The Hermit and the Wild Woman

ALL the heat and glare from the long illuminated table, about which the fumes of many courses still hung in a savoury fog, seemed to surge up to the ladies’ gallery, and concentrate themselves in the burning cheeks of a slender figure withdrawn behind the projection of a pillar.

It never occurred to Margaret Ransom that she was sitting in the shade.  She supposed that the full light of the chandeliers was beating on her face—­and there were moments when it seemed as though all the heads about the great horse-shoe below, bald, shaggy, sleek, close-thatched, or thinly latticed, were equipped with an additional pair of eyes, set at an angle which enabled them to rake her face as relentlessly as the electric burners.

In the lull after a speech, the gallery was fluttering with the rustle of programmes consulted, and Mrs. Sheff (the Brant girl’s aunt) leaned forward to say enthusiastically:  “And now we’re to hear Mr. Ransom!”

A louder buzz rose from the table, and the heads (without relaxing their upward vigilance) seemed to merge, and flow together, like an attentive flood, toward the upper end of the horse-shoe, where all the threads of Margaret Ransom’s consciousness were suddenly drawn into what seemed a small speck, no more—­a black speck that rose, hung in air, dissolved into gyrating gestures, became distended, enormous, preponderant—­became her husband “speaking.”

“It’s the heat—­” Margaret gasped, pressing her handkerchief to her whitening lips, and finding just strength enough left to push back farther into the shadow.

She felt a touch on her arm.  “It is horrible—­shall we go?” a voice suggested; and, “Yes, yes, let us go,” she whispered, feeling, with a great throb of relief, that to be the only possible, the only conceivable, solution.  To sit and listen to her husband now—­how could she ever have thought she could survive it?  Luckily, under the lingering hubbub from below, his opening words were inaudible, and she had only to run the gauntlet of sympathetic feminine glances, shot after her between waving fans and programmes, as, guided by Guy Dawnish, she managed to reach the door.  It was really so hot that even Mrs. Sheff was not much surprised—­till long afterward. . . .

The winding staircase was empty, half dark and blessedly silent.  In a committee room below Dawnish found the inevitable water jug, and filled a glass for her, while she leaned back, confronted only by a frowning college President in an emblazoned frame.  The academic frown descended on her like an anathema when she rose and followed her companion out of the building.

Hamblin Hall stands at the end of the long green “Campus” with its sextuple line of elms—­the boast and the singularity of Wentworth.  A pale spring moon, rising above the dome of the University library at the opposite end of the elm-walk, diffused a pearly mildness in the sky, melted to thin haze the shadows of the trees, and turned to golden yellow the lights of the college windows.  Against this soft suffusion of light the Library cupola assumed a Bramantesque grace, the white steeple of the congregational church became a campanile topped by a winged spirit, and the scant porticoes of the older halls the colonnades of classic temples.

“This is better—­” Dawnish said, as they passed down the steps and under the shadow of the elms.

They moved on a little way in silence before he began again:  “You’re too tired to walk.  Let us sit down a few minutes.”

Her feet, in truth, were leaden, and not far off a group of park benches, encircling the pedestal of a patriot in bronze, invited them to rest.  But Dawnish was guiding her toward a lateral path which bent, through shrubberies, toward a strip of turf between two of the buildings.

“It will be cooler by the river,” he said, moving on without waiting for a possible protest.  None came:  it seemed easier, for the moment, to let herself be led without any conventional feint of resistance.  And besides, there was nothing wrong about this—­the wrong would have been in sitting up there in the glare, pretending to listen to her husband, a dutiful wife among her kind. . . .

The path descended, as both knew, to the chosen, the inimitable spot of Wentworth:  that fugitive curve of the river, where, before hurrying on to glut the brutal industries of South Wentworth and Smedden, it simulated for a few hundred yards the leisurely pace of an ancient university stream, with willows on its banks and a stretch of turf extending from the grounds of Hamblin Hall to the boat houses at the farther bend.  Here too were benches, beneath the willows, and so close to the river that the voice of its gliding softened and filled out the reverberating silence between Margaret and her companion, and made her feel that she knew why he had brought her there.

“Do you feel better?” he asked gently as he sat down beside her.

“Oh, yes.  I only needed a little air.”

“I’m so glad you did.  Of course the speeches were tremendously interesting—­but I prefer this.  What a good night!”

“Yes.”

There was a pause, which now, after all, the soothing accompaniment of the river seemed hardly sufficient to fill.

“I wonder what time it is.  I ought to be going home,” Margaret began at length.

“Oh, it’s not late.  They’ll be at it for hours in there—­yet.”

She made a faint inarticulate sound.  She wanted to say:  “No—­Robert’s speech was to be the last—­” but she could not bring herself to pronounce Ransom’s name, and at the moment no other way of refuting her companion’s statement occurred to her.

