Lady Good-for-Nothing: A Man's Portrait of a Woman
Page 35
Chapter VII.
HOUSEKEEPING.
She awoke at daybreak to the twittering of birds. Raising herselflittle by little, she bent over him, studying the face of her beloved.He slept on; and after a while she slipped from the couch, collected hergarments in a bundle, tiptoed to the door, and lifting its curtain,stole out to the dawn.
Mist filled the valley below the fall. A purple bank of vapour blockedthe end of it. But the rolling outline was edged already with gold, andalready ray upon ray of gold shivered across the upper sky and touchedthe pinewoods at the head of the pass.
Clad in cloak and night-rail, shod in loose slippers of Indianleather-work, she moved across to the fire she had banked overnight.Beside it a bold robin had perched on the rim of the cooking-pot.He fluttered up to a bough, and thence watched her warily. She remadethe fire, building a cone of twigs; fetched water, scoured the cauldron,and hung it again on its bar. As she lifted it the sunlight glinted onthe ring her lover had brought for the wedding and had slipped on herfinger in the cabin, binding her by this only rite.
The fire revived and crackled cheerfully. She caught up the bundleagain and climbed beside the stream, following its right bank until shecame to the pool of her choice. There, casting all garments aside, shewent down to it, and the alders hid her.
Half an hour later she returned and paused on the threshold of the hut,the sunlight behind her. In her arms she carried a cluster--a bundlealmost--of ferns and autumnal branches--cedar and black-alder, the oneberried with blue the other with coral, maple and aromatic spruce, withtrails of the grape vine. He was awake and lay facing the door,half-raised on his left elbow.
"This for good-morning!" She held out the armful to show him, but sothat it hid her blushes. Then, dropping the cluster on the floor, sheran and knelt, bowing her face upon the couch beside him. But laying apalm against either temple he forced her to lift it and gaze at him,mastering the lovely shame.
He looked long into her eyes. "You are very beautiful," he said slowly.
She sprang to her feet. "See the dew on my shoes! I have bathed,and--" with a gesture of the hand towards the scattered boughs--"afterwards I pulled these for you. But I was in haste and latebecause--because--" She explained that while bathing she had let thering, which was loose and heavy, slip from her finger into the pool.It had lodged endwise between two pebbles, and she had taken someminutes to find it. "As for these," she said, "the flowers are alldone, but I like the leaves better. In summer our housekeeping mighthave been make-believe; now, with the frosts upon us, we shall have hardwork, and a fire to give thanks for."
He slid from the couch and, standing erect, threw a bath-gown over hisshoulders. "I must build a chimney," he said, looking around; "achimney and a stone hearth."
"Then our house will be perfect."
"I will start this very day. . . . Show me the way to your pool."
They ate their breakfast on the stone above the fall, in the warmsunshine, planning and talking together like children. He would buildthe chimney; but first he must climb down to the lower valley and findBayard, deserted at the foot of the falls, and left to wander all nightat will.
He must take the mare, too, she said; and promised to start him on thebridle-path, so that he could not miss it.
"What! Must I ride on a side-saddle?"
"It should be easy for you," she laughed. "You pretended to know allabout it when you taught me." In the end it was settled that she shouldride and he walk beside till Bayard was found. "Then you can lead herback and leave her with Mr. Strongtharm."
"But I shall need Bayard to bring home a sack of lime for my mortar.And you are over thoughtful for Madcap. I walked up to inspect thepasture, and there is enough to last the pair for a week. It is odds,too, we find some burnt lands at the back of these woods, with patchesof good grass. Let us keep the horses up here, at any rate until thenights turn colder. A taste of hard faring will be good for theirpampered flesh, as for mine. Besides--though you may not know it--I ama first-class groom."
"As well as a mason? You will have to turn hunter, too, before long,else your cook will be out of work. Dear, dear, how we begin to crowdthe days!"
For a whole week he worked at intervals, building his chimney withstones from the river bed, and laying them well and truly. Ruth helpedhim at whiles, when household duties did not claim her. Now and then,when his back ached with the toil, he would break off for a spell andwatch her as she stooped over the cooking-pot, or knelt by thestream-side, bare-legged, with petticoat kilted high, beating the linenon a flat stone.
When the chimney was finished they were in great anxiety lest, beingbuilt close under the cliff, it should catch a down-draught of the windand fill the dwelling with smoke. But the wind came, and, as it turnedout, made a leap from the cliff to the valley, singing high overhead andmissing the chimney clear. When they lit their first fire indoors andran forth to see the smoke rising in a thin blue pillar against thepines, they laughed elated, and at supper drank to their handiwork.
Ruth's first sacrifice on the new hearth was the solemn heating of aflat iron, to crimp and pleat her lover's body-linen.
Next day he shot a deer and flayed it; and, the next, set to work tobuild a bed. Their couch had been of white linen laid upon skins, theskins resting on a thick mat of leaves. Now he raised it from theground on four posts, joining the posts with a stout framework andlacing the framework with cords criss-crossed like the netting of ahammock. Also he replaced the curtain at the entrance with a door ofsplit pinewood, and fashioned a wooden bolt.
