Читать книгу: «Heart's Kindred», страница 2

Something in the Inger leaped out and soared. He stood there, saying what he had to say, conscious all the time that as soon as might be he should be free to soar with it.

“Alone?” he demanded.

Jem Moor held out a scrap of paper. The Inger took it and read, the others peering over his arms and shoulders.

“Dad,” it said, “I can’t go Bunchy. I know what this’ll do to you, but I can’t never do it – I can’t. I’ve gone for good. Dear old Dad, don’t you hate me.

“Lory.”

The tears were running down Jem Moor’s face.

“‘Leven Hundred odd,” said he, “and I ain’t a red. Not a red.”

The Inger threw up his head.

“Lord Harry,” he cried. “Why didn’t I think of it before? Buck up!” he cried, bringing down his hand on Jem’s little shoulder. “And drink up! Come along in!”

He led the way to the Mission Saloon, and bade the man take orders for everybody. Then he went to the back of the place, and found for himself ink and a pen, and tore a leaf from a handy account book. When he had filled in the name of his bank, he wrote and signed:

“Pay to Bunchy Haight, Twelve Hundred Dollars and be damned to him.”

Then he wrote out a receipt to Jem Moor, with a blank for the sum and for Bunchy’s signature.

When he could, he drew Jem in a corner and thrust at him the papers. The little man stared at them, with a peculiarly ugly, square dropping of his jaw, and eyes pointed at top.

“Don’t bust,” said the Inger, “and don’t think it’s you. It ain’t you. The check isn’t drawn to you, is it? I want to hell-and-devil Bunchy some, that’s all. Shut up your mouth!” he added, when Jem tried gaspingly to thank him.

Then he got out of the place, where sharp music was beginning and the ten or twelve women were dancing among the tables, and went down the street, thronged now with the disappointed guests, intent on forcing the ruined evening to some wild festivity. When they called to him to join them, he hardly heard. He went straight through the town and shook it from him and met the desert, and took his own trail.

The night was now one of soft, thick blackness, on which the near stars pressed. The air had a sharp chill – as if it bore no essence of its own but hung empty of warmth when the daylight was drained from it. The stillness was insistent. In a place of water, left from the rains, and still deep enough to run in ripples over the sedge, frogs were in chorus.

There was a sentinel pepper tree on the edge of the town and here a mocking-bird sang out, once, and was still. These left behind, and the saw and crack and beat of the music dying, the Inger faced the dark, gave himself to the exultation which flowed in him, mounted with it to a new place.

The liquor which he had drunk was in his veins, and to this the part of him which understood all the rest of him credited his swimming delight. But separate from this, as his breath was separate, there came and went like a pulse, something else which he could not possibly have defined, born in him in the street, when he had heard Jem Moor’s bad news.

He threw out his arms and ran, staggering. What was there that he must do? Here he was, ready for it. What was there that he must do? Then he remembered. The War! He would have that. That was what he could do.

He stood still on the desert, and imagined himself one of thousands on the plain. What if he were with them there in the darkness? What if the rise of the sand were the edge of the opposite trenches, with men breathing behind them, waiting? With a drunken laugh, he pulled his revolver, and fired and shouted. Why, he could plough his way through anything. He should not go down – not he! But he should be fighting like this in the field of civilized men, and not taking his adventures piecemeal, in a back lot of the world, with a skulking sheriff or two and Bunchy for adversary. To-morrow! He would go to-morrow, and find what his life could give him.

But this other thing that was pulsing in him … the girl! What about her? Was he not to find her, was he not to have her? He closed his eyes and swam in the thought of her. War and the woman – suddenly he was aflame with them both.

When he went into the wood, he went singing. He himself was the centre of the night and of his universe. The wood, Whiteface, his journey, the war, lay ready to his hand as accessory and secondary to his consciousness. He felt his own life, and other life was its background. He made a long crying guttural noise, like an animal. He shook his great body and crashed through the undergrowth, the young saplings stinging his cheeks. To-morrow – he would be off to-morrow…

He emerged upon the little space which was his home. The fire had fallen and was a red glow, and a watching eye. Rolled in his blanket beside it lay his father, deeply breathing. In a moment the Inger became another being. He stood tense, stepped softly, entered quietly the open door of his hut.

Within something stirred, was silent, stirred again, with a movement as of garments. Out of the darkness, her voice came:

“Mr. Inger: … It’s Lory Moor.”

