Chapter IX

Mr. Neckart, standing back in the shadow of the scrubby althea-bushes, his hands clasped behind him and his eyes following the skiff as it drifted down the river in the twilight, compelled himself to argue the matter out according to the rulings of common sense, just as he would the appropriation bill.

He had been coming too close of late to this little girl in a brotherly way—of course in a brotherly way. He must stand farther off. She must marry. He had always looked forward to her marrying, and the time, in all probability, had come now. Van Ness was a manly, strong fellow: her father would urge it, and Jane would soon be won. For Neckart, with the majority of men, regarded amiability and high-colored, beefy good looks in his own sex as the irresistible attractions in a woman's eyes.

"They both have youth and personal attractions and culture—everything to make a marriage suitable. I can find no objection to it," proceeded his most reasonable meditation.

"But I can never see it!"

He had not spoken, but it seemed to him as if he had cried out. Then he laughed to think what an egregious ass he was. What was this yellow-haired girl in the boat to him more than any other of the millions of women with whom the world was filled? Nothing. They all were nothing to him.

He turned his back on the river and struck into one of the dusky alleys of the garden, pacing up and down below the old plum trees. He whistled to himself, and ran his hand through his shaggy hair as if to be rid of some cobwebs in his brain. As he brushed against the branches a bird fluttered out of its nest and chirped angrily. Why, women and their love and their homes could no more come into his life than that silly robin or her brood! Two years ago this inexorable necessity did not even give him a moment's chagrin. The newspaper, his army of followers, the policy of the country,—these made life big and full enough. If he wanted little selfish pleasures, there was his arm-chair and open fire, his shelf of old books, or a dinner at Delmonico's with some clever fellow, or a dash to Europe, or across the continent, to pry into the background against which other clever fellows, whether white or yellow or black, lived and worked. He would go back to the office to-night; he could hear the engine puffing at the station now, making ready for the next train; he could finish the evening with his old friends, the books; he could order a dinner to-morrow that would satisfy even his palate,—and he used to be an epicure. He ought to go. He would go.

He walked up the open path leading to the house. Then he stopped, turned and struck directly through the trees and bushes to the river-side. The boat was at some distance: he called once or twice for her to come and take him on board before she heard him. His voice sounded hoarse and strange to himself: he did not know himself in what he did. As for the world, there was nothing in it but that boat yonder which shot through the water, and the woman with eager face rowing swiftly toward him.

There was not a Wall-street banker or a politician among Neckart's confrères who would not have looked upon him as insane for the moment. This dull wisp of a woman to blot out all business, power, place, from his life? But, after all, there is no insanity so practical or long-lived. Why does A bull and bear the market, or B sell himself and his party, but for the sake of some ugly, faded woman and the commonplace children she has borne him? They are not thought worth notice by anybody but himself, but he ignores honesty, death, God himself, for them his life long. A plodding, shrewd fellow too, probably not a whit heroic.

Neckart was tramping along the common road which all of us know, but it seemed to him that he was breaking ground in a new world full of misty splendors and untried action. When he called to her his breath failed him, as it used to do when he was a boy wild with excitement. The sand under his feet, the brambles on the bank, the overarching sky, were not the same they were an hour ago. When the boat darted up to the shore, rocking as she held it fast with the oar, it seemed strange to him that she should speak in her ordinary tone. Did she not know?

She stood up in the bow steadying the skiff as he sprang into it. His hand touched her fingers for an instant, and she noticed that it shrank from hers.

"Did my father call me?"

"No: I wanted to talk to you alone."

She pushed from shore and dipped her oars: in a moment they were out in the current. It was a rippling belt of steely blue, the banks making indistinguishable ramparts of shadow on either side. Overhead was the soft starless twilight of June, through which a nighthawk flapped heavily and vanished. When it was gone they were alone. Could she not understand that they were alone? In this wide dark world that there were only they two, a man and a woman?

He could not distinguish her face, and her figure was but a light dark outline like a silhouette against the air. But the power of her womanhood was upon him, a something which Neckart had never felt before—a terrible, pure passion.

"Give me the oars," he said. "Let me help you," reaching forward to take them. His hand rested on hers accidentally: he did not remove it. Now did she understand? His mouth was closed. It seemed to him as if words were poor to say what was in his blood, in his soul, in the water, the air, the very ground.

She was startled, and turned to him wondering. The moon, rising higher, showed him the childish, sensitive mouth, the dark eyes heavy with tears, for she had been crying. What was that which gleamed through them, half answering him, frightened at itself? It seemed to him in this brief pause that they had been waiting all their lives for this word—he to speak and she to hear.

