the first rock block her way? Youth can forget its grief. ”

“ A craving for a glass of water has served its purpose a thousand times; as her cavalier solicitously departed to fetch the cooling draught, she rose, and carelessly humming the refrain the music had just left off, sauntered lightly out by another door to the open air. A swift glance about her showed her she was unobserved and she stepped down to the grass and along the winding path to a bench at some distance in the shrubbery. Here the smiling mask slipped from her face and with a shiver she dropped her hot face in her hands.
There were no tears. ”

“ His momentary glimpse on that day of Echo had stung his every sense to quivering protest. It had pierced, as with a fiery sword, the torpor which had unwrapped his love with its protecting armour and that love had awaked to agonised consciousness, vivified and intensified. Then, in his loneliness, the knowledge that the woman he would have died for had left him to drag out his penalty, would sweep over him till a fierce hatred of her would rise up in him—to be swept away as swiftly by something sweeter and stronger that would not be denied. ”

“ Marrion stood for a moment immovable, then he took her hand with reverential homage.
“Cherokee, you have raised all womankind in my eyes. I did love you—now I worship you. Your open frankness is so unlike the irresolute frailty, the miserable wiles of your sex. You have touched a chord in my heart that has been mute for years. To me you are a garden of roses, you have bloomed even under blight. Beholding you now, I am enabled to forget that the world is evil.” ”

“ A cloistered city, its old grandeur departed and seemingly but half inhabited; the river drifting by, the house of the Shelleys on the opposite bank; boats and horses; a garden sweet with orange-trees and gushes of violets along shady walks; a few servants marshalled by Fletcher and Tita; a study and books—and Teresa. It was the home Gordon had dreamed of when his arms were around her at the villa chapel, but more satisfying, more complete. ”

“ For the tiny rock-knoll, with its single twisted pine-tree in front of the main door, the wistaria arbor and red dwarf maples, the great stone lanterns, the miniature lake and pebbled rivulet spanned by its arching bridge—all these were Japanese. In the early morning the eerie witchery of the night was gone, but the sky was as deep as space and the air languid with the perfume and warmth of a St. Martin's summer. A green-golden glow tinged the camelia hedges and above them the long cool expanse of weather-boarding and olive blinds—like a carving in jade and old ivory. ”

“ Just before her, upon an eminence, spread the University buildings, the tall spires marking their profile on the sky. The sun’s rays shot up behind them its last warm flashes. Its heat had already dampened Esther’s hair, deepening the red tint of its waves against her temples. The campus was alive with students coming and going in every direction. The tenor of the glee club, in his striped sweater of the college colors, humming a popular air, walked leisurely across to where one fellow was sprawled on the ground, gazing at the wagon with an amused curiosity on his handsome face. ”

“ It was Sassoon’s death that her mother mourned. The man in whose arms she had stood such a little while ago by the old dial of Damory Court was the son of the man who had killed him! She lifted her hands to her breast with a gesture of anguish, then dropped to her knees, buried her face on the dusty seat of one of the rickety horsehair chairs and broke into a wild burst of sobs, noiseless but terrible, that seemed to rise in her heart and tear themselves up through her breast. ”

“ Her mind was far away, in another city and state; her thought had entered again the gloomy prison which she had visited with Nancy Langham and Malcolm—on a day when a prisoner had intervened to save the Warden's life. The peace of autumn evenings brought no comfort to that place, save it were the mere rest of wearied bodies. A city of itself, it was as alien to that city so near it, of comfortable homes and pleasant people which she had visited, as the deep life of the coal-miner is alien to that of the free hunter who breathes the sweeter air a thousand feet above the other's sunless toil. ”

“ Like most Southerners, Major McDowell had the happy faculty of entertaining his guests royally.
The New Yorker was there for the day, at the kind solicitation of the Major and his most estimable wife. Afternoon brought a rimming haze; the wind had hushed, and the thick, lifeless air bespoke rain. A cloud no bigger than a man’s hand had gathered at low-sky; then mounted, swelling, to the zenith, and wrapped the heavens in a pall and covered the earth’s face with darkness that was fearfully illumined by the lightning’s glare. ”

“ Up and down the roadway went shimmering rick'sha, and Japanese couples in light kimono strolled along the bay's edge, under the bent pines, their low voices mingled with the soft lapping of the tide. Now and then a bicycle would pass swiftly, bare sandaled feet chasing its pedals, and kimono sleeves flapping like great bats'-wings from its handle-bars; or a flanneled English figure would stride along, with pipe and racquet, from late tennis at the recreation-ground. From the corner came the cries of romping children and the tapping staff and double flute-note of a blind masseur. ”

“ The rainy season set in with all its rigors. Missolonghi became a pestilential mud-basket beside which the dikes of Holland were a desert of Arabia for dryness. An unknown plague fastened on the bazaar and terrified the townspeople. But in all conditions, Gordon seemed inspirited with a calm cheerfulness.
He thought of Teresa continually. Oddly enough, she stood before him always as he had once seen her on a square in Venice, with moonlight tangling an aureole in her gold hair, her face now not frozen with mute horror—that picture had vanished forever!—but serene with love and abnegation. ”

“ My philosophy taught me the penalty of emotion, and I thought I had much to do in the world. I dreamed of work that would absorb me utterly—that would take the best that was in me, of feeling and of effort. All my life I had denied myself the passion that my eyes told me was growing in you. I had grown to consider myself apart from others—a mental solitary who had locked the door of his heart because he had work to do. It had not occurred to me that the Juggernaut whose rumbling wheels I would not hear might crush you. It was the concert at the Metropolitan that opened my eyes. ”

