"Oh, my dear, my dear, it was so near, so near, I thought I was to lose you before I had had you--before I had had you at all!"

"No, no ... not that, Olivia, not that!" His arms were around me and all my life up to that moment was no more to me than a path which led up to those arms. I remember that ... and the world dissolving in the wash of the rain outside ... and the lift of his breast; and deep under all, old, unimagined instincts reared their heads and bayed at the voice of their master....

CHAPTER IV

After the evening of the storm we talked no more of marriage for a while, and about a week later I went over to Paris ostensibly to shop, and was joined there by Mr. Garrett on the way to Italy. I suppose that Italy must always lie like some lovely sunken island at the bottom of all pa.s.sionate dreams, from which at the flood it may arise; the air of it is charged with subtle essences of romance. One supposes Italy must be organized for the need of lovers. Nothing occurred there to break the film of our enchanted bubble. For a month we kept to the hill towns and to Venice, where we could go about in the conspicuous privacy of a gondola, and all that time we met n.o.body we had ever known.

It was all so easily managed--we had to think of the girls, of course--no one seeing our registered names side by side, Mrs. Thomas Bettersworth, New York, and Helmeth Garrett, Chilicojote, Mexico, would have thought of connecting them. Helmeth attended to all his business correspondence as though he were still in London, and n.o.body expected to hear from me in any case.

It is strange how little history there is to happiness. We had come together past incredible struggles, anxieties, triumphs, defeats; we had been buffeted and stricken, and now suddenly we were stilled. If at any time the ghosts of the uneasy past rose upon us, we kissed and they were laid. So long as we kept in touch, there ran a river of fire between our blessed isolation and the world. And for the first time we looked upon the world free of the obligations of our being in it. We looked, and exchanged our separate knowledges as precious treasure. My exploration of life had been from within--I knew what Raphael was thinking about when he painted that fine blue vein on his Madonna's wrist. But Helmeth had looked on the movement of history; what he saw in Italy was the path of armies, lines of aqueducts, old Roman roads to and from mines. Everything began or ended for him in a mine, in Gaul or Austria or Ophir; dynasties were marked for him by change in the ownership of mines. So he drew me the white roads out of Italy as one draws fibre from a palm, and strung on them the world's great adventures. There were hours also when we let all this great fabric of art and history float from us, sure that by the vitalizing thread of understanding which ran between us like a new, live sense, we could pull it back again ... but we loved ... we loved.

Nothing that happened to us there, came with a more revealing touch than the att.i.tude in which I caught myself, looking out for and being surprised at not discovering in myself any qualms of conscience. All that I had known of such relations in other people, had made itself known by a subtle, penetrating, fetid savour, against which some instinct, as sure as a hound, threw up its head and bayed the tainted air.

But in my own affair, the first compulsion that irked me was the necessity I was under of not telling anybody. I wasn't conscious at any time of any feeling that wouldn't have gone suitably with the outward form of marriage; there were times even when I failed to see why one should take exception to the neglect of such form. I was remade every pulse and fibre of me, my beloved's ... and so obviously, that the necessity of tagging my estate with a ceremony struck me as an impertinence. Marriage I think must be a fact, capable of going on independently of the prayer book and the county clerk. Whatever _you_ may think, no G.o.d could have escaped the certainty of my being duly married.

There were days though, just at first, when I suffered the need of completing my condition by an outward bond. I knew very well where the custom of wedding rings came from; I should have worn anklets and armlets as well, if only they could have been taken as the advertis.e.m.e.nt of my belonging wholly to my man. Depend upon it, the subjugation of woman will be found finally to rest in the attempt visibly to establish, what the woman herself concurs in, the inward conviction of possession.

How much of what was in my own mind, was also in Helmeth's, I do not know, but because I had brought upon myself the condition of not being married, I failed to speak of what I found regrettable in it. What did come out for me satisfyingly, was the man's sheer content in his mate, the response, and our pride in it, of his blood and body to my presence, and the new relish it created in him for the processes of living, for his pipe and his meals, and his work. He had brought some estimates to figure out; evenings at work on these, he would call me to him and sit with his left arm thrown lightly about my chair, the pencil going as though my presence were an added fillip to activity. He took on weight in that holiday, and his mouth relaxed to a more youthful curve.