The halcyon weather held for two weeks, the delicate weather of Indiansummer. Day by day the forest dropped its leaves under a blue windlesssky; but the nights sharpened their frosts. Ruth, stealing early to herbathing-pool, found it edged with thin ice, and paused, breaking it withtaps of her naked foot while she braced her body for the cold shock.
The flat rock over the fall was still their supper-table. After suppingthey would wrap themselves closer in their cloaks of bearskin, and sitfor long, his arm about her body. The stars wheeled overhead.At a little distance shone the open window inviting them.From their ledge they overlooked the world.
She marvelled at the zest he threw into every moment and detail of thisstrange honeymooning. He had taken pride even in skinning and cuttingup the slain deer.
She had, in fact, being fearful of her experiment; had planned it, insome sort, as a test for him. She was no sentimentalist. She hadbelieved that he loved her--well she knew it now. But for him thiscould not be first love. Many times she had bethought her of the deadMargaret Dance, and as a sensible girl without resentment. But, herselfin the ecstasy of first love, she marvelled how it could die andanything comparable spring up in its room; and she had only her ownheart to interrogate. Her own heart told her that it was impossible."Fool!" said her own heart. "Is it not enough that he condescends--thatyou have found favour in his sight--you, that asked but to be hisslave?"
"Fool!" said her heart again. "Would you be jealous of this dead woman?Then jealousy is not cruel as the grave, but crueller."
And she retorted, "The woman is dead and cannot grudge it.Ah, conscience! are you the only part of me that has not slept in hisarms. I want him all--all!"
"How can that be--since you are not his first love?" objectedconscience, falling back upon its old position.
"Be still," she whispered back. "See how love is recreating him!"
Indeed, the secret may have lain in her passing loveliness--by night,beside their fire on the rock, he would sit motionless watching her facefor minutes together, or the poise of her head, or the curve of her chinas she tilted it to ponder the stars; and, in part, the woodland life,chosen by her so cunningly, may have bewitched him for a space. Certainit is that during their sojourn here he became a youth again, eager andglad as a youth, passionate as a youth, laughing, throwing his heartinto simple things and not shrinking from coarser trials--as when heplunged his han
ds into the blood of the deer.
This story is of Ruth, not of Oliver Vyell; or of him only in so far ashis star ruled hers. For the moment their stars danced together and thecommon cares of this world stood back for a space and left a floor forthem.
Their bliss was absolute. But the seed of its corruption lay in him.Her spirit was chaste, as her life had been. For him, before everMargaret Dance met and crossed his path, he had lived loosely,squandering his manhood; and of this squandering let one who laterunderwent it record the inevitable sentence.
"But ah! it hardens all within, And petrifies the feeling."
Nor could this temporary miracle do more for Oliver Vyell than wake inhim a false springtide of the heart and delay by so long the revenge ofhis past upon his present self.
Midway in the third week the weather broke. He had foreseen this, andearly one morning set forth upon Bayard, the mare following obedientlyas a dog, along the downhill circuit to the village. There he wouldleave them in stall at the Ferry Inn, to be fetched by his grooms.Ruth walked some way beside him, telling off a list of purchases to bemade at the village store to replenish their household stock.
She left him and turned back, under boughs too bare to hide the loweringsky. She had gained the hut and he the village before the storm broke.Indeed it gave him time to make his purchases and reach the Inn, where aheavy mail-bag awaited him. He was served with bread, cheese, and beerin the Inn parlour, and dealt with the letters then and there; answeringsome, tearing up others, albeit still with a sense of bringing back hishabits of business to a world with which he had no concern. While hewrote, always in haste, on the cheap paper the Inn supplied, the stormbroke and with such darkness that he pulled out his watch. It was yetearly afternoon. He called for candles and wrote on.
The last letter, addressed to Batty Langton, Esquire, he superscribed"_Most urgent_," and having sealed it, arose and shouldered his sack forthe homeward tramp. By this time the wind howled through the villagestreet, blowing squall upon squall of rain before it. It blew, too,dead in his path; but he faced it cheerfully.
Before he gained what should have been the shelter of the woods, thegale had increased so that they gave less than the road had given.The trees rocked above him; leaves and dead twigs beat on his face, andat length the blast forced him almost to creep on all fours. It wasdark, too, beneath the swaying boughs. But uppermost in his mind wasfear for his love, lest the hut should have given way before thetempest, and she be lying crushed beneath it.
Still he fought his way. Darkness--the real darkness--was falling, andhe was yet a mile from the hut when in his path a figure arose from theundergrowth where it had been crouching.
"Ruth!"
"Ah, you are safe! . . . I could not rest at home--"
They took hands and forced their way against the wind.
"The cabin?"
"It stands, please God!"
After much battling they spied the light shining through the louvers ofits closed shutter. The gale streamed down the valley as through afunnel, but once past the angle of the cliff they found themselvesalmost in a calm. He pushed the door open.
On the hearth--the hearth of his building--a pile of logs burnedcheerfully. Over these the kettle hissed; and the firelight fell ontheir bed, with its linen oversheet turned back and neatly folded.
She entered and he closed the door behind her. She laughed as he pushedits bolt. They were drenched to the skin, the pair.
"This is best," said she with another soft and happy laugh.
"This is best," he repeated after her. "Better even than in fairweather."