“ So long as Craig lived, the harrowing danger would always be there—a veritable Sword of Damocles! Would not his future be forever a dubious adventure, haunted always by a torturing shadow and the dread of discovery and shame? In fancy he saw himself seized—to be suddenly confronted with that shameful thing, to face a cloud of witnesses, be dragged back to a cell, despised and broken, once more a convict—that, or else flight, cringing and furtive, with the hounds of the law in cry! ”

“ Everywhere Barbara was conscious of the flutter of children—of little girls whose dress and hair showed a pervasive sense of care and adornment; of faces neither gay nor sad looking from latticed windows that hung above open gutters of sluggish ooze; of frail balconies adorned with growing flowers or miniature gardens set in earthen trays; of doorways hung with soft-fringed, rice-straw ropes and dotted with paper charms—the talismanic o-fuda seen on every hand in Japan. In Yokohama what had struck her most had been the curious composite, the jumbled dissonance of East and West. ”

“ As she stood again at the altar, the phial in her hand, a bleak fear crossed her soul. What if it had never been anything but a story? Perhaps Juliet had never awakened really, but had died when she drank the potion! Suppose it were a poison, from which there was no awaking!
She shivered as if with cold. Better even that than life—without him!
Perhaps, too, Gordon had jested or had been mistaken. ”

“ When such a development has become the great and absorbing passion of a man’s life, I cannot express to you how haunting becomes the fear of disappointment, how terrible the jealousy of circumstance that may step between him and its fulfillment. You had beautiful ideals—such as I have had—and they had grown a part of you. To lose them would have ashed the ember; it would have deadened the quick sensibilities and wounded that soul-instinct of yours in which your music lived. ”

“ Lying in his bunk Harry awoke to the consciousness of another bleak dawn. The morning waking was always a pain to him, for in sleep the barriers fell away and the mind fared forth along the free, sweet highways of memory. He did not open his eyes at once, but he felt the rasp of the coarse blanket at his throat, smelled the cold clamminess of the granite floor, and realised by a thousand reminders of the sharpened senses that another round of the treadmill awaited him. ”

“ With his pallid face, his stirless attitude, his great white fingers clutching the arms of the chair, he suggested some enormous, sprawling batrachian awaiting its more active prey.
All at once there came a chirp from the cage in the corner and its tiny occupant, waked by the electric-light, burst into song as clear and joyous as though before its free wing lay all the meads of Eden. A look more human, soft and almost companionable, came into its master's massive face. Bersonin rose and, whistling, opened the cage door and held out an enormous forefinger. ”

“ But from time to time, in this routine, a searing memory would recur and he would see in shifting chiaroscuro, the scene on the Piazza San Marco: the faces of the maskers, the slight, shrinking form of Teresa, the angry dark eyes of the Fornarina, a hand snatching at a veil—then the streaming moonlight tangling to a halo about a girl’s shocked face so innocently touched with horror, a face that would always be distinct to him! ”

“ Just as Glenn was about to utter an apology for the confusion, his face became serious and silent. He was peculiarly sensitive to the influence of the violin. He was conscious of a dreamy exaltation, and the awakening of a new enthusiasm. The music had burst into a wild, passionate tenderness, as though she was daringly investing all her dreams with life-throbbing human life—the tone fairly voicing the longing of her soul. ”

“ Echo slipped off her gown and drew out the pins from her hair, letting it fall in a shimmering cloud to her waist. Then in the moon-light she drew a deep chair before the open window and began to brush out that wonderful mass of stirring gold that curled and waved about her bare, round shoulders. Below her the garden lay, a mass of olive shadows, wound in cloudy golds and misty greens, sprinkled with moon-dust and drenched with the dizzying scent of roses and honeysuckle. ”

“ Daunt seized this excuse, plunged ferociously into tweeds and an hour afterward found himself in a railway carriage thudding gloomily toward the lower bay. In his heart he knew that he was trying to run away—from something that nevertheless traveled with him.
The sky was palely blue, without a cloud, but the bay, where the rails skirted it, was heaving in long swells of oily amethyst like a vast carpet shaken at a distance in irregular undulations, on which junk with flapping, windless sails, of the deep gold color of old straw, tumbled like ungainly sea-spiders. ”

“ While the wheels rattled onward, Gordon’s white whimsical face, lifted to those presences above the smoky roofs, gradually lost its bitter glaze and expressed a curious wistfulness—a vague, appealing weariness and speculation.
“Matter is eternal,” he reflected, “always changing, but reproduced and eternal. May not mind be also? Is its inner spark celestial? Or, like the cells that produce it, is it a creature of the mold, doomed to extinction with the brain, sinking as the candle-flame perishes when the wick falls? ”

“ Glenn stood immovable, with his eyes fixed upon her.
The sublime passion throbbing through the music was a sound that a human soul could not resist, as if the player’s whole nature were speaking to him. It pleaded, commanded, until it smote each tense chord of his life—compelled completest harmony. He followed with eager looks every gesture of her bow. His lips broke into a proud smile, revealing all he felt. It ended in an echo, transcendent, sovereign, supreme. The violin fell at her feet. ”

“ The assurance came to Barbara's heart with an infinite relief that he could not guess. At the first sight of the huge bird-like thing slipping down the sky she had known the man clinging to its framework was Daunt. The stricken moments while the wreck of the great vanes lay outspread on the water—the launch of the yacht's boat, and the lifting of the limp form over its gunwale—the cruelly kind ministrations that had brought breath back to the inert body—these had seemed to her to consume dragging hours of agony. ”