The maple trees towered compact and majestic over the level sod, holding their ma.s.sed foliage black against the green sky. Low in the right the new moon hung like a gold fillet above the odorous, crepuscular earth; and, at the base of the trees, the fires were like bubbling, crimson sealing wax poured into the deeper, indigo gloom.

As Gordon advanced he saw a number of vehicles, from which the horses had been taken and tied to an improvised railing. Figures moved darkly against the flames; beyond familiar features flickered like partial, painted masks on the night. In the grove the sap, stirred in the great iron kettles, kept up a constant, choking minor; the smooth trunks of the trees swept up from the unsteady radiance into the obscurity of invisible branches looped with silver strings of stars.

Blurred forms moved everywhere. He searched for Meta Beggs. She was not by the kettles of sap; beyond the trees, by covered baskets of provisions lanterns made a saffron pool of light, but she was not there. He felt in his pocket the cool, sinuous necklace. Finally he found her; or, rather, she slipped illusively into his contracted field of vision.

"You didn't tell me you were coming," she reproached him.

She wore a red dress, purple in the night, with a narrow, black velvet ribband pinned about her throat; her straw hat was bound in red. She gained an extraordinary potency from the dark; it almost seemed to Gordon Makimmon that her skin had a luminous quality; he could see her pointed hands distinctly, and her small, cold face. All her dresses strained about her provocative body, an emphasis rather than a covering of her slim maturity. They drifted, without further speech, out of the circles of wavering light, into the obscurity beyond.

They sat, resting against a hillock of sod, facing the sinking visible rim of the moon. From the bog the frogs sounded like a continuously and lightly-struck xylophone. Meta Beggs shivered.

"I'll go mad here," she declared, "in this--this nothingness. Look--the moon dropping into wilderness; other lucky people are watching it disappear behind great houses and gardens; women in the arms of their lovers are watching it through silk curtains."

He gazed critically over the valley, the mountains, into the sky scarfed by night. "I'm used to it," he returned; "it doesn't bother me like it does you. Some people even like it. A man who came here from the city to die of lung trouble sat for weeks looking up Greenstream valley; he couldn't get enough morning or evening."

"But I don't want to die, I want to live. I'm going to live, too; I've decided--"

"What?"

"To stop teaching. When the term's over, in a few weeks, I'm going to take the money I make and go to New York. It will be just enough to get me there and buy me a pretty hat, with a few dollars over. I am going with those into a cafe and get a bottle of champagne, and pick out the man with the best clothes. I'll tell him I'm a poor school-teacher from the South who came to New York to meet a man who promised to marry me, but who had not kept his word. I'll tell him that I'm good--I can, you know; no man has ever fooled anything out of me--and that I bought wine to get the courage to kill myself."

"It sounds right smart," he admitted; "you can do it too, you can lie like h.e.l.l. But," he added importantly, "I don't know that I will let you."

This, he a.s.sured himself, was purely experimental. He had decided nothing; his course in the future was hidden from him absolutely. He thought discontentedly of his home, of the imagined long, dun vista of years.

He was now, he realized dimly, at the crucial point of his existence: with Meta Beggs, in that world of which Paris was the prefigurement, he might still wring from life a measure of the sharp pleasures of tempestuous youth and manhood; he might still dance to the piping of the senses. With Lettice in Greenstream he would rapidly sink into the dullness of increasing age.

He was vaguely conscious of the baseness of the mere weighing of such a choice; but he was engulfed in his overmastering egotism; his sense of obligation was dulled by the supreme selfishness of a lifetime, of a lifetime of unbridled temper and appet.i.te, of a swaggering self-esteem which the remorseless operation of fate had ignored, had pa.s.sed indifferently by, leaving him in complete ignorance of the terrible and grim possibilities of human mischance.

He had suffered at the loss of his dwelling, but princ.i.p.ally it had been his pride that had borne the wound; Clare's death had affected him finally as the arbitrary removal of a sentimental object for his care, on which to lavish the gifts of his large generosity.

He sat revolving in his mind the choice of paths which seemed to open for his decision in such different directions, which seemed to await the simple ordering of his footsteps as he chose. The night deepened to its darkest hour; the moon, in obedience to its automatic, fixed course, had vanished behind the mountains; the frogs, out of their slime, raised their shrill plaint of life in death.

XVI

"I've got something for you," Gordon said suddenly.

"I hope it's pretty," she replied, leaning forward, resting against his shoulder.

He brought from his pocket the slender, looped necklace of seed pearls. It was faintly visible in the dark, the diamond clasp made a small glint. She took it eagerly from him. "I'll light a match," he told her. In the minute, orange radiance the pearls shimmered in her fingers.

"But it's wonderful!" she exclaimed, unable to suppress her surprise at his unerring choice; "it's exactly right. Have you been to Stenton?

however could you get this here?"