"Jane!" He took her hand in both of his and held it close, and then he threw it from him, drawing back: "My God! I had forgotten."

"Forgotten?" She closed her eyes once or twice, bewildered, as if suddenly wakened from sleep. "You are in trouble," she said anxiously. "Can I help you?"

The question brought him to sober reason sharply enough. It was precisely the frank, tender tone which she would use to her father; and the truth was, that the girl to herself did not yet distinguish between her father and this friend. A moment before a strange emotion had touched her. But it had passed like a warm gust of summer. There was not a seven-year old child in the city yonder who did not know more about love than Jane. She had never heard servants or schoolmates chatter about it; novels had bored her; the captain, whatever he had left undone, had kept the air pure and cold about her as for a very nun.

"What is this trouble, Mr. Neckart? You have been ill for months, I know. Can I—? Or perhaps father—"

She leaned forward, the oars suspended in her hands, her lips apart, attentive and eager.

He leaned over the edge of the skiff and wet his forehead and eyes, forcing a careless laugh: "One moment, Miss Swendon, and I will explain to you," adding presently, precisely in the manner with which he would have discussed the weather, "We men each have our skeleton to hide, according to popular belief, and mine is no worse than the rest. It is the most practical of facts. Only I am apt to forget it, and then, when it meets me unawares, it is as grim as death."

She nodded, watching him intently as if he were physically ill: she would not let the oars strike on the water, lest the noise might jar on him. All kinds of wild plans for helping him filled her brain. If the trouble were anything which money could help, there was plenty of that, thank God! If it was political difficulty—bills maybe—she could not even understand it. If God had only not made her so stupid! the humble tears rising slowly to her eyes.

Mr. Neckart did not see them. He was careful not to look at her as he spoke, and hurried on with his explanation, as if it were business of small importance. But she was not deceived by that. "I never have talked of this matter, and least of all should I have told it to you. I can bear the trouble when it comes without difficulty. The most ordinary men meet disaster coolly which they know is inevitable. Commonplace fellows who are born with scrofula or consumption march along with them to early death cheerfully. They make no tragedy out of it. There is no reason why I should complain of my lifelong companion." His tone was harder than he had ever used in speaking to Jane before.

"I have never told you of my mother?"

"No," eagerly, hastening to spare him pain. "But I have heard of her from Cornelia Fleming, who was your neighbor in Delaware. I know all that she suffered. You need not tell me."

"She was the last of the Davidge family. There was not one of them for generations who had not inherited disease of the brain. They were either epileptics from youth, or became, as she did, incurably insane. The disease invariably manifested itself in that way after middle age, and from that time they were helpless burdens to their children. Yet there was not a Davidge who refrained from marriage, so entailing the curse on another generation. It would have been more righteous to have put a pistol to their heads and have blown out their brains."

His manner was quiet and cold. Jane made no answer.

"Naturally, I have studied the pathology of insanity closely. I know that I have inherited the disease. The symptoms within the last six months are unmistakable. I know that in five or ten years at the outside I shall be of no more use in the world than any other mindless animal. But I will have no woman, nor child, suffer for me."

When he ceased to speak the silence and the night fell oppressively on them. The boat had drifted down to the edge of the bank and grounded. The moonlight showed her to him sitting in the bow of the boat facing him, her hands clasped on her knees. She was so near that if he but opened his arms he could take her to his breast. Yet he knew that she was separated from him now as though death itself lay between.

"I have known this necessity which lay upon me for years, Miss Swendon," he said quietly, but leaning forward to watch her immovable face. "It is my duty to isolate myself as other men need not do. The more dear"—his voice failed suddenly, but he recovered himself in a moment and went on—"the more dear a woman is to me, the more I must shut her out of my sight. I can never try to win her nor marry her."

Was the girl stone? Had she not even common human sympathy for him?

"You understand why I do this?"

"Yes, I understand."

"And you think I am right?"

She looked up at him with her usual blunt directness: "You are altogether right. An honest man could not do otherwise." Her chin fell on her breast again. Not a moan, not a breath of regret, at the blow which struck them apart. Weaker women would have cried a little at parting from a dog who had been sometimes a companion. This cool-blooded Swede gave her verdict on the right and wrong of the matter as though it had been a sale of goods, and there was the end of it! All the long-latent passion in Neckart's nature revolted and flamed into life. He moved restlessly, watching her sit there stony and immovable. He would have flung away life, as men used to do against the dumb Sphinx, to tear from her some word of pity or life.

