University of Virginia Library

15. XV.

When little May had been laid to her long rest,
and the great house was still once more, the
early days of March were beginning to blow their
whistling breath, the snow had slipped from the
hill-sides to the valleys, and McRoy's crocuses,
to which he seemed to give his whole soul, had
peeped up like risen spirits of the last summer
from their white shroud beneath the windows and
around the paths. Catherine had not kept her
room another day: in fact, she dared not be left
alone. She worked with her mother and sisters,
she stood silently beside McRoy as he delved, she
marched across the fields for miles with Beaudesfords.
Beaudesfords said just such a sudden,
nervous shock had been the thing she needed.
If Gaston always came in for the end of these
rambles taken by the two, and the quick walk
home, Catherine never spoke to him a sentence
beyond the ordinary courtesies of the occasion.

She fancied that he was silently establishing a
right in her because of that mutual work of
theirs, because of that confidence shared between
them, and unknown to others. She rebelled
against it, and never referred to the dead child;
nor did she linger in his company, or suffer him
to seek her own. In spite of all she had felt in
the past or still felt in the present, the idea of
even that partnership with Gaston was revolting to
her. If, — ah, fatal if! — if she loved him, she
loathed him too. She was not sure she did love
him, — of the two it was not his happiness that
she preferred: she never raised her eyes to look
at him, she never listened when she heard his
voice. As she became aware of this in her constant
self-examination, she was glad, with a sort
of stifled gladness, half believing she was about
to overcome; and then as suddenly she feared that
these were the effects of her will and not of her
nature, that, if she refused to raise and rest her
eyes on Gaston's face, it was because the image
of that face was so deeply fastened in her soul
that she had no need to raise her eyes to see
what inwardly they so perpetually brooded
over.

Spring was hastening forward now in all the

land: the rivulets and runnels had burst their
icy scales asunder, and fringed their banks with
such a callow green that they seemed the very
highways by which she came. There was that
delicious promise in the air that lightens every
heart, and that ineffable fragrance that always
precedes the full breaking of the blossom: the
hope and happiness that start new-born with
every year pervaded all the household at Beaudesfords,
— all save Catherine. Beaudesfords
himself was as full of mounting gayety as the
tree-twigs are of sap hurrying to burst into leafage.
Gaston sparkled in face and eye with joy
of the fresh weather, — with a new determination.
Do you know what the determination was?
He was going away — when the water-works
were finished.

For Catherine's part, she followed Beaudesfords
about till Rose and Mrs. Stanhope made merry
over such manifestations of devotion; and Mrs.
Stanhope stroked her sleek fur every day, congratulating
herself that she had known what was
for her daughter's welfare better than that daughter
herself had known. But in reality Catherine
had wished to endeavor so to accustom herself
to him that she might find it impossible to do

without him. She appealed to him on every
trifle; she went to him with a thousand solicitudes
and confidences; she studied his pleasures
as she had never done before; she tried with all
her might to keep him ever before her, to make
him the subject of her waking and her sleeping
thoughts. Never had she been so humble, so
small in her own estimation. She wondered
one day, in looking in upon it, how she could
ever have been of a large and lofty type enough
to fill the ideal of the pure and passionless Veronica,
the bride of Heaven himself. And after
every thing was done, the whole endeavor and
humility, the dark, scarred face would rise before
her eyes and shut her out from all the world save
that, as she had seen it first when standing with
death at her feet, on that point of rock in the
midst of the swelling waters. This life again
then swept in a wave of warmth through all her
blissful veins, and hope and heaven gleamed for
her out of Arnold Gaston's eyes. Or else some
dream of the night, some lawless dream, where
Gaston reigned supreme, would lighten up a
livelong day with an insane happiness, — till
night again came, night and that intense inner
loneliness which now had become so unbearable
to her, and in which peace and happiness were
lost with every thing else but horror.

April, with all its blue sky and silver showers,
had come and gone. It was May Day itself indeed;
and Beaudesfords had stolen out to the
woods for the sweet and spicy May-flowers which
he loved, and with which he meant to surprise
Catherine on his return. He forgot the disastrous
end of the last surprise that had been studied
with a flower. Perhaps he would have arranged
it otherwise had he remembered; for there was
just that atom of superstition about him to give
salt to his caprices. One thing and another busied
all the rest that morning. Catherine took up a
book that she had seen Beaudesfords reading, —
it was one of her devices by which, if Gaston were
only away, she would have studied herself into
all due regard for Beaudesfords, — and went with
it into the conservatory, wandering through the
alleys of the great, green palm-trees there, and
sitting down at last in the warm and enervating
atmosphere, impregnated with its deathly sweet
scents and dyed with blossom tints of deepest
azure and sharpest scarlet.

It was a version of an old Middle Age legend;
and she had opened it at that place where the

knight, conscience-stricken with his own treachery
to his king and friend, bids the lady farewell,
and crosses to his castles in the remote land,
remorse running at his stirrup. Catherine read
the chapter listlessly, not taking much impression
from its quaint old English, when suddenly a
finger was stretched before her on the page, —
the finger of a brown and nervous hand following
along the lines, — and Major Gaston read out
those words in which the betrayer of his friend
speaks to his mistress in an eternal parting. And
then, before the passage ended, his voice trembled
and stopped, and Catherine saw a great tear drop
upon the leaf. She turned her head slowly, and
looked up at the reader where he leaned one arm
on the stem of the tree, and the broad banana-leaf
spread its green shelter over him and hung its
clusters, like bunches of blood-tipped javelins, just
beyond. Since he was going then, — since it was
all over, — since this was the last, — the last, the
first and last! His head bent towards her, as
once before it had bent, — towards her face upturned
like a flower to the sun, — and then a rustle,
a foot-fall, a form, — McRoy, perhaps. Catherine
started and picked up her fallen book, as Beaudesfords
stooped to lift it for her.

She rose trembling and defiant to confront him;
but he tumbled the great pink bunches of the
May-flower into her arms, looking at them with
such an innocent face that she was simply amazed
into silence. “Just see how the native, wild
savor dissipates all these foreign scents, so rich
and so unreal!” he exclaimed, as the wood-flowers
asserted their sovereignty. “It is like a morning
cock-crow scattering ghosts.”

It was indeed. In the second that Catherine
stood there, inhaling that delicious breath, she
remembered all the days of her youth and her
innocence, — countless truant noons when she was
a child and Beaudesfords a boy, and they went
wandering beneath the dark woodside shadows
and burrowing in the moss and leaves to bring up
the long brown wreaths loaded with their pink
tufts of beauty. How her father had kissed her
face all over once when she ran in with her hands
full of the fragrant treasure! And these false,
false kisses for which a moment since she would
have pledged her soul, — oh! they stung, they
stung! How he kissed her, — her father, whom
she had worshipped, and when she was young and
innocent! She gathered the armful of flowers to
her heart, and bowed her face down and hid it in

the perfume of the soft petals. “Oh, Beaudesfords!
how good you are to me!” she cried, before
she knew it, lifting a streaming face and
hurrying from the spot.

If Beaudesfords had till now been blind, he was
so no longer! That face of Catherine's raised
to the bending one above, that sudden start, that
defiant turn, those streaming tears, those words,
were like so many flashes of light. Slight
things, but all that were needed. For in an
instant a fabric rose before him complete from
basement to battlement, — a cloud-built castle,
that, try as he might to puff it away, still hung
before his gaze, and out of whose every window
Catherine looked with eyes of love on Gaston.