III

For a moment he thought that this would be a part of his crazy dreaming, and he said nothing. But then he knew that she had risen and was standing before him; and he heard her breath, taken tremblingly. Her words came rushing – almost the first words that he had ever heard her say:

“You been down there. You know. I don’t know where to go. Oh – don’t tell ’em!”

“Tell ’em,” he muttered, stupidly. “Tell ’em?”

“I can’t do it,” she said gaspingly. “I can’t – I can’t.”

She was sobbing, and the Inger, so lately a flame of intent and desire, did not dare to touch her, and had no least idea what to say to her. In a moment she was able to speak again.

“I thought I could hide here for a day or two,” she said, “till they quit huntin’. Then I could get away. Would you hide me, somehow? – would you?”

He was silent, trying to think, with a head not too clear, how best to do it; and she misunderstood.

“Don’t make me go back – don’t tell Dad and Bunchy! If you can’t hide me, I’ll go now,” she said.

“What you talkin’?” he said, roughly. “I’m thinkin’. Thinkin’ up how. Thinkin’ up how.” He put his hands to his temples. “My head don’t think,” he said thickly.

“Here in the hut,” she said, eagerly and clearly. “They’ll never think of comin’ up here. Why, I don’t hardly know you.”

“Won’t they though?” said the Inger, suddenly, and dimly remembered Bunchy, and the blow for the sake of the girl. Last, there came dancing to him something about a check for the debt to Bunchy which she had not paid.

“As it happens,” said the Inger, “this is jus’ the first place where they will come lookin’ for you. Jus’ the first place…”

“Why?” she cried.

“Nev’ you mind,” he said.

He could almost see her, standing within his door, her white face blooming from the black. But his sense of her was obscured to him by the need for immediate action, and by his utter present inability to cope with that need.

“How’d you come – to come – to come up here?” he asked curiously.

For a breath she hesitated, and there was a soft taking of breath in her answer.

“I didn’t know no woman I could tell,” she said, “nor no other decent man.”

From head to foot a fire went over the Inger, such as he had never known. And first he was weak with her words, and then he was jubilantly strong. He put them away, but they lay within him burning, where again and again he could turn to them for warmth.

“How – how’d you hit the trail up?” he asked almost gently.

Again she was silent for a moment, and her answer was very low.

“I’d been by here once-to-twice before,” she said.

Hazily he turned this over. The trail led only to his hut. No one ever came who had not come to be there. Unless —

He threw back his head as something new swam to consciousness. She stood quietly, waiting to hear what he would do. Some sense of this sudden new dependence on him beset him like words.

“They’s a way over the mountain,” he muttered. “I made it in that sheriff business. Can you take that?”

“I’ll go any way,” she said.

“It’s pretty rough,” he told her. “It’s pretty rough,” he repeated with intense care. “I’ll take you. I’ll take you,” he insisted thickly.

“You mean you’d go with me?” she asked.

“You’d never fin’ it if I didn’t,” he told her. “Y-you’d never fin’ it. Never.”

“I’ll go any way,” she repeated. “But I didn’t mean to – to come down on to you like that.”

“Tha’s nothing,” he said. “Tha’s nothing. Tha’s nothing.”

He put his hand to his head, with the need to touch it and to make it work properly. He had to think of things to do, and how could he do that? His father, for example – what should he do about him? He went a few steps without the door, and tried to consider, looking at the sleeping figure by the fire. The faint glow of the coals made a little ring of dim light. In it he stood, swaying.

“Oh my God,” she said, behind him. “You are drunk.”

“Li’l bit,” he admitted. “Li’l bit. Not enough to scare a b-baby.”

She put this away scornfully. “Scare nothin’,” she said sharply. “Can you keep to the trail? That’s all.”

He laughed foolishly. “Tha’s all right,” he repeated, “I can find trail, drunk or sober.”

She stood pressing her hands in and out and turning helplessly to the dark. The dark gave her back only the lights of Inch.

“There’s nothing else to do,” she said dully. “If you show me the trail, maybe I can keep you on it.”

In some indeterminate shame, he went without a word, brought his blanket, and turned again to the hut.

“I’ve got a kit,” she said. “It’s got enough to eat. Do you understand? Don’t get anything else. Oh, let’s start, let’s start!”

As he emerged, his hand had brushed the feathers of the wood duck. He took it down and slung it fumblingly to his roll of blanket. Less by taking thought than by old instinct, he remembered his cartridge belt, and found and strapped it on. Then he stood hesitating.

