Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/84

78 perious changeling. Strange forces had laid hold on her. He could see her now with the artist's eye of unrelenting accuracy—as faithful as still water giving back a dreadful image—as she walked up and down the room, reproaching him for his silence, his deadness to what pleased her, his scorn of the world's usages. He had not spoken. Again he was the alien prince, condemned by the queen consort before his exile. Then, when she had finally set her own discontent in the mould of an eloquent fury, he had proposed to end what lay between them. They had made the common mistake: they had lashed together two warring temperaments. But they were not answerable to other people; they could invite a remedy. He would go back into the woods, to paint. That reason would save her from plausible inventions.

The next day, when he went, there were but few words between them. They were gentle words, such as are spoken by friends who love no more; but the faithful artist's-eye told him she looked smitten, and that always hurt him, like a separate scourge of memory; it was the index of his failure. For, however his achievements were regarded among men, he knew he had taken a woman's lot and bungled it by ignorant usage. His hands, deft as they were with brushes, had been too clumsy for wielding anything so fine. If they had been stronger, cleverer, he might have moulded his own life to fit hers; as it was, there had been nothing but to part, and let her achieve what was left her of her brilliant destiny. And for him, there was work and the desolation of a day on which the dusk had fallen too soon. When he came back to the woods, he had summoned Gaspard, his guide and comrade, and they had taken up their old free life together. In the manner of men who are stricken, he had worked the harder. Because he was crippled, he had striven the more desperately to keep in the paths that once had been so smooth to tread. Life there had been an Atalanta flight; now it was a march to solemn music. In the months he had been away from her, he had wrought like an artisan. The piled canvases showed it. He had exhibited nothing, because as yet the wound in him was too raw even for the breath of praise; but here were the pictures: the earth with the face of winter, summer, spring. They were the record of long tramps, of weeks of camping in the farther woods, of dewy leaf and twilight mysteries. He had copied the page faithfully, and now at once it seemed in vain. He had stanched his hunger of loss by toiling for her. But her silence was as cold as the Canadian winter. If there had been a time when he thought she might recall him, that hope was dead. She wanted neither him nor his handiwork. The virtue had gone out of him. He could work no more.

He lay there and let his mind wander back on the worn pathways of his art, as they ran through other lands and ages. He saw colossal figures travelling there, not bowed like him, but walking at their ease, triumphantly. He felt a sharp hunger to know what made the sun so bright on those pure faces. In his humility he could not dream that his face also shone to those afar from him. What was the light, he went on thinking, that made the masters paint a mother and her child so that they seemed to be the Mother of God and God Himself?

There was a step at the door, and glancing first at the candle, to be sure it burned, he shut his eyes lest Gaspard detect the trouble in them. The door opened and closed carefully.

"It burns, Gaspard," he said, to break the silence. "It must be fragrant." Then the words sounded broken to him, and he moved his head impatiently.

"It is very fragrant after the outer air," said a woman's voice. "Bayberry!"

His eyes came open.

"Winifred!" he breathed.

She stood there in the opulence of her charm, filling the bare room with some new emanation. To his hungering eyes she was a dream, and while she stayed so he lay learning her by heart, as she pulled off her gloves, and then threw back her fur-lined cloak and unpinned the close fur cap that bound her hair. Suddenly he noticed her hands, white, firm, with but one ring upon them—a wedding-ring. He came to his feet.

"You are alive," he said. "You are real. It is you."