It was sadness, not boldness, not any gay challenge, that marked his own.

"Can you then call it good fortune?" His own voice was low, suppressed.

"Why not, then?"

"You did not need me. A moment, and you would have been in command again--there was no real need of me. Ah, you never need me!"

"Yet you come. You were here, had the need been worse. And, indeed, I was quite off my guard--I must have been thinking of something else."

"And I also."

"And there was the serpent."

"Madam, there was the serpent! And why not? Is this not Eden? I swear it is paradise enough for me. Tell me, why is it that in the glimpses the sages give us of paradise they no more than lift the curtain--and let it fall again?"

"Captain Meriwether Lewis is singularly gloomy this morning!"

"Not more than I have been always. How brief was my little hour! Yet for that time I knew paradise--as I do now. We should part here, madam, now, forever. Yon serpent spelled danger for both of us."

"For both of us?"

"No, forgive me! None the less, I could not help my thoughts--cannot help them now. I ride here every morning. I saw your horse's hoof-marks some two miles back. Do you suppose I did not know whose they were?"

"And you followed me? Ah!"

"I suppose I did, and yet I did not. If I did I knew I was riding to my fate."

She would have spoken--her lips half parted--but what she might have said none heard.

He went on:

"I have ridden here since first I saw you turn this way one morning. I guessed this might be your haunt at dawn. I have ridden here often--and feared each time that I might meet you. Perhaps I came this morning in the same way, not knowing that you were near, but hoping that you might be. You see, madam, I speak the absolute truth with you."

"You have never spoken aught else to any human soul. That I know."

"And yet you try to evade the truth? Why deceive your heart about it, since I have not deceived my own? I have faced it out in my own heart, and I have, I trust, come off the victor. At some cost!"

Her face was troubled. She looked aside as she replied in a voice low, but firm:

"Any woman would be glad to hear such words from Captain Lewis, and I am glad. But--the honest wife never lived who could listen to them often."

"I know that," he said simply.

"No!" Her voice was very low now; her eyes soft and cast down as they fell upon a ring under her glove. "We must not meet, Captain Meriwether Lewis. At least, we must not meet thus alone in the woods.

It might cause talk. The administration has enemies enough, as you know--and never was a woman who did not have enemies, no matter how clean her life has been."

"Clean as the snow, yours! I have never asked you to be aught else, and never will. I sought you once, when I rode from Virginia to New York--when I first had my captain's pay, before Mr. Jefferson asked me to join his family. Before that time I had too little to offer you; but then, with my hopes and my ambitions, I ventured. I made that journey to offer you my hand. I was two weeks late--you were already wedded to Mr. Alston. Then I learned that happiness never could be mine.... Yes, we must part! You are the only thing in life I fear. And I fear as well for you. One wagging tongue in this hotbed of gossip--and there is harm for you, whom all good men should wish to shield."

As he rode, speaking thus, his were the features of a man of tremendous emotions, a resolute man, a man of strength, of pa.s.sions not easily put down.

She turned aside her own face for an instant. At last her little hand went to him in a simple gesture of farewell. Meriwether Lewis leaned and kissed it reverently as he rode.

"Good-by!" said he. "Now we may go on for the brief s.p.a.ce that remains for us," he added a moment later. "No one is likely to ride this way this morning. Let us go on to the old mill. May I give you a cup of coffee there?"

"I trust Captain Meriwether Lewis," she replied.

They advanced silently, and presently came in sight of a little cascade above a rocky shallowing of the stream. Below this, after they had splashed through the ford, they saw the gray stone walls of Rock Creek Mill.

The miller was a plain man, and silent. Other folk, younger or older, married or single, had come hither of a morning, and he spoke the name of none. He welcomed these two after his fashion. Under the shade of a great tree, which flung an arm out to the rivulet, he pulled out a little table spread in white and departed to tell his wife of the company. She, busy and smiling, came out presently with her best in old china and linen and wherewith to go with both.

They sat now, face to face across the little table, their horses cropping the dewy gra.s.s near by. Lewis's riding crop and gloves lay on his knee. He cast his hat upon the gra.s.s. Little birds hopped about on the ground and flitted here and there in the trees, twittering. A mocker, trilling in sudden ecstacy of life, spread a larger melody through all the wood.

The sun drew gently up in the heavens, screened by the waving trees.

The ripple of the stream was very sweet.

"Theodosia, look!" said the young man, suddenly swinging a gesture about him. "Did I not say right? It is Eden! Ah, what a pity it is that Eden must ever be the same--a serpent--repentance--and farewell!

Yet it was so beautiful."

"A sinless Eden, sir."

"No! I will not lie--I will not say that I do not love you more than ever. That is my sin; so I must go away. This must be our last meeting--I am fortunate that it came by chance today."

"Going away--where, then, my friend?"

"Into the West. It always has called me. Ah, if only I had remained in the Indian country yonder, where I belonged, and never made my ride to New York--to learn that I had come too late! But the West still is there--the wilderness still exists to welcome such as me!"

"But you will--you will come back again?"

"It is in the lap of the G.o.ds. I do not know or care. But my plans are all arranged. Mr. Jefferson and I have agreed that it is almost time to start. You see, Theodosia, I am now back from my schooling. You behold in me, madam, a scientist! At least I am competent to read by the sun and stars, can reckon longitude and lat.i.tude--as one must, to journey into the desert yonder. If only I dared orient my soul as well!"

"You would never doubt my faith in my husband."

"No! Of course, you love your husband. I could not look at you a second time if you did not."

"You are a good man, Meriwether Lewis!"

"Do not say it! I am a man accursed of evil pa.s.sions--the most unhappy of all men. There is nothing else, I say, in all the world that I fear but my love for you. Tell me it will not last--tell me it will change--tell me that I shall forget! I should not believe you--but tell me that. Does a man never forget? Success--for others; happiness--for someone else. My mother said that was to be my fate.

What did she mean?"

"She meant, Meriwether Lewis, that you were a great man, a great soul! Only a man of n.o.ble soul could speak as you have spoken to me.

We women, in our souls, love something n.o.ble and good and strong. Then we imagine someone like that. We believe, or try to believe, or say that we believe; but always----"

"And a woman may divide not love, only love of love itself?"

"I shall love your future, and shall watch it always," she replied, coloring. "You will be a great man, and there will be a great place for you."

"And what then?"

"Do not ask what then. You ask if men never change. Alas, they do, all too frequently! Do not deny the imperious way of nature.