“Gotta tell ’em,” he suggested, looking at his father.

She had shouldered her pack and stood waiting.

“Why?” she demanded. “It’ll only be harder for him if they come. This way he won’t know, and he can tell ’em so.”

In this there was reason, but not, it seemed, enough reason. The Inger stood trying to recall something pressing on him for remembrance: if not his father, what was it that he must do or fetch, before he left. He put both hands to his head, but in there was only a current and a beating.

“There’s s’more to do,” he said indistinctly.

Lory Moor stepped toward him and laid her hand briskly on his shoulder, with a boy’s gesture of eager haste.

“The trail – the trail!” she said, with authority. “Find us the trail.”

Without a word he started, went round the end of the hut, and plunged into the wood, which ran down to the very wall. In a half dozen steps the ascent began.

Even by daylight the trail was little more than an irregular line of bent branches and blazed trunks. Since he had finished it, the Inger had taken it a dozen times by daylight with a boy’s delight in a secret way. By night he had never taken it at all. But he had the woodsman’s instinct and, now that his thoughts were stilled or lost in a maze of their own inconsequent making, this secondary consciousness was for a time paramount. He went as a man goes who treads his own ways, and though he went irregularly and sometimes staggeringly, he managed at first to keep to the course that he had taken.

Over the mountain by the trail to the railway station – that had become clear to him. When they should reach it or how the railway should serve, was not his concern at all. Meanwhile, here she was with him. He tried to get this straight, and cursed his head that only buzzed with the knowledge and whipped him with the need to keep to the trail.

“Lory Moor,” he tried to grasp it; “Jem Moor’s girl. She never married Bunchy at all. She’s here —with me. I’ve got her with me…”

The girl was not a pace behind him. She had stretched out her hand and laid it on his roll of blanket and thus, though seeing nothing, she was able to fit her steps somewhat to his, to halt when he halted, to swerve or to slow or to retrace. She was profoundly thankful for his consent to take her away, and in that consent she rested without thought or plan.

An hour passed before the Inger missed the trail. In a stretch fairly free of undergrowth, he stood still for a moment to take his bearings, and thrust out his hand against a declivity, sharp with fallen rock. To the right the wall extended to meet the abrupt shoulder of the slope; to the left it dropped away so that a stone, sent down, went crashing far below.

“Stay here,” the Inger commanded, and found his way up in a shower of falling rocks, to the summit of the obstruction. He clung to a tree, and listened. The mountain brook, which they should cross some rods ahead, was not yet audible. On the other side the rocks fell precipitately; and leaning out, he seemed to sense tree-tops.

“Look out!” he called, and clambered down again, and bade her wait while he went and came back and went and came back in vain. She heard him stumbling, no more fit to find a trail than to think his thoughts.

“I’m stumped,” he said. “We’ve got wrong somewheres.”

She answered nothing. She was sitting on the ground where he had left her. Her silence touched him somehow as a rebuke. “You think it’s because I’m drunk,” he said, in a challenge.

“I don’t think anything,” she answered. “Rest a little – then mebbe we can get right again.”

He flung himself down on his face. The scent of pine needles and dead leaves was there, waiting for him. The stillness of the wood took them both, and for a few minutes they were silent.

And as he lay there, with her sitting beside him, something of the desert, of an hour before, came running along his veins and took him, and, something, too, of the time when he had had her before him on his horse, galloping. When that time had been he could not say; but he remembered it with distinctness, and that day he had had his arms about her.

“We rode – on a horse,” he submitted, suddenly. “C’n you ’member that day?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Don’t talk,” she begged him, “just rest. I want to rest.”

The Inger was silent. His mind was busy trying to piece together what he knew of that day – of her there before him on his horse, of her face laughing at him as she ran away.

“You threw me a kiss,” he offered, after a pause.

“Don’t talk, don’t talk,” she begged him. “I can’t breathe – let me rest.”

“I wish it was that day now,” he said foolishly, and drew a deep breath, and lay quiet. But in a few minutes he roused himself, his mind struggling with a new problem. What a fool he was, wishing for that day, when here she was, just the same as then. What was the matter with this day?

“Wha’s the matter with this day?” he inquired, reasonably. Then he remembered. They were lost, of course. The trail was gone – gone clean off.

