She cried out to him in a sudden anguish that was beyond her control, "But _suppose you face it and still it springs_!"

Her aspect, her accent, her shaken voice gave him a great start. He faced her. He looked at her as though he saw her for the first time that day. And he grew very pale as he looked. Something wordless pa.s.sed between them. Now he knew at last what she was afraid of.

But he did not flinch. He said desperately, in a harsh voice, "You have to take what comes to you in life," and was grimly silent.

Then with a gesture as though to put away something incredible, approaching him, he went on more quietly, "But my experience is that it doesn't dare spring if you walk right up to it. Generally you find you're less afraid of everything in the world, after that."

She had been frightened, stabbed through and through by the look they had interchanged, by the wordless something which had pa.s.sed between them. But now she wondered suddenly, pa.s.sionately, amazedly, if he had really understood all the dagger-like possibilities of their talk.

"Neale," she challenged him, "don't you put _any_ limits on this? Isn't there _any_where you'd stop out of sheer respect? Nothing too hallowed by ..."

"Nothing. Nothing," he answered her, his face pale, his eyes deep and enduring. "It's lying down, not to answer the challenge when it comes.

How do you know what you have to deal with if you won't look to see?

You may find out that something you have been trusting is growing out of a poisonous root. That does happen. What's the use of pretending that it couldn't to you, as to anybody else? And what's the use of having lived honestly, if you haven't grown brave enough to do whatever needs to be done? If you are scared by the idea that your motherhood may be only inverted sensuality, or if you think there is any possibility that the children would be better off in other hands, or if you think ... if you think there is any other terrifying possibility in our life here, for G.o.d's sake look into your own heart and see for yourself! It all sounds like nonsense to me, but ..."

She s.n.a.t.c.hed at the straw, she who longed so for help. "Oh, Neale, if _you_ think so, I know ..."

"I won't _have_ you taking my word for it!" he told her roughly. "_I_ can't tell what's back of what you do. And you oughtn't to take my word for it if I tried to. n.o.body on earth can make your decision for you, but you yourself." The drops stood out on his forehead as he spoke, and ran down his pale face.

She quivered and was silent for a moment. Then, "Neale, where shall I get the strength to do that?" she asked.

He looked full in her face. "I don't know anywhere to go for strength but out of one's naked human heart," he said.

She shrank from the rigor of this with a qualm of actual fear. "I think I must have something else," she told him wildly.

"I don't know," he returned. "I don't know at all about that. I'm no mystic. I can't help you there, dear. But I know, as well as I know anything on earth, that anything that's worth having in anybody's life, his parent-hood, his marriage, his love, his ambition, can stand any honest challenge it can be put to. If it can't, it's not valid and ought to be changed or discarded." His gaze on her was immeasurably steady.

She longed unspeakably for something else from him, some warming, comforting a.s.surance of help, some heartening, stimulating encouragement along that stark, bleak way.

Somehow they were standing up now, both pale, looking profoundly into each other's eyes. Something almost palpable, of which not a word had been spoken aloud, came and stood there between them, and through it they still looked at each other. They had left words far behind now, in the fierce velocity of their thoughts.

And yet with the almost physical unity of their years of life together, each knew the other's thoughts.

She flung herself against him as though she had cried out to him. He put his arms strongly, tenderly about her, as though he had answered.

With no words she had cried out, silently, desperately to him, "Hold me!

Hold me!"

And with no words, he had answered, silently, desperately, "No one can hold you but yourself."

A shouting babble of voices rose in the distance. The children crying to each other came out of the house-door and raced down the flag-stone walk. "There they are! In the garden! By the onion-bed! Father! Mother!

We've been looking for you everywhere. Toucle says if you'll let her, she'll boil down some maple syrup for us to wax on ice for dessert."

They poured into the garden, children, cat and fox-terrier, noisy, insistent, clamorous. Mark, always frankly greedy of his mother's attention, pushed in jealously between his parents, clinging to his mother's knees. He looked up in her face and laughed out, his merry peal, "Oh, Mother, what a dirty face! You've been suspiring and then you've wiped your forehead with your dirty hand, the way you say I mustn't. How funny you look! And you've got a great, long tear in your sleeve, too."

Behind them, tiny, smooth and glistening, Eugenia Mills strolled to the edge of the garden, as far as the flag-stones went, and stood waiting, palpably incapable of taking her delicate bronze slippers into the dust.

"You've missed a kitchen call from that lively, earthy old Mrs. Powers and her handsome daughter-in-law," she announced casually. "Toucle says they brought some eggs. What a stunning creature that Nelly is! There's temperament for you! Can't you just feel the smouldering, primitive fire hidden under that scornful silence of hers?"

"Mother, may we tell Toucle to put the syrup on to boil?" begged Elly.

Her hair was tangled and tousled, with bits of bark sticking in it, and dried mud was caked on her hands and bare legs. Marise thought of the repugnance she must have aroused in Eugenia.

"Mother," said Paul, "Mr. Welles is going to give me a fishing-rod, he says. A _real_ one. Boughten."

"Oh, I want one too!" cried Mark, jumping up and down. "I want one too."

"You're too little. Mother, _isn't_ Mark too little? And anyhow, he always breaks everything. You do, Mark, you know you do. I take _care_ of my things!"

Someone in the confusion stepped on the fox-terrier's toes and he set up a shrill, aggrieved yelping. The children pawed at her with dirty hands.

"Good-evening, Mr. Marsh," said Eugenia, looking over her shoulder at the dark-haired figure in flannels approaching from the other house. She turned and strolled across the gra.s.s to meet him, as white and gleaming as he.

A sick qualm of self-contempt shook Marise. For, high and clear above everything else, there had come into her mind a quick discomfort at the contrast between her appearance and that of Eugenia.

CHAPTER XV

HOME LIFE

July 20.

The heat was appalling even early in the morning, right after breakfast.

There were always three or four such terrific days, even up here in the mountains, to remind you that you lived in America and had to take your part of the ferocious extremes of the American climate.

And of course this had to be the time when Toucle went off for one of her wandering disappearances. Marise could tell that by the aspect of the old woman as she entered the kitchen that morning, her reticule bag bulging out with whatever mysterious provisions Toucle took with her.

You never missed anything from the kitchen.

Marise felt herself in such a nervously heightened state of sensitiveness to everything and everybody in those days, that it did not surprise her to find that for the first time she received something more than a quaint and amusing impression from the old aborigine. She had never noticed it before, but sometimes there was something about Toucle's strange, battered, leathery old face ... what was it? The idea came to her a new one, that Toucle was also a person, not merely a curious and enigmatic phenomenon.

Toucle was preparing to depart in the silent, unceremonious, absent-minded way she did everything, as though she were the only person in the world. She opened the screen door, stepped out into the torrid glare of the sunshine and, a stooped, shabby, feeble old figure, trudged down the path.

"Where does she go?" thought Marise, and "What was that expression on her face I could not name?"

Impulsively she went out quickly herself, and followed after the old woman.

"Toucle! Toucle!" she called, and wondered if her voice in these days sounded to everyone as nervous and uncertain as it did to her.