Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/724

672 moisture. Presently it began to rain. Andersen lay out in the warm rain and let it soak through him, and felt the winds, and soon the old sense of attaining his full stature—the sense of freedom from trammels which held him to an encumbering happiness—was over him. Still, as he lay there he felt his heart dislocated as Jacob felt his hip after the angelic encounter. He remembered with solicitude that his wife's face had looked thinner and older, that much of the look of decision and feminine imperiousness which had in reality fed upon him had vanished. The woman, bereft of her gentle, subservient husband, settled back into what she really was—a rather incompetent, timid female of her species. Adam had overrated her capability; her manner had misled him. The next year he, covertly observant, saw with concern that the fields had begun to suffer for want of his overlooking. Still his wife and his children retained their prosperous air.

Adam saw that his wife wore a rich silk dress, and bonnet loaded with flowers, and that she held her head high, while her mouth had a pleased, self-conscious expression. He understood her thoroughly. He knew that her beautiful clothes soothed as with a soothing emollient any ache in her heart because of his desertion of her. She was a type of the perfectly common feminine. She was a good woman, she kept the Commandments, but the material frivolity of her had overrun the spiritual, as weeds will overrun the flowers of a garden. And it was the same with the children, who resembled their mother, and it had been becoming the same with Adam. He had been losing the feeling of his own soul, and that from which the soul emanates, by reason of these harmless and pleasant, but utterly earthly and petty, interests. His children were as smartly attired as his wife; none of them looked downcast. He realized that for the time at least, in this atmosphere of religious festivity, and enveloped in their fine feathers, they were not troubled because of him, and his own misgivings were laid at rest. He had placed half of his gold which he had discovered in trust, and the interest was to be sent quarterly to his wife. He told himself that even if she did let the farm go to waste, she would have enough. And there was the remainder of his wealth, which he had buried as a dog might have buried a bone in a secret place in the woods. He used very little of it. His needs, the needs of a primitive and wild man which he had become, were few, and mostly supplied without coin of the realm. In summer there were always succulent greens, mushrooms, and berries. In winter there was the game which he had now forced himself to kill and eat, for savagery had returned in a degree with his freedom. He really needed little except cartridges, and now and then a rough garment.

All this time, although conscious of a never-ceasing ache of hunger in the earthly heart of him, he had the exaltation of a martyr, the sublime happiness of one who forfeits the good for the sake of the better, and the consciousness of that beyond his earthly life, which had been slipping away from him, was never lost. Always the wonderful perfume of a broken box of ointment was in his nostrils, and his sense of Him for whom it had been broken never left him. A religion so deep and vast that it seemed to furnish his soul with wings toward immensity possessed him. God and his relation to Him became more than his relation toward his kind. He became in the fullest sense himself. His growth, which had been checked, again reasserted itself.

Yet always he kept that watch upon that which he had left. Year after year the fields which had yielded so bountifully under his care suffered. The time came when it was hard for him not to enter the house and ask his wife what it meant, why she did not see to things, but he never did. He knew that she had enough, even if the broad fields, as finally happened, were converted into gardens of flaming weeds instead of grain. But soon after that—it was now three years since his exit—he began to notice that his wife no longer went dressed as richly as formerly, and that his children were even shabby. Then he saw them walking when properly they should have been riding; and one night, stealing into the barn, he found that the horses were all gone. He began to ask himself if anything could have gone wrong with that