Without delaying to exchange a word with
his remaining companion, Beaudesfords followed
Catherine from the conservatory, and then plunged
into his own den, up and down whose floor he
walked or bounded, like a caged leopard, half
the day. He was neither stunned nor stupefied,
but awake and receptive to his very pores: he
was writhing with pain at mistrusting Gaston,
with pain at Gaston's treachery to him, with
anger, with grief, with love for Catherine. That
night on the river, when she and Gaston in the

boat ran down among the breakers, took a new
meaning. If they had only told him at that time,
that time not yet three years ago, before it had
been too late! He would have forgotten himself;
he would have compassed heaven and earth for
them. It hurt him more than it maddened him.
And then how was it possible to have such fears
and fancies concerning his white-souled wife?
Why had he exposed her to temptation? What
woman ever withstood Gaston? Oh, if she had
come to him and confided in him and begged him
to take her away again, — how he would have forgiven,
how he would have helped! Ah, why not
leave the world and them together? Then, in
hasty contradiction of all this, he endeavored to
become convinced, as one thing started up after
another in his memory, — that blush, that staining,
branding blush with which his friend and wife
had met on the day when she returned to her
home and found him there; that face, that wild,
white face, that on Christmas Eve searched the
storm with him; their earnest pantomime a
little after; her singing, and her saying, and her
silence; her sudden illness and as sudden recovery;
looks, sighs, tears, surprises, deeds, — that
they were suspicions, base suspicions, and groundless.
He raged and raved and spurned himself,
a husband and a friend, for entertaining them.
He recalled all Catherine's sweet submission of
late, as she had followed him, yielded to him,
humored him, studied him. He saw at least the
effort: he felt as though he were the guilty one,
since except for him no effort would be needed.
He passed through into what had once been his
own sleeping-room, the beautiful and spacious
place with its casement opening on the garden
and guarded by two giant firs; and when he was
weary of gazing at the St. Veronica hanging
there, — now more than ever like Catherine, as
he thought, — he went out at last, declaring that
he must have been mad, merely mad, nor could he
insult his wife or Gaston by another doubt.

But suspicion is a serpent that, once startled,
has its head erect and hissing ever afterwards.

Beaudesfords bent his steps to the river:
the fresh air playing there would blow off all
these megrims, he said. He waved his hand to
Catherine in going, as he looked back at her
sitting on her balcony, where she saw the long,
large landscape bathed in the afternoon clearness
of May; where she saw Gaston floating in his
boat, and following in and out the windings of

the stream. A shadow darkened Beaudesfords'
face, and swept away again, as a cloud sweeps its
shadow over any sunny clover-field. He beckoned
Gaston to take him on board; and shaping their
course up-stream, where the river ran in rapids
between the hills, — the smooth outside of which
rapids they were wont to skirt, and then come
down like an arrow on their bosom, — they were
soon out of sight.

Catherine had just risen to go in, an hour later,
when the boat came slipping down again before
the wind; and she paused, standing there half-turned,
to watch its great white sail take on the
sunset tints, — listlessly, and with little interest in
that, it seemed to her, or in any thing else in the
world. She saw the rosy flush catch the sail, as
she paused; she saw the windy flaw from the
hills following fast behind it on the surface; she
saw the boat rock and careen as the flaw struck
it, saw it dip its sail far over and down; she saw
the two men in the water, struggling through the
stream for shore, — and one she saw go down, —
and one, the fair head, the fresh face, Beaudesfords',
stood safe and whole upon the river-bank;
and had a bullet pierced her brain, she could not
have dropped more instantly. Had she kept control

of her pulses one moment longer, she would
have seen Beaudesfords dash in and down again,
and bring up his companion to the capsized boat's
edge, till together they loosened the rope that had
entangled and held him under, and together
reached the shore once more, rather in glee over
the adventure than in gloom over such an approach
to disaster. “Cannot a woman faint with joy on
finding her husband safe, as soon as with despair
at finding his rival drowned?” asked Beaudesfords
of himself by and by, when he had heard of Catherine's
mishap. Yet reason with such willing
sophistries as he might, something told him that
sophistries they were; and from that day there
was no more rest for Beaudesfords. The unconsidered
atoms that had floated formlessly in mind
and memory had taken shape and consciousness.
It was the last setting of the crystal. “It is
strange,” said he to Gaston, in bidding him goodnight,
“that we need oblivion half our life in
order to endure the other half.”