"No, you're not," he contradicted. "That's what makes me so provoked with you now, going without eating since morning."

Agnes put in, "It's the suddenness of it that was such a shock. It takes me just so, too, comes over me as I start to put a mouthful of food into my mouth. I can't get it down. And you don't know how _lost_ I feel not to have Miss Hetty here to tell me what to eat. I feel so gone!"

"You must go to bed this minute," said Neale. "I'll go right back to the children."

He remembered suddenly. "By George, I haven't had anything to eat since noon, myself." He gave Marise an apologetic glance. "I guess I haven't any stones to throw at your foolishness."

Agnes ran to get him another cup of cocoa and some more bread and b.u.t.ter. Marise leaned back on the sofa and watched him eat.

She was aware of a physical release from tension that was like a new birth. She looked at her husband as she had not looked at him for years.

And yet she knew every line and hollow of that rugged face. What she seemed not to have seen before, was what had grown up little by little, the expression of his face, the expression which gave his presence its significance, the expression which he had not inherited like his features, but which his life had wrought out there.

Before her very eyes there seemed still present the strange, alien look of the dead face upstairs, from which the expression had gone, and with it everything. That vision hung, a cold and solemn warning in her mind, and through it she looked at the living face before her and saw it as she had never done before.

In the clean, new, sweet lucidity of her just-returned consciousness she saw what she was not to forget, something like a steady, visible light, which was Neale's life. That was Neale himself. And as she looked at him silently, she thought it no wonder that she had been literally almost frightened to death by the mere possibility that it had not existed. She had been right in thinking that there was something there which would outlast the mere stars.

He looked up, found her eyes on him, and smiled at her. She found the gentleness of his eyes so touching that she felt the tears mounting to her own... . But she winked them back. There had been enough foolishness from her, for one day.

Neale leaned back in his chair now, looked around for his; cap, took it up, and looked back at her, quietly, still smiling a little. Marise thought, "Neale is as _natural_ in his life as a very great actor is in his art. Whatever he does, even to the most trifling gesture, is done with so great a simplicity that it makes people like me feel fussy and paltry."

There was a moment's silence, Neale frankly very tired, looking rather haggard and grim, giving himself a moment's respite in his chair before standing up to go; Marise pa.s.sive, drawing long quiet breaths, her hands folded on her knees; Agnes, her back to the other two, hanging about the sideboard, opening and shutting the drawers, and shifting their contents aimlessly from one to the other.

Then Agnes turned, and showed a shamed, nervous old face. "I don't know what's got into me, Miss Marise, that I ain't no good to myself nor anybody else. I'm afraid to go back into the kitchen alone." She explained to Neale, "I never was in the house with a dead body before, Mr. Crittenden, and I act like a baby about it, scared to let Mrs.

Crittenden out of my sight. If I'm alone for a minute, seems 'sthough ..." She glanced over her shoulder fearfully and ended lamely, "Seems 'sthough I don't know what might happen."

"I won't leave you alone, Agnes, till it is all over," said Marise, and this time she kept contempt not only out of her voice, but out of her heart. She was truly only very sorry for the old woman with her foolish fears.

Agnes blinked and pressed her lips together, the water in her eyes.

"I'm awful glad to hear you say that!" she said fervently.

Marise closed her eyes for a moment. It had suddenly come to her that this promise to Agnes meant that she could not see Neale alone till after the funeral, tomorrow, when she went back into life again. And she found that she immensely wanted to see him alone this very hour, now!

And Agnes would be there ... !

She opened her eyes and saw Neale standing up, his cap in his hand, looking at her, rough and brown and tall and tired and strong; so familiar, every line and pose and color of him; as familiar and unexciting, as much a part of her, as her own hand.

As their eyes met in the profound look of intimate interpenetration which can pa.s.s only between a man and a woman who have been part of each other, she felt herself putting to him clearly, piercingly, the question which till then she had not known how to form, "_Neale, what do you want me to do?_"

She must have said it aloud, and said it with an accent which carried its prodigious import, for she saw him turn very white, saw his eyes deepen, his chest lift in a great heave. He came towards her, evidently not able to speak for a moment. Then he took her hands ... the memory of a thousand other times was in his touch ...

He looked at her as though he could never turn his eyes away. The corners of his mouth twitched and drew down.

He said, in a deep, trembling, solemn voice, "Marise, my darling, I want you always to do what is best for _you_ to do."

He drew a deep, deep breath as though it had taken all his strength to say that; and went on, "What is deepest and most living in you ... that is what must go on living."

He released one hand and held it out towards her as though he were taking an oath.

CHAPTER XXV

MARISE'S COMING-OF-AGE

July 23. Dawn

Even after the old child, Agnes, had been soothed and rea.s.sured, over and over, till she had fallen asleep, and the house lay profoundly quiet, Marise felt not the slightest approach of drowsiness or even of fatigue. She lay down on her bed, but could not close her eyes. They remained wide open, looking not at a wild confusion of incoherent images as they had the night before, but straight into blackness and vacancy.

It was strange how from the brawling turmoil of impressions which had shouted and cried out to her the night before, and had wrought her to frenzy by their insane insistence, not an echo reached her now. Her mind was as silent and intent as the old house, keeping its last mute watch over its mistress. Intent on what? She did not know. On something that was waiting for her, on something for which she was waiting.