"Oh, I know a few things," he a.s.sured her; "I got an eye. Let me put it on for you." He took it from her, and his hands fumbled about her smooth throat. He required a long time to fasten it. The intoxication of the subtlety of her s.e.x welled from hand to head. He kissed her still lips until he ceased from sheer lack of breath. He drew her close to him, with an arm about her pliant waist.

"I've been thinking of you in those pretty clothes," he admitted.

"All lace and webby pink silk and ribbands underneath," she reminded him; "but only for you, and satin trains and diamonds for the others."

Her words winged like little flames into his imagination. He whispered in her ear, "Richmond." She stiffened in his arms as if that single word had the power to freeze her. "We'll see, we'll see," he added hastily, fearing to dispel her complacency. "Paris is a long way ... a man could never come back."

"I didn't know you were so cautious," she challenged; "I thought you were bolder--that's your reputation in Greenstream, a bad one for a man or woman to cross."

"So I've been," he acknowledged; "I told you I wouldn't have hesitated a while back."

"What is holding you now--your wife? She would soon get over it. She's only a girl, she hasn't had enough experience to hold a man. Besides, she must know by now that you only married her for money; she must know you don't care for her; women always find out."

The bald, incontestable statement of his reason for marrying Lettice disconcerted him. He had never made the acknowledgment of putting it into words to himself, and no one else had openly guessed, had dared....

Suddenly it appeared to him in the light of a possible act of cowardice--Lettice, a girl, blinded by affection. And, equally, it was undeniably true that he did not care for her ... he did not care for her?

that realization too carried a slight sting. But neither did he care for Meta Beggs; something different attracted him to the latter; she--she brought him out, that was it; she ministered to his pleasure, his desire, his--

"Don't," she said firmly.

His balked feelings overmastered him, and he disregarded her prohibition.

She slipped from his grasp as lithely as the serpentine pearls had run through his fingers.

"Haven't you learned," she demanded, standing, "that I can't be bought with silk stockings or a little necklace? Or, perhaps, you are cheap, and I have been entirely wrong.... I'm going to get something to eat, with the people who brought me from Greenstream. I will be back here in two hours, but it will be for the last time. You must decide one way or the other while I am gone. You may stay or leave; I'm going to leave. Remember--no more penny kisses, no more meetings like this; it must be all or nothing.

Some man will take me to Paris, have me." She dissolved against the dark of the maple grove.

XVII

But, curiously, sitting alone, he gave little consideration to the decision, immediate and irrevocable, which confronted him. His thoughts evaded, defied, him, retreated into night-like obscurity, returned burdened with trivial and unexpected details of memory. It grew colder, the rich monotone of mountain and sky changed to an impenetrable, ugly density above which the constellations wheeled without color. His back was toward the maple grove; the removed, disembodied voices mingled in a sound not more intelligible than the chorus of frogs. It occurred to him suddenly that, perhaps, in a week, a month, he might not be in Greenstream, nor in the mountains, but with the white body of Meta Beggs in the midst of one of those vast, fabulous cities the l.u.s.t of which possessed her so utterly.... Or she would be gone.

He thought instinctively of the little cemetery on the slope above the village. One by one that rocky patch was absorbing family and familiars.

Life appeared to be a stumbling procession winding through Greenstream over the rise and sinking into that gaping, insatiable chasm. He was conscious of an invisible force propelling him into that sorry parade, toward those unpretentious stones marked with the shibboleth of names and dates. A desperate anxiety to evade this fate set his soul cowering in its fatal mask of clay. This, he realized, was unadulterated, childish fear, and he angrily aroused himself from its stifling influence.

Meta Beggs would be back soon; she would require an answer to her resolve ... all or nothing. The heat, chilled by the night and loneliness, faded a little from his blood. She demanded a great deal--a man could never return. He bitterly cursed his indecision. He became aware of a pervading weariness, a stiffness from his prolonged contact with the earth, and he rose, moved about. His legs were as rigid, as painful, as an old man's; he had been leaning on his elbow, and the arm was dead to the fingers. The nerves p.r.i.c.ked and jerked in infinitesimal, fiery agonies. He swung his arms, stamped his feet, aiding his stagnating circulation. The frogs ceased their complaint abruptly; the concerted jangle of voices in the grove rose and fell. The replenished fires poured their energy over the broad bottoms of the sap kettles.

The night faded.

The change, at first, was imperceptible: as always the easterly mountains grow visible against a lighter sky. The foliage of the maples, stripped of the looping stars, took the form of individual branches brightening from black to green. There was a stir of dim figures about the impatient horses. Meta Beggs came swiftly to him. He could see her face plainly now, and was surprised at its strained, anxious expression. Her hand closed upon his arm, she drew him to her:

"Which?" she whispered.

"I don't know," he dully replied.

"Save me," she implored; "take me away." She whispered maddeningly in his ear, summoning the l.u.s.t within him, the clamor in his brain, the throbbing in his throat, his wrists. He shut his eyes, and, when he opened them, the dawn had arrived. It forced her from him. Her gown changed to vivid red; about her throat the graceful pearls were faintly iridescent.

"I don't know," he repeated wearily.