Page:The Pacific Monthly volumes 1-3.djvu/226

 beach. The hours seemed to drag their weary length on leaden feet, the days were empty and the nights were dull, or disturbed by vaguely troubled dreams. The girl had tasted the sweet of human companionship and Nature no longer sufficed. She missed the clinging touch of hands, the light of loving eyes, the sound of a voice whose every note was a caress. She longed without the consciousness of the longing for some one to talk to. She recalled again and again, each incident of the past half year, remembered every word and glance and tone, and wondered and questioned and aoubted. He was so strong, so kind, so cold; he said he loved her, yet seemed always to impose an impenertable bar- rier between them. Was it because, after all, they were of a different class as he declared? Elise knew little of classes and conditions. In her limited experi- ence there had been no room for such knowledge, but she felt instinctively the difference that separated her from the women in the village. They were farther from her in all things than the Indian girls whom she sometimes met on the beach or on the hills. The Indians, at least, had been taught by the same great Mother of them all. They had learned their lessons from the same book and saw and understood the hidden meaning of things.

"Of the people" he had named himself, he who was so strong and noble, and so true, like the heroes in the old romances he read aloud to her those long rainy afternoons and evening last winter. Were the people then so superior? She wearied of this questioning in time and gave herself up to dreams, drifting upon the rose-pink flood of fancy until the realities of life became blurred and indistinct. She often climbed to the hill-top overlooking the bar where she would lie for half the day gazing out over the ocean, yet seeing nothing that was visible to the physical sight, because she was looking into the past, or trying to pierce the veil that hung like a silver sun-shot mist between the present and the future. This state of mental indolence might have continued indefinitely but for a timely interruption which had the effect of startling the girl from her dreams and which gave her something less enervating if less pleasant as an occupation.

On that afternoon when Elise, strolling beside the river, became suddenly aware that she was observed by a pair of sullen black eyes, she entered upon a new phase of existence.

It was just where the current at low water bares the barnacled length of an old uprooted spruce, the beach ends abrupty, and the ebbing tide, deep and dark, sweeps passed the dead spruce with the velocity of a mill-stream.

Huddled in an uncomfortable fashion upon the log was a girl, a girl with a handsome swarthy face and a wild tangle of raven hair. She was bare-headed and wore a gay-colored shawl drawn closely about her shoulders and trailing down upon the wet sands.

For a full minute the two stared at each other in silence, the blue eyes wide with wonder and surprise, the black ones burning with hate and desperation. Then Elise smiled.

"You are not from the town," she said in the musical Indian tongue.

"No, I am not." the stranger replied in English.

"And yet—"

"I ain't white, and I ain't Indian. O God, I ain't nothin'!" Her head went down upon her out-flung arms and her ungainly figure shook with a passionate fury of dry, tearless sobs.

Elise impulsively drew nearer and laid her hand upon the unkempt hair, waiting till the storm had passed. When the girl lifted her head it was not to look at her companion, but at the hurrying stream.

"There ain't no use livin'," she said sullenly, "I'm goin' to drown myself!"

"Oh!" cried Elise, "why should you do that?" Her voice was vibrant with sympathy and sweet and tender. "Why, oh, why, should you think of such a dreadful thing?"

But the girl shook her hand off roughly. "You better not touch me!" she exclaimed. "I ain't fit; ain't nobody speaks to me up town, but I don't care!" She slipped awkwardly from the log to the sands, clenching her hands in a sort of impotent dull rage. "I don't