“Gone clean off,” he muttered, reproachfully. “Damn dirty trick to play.”

Then he was shot through with his dominant consciousness. Here she was, here she was – with him. There was something else, something that she had said which made a reason why he should not touch her. But what was that? It was gone – gone clean off, gone with the trail…

Back upon him came flooding the desire of the desert, as he had run with the thought of her and with the thought of battle. Then he had believed that she belonged to Bunchy. That was a lie and Bunchy was a fool. Everything was different, and now here she was and nobody knew…

He lifted himself, and scrambled forward toward her.

“We’re lost,” he said thickly. “Wha’d we care? Wha’d we care…”

He put out his arms, but they did not touch her. He swept a circle, and they did not enclose her. Alarmed, he rose and lurched forward, feeling out in all directions, an arm’s span. And she was not within his reach nor within the crazy length which he ran, with outspread hands, trying to find her.

At last his foot caught in a root and he fell, and lay there, and began quietly weeping. Now she was gone and the trail was gone. He was treated like a dog by both of them. He fumbled for his pack, but he had slipped that off when he climbed the rocks, and now that was gone too. He wept, and lay still. In a few moments he was sleeping.

IV

When he awoke, he looked into soft branches, gray in dim light. The whole mountain was lyric with birds. There was no other sound, save the lift and touch of branches, and the chatter of a squirrel, and there was as yet no sun.

He remembered. And with the memory, a rush of aching, eating shame seized on him and he closed his eyes again. Then he thought that he must have dreamed it all. And that it was impossible that such a thing should be. Yet here he was in the woods, where she had left him because he was a fool. Where had she gone? He sprang up, mad to find her, possessed by the need to make amends, and by the sheer need to find her.

As he sat up, he threw off his blanket, and he marvelled that this should have been covering him. Then he found himself looking into Lory Moor’s face.

She was sitting near him, wrapped in her own blanket, leaning against a tree. She was wide awake, and by all signs she had been so for a long time, for a great cluster of mountain violets lay on her blanket.

When she saw that he was awake, she smiled, and this seemed to the Inger the most marvellous thing that ever had befallen him: that she was there and that she smiled.

He looked at her silently, and slowly under the even brownness of his skin, the color rose from his throat to his forehead, and burned crimson. But more than this color of shame, it was his eyes that told. They were upon her, brown, deep, like the eyes of a dog that has disobeyed, and has come back. For a moment he looked at her, then he dropped his face in his hands.

She moved so quietly that he did not hear her rise. He merely felt her hand on his shoulder. And when he looked up again, she was sitting there beside him.

“Don’t,” she said.

He looked at her in amazement. Her look was gentle, her voice had been gentle.

“You mustn’t,” she said. “It’s all over now.”

“What do you think of me? What do you think of me?” he muttered, stupidly.

She shrugged lightly. “It don’t make any difference what I think of you,” she said. “Ain’t it whether I’m goin’ to get away from Inch or not? Ain’t that the idea?”

When he came to think of it, that was the immediate concern. With his first utterance he had blundered, as he had blundered since the moment when she had put herself in his keeping. None the less his misery was too sharp to dismiss. But he had no clear idea how to ask a woman’s forgiveness – a thing that he had never done in his life.

“I feel as bad as hell,” he blurted out.

“What for?” she asked.

“For all I’ve done,” he put it.

She considered this.

“Look here,” she said slowly. “You’ve been drunk before often enough, ain’t you?”

“Yes,” he answered, miserably.

“Well, don’t feel bad about this just because I mixed up in it,” she said. “I’m used to it. I see Dad and all of ’em drunk more times ’n I see ’em sober.”

He looked away from her.

“I wasn’t thinking just about being drunk,” he said. “I meant – what I said to you.”

“Oh – that!” she said. “Well. All men say that, I guess.” She looked at him. “I did guess you was differ’nt, but I ought to knowed better.”

Then in a flash of intense joy, he remembered what she had said to him in the hut. Her words came back as if she were speaking them again: “I didn’t know no woman I could tell. Nor no other decent man.” Once more the warmth of this was upon him, within him. Then the recollection of how he had failed her invaded him in an anguish new, impossible to combat. For she had thought that he was different from Jem Moor and Bunchy…

The Inger got to his feet.

“I am differ’nt,” he heard himself surprisingly saying.