In an immense hush, like the dusky silence in a cathedral aisle or in the dark heart of the woods, there was something there waiting for her to go and find it.

That hush had fallen on her at the sight of Neale's face, at the sound of his voice, as he had looked at her and spoken to her, at the last, just before he went away back to the children. Those furiously racing pulses of hers had been stilled by it into this steady rhythm which now beat quietly through her. The clashing thoughts which had risen with malevolent swiftness, like high, battling shadowy genii, and had torn her in pieces as they fought back and forth, were stilled as though a master-word had been spoken which they must all obey.

The old house, silent under the stars, lay quiet in its vigil about her, but slept no more than she; the old house which had been a part of her childhood and her youth now watched over her entry into another part of her journey.

For as she lay there, wide-awake, watching the light of the candle, she felt that she knew what was waiting for her, what she must go to find.

It was her maturity.

And as she lay quiet, her ears ringing in the solemn hush which Neale's look and voice had laid about her, she felt slowly coming into her, like a tide from a great ocean, the strength to go forward. She lay still, watching the candle-flame, hovering above the wick which tied it to the candle, reaching up, reaching up, never for a moment flagging in that trans.m.u.tation of the dead matter below it, into something shining and alive.

She felt the quiet strength come into her like a tide. And presently, as naturally as a child wakes in the morning, refreshed, and feels the impulse to rise to active effort again, she sat up in bed, folded her arms around her knees, and began to think.

Really to think this time, not merely to be the helpless battle-field over which hurtling projectiles of fierce emotions pa.s.sed back and forth! She set her life fairly there before her, and began to try to understand it.

As she took this first step and saw the long journey stretching out before her, she knew on what staff she leaned. It was Neale's belief that she was strong and not weak, that she could find out, if she tried, what was deepest and most living in her heart. With this in her hand, with that great protecting hush about her, she set forth. She was afraid of what she might find, but she set forth.

She must begin at the beginning this time, and go steadily forward from one step to the next, not her usual involuntary plunge, not the usual closing over her head of those yelling waters of too vivid impression.

The beginning had been ... yes, the first conscious beginning had been the going away of little Mark, out of his babyhood into his own child-life. He had gone out and left an empty place behind him, which till then had been filled with the insistent ever-present need for care for the physical weakness of babyhood. And she had known that never again would Mark fill that place.

Emptiness, silence, solitude in the place of constant activity; it had frightened her, had set before her a vision that her life had reached its peak, and henceforth would go down the decline. Into that empty place had come a ringing, peremptory call back to personal and physical youth and excitement and burning sensations. And with that blinding rebirth of physical youth had come a doubt of all that had seemed the recompense for the loss of it, had come the conception that she might be letting herself be fooled and tricked out of the only real things.

There had been many parts to this: her revolt from the mere physical drudgery of her life, from giving so much of her strength to the dull, unsavory, material things. This summer, a thousand times in a thousand ways, there had been brought home to her by Vincent, by Eugenia, the fact that there were lives so arranged that other people did all the drudgery, and left one free to perceive nothing but the beauty and delicacy of existence. Now, straight at it! With all the knowledge of herself and of life which she had gathered,--straight at it, to see what this meant! Did their entire freedom from drudgery give them a keener sense of the beauty and delicacy of existence? Were they more deeply alive because of the ease of their lives?

She cast about her for evidence, in a firm, orderly search among the materials which life had brought to her. Had she seen anything which could give evidence on that? There was Eugenia; Eugenia and her friends had always lived that life of rich possessions and well-served ease.

What had it made of them? Was their sense of beauty deeper and more living because of it? No, not in the least.

She turned her inward eye on Eugenia's life, on the lives of the people in that circle, in a long searching gaze. Was it deep in eternal values?

Was it made up of a constant recurrence of sensitive aliveness to what is most worth responding to? Odd, that it did not seem to be! They were petulant, and bored, and troubled about minute flaws in their ease, far more than they were deep in communion with beauty.

Another piece of evidence came knocking at the door now, a picture of quaint and humble homeliness ... herself standing before the stove with the roast on a plate, and little Mark saying fastidiously, "Oh, how nasty raw meat looks!" She recalled her pa.s.sing impatience with the childishness of that comment, her pa.s.sing sense of the puerile ignorance of the inherent unity of things, in such an att.i.tude of eagerness to feed on results and unwillingness to take one's share of what leads up to results. Yes, it was more there, than in looking at Eugenia, that she could find evidence. Did she want to be of those who sat afar off and were served with the fine and delicate food of life, and knew nothing of the unsavory process of preparing it? It had seemed to her this summer, a thousand times with Vincent's eyes on her, scornful of her present life, that she did want it, that she wanted that more than anything else. Now let her look full at it. She was a grown woman now, who could foresee what it would mean.

She looked full at it, set herself there in her imagination, in the remote ivory tower and looked out from its carven windows at the rough world where she had lived and worked, and from which she would henceforth be protected ... and shut out. She looked long, and in the profound silence, both within and without her, she listened to the deepest of the voices in her heart.