The boat rocked in the shallow water. She rose to leave it. Neckart mechanically held out his hand to help her jump ashore. She held it tightly, and when she stood beside him on the grass took it in both her own: "No. You ought never to marry. You ought to hold yourself apart from the world. These strange people would only irritate and wear you out. Now you can give yourself entirely to us. We are your nearest friends. You shall give up the paper and politics: it is the work and anxiety that are telling on your brain. You shall live here with father, in the quiet and country air. I will take care of you both." She stroked his hand as a mother might that of her dying child, trying to believe that it was not growing cold. For a year the girl had fought death back from her father step by step. Now, her one friend, who with the old man filled all the world for her, was to be taken from her.

He seated her on a fallen log and pushed back the hair from her clammy forehead: "Child! child! you do not understand! All I have told you has gone for nothing!"

"I do understand. I can cure you both. Rest and the air—I am dull, but you don't know how good a nurse I can be for my own people," with a pitiful laugh.

He did not speak. The soft golden hair lay in his hand, warm and alive. He looked down at her. He could soon turn this childish affection into love: he could wrench her soul into his own. Why should he not take what God had set before him? All the other men of his race had done it.

One moment he stood irresolute. Then the hair dropped from his hand. "Jane," he said, as if reasoning with a child, "when I remember my mother first she was a pretty, tender little woman, with hardly a thought outside of her boy. For years before she died I was forced to fasten her as one does a wild beast, that she might not kill me. Do you understand what that was to me? Do you think I can bring the misery I knew in those years to any woman? My wife shall never have it to bear."

"But you can have no wife!" she cried. "You said you dared not marry! I can bear the misery. You will come to us—us. Those women in Washington of whom you tell me—how could they know what you need? I have nobody but you and father."

She felt herself so young and strong! Death, a most horrible and certain death, was creeping upon him. In her agony of pity she held his hand to her wet, burning cheeks.

"Jane, you drive me mad!" stooping over her trembling. "It is you—you that I dare not marry!"

She stood erect: "I marry you? I never thought of that," simply.

"You never thought of it?" with a queer uncertain laugh. "You never thought that I loved you?"

"That you loved me, Mr. Neckart? Me?" The blue innocent eyes that had been fixed on his suddenly filled with light; she dropped her face into her hands; her whole body burned with blushes, and she turned away.

Neckart slowly followed her. Jane's thoughts were always transparent as crystal: he had read in that one brief glance all the delight, the tender passion, whose first impulse was to escape from him.

"I have been a damned scoundrel!" he said to himself: "I have ruined her life!"

He was now thoroughly awake to what he had done—saw it as any other practical, honorable man would do, unbiased by his passion or his pity for himself. He walked silently beside her as she went up the steep path to the house.

As for Jane, she did not know that he was silent: she would scarcely have heard if he had spoken to her. She did not know what this was that had come to her, that had lifted her whole life upward as by a touch. She could not look at him. If she could only reach her father and hide from him, that he might never find her—never! She remembered how a minute ago she had held his hand to her face, and the hot flood of shame covered every other thought: the next she glanced shyly at him with a sweet pride;—he loved her, he would understand! The terrible story he had told her had passed out of her mind like a breath of smoke in sunshine. He loved her: she could keep him out of all danger. Even if she had remembered that she could never be his wife, it would not have troubled her. He loved her! She thought no more of marriage than the bird in its first song of dawn thinks of the barred lines and visible notes to which its music might somewhere be written down.

Neckart followed her up the steps and into the wide hall, carrying his hat behind him in his hand. The damp air wet his hair, and it hung lankly back from his haggard face. He felt physically ill. He had acted like a brute, a coward! This was the end of his stern resolve, his lifelong self-denial!

A lamp burned at the foot of the wide staircase. He paused beside it: she had gone up a step or two, and halted, her hand on the rail, looking down. "Good-night!" she said shyly.

The light shone full on the pink glow in her cheeks, the loose hair glistening like a golden mist, the half-frightened, half-triumphant gleam shot down from the blue eyes.

He did not answer her.

The delicate virgin bloom of this love which he had coveted so madly an hour ago scarcely stirred his heart now with pleasure. A man cannot live all the time on the heights of emotion or of religion; the air is too rarefied up there for healthy lungs; he comes down punctually to the ordinary levels of his saner self; and Neckart, on his ordinary level, was an exceedingly practical, honest man. He knew that he had brought irreparable injury to this girl, and that it was his duty now to make amends as best he could.

Rebecca Harding Davis.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]