She regarded him curiously, and with nothing in her eyes. It came to him as he stood looking down at her, that he would give all that might be asked if he could have seen her eyes as she looked up at him in the hut the night before and told him why she had come to him to help her. In the face of what had happened, the foolishness of protesting that he was different overcame him, and he fell silent.

A new anxiety beset him.

“Did you sleep?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “I was afraid,” she answered, simply.

The Inger stood for a moment as if the strength had run from his body. She had sat there, afraid, while he had slept – and he himself had been a part of her fear…

He turned away, and across the tops of the trees, he looked over the valley, still lying in the shadow. There was mist, and down there the pointed tops of the trees showed like green buds fastened to soft wool. Where they two were, the sun was already smiting the branches, and silencing the birds. Overhead, the clear blue, touched by sunny clouds, lay very near. It was as if he were trying to find, among them, something that could help him to tell her what he was feeling. But he found nothing and he said nothing. He caught up the blanket and flung it savagely aside, seized a great dead limb lying beside him and broke it over his knee.

“Get out the stuff,” he bade her. “We’ll have a fire.”

He built and lighted the fire, brought the water, and found his way down to the brook. He threw off his clothes, and lay flat in the bed of the stream, his head on a rock. The sharp stones cut his flesh, and the water somehow helped to heal him. He shook himself, dried by a run down the trail, dressed, and returned, glowing.

The coffee was on the fire, and she was making toast on a stick. She had spread what food she had brought, chiefly fruit and cooked meat and cheese.

“Didn’t I bring any grub?” he demanded.

“The bird,” she answered. “The big bird.”

“That’s for dinner,” he observed, gruffly, and said no more.

He took the stick from her and made the toast. When she poured the coffee, it was clear and golden and fragrant. She had two plates and two cups, the Inger noticed. She made him roll the blankets for seats. In spite of his suffering – which was the more real that it was new to him – the cheer and the invitation of the time warmed him. But as for her loveliness, he found himself now hardly looking at that, save when he must, as if what she was had become to him something utterly forbidden.

As for her, while she ate, she continually listened, and if a twig broke, she started. For this she laughed at herself once.

“But if he should come,” she said, “if he should come…”

The Inger looked at her, that once, steadfastly.

“If he should come,” he said, “I could save you – now.”

The elusive trail which had baffled him, led with perfect distinctness along a little shelf three steps up and around that sharp height of rocks which he had scaled, and then the trail dipped down into a narrow cañon, and up. Before the sun was an hour high, they were on their way again.

With their brisk progress, her spirits rose, and once, to the Inger’s exquisite delight, she broke into a lilt of song.

“You sing the way you laugh,” he said awkwardly. And she flashed him a smile, over shoulder, as she had done that morning on the desert.

A tanager drew a line of scarlet through the trees, and burned from a bough before them. In an instant the Inger’s hand was raised, and he had aimed. But in that second, his arm was struck aside, the shot glanced harmlessly among the trees, and the bird flashed safe to the thicket.

He looked round at her in open amazement.

“What did y’ do that for?” he demanded.

“What did you want to go and kill him for?” she cried.

He considered this: what had he wanted to kill that red bird for?

“He was such a pretty little fellow,” she said, but instead of a rebuke, this seemed to him a reason.

“Yes,” he seized it eagerly. “That’s why. You want to get up close to ’em.”

“But if they’re dead…” she protested.

“You want to get up nearer to ’em,” he repeated. “Don’t you see? It’s the only way you can.”

She said nothing. She was walking before him now, and he watched her. She had braided her hair, and he liked the way the bright braids moved on her shoulders when she walked, and hung against the hollow of her waist. She must have braided her hair, he reflected, before he woke. Then he remembered the blanket which he had found folded across his shoulders. She must have found it, unstrapped it, covered him as he lay. He longed to let her know that he knew, but he could not bring himself to recall the time. “She seems to do everything so careful,” he thought, and remembered the red bird and tried to fathom her care for that. When she stooped to pick up a shining stone, he laughed out.

“See!” he said. “You want to pick up that stone to see it. Well, I wanted to kill the bird – to see it.”

“But the bird was alive!” she exclaimed.

He stared at her.

“What of it?” said he. “Look at the lots of ’em there are!”

She said nothing.

“Who’d miss it?” he argued. “Who wants it? You always kill things.”

“I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “I don’t know why. But it don’t seem right.”

Women were like that, he reflected. They hated blood. But – a bird! It was unfathomable.

