第78章 CHAPTER IX(1)

Lyndall's Stranger

A fire is burning in the unused hearth of the cabin. The fuel blazes up, and lights the black rafters, and warms the faded red lions on the quilt, and fills the little room with a glow of warmth and light made brighter by contrast, for outside the night is chill and misty.

Before the open fireplace sits a stranger, his tall, slight figure reposing in the broken armchair, his keen blue eyes studying the fire from beneath delicately pencilled, drooping eyelids. One white hand plays thoughtfully with a heavy flaxen moustache; yet, once he starts, and for an instant the languid lids raise themselves; there is a keen, intent look upon the face as he listens for something. Then he leans back in his chair, fills his glass from the silver flask in his bag, and resumes his old posture.

Presently the door opens noiselessly. It is Lyndall, followed by Doss.

Quietly as she enters, he hears her, and turns.

"I thought you were not coming."

"I waited till all had gone to bed. I could not come before."

She removed the shawl that enveloped her, and the stranger rose to offer her his chair; but she took her seat on a low pile of sacks before the window.

"I hardly see why I should be outlawed after this fashion," he said, reseating himself and drawing his chair a little nearer to her; "these are hardly the quarters one expects to find after travelling a hundred miles in answer to an invitation."

"I said, 'Come if you wish.'"

"And I did wish. You give me a cold reception."

"I could not take you to the house. Questions would be asked which I could not answer without prevarication."

"Your conscience is growing to have a certain virgin tenderness," he said, in a low, melodious voice.

"I have no conscience. I spoke one deliberate lie this evening. I said the man who had come looked rough, we had best not have him in the house; therefore I brought him here. It was a deliberate lie, and I hate lies. I tell them if I must, but they hurt me."

"Well, you do not tell lies to yourself, at all events. You are candid, so far."

She interrupted him.

"You got my short letter?"

"Yes; that is why I come. You sent a very foolish reply; you must take it back. Who is this fellow you talk of marrying?"

"A young farmer."

"Lives here?"

"Yes; he has gone to town to get things for our wedding."

"What kind of a fellow is he?"

"A fool."

"And you would rather marry him than me?"

"Yes; because you are not one."

"That is a novel reason for refusing to marry a man," he said, leaning his elbow on the table and watching her keenly.

"It is a wise one," she said shortly. "If I marry him I shall shake him off my hand when it suits me. If I remained with him for twelve months he would never have dared to kiss my hand. As far as I wish he should come, he comes, and no further. Would you ask me what you might and what you might not do?"

Her companion raised the moustache with a caressing movement from his lip and smiled. It was not a question that stood in need of any answer.

"Why do you wish to enter on this semblance of marriage?"

"Because there is only one point on which I have a conscience. I have told you so."

"Then why not marry me?"

"Because if once you have me you would hold me fast. I shall never be free again." She drew a long, low breath.

"What have you done with the ring I gave you?" he said.

"Sometimes I wear it; then I take it off and wish to throw it into the fire; the next day I put it on again, and sometimes I kiss it."

"So you do love me a little?"

"If you were not something more to me than any other man in the world, do you think--" She paused. "I love you when I see you; but when you are away from me I hate you."

"Then I fear I must be singularly invisible at the present moment," he said. Possibly if you were to look less fixedly into the fire you might perceive me."

He moved his chair slightly, so as to come between her and the firelight.

She raised her eyes to his face.

"If you do love me," he asked her, "why will you not marry me?"

"Because, if I had been married to you for a year I should have come to my senses and seen that your hands and your voice are like the hands and the voice of any other man. I cannot quite see that now. But it is all madness. You call into activity one part of my nature; there is a higher part that you know nothing of, that you never touch. If I married you, afterward it would arise and assert itself, and I should hate you always, as I do now sometimes."

"I like you when you grow metaphysical and analytical," he said, leaning his face upon his hand. "Go a little further in your analysis; say, 'I love you with the right ventricle of my heart, but not the left, and with the left auricle of my heart, but not the right; and, this being the case, my affection for you is not of a duly elevated, intellectual and spiritual nature.' I like you when you get philosophical."

She looked quietly at him; he was trying to turn her own weapons against her.

"You are acting foolishly, Lyndall," he said, suddenly changing his manner, and speaking earnestly, "most foolishly. You are acting like a little child; I am surprised at you. It is all very well to have ideals and theories; but you know as well as any one can that they must not be carried into the practical world. I love you. I do not pretend that it is in any high, superhuman sense; I do not say that I should like you as well if you were ugly and deformed, or that I should continue to prize you whatever your treatment of me might be, or to love you though you were a spirit without any body at all. That is sentimentality for beardless boys. Every one not a mere child (and you are not a child, except in years) knows what love between a man and a woman means. I love you with that love. I should not have believed it possible that I could have brought myself twice to ask of any woman to be my wife, more especially one without wealth, without position, and who--"

"Yes--go on. Do not grow sorry for me. Say what you were going to--'who has put herself into my power, and who has lost the right of meeting me on equal terms.' Say what you think. At least we two may speak the truth to one another."

Then she added after a pause: