University of Virginia Library

17. XVII.
CHRISTINA. — LUCY.

PIQUED at Guy's hesitancy, the seeress with a
petulant gesture tossed back the oar.

“You are not a very gallant youth, Mr. Bannington!”

“You are an exceedingly charming woman, Miss Freze!”

“What do you tell me that for?”

“To win a reputation for gallantry!”

She regarded him with a very slight disdainful curl of her
imperious lip.

“You don't wish to accompany me? Speak honestly!”

“Honestly, then, I am tired.”

“Is that all?”

“And hungry.”

He folded his arms gravely. The boat was floating from
the shore. For a minute she remained silent, fixing her
dilating eyes upon him, as if she would drink the inmost
meaning of his soul. Then, with a wilful, radiant laugh, she
shook her jewelled finger at him: —

“For one hour you are mine! If you are tired, I can row.
If you are hungry, I have secret bread reserved for this
emergency;” and she uncovered cheese and sandwiches in
a napkin.

He took the napkin; she took the oars. The delicate but
vigorous little hands managed them not unskilfully; and with
an easy motion the boat glided through water smooth as satin,
under the cool green forest-shadows.

“If ever I determine on suicide,” said she, “I shall come
and throw myself into this lake.”

“Do so,” said Guy; “for that would give a fine finishing
touch to its weird and sombre character. `Suicide
Pond,' — that would sound well. What is your given
name?”

“Christina.”

“The place where you throw yourself in shall be called
`Christina's Leap.' I'll see to it.”

She leaned over the side, gazing down intently, and speaking
with melancholy softness.

“It looks cool and pleasant in there; and life is feverish
and bitter. What is there to keep one here in this
world?”

“There is a good deal to keep me,” Guy answered. “I
sometimes think the mere breath of life is joy enough. This
wild nature, with its clouds, its waters, its crags, fills me full
and full! I've not done with it yet: there's juice left and
wild honey! Even this sandwich is a solid satisfaction.”

“You are in the external yet,” she replied. “You will
some time get beyond that, and feel as I do.”

“That is to say, you have progressed a good deal beyond
me. I find a vast amount of cant and spiritual self-conceit
among mediums, which I hoped you were free from. `You
are in the external yet; when you have had certain experiences
I have had, when you have progressed to a higher
plane, when you get to see things from my stand-point;' and
so forth.”

“Let me say what is true, won't you? I have been where
you are” —

“That's it, that's the style!” said Guy.

“The world was as much to me as it is to you,” she
went on, regardless of his sarcasm. “And, even now, I can
laugh and dance and enjoy; but the only real consolation I
have is in the communion of spirits.”

“The communion of spirits is a glorious thing, if it is true;
because it demonstrates that life is perpetual; that the soul,
and love, and the sense of joy and beauty, do not cease at
death, but continue forever.”

“Then what is the fear of death? Come,” she said coaxingly,
“fall overboard with me! I'll do it!”

“Thank you, I'd rather be excused. This world is tolerably
well got up, on a good plan; and I'm not so sure of
being ready for another. I am a child yet: here I have
nestled long, and I have no wish to be weaned from the
familiar, dear old bosom.”

“You will talk very differently a year from now. You
will be a tired child then, and ask to be put to rest.”

“Perhaps. But, for the present, this blue roof and spacious
play-ground for me! This water, this air, this bread
and cheese, suffice. Nectar and ambrosia by and by. Hopes
and heart-beats, questions and longings of the soul, the endless
curiosity, — I haven't yet lost my relish for these: have
you?”

“What is all that without companions?” she replied.

“Have you none?”

“I have been looking longer than ever Diogenes did for
a man;” she gave Guy a significant glance. “I wonder if I
have found one at last.”

“Don't you find any women?”

“I hate women!”

“Indeed! I judged as much. The more intensely
woman a woman is, the more she hates her own sex, I believe.
It isn't so with men: there is friendship among men.”

“Do you know what has brought us together to-day, Guy
Bannington?”

“No; but I should like to know.”

“Then I will tell you something which you won't laugh
at. It was written through my hand this morning that I
must come to the picnic, and that I should meet you here.”

“That is singular,” said Guy; “for I have not been near
this lake for a year, and should not have come to-day but for
the bear.”

“What is more singular,” replied the seeress, “upon the
same paper on which I was made to write that, I drew the
picture of your bear.”

“When was that?”

“At eight o'clock this morning. The date is on the paper.
The paper is in my portfolio, in my room at the hotel.”

“I will accompany you to the hotel, enter your room with
you, and give you fifty dollars to produce that paper!”

“I'll do it for less than that. Here is the key to my
portfolio. You shall go with me, and open it if you will
grant me one little favor.”

“What?”

“I don't know yet what it will be; but you are to
promise.”

Guy promised. At the instant, Lucy's image rose before
him, pale, beseeching, sad.

“I like you,” said Christina, moving to his side. “Prim,
conventional people are the death of me. I want to be
lawless: I want the companionship of lawless, glorious souls.
You will let me do as I please?”

“Probably; for I am very amiable.”

“You amiable? You are violent, impetuous, domineering;
and you can be cruel.”

“Shall I tell you what your are?”

“Yes.”

“You are fitful, fiery, scornful; and you can be vastly
impudent.”

“You don't dare to say you like me!” she laughed.

Guy looked grave. He didn't answer. His thoughts
were far away, and his heart was troubled.

Christina sat down at his feet, silent, very quiet. Her
breast heaved with a long, deep sigh. Her head bent pensively
until her cheek touched his knee. In spite of himself,
he felt a thrill of something more than interest, — a
melting sensation towards her, tender and yearning.

“What are you there for?” he asked coldly.

“My place is at your feet.” And she lifted her eyes to
his face with a burning look, full of wonder and worship.

“Christina!” he exclaimed, trying to remove her.

In vain: she kept her place.

“My lord and my king!” she said with upturned face,
and such a smile as he had seen upon it at their first meeting,
sweet, enraptured, divine.

Late that evening, Guy mounted the dark stairway noiselessly,
opened Lucy's door, and entered. No light, no sound,
within. He groped his way to the bed-chamber, and passed
his hand over the pillow. It had not been pressed.

“Lucy!” he called; and the roar of the brook in the midnight
answered him.

He returned to the little sitting-room, wondering, listening,
straining his eyes in the darkness, and thinking of Lucy with
pity and repentance.

“Guy!” breathed a faint voice from the sofa, — a tender,
suffering, and loving voice.

He knelt by her side. She put up her arms, drew his
head to her bosom, and burst into sobs of anguish.

“Don't cry, don't cry, Lucy! What is the matter? I
am here.”

“I have been waiting so long, so long!” She wept,
from a heart wrung with misery. “Oh! how could you leave
me so? how could you? I thought you would never come
again!”

“Have you so little confidence in me?” said Guy softly.

“If you could have known all I have thought, all I have
felt, this long day, this long, long night,” she broke forth
bitterly, “you surely would have come! But you were in
the boat with that woman, and I was forgotten!”

That was a stroke. Guy sat chilled and dumb, answering
nothing. Lucy hushed her sobs, waiting for him to acquit
himself, and re-assure her of his love. Only the brook
moaned.

“Speak! say something!” she entreated in a voice full
of pain and passionate appealing. “I am wretched, wretched,
wretched! Have mercy on me! have mercy!”

“I have broken my promise,” said he, not tenderly and
soothingly, but frigidly and perversely. “I have sinned. I
am unworthy of your pure affection.”

“Oh, never, never!” she cried. “Think what I am to
you and never, never say you are unworthy of my affection!”

Guy gnashed his teeth together with fiery inward thoughts,

knowing how he had wronged Lucy, and how he wronged her
still with his stubborn icy will, which even love could not
thaw.

“My vision, my prophetic vision!” she exclaimed despairingly.
“As I lay waiting here in the dark, I saw faces
around me, like laughing fiends, and heard voices saying,
`Lost, lost, lost!' In the dark and silence I kept seeing
the faces, I kept hearing the voices, — `Lost, lost, lost!' —
with the roaring of the brook. I prayed that they would
stop. I entreated the brook to stop: it was torturing me. I
know now what it meant. You wish to be free from me.
I will not hold you; I will not, though I die! O my father,
my father! you are all I have left: come to me, father!”
And she threw herself upon her face.

“God! God!” groaned Guy, “how you make me suffer!
I cannot be free from you: Heaven knows, as you
should know, that I have neither the power nor the wish
to be.”

“Oh! then, when you said, so coldly, that you had broken
your promise, why couldn't you add one word, one little syllable,
to soften that cruel sentence, just to assure me that you
did not mean to break it?”

“Because I thought you ought to have been satisfied of
that without waiting to be told so.”

“Then you did not willingly break it?” she cried eagerly.

“So far from that, it was most unexpectedly and quite
unwillingly that I did so.”

With a cry of joy, she flung herself into his arms. He was
softened: he strained her to his heart.

But how was he to explain? He knew well that she
would not regard as he did the conduct of Christina. Men
have boundless toleration for women: women have none for
each other. Men excuse, women accuse, — especially when
the question is of those feminine foibles which flatter the masculine
vanity.

Guy looked upon Christina as a person of keen perceptions,
who had seen enough of the hypocrisies and corruptions of
society to despise and defy it. She had thrown off its laws,
without, however, arriving at the supreme law within herself.
Such a woman is always interesting to a man fond of adventure
and of the exercise of power; and, in Christina's case,
her mediumship invested her with superior attractions. Guy
felt that their relation was of a spiritual character, and that
they might benefit each other without wronging Lucy. But,
clear as all this was to his own mind, he knew that it would
be impossible to make Lucy believe a word of it.

He stated simply, therefore, that the seeress had offered
him sandwiches, when sandwiches were very acceptable; and
that she had interested him in a spiritual phenomenon with
which he was personally connected. And, passing over circumstances
which he thought it unwise to relate, he hastened
to call Lucy's attention to a mysterious bit of paper which
he brought to her in one hand, with the previously lighted
lamp in the other.

Lucy read the following sentence in pencil: —

“Go to the lake to-day. The leader, G. B., will be sent to
you there.”

Above this was the date. Beneath it was a drawing of an
animal.

She studied the paper long with her red eyes, while Guy
urged her to tell him what she made of it.

“It is plain,” she admitted, “that the drawing is intended
for a bear; but it isn't so plain that it was done in the
morning before she saw you or the bear at the lake,” she
added with perceptible scorn.

“Neither would I readily believe it,” said Guy; “though
she told me of the written prediction, which had been left,
she said, at the Mt. Solomon Hotel. She gave me a key,
and invited me to go with her and her friends this evening,
and witness the verification of the story. I was curious
enough to go. We all went together to her room. There,
in my presence, she opened a desk, in which lay a portfolio.
`Unlock that,' said she, `with the key I gave you.' I
unlocked it, and with my own hands took out this paper.”

Once more, Lucy studied the writing and the picture. She
was pale; her lips quivered; she was evidently not yet convinced.
There must have been some legerdemain; or it was
all a mere coincidence. But, whatever it was, it stirred up
again her jealousy and scorn.

“She calls you the leader!” — flinging away the sheet.
“And what if she did meet you there? I don't see the use
of a special revelation on the subject!”

“Unhappily, there are many things you do not see.”

“Unhappily, there is one thing I do see!” she exclaimed,
pacing the floor with agitation and tears. “I see that there
is a plot to dupe you, and it is succeeding. That woman is
doing her utmost to take you from me; and you are only too
willing to go!”

“Lucy!” said Guy warningly.

“I shall say no more,” — wiping her tears. “Go, if you
wish to. I shall exact no more promises to have them broken
afterwards, when my heart will be broken with them.
My happiness has been short; I might have known it would
be; and I have no desire to prolong it at the expense of your
freedom.”

She fell upon the sofa. Guy stood before her, looking
down upon her frowningly, gnawing his lip to control the
fiery words that rose to it.

“And you give me my freedom?” he said calmly, after a
pause.

“Freely and entirely.”

“I thank you, both for you and for myself. By leaving
me free, you will find that you make me more your own.
Whatever I do, I shall remain true to you: I shall always
return to you.”

His tones were full of truth and tenderness. She could
not resist him. The clouds were breaking; her sunny spirit
was shining forth. She reached up her arms, and love and
sweet forgiveness united them once more — for a little while.