We spent the last three weeks of it at a quiet hotel on the point of land that divides Lake Como from Lecco, opposite Cadenabbia. Times yet I will wake out of dreaming, to find the pulse of the city trans.m.u.ted into the steady lisping of that silver fretted lake. We had come to a phase like that in our relation, deep and full and shining. We spent hours sitting on the parapet in the sun, looking at it. I would sit on the stone ledge and Helmeth would stretch himself, with his pipe, along the ground.

"Helmeth," I said on such a morning, "do you know this is the first time I ever rested?" He gave a little gurgle of content; the sun turned on the sails of the fishing-boats and flashed us sympathy. "I'm afraid," I admitted, "I'm never going to want to do anything else."

"Oh, I'm going to want to. This is good enough, but it wouldn't be half so good if I couldn't take it along with me and do things with it--great things." He threw his arm across my knees with one of those quick, intimate caresses, flooding me full of the delighted sense of how completely I belonged to him. "I feel," he said, "as if I had been going about with one arm or one hand, and now I've got a full set of them.

Wait until I show you!"

"When you talk of doing, Helmeth--that means leaving me."

"That's for you to say, Olive." That was as near as he had come yet to reminding me that it was I who had chosen this instead of a relation which would have implied my going with him wherever his work led him, and that the choice was still open to me. The night after the storm he had written me:

"There is nothing that troubles me about to-night except the fear that you may regret it, that you might ever come to have a doubt of how I feel about it. I want you to feel that whatever you choose is right to me, and though I hope for nothing so much as to make you my wife, I shall not urge you beyond what you feel that you can do without urging."

It was a generous letter, and no doubt it had its weight in persuading me to trust the situation, in the face of that instinct which saves women, even from pa.s.sions that seem their own justification. If he had counted on the naturalness of love to set up its own public obligation, he had not been far wrong with me. If it had been practicable, I should have walked out with him any day those first weeks to be married. But marriage is a very complicated business in Italy. In a measure I had satisfied my fret for the visible tie, with a ring which he had bought me in Florence, which, as the stones flashed in the sun, turned me back on the thought I had when first he set it on my hand.

"Helmeth, do you suppose that we are pushed on to make laws and observances about marriage because the bond that comes into being then has a consistency and validity beyond what we feel about it?"

"Oh, beyond what we feel about it, yes." He sat up then a little away from me, as he often did when he drew upon experiences lying beyond the points at which his life had been touched by mine, and began skipping little stones into the water. "Yes, I'm sure that what you feel about a thing that happens to you is not always the test of what it does to you.

Sometimes I think feelings haven't much to do with our experiences except to get us into them." He left off skipping stones and began to pile them into a little heap. "I was thinking of Laura," he concluded.

It was not often that he spoke to me of his wife.

"I can't remember that I had a great deal of feeling about her; I was too busy, I suppose, getting on with my engineering; but she had a grip on me. She had a grip. Look here, my dear, I ought to tell you this, you're the wonder of the earth for me, and I know very well that my wife's world was a very little one; it was bounded by the church on one side and by conventions on all the others. But somehow I don't want to get too far away from it, and I don't want the girls to get too far." He swung about to look squarely up at me. "This that you've given me, it's heaven; it's a thing for a man to die for and die happy; but there's the other too." He laughed a little awkwardly; he caught my feet in one of his strong hands. "Have I made you understand?"

"I understand that kind of life. It's like a clean, scrubbed room. I _know_. I was brought up in it. There have been times when I have been desperate because I couldn't go back and live there. But I ought to tell you, Helmeth, I can't find my way back."

"You! Why should you? You were made to live in Kings' houses. But I wanted to be sure you weren't going to be disappointed if I haven't the manners that always belong to palaces. I've been in camps where a scrubbed room looked mighty good to me." He stretched himself and rolled over on the ground, lying with his back to the sun, soaking in it in simple, animal content. Little white flecks showed on the lake, the sails of the fisher-boats tilted slowly and composed themselves anew with the line of the sh.o.r.e and the flowing hills. Directly opposite, the walls of Cadenabbia showed white amid the green, like a little streak of Arcady.

"We've never been," I reminded him.

"I thought you wanted to leave it so you could always think of its being as romantic as it looks, without making sure that it isn't." That was the reason I had given him, but the truth was that Cadenabbia was on one of those tourist routes where, supposing anybody we knew to be wandering about Europe, we would be sure to run into them. This morning, however, I was seized with an irresistible desire to visit it.