High noon found them on the summit of Whiteface, looking down upon the crouching shoulders of the east foothills. Where they stood, the sun beat hotly, and the bare rocks and the coarse growth lay in intense brooding quiet. Everything there was flat, as if the long pressure of the sun had told, like weight.

Electrically, the Inger’s spirits returned to him. Here on the height, kindling fire, boiling water, spreading food, were no such business as these had been to him down on his little shelf. Here everything had a way of being that was hitherto unknown to him. When their table was spread in the shade of a pine, and the wood duck roasted slowly over the fire on a spit which he had fashioned, he stood up and surveyed their work, and his look fell on the girl, sitting relaxed, with loosely fallen hands, the sun striking her hair to brightness.

For a moment he let himself watch her, and catching his look, she smiled, as she had smiled when his eyes had met hers as he woke.

“Yi – eh! Yi – eh! Yi – e – h!” he suddenly shouted with the strength of his lungs.

The echo rolled back to them like a taunt.

She sprang up.

“If they’re huntin’ us – ” she said, trembling, “oh, they’ll hear that!”

He looked at her in horror. Fool! Would he never have done with his blundering…

“Oh, my God, I forgot,” he exclaimed, contritely, and dropped to the ground. “I don’t get rested between kicking myself for being a damn fool,” he said.

While they ate, he was quiet. There was no way to let her know how much he hated himself, and his thought was occupied with nothing else. And it was as if she divined, for she became very gentle.

“I guess maybe you wanted to do somethin’ else to-day,” she said.

He shook his head.

“It’s awful, me makin’ you do this,” she added. “Don’t you think I don’t know that.”

“I ain’t doin’ anything – what am I doin’?” he burst out.

She looked at him gravely.

“You’re takin’ me out of a good sight worse’n death,” she answered. “And don’t you think I’ll ever forget it.”

There was about her manner of saying this something infinitely alluring. She fell in a sudden breathlessness, and her voice had a tremor which seemed to lie in the very words themselves. And with this, and with what she said, the Inger found himself suddenly utterly unable to deal.

“Oh, g’on,” he said, feebly.

She said no more, and for a moment he was wretched again lest he had offended her. But the gentleness and softness of her manner reassured him. Moreover, he became conscious that of the cheese and bread she was leaving the greater part for him, and pretending to have finished.

After their lunch, a consuming content fell upon the man, and he lay stretched on his back, under the pine, staring upward, thinking of nothing. For a little she moved about, and then she came and sat beside him, saying nothing. More than he knew, this power of hers for silence conquered him. When a man knows how to live alone, he may or may not understand words, but he always understands silence.

Presently he looked over at her, and seeing that her eyes were heavy, he sat erect, with the memory of her night’s vigil.

“Could you go to sleep?” he demanded.

She nodded. “I could,” she said. “I guess there ain’t the time,” she added.

“Yes, there is,” he said eagerly. “We can get down from here in no time. You rest yourself.”

She regarded him for a moment. Then, without a word, she drew her blanket toward her, rested her head upon it, and relaxed like a child. In a moment she lay sleeping.

Then he looked at her. All that day he had averted his eyes, in his shame. But now that there could be in her look no rebuke, no reminiscence of the night, he looked at her as freely as he had looked that day on the desert, when she had sat his horse before him. Only then his look had been a flame, and now it was as if the sight of her was to him a healing power. For she still trusted him. She was lying here asleep, and she had set him to watch. Immeasurably, she was giving him back his self-respect, restoring to him his own place in her eyes and in his own. He had no knowledge that this bore so strong a part in the creeping sweetness which possessed him. He only knew that he was happy, that he dreaded the time when she should awaken almost as much as he longed for it; and he hoped with childish intensity that the afternoon would never end.

That was an hour such as the man had never known. Women had followed him, tempted him, run from him, but never in his life had a woman either begged his help, as one being of another, or walked with him, comradely. And with women he had always moved as lord and dispenser, avoiding them, taking them for granted, occasionally pursuing them, but always as chief actor. Now, suddenly, he had become in his own sight, infinitely the lesser of the two; and even that grateful return of belief in himself was a thing which she was, so gently, bestowing. He sat, sunk in the newness of what had come upon him, making no effort to understand, and looking neither forward nor back. He was beset alike by the knowledge that she trusted him, and by the soft movement of her breathing and by the flushed ripeness of her, and by the fact that, at any second, she might waken and then smile upon him.