CHAPTER XXVI

HOW IT ENDED--AND BEGAN.

The railings and uprights of the porch were strips of jet against a world swimming in blue and silver gray. The planks creaked under our feet. A confusion of saddles and farm gear hung against the log walls.

The tin basin stood on its accustomed shelf. The world of magic was jumbled with the commonplace. I led her over to the corner where the eye could gather in the widest vista. She stood there before me very upright and slim and her eyes held mine as frankly as a child's might have done.

I gazed at her for a moment more, then my arms went out and encircled her, and I talked very fast and very low.

"I may, at times, seem extremely abrupt," I confessed, "but I'm not.

I've worshiped you upon a coral reef and I've made love to you through endless days and nights with stars for my witnesses much larger than these--and softer. And now I've found you--I've found you, and it doesn't matter what you say, because I shall never again let you go."

She tilted her face upward and her eyes were dancing as she quoted, "'n.o.body asked you, sir.'"

She stood there, facing me, within the circle of my arms, with her chin as proudly tilted as though she were not surrendering, and with the old incomparable smile lingering on her lips.

And as I gazed at her in the witchery of the moon, the utter improbability of it all dawned upon me, until I felt that a moment would bring awakening and the old gnawing despair. The expression was that which I knew so well, and she seemed no more and no less real than she had been, looking out from the mate's chest, with the circle of mahogany-skinned savages sitting silent before her shrine.

That I had loved her was inevitable. It was written, but that was the lesser part. Here she stood looking at me out of eyes that were accepting my love without question. Why did she, without even the siege of a long wooing, so permit me to step into the temple of her life, as naturally as though it were the shrine of the coral island where I belonged as high-priest and demi-G.o.d?

She had, before to-night, met me only once, and then I had been the churl, brusquely rebuffing her sweet courtesy. Yet she had ridden across the hills, and something sang to me that it was to me she had ridden, though she may have called it coming to her brother. Why was it? Had I really conjured her soul to me by wishing it across the world? Had supreme forces compelled us both, so that preliminary details were superfluous between us?

However that might be, the gracious smile died slowly on her lips to a seriousness far sweeter, and as she looked into my face her eyes widened, and dropped all concealment until I was gazing into her soul.

When a woman meets the eyes of a man in that fashion he ceases to question, and wishes only to do reverence. It is like rolling back the waters of the sea and revealing the wonders of the deeps. For it is decreed that the eyes of a woman are given her in defense, to hide behind their dance and sparkle the things which lie beneath--and to disarm. When once they have opened in the miracle of self-revelation and surrendered their secret, one must be unworthy who feels himself worthy of such a manifestation.

And the secret I read there was that she loved me beyond all doubting.

It mattered no longer how the wonder had come to pa.s.s. That was a mere point of G.o.d-craft. It had happened, and the stars were singing.

I dropped on one knee and lifted her hand to my lips.

Later, I sketched rapidly, agitatedly, the story of the coming of her portrait to the island, of its place on the chest and its subsequent worship. I told her of meeting Keller on the steamer and Maxwell in New York. I summarized the chain of evidence which had to my mind proved her to be Mrs. Weighborne. I have no doubt that I told it badly, but that was of no consequence, since back of my broken narration was the pent-up rush of emotion, and to her this seemed important. Nor did my story, so fantastic that I hardly expected her to accept it without proof, seem to surprise her.

"And," I concluded, "I am going to build you a new temple which will make the Taj Mahal a tawdry mosque, for every block and rafter will be love, and each year we live I shall add new minarets of worship--and not only five times each day but a hundred, its _muezzin_ shall call me to prayer."

Her eyes were glowing, and her laugh trembled.

"I came quite a long way," she told me, "to make you say that, but after all you have done it very nicely."

"But," I admitted after a long pause, "I don't yet understand--not that it matters now--but why? That word is beating at my brain--why in the names of all the G.o.ds should you care?"

"Why shouldn't I?" she indignantly countered.

"You have known me," I said blankly, "a few days--and I should have imagined that I made a sorry impression."

She laughed again.

"I have known you always," she replied.

I shook my head wonderingly.

"Listen," she commanded. "Once upon a time--that's the way all fairy stories start--I saw you. You didn't notice me much. I was just a kid, but I fell in love with you. To be exact, it was ten years ago this month."

There was no end to wonders. All the loose threads of coincidence were being plaited into a single cable, and the cable was my life line.

"As I grew up I met a lot of men and they insisted on saying nice things to me; but they were all things of one kind and that wasn't the kind I wanted--besides, you see, I was waiting. I knew that some day you would come and that if you had anything to say it would be different. I compared them all with you. It wasn't just a girl's romantic foolishness. There was destiny in it. You know the Moslem text--'man's fate is about his neck.' You had no chance to escape me."

"I, too, knew it was written," I told her, "but I was afraid we should meet too late. When I saw you at Lexington I thought it was too late."

"I was never afraid of that," she affirmed. "Sometimes I have known that you were in danger--and later I've known that you escaped. Then there was the dream--the one dream about the door that came over and over....

At times it seemed that you were very near. Once at Cairo I felt that I was going to meet you around some corner or in some bazaar--but I didn't."

"You might, if you had turned your head," I declared. "Did you by any chance lose a diary at Cairo?"

This time it was she who was surprised.

"I lost one somewhere," she acknowledged; then as she colored divinely she demanded, "You didn't find it, did you? You didn't read those fool things?"

"It wasn't foolishness," I quoted. "There was destiny in it." And then I made full confession.

"I'm glad you wrote it," I added. "I owe that diary something and I want all my debt to be to you."

For a moment she was silent, then she looked up again and confronted me once more with a charge of stupidity.

"And you read that, and knew what football game it was, and yet you never recognized yourself! What are your brains made of, anyway?"

How could a man reply to such a sublime absurdity as that? I groaned.

"In the diary you wrote of an apotheosis," I confessed. "How in the name of all that is logical could I connect myself with this admirable, impossible superman? You failed to give the name."

She looked at me and laughed.

"The man is also modest," she observed.

"Of course," I demurred, "it's great to see you treading the clouds, with ideals for your playmates. Moreover, it's appropriate; but I'm down here, you know, earthbound and extremely mortal. If we are to walk together you must come down and join me."

"I'll take you up with me," she hospitably a.s.serted, and though since then she must have discovered many times that she had draped her cloth of gold upon a lay figure and had made a plumed and mailed knight of a failure and an inconsequent, yet she has, with gallant stubbornness, refused to admit it.

"Dearest," I said very humbly, "I have been inconceivably boorish, and worse. How could you bring yourself to forgive it?"

"Because," she answered, "I'm a woman--and inquisitive. I knew how you felt, and I wanted to find out why you acted so horridly at Lexington."

"I was trying very hard not to tell you how I felt," I admitted.

"You didn't have to tell me--in words," she laughed. "You told me in a hundred other ways, that were just as plain."