"But supposing it isn't as interesting as it looks," I submitted, "if I go there with you I shall never know it. And think how disappointed I should be if I should ever come there without you and find that it is the one place we ought to have seen."

There was a little motor launch plying between the sh.o.r.es of the lake, and an hour before tea time we crossed in it. We spent the hour in the garden of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and then along the parapet we strolled in search of tea. It was the height of the tourist season and the gay groups moving in the streets between the quaint low houses, gave it a holiday air. We heard them calling one to the other, exchanging appreciations and information. All at once we heard them calling us.

"Garrett, Garrett!" a party in the act of settling at a tea table in the garden of one of the hotels, dissolved and reorganized about us as the centre. There was laughter and garbled greetings and handshaking.

Presently Helmeth began to introduce me. They were a party of Californians, all more or less acquainted and importunate; we were swept back by them to the table and tea. There were two married couples and one unmarried woman of about my age, and a boy of sixteen. I could see by the way she appropriated him, that his acquaintance with Miss Stanley had been of the degree that might have ripened into marriage, and that Miss Stanley had not wholly made up her mind that it wouldn't. She was one of those unmarried women who contrive by a multiplicity and vivacity of interests to deny what is explicitly advertised by their anxiety to have you understand that they consider themselves much better off just as they are. I could see her taking in all the details of my appearance, to find the key to what Mr. Garrett might presumably like in me, and striking out in her manner to him a quick sketch of me, bettered in the direction of what she believed it most to be. The other women, if they had been brought up in Taylorville, would have resembled Pauline Mills; that they didn't I could see was difference of geography. They were all full of gay talk and reminiscence of a mutual life in the West, on a footing that left me rather more than room to play the part, which I had cast for myself with celerity, of being a casual acquaintance of his, picked up at a hotel. He had introduced me to them as Mrs. Bettersworth, and whether they would have known me or not by my stage name, I took care they shouldn't have the opportunity.

Nothing would do but he must stay to dinner; I guessed that there was that degree of acquaintance between them which would have made it unfriendly of him to refuse. I could see Miss Stanley p.r.i.c.k up at his manner of leaving the decision to me, and realized that whatever we might have agreed upon, there would be no keeping our relation from being at least a matter of curiosity to the women, the elder of whom had promptly included me in the invitation.

I invented a mythical travelling companion across the lake whom I must join, and managed to make my being in Mr. Garrett's company appear so casual that I came near to overdoing it by exciting his concern.

"What's the matter; don't you like them?" He wished to know as he saw me to the landing.

"Ever so," I insisted promptly, "but they wouldn't like me after a while. You behave as if we had been married five years."

"Oh, well, haven't we?" He looked back and his brow gathered a little.

"For two cents I'd tell them." But after all there was nothing he could do but see me comfortably off and go back to them. He told me afterward that Mr. Harwood, the elder of the two gentlemen, had been useful to him in business.

It must have been close on to midnight when he waked me, sitting on the edge of my bed. He must have gone to his own room very softly, meaning not to disturb me; now I heard him calling my name in a whisper and his hand seeking for my face.

I reached up and drew his down to me.

"Oh, my dear----" I was startled at what I found there. "Beloved, why are you crying?" I could feel him shake with sudden uncontrollable emotion. I kept his head on my breast and comforted him.

"When did you come in?"

"An hour ago--you were asleep." The commonplace question seemed to quiet him.

"Was it something went wrong at the dinner?"

"Wrong, yes ... but not there, not there. It's all wrong, it has been wrong from the beginning."

"Dear heart, tell me."

"Olive, marry me; say you'll marry me!" There was urgency in his whisper, there was pain in it. "Say it; say it!"

"I'll marry you. I've been waiting for you to ask."

"Oh, my dear, when I have begged you so...."

"Tell me," I urged....

"There isn't anything to tell, only ... we walked along the parapet and were very happy together. They're a good sort. I've known them for years. And we found a peasant woman selling lace, good lace, the women said, and cheap ... Harwood bought some for his wife ... and Stanley bought his sister some. Harwood went back, pretending he'd forgotten something, and bought a piece his wife wanted and thought she couldn't afford. And I couldn't buy you any ... not openly. I wanted Miss Stanley to select some handkerchiefs that I said were for the girls and she said girls shouldn't wear that kind. Oh, Olive, don't you understand?"

"I understand; you shall go back to-morrow and buy me some."