The young man leaned back luxuriously, reassured by her silence.

“You see it’s my last chance—­and I want to make the most of it.”

“Your last chance?” How stupid of her to repeat his words on that cooing note of interrogation!  It was just such a lead as the Brant girl might have given him.

“To be with you—­like this.  I haven’t had so many.  And there’s less than a week left.”

She attempted to laugh.  “Perhaps it will sound longer if you call it five days.”

The flatness of that, again!  And she knew there were people who called her intelligent.  Fortunately he did not seem to notice it; but her laugh continued to sound in her own ears—­the coquettish chirp of middle age!  She decided that if he spoke again—­if he said anything—­she would make no farther effort at evasion:  she would take it directly, seriously, frankly—­she would not be doubly disloyal.

“Besides,” he continued, throwing his arm along the back of the bench, and turning toward her so that his face was like a dusky bas-relief with a silver rim—­“besides, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you.”

The sound of the river seemed to cease altogether:  the whole world became silent.

Margaret had trusted her inspiration farther than it appeared likely to carry her.  Again she could think of nothing happier than to repeat, on the same witless note of interrogation:  “To tell me?”

“You only.”

The constraint, the difficulty, seemed to be on his side now:  she divined it by the renewed shifting of his attitude—­he was capable, usually, of such fine intervals of immobility—­and by a confusion in his utterance that set her own voice throbbing in her throat.

“You’ve been so perfect to me,” he began again.  “It’s not my fault if you’ve made me feel that you would understand everything—­make allowances for everything—­see just how a man may have held out, and fought against a thing—­as long as he had the strength. . . .  This may be my only chance; and I can’t go away without telling you.”

He had turned from her now, and was staring at the river, so that his profile was projected against the moonlight in all its beautiful young dejection.

There was a slight pause, as though he waited for her to speak; then she leaned forward and laid her hand on his.

“If I have really been—­if I have done for you even the least part of what you say . . . what you imagine . . . will you do for me, now, just one thing in return?”

He sat motionless, as if fearing to frighten away the shy touch on his hand, and she left it there, conscious of her gesture only as part of the high ritual of their farewell.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked in a low tone.

“_ Not_ to tell me!” she breathed on a deep note of entreaty.

“_ Not_ to tell you—?”

“Anything—­anything—­just to leave our . . . our friendship . . . as it has been—­as—­as a painter, if a friend asked him, might leave a picture—­not quite finished, perhaps . . . but all the more exquisite. . . .”

She felt the hand under hers slip away, recover itself, and seek her own, which had flashed out of reach in the same instant—­felt the start that swept him round on her as if he had been caught and turned about by the shoulders.

“You—­you—?” he stammered, in a strange voice full of fear and tenderness; but she held fast, so centred in her inexorable resolve that she was hardly conscious of the effect her words might be producing.

“Don’t you see,” she hurried on, “don’t you feel how much safer it is—­yes, I’m willing to put it so!—­how much safer to leave everything undisturbed . . . just as . . . as it has grown of itself . . . without trying to say:  ‘It’s this or that’ . . . ?  It’s what we each choose to call it to ourselves, after all, isn’t it?  Don’t let us try to find a name that . . . that we should both agree upon . . . we probably shouldn’t succeed.”  She laughed abruptly.  “And ghosts vanish when one names them!” she ended with a break in her voice.

When she ceased her heart was beating so violently that there was a rush in her ears like the noise of the river after rain, and she did not immediately make out what he was answering.  But as she recovered her lucidity she said to herself that, whatever he was saying, she must not hear it; and she began to speak again, half playfully, half appealingly, with an eloquence of entreaty, an ingenuity in argument, of which she had never dreamed herself capable.  And then, suddenly, strangling hands seemed to reach up from her heart to her throat, and she had to stop.

Her companion remained motionless.  He had not tried to regain her hand, and his eyes were away from her, on the river.  But his nearness had become something formidable and exquisite—­something she had never before imagined.  A flush of guilt swept over her—­vague reminiscences of French novels and of opera plots.  This was what such women felt, then . . . this was “shame.” . . .  Phrases of the newspaper and the pulpit danced before her. . . .  She dared not speak, and his silence began to frighten her.  Had ever a heart beat so wildly before in Wentworth?

He turned at last, and taking her two hands, quite simply, kissed them one after the other.

“I shall never forget—­” he said in a confused voice, unlike his own.

A return of strength enabled her to rise, and even to let her eyes meet his for a moment.

“Thank you,” she said, simply also.

She turned away from the bench, regaining the path that led back to the college buildings, and he walked beside her in silence.  When they reached the elm walk it was dotted with dispersing groups.  The “speaking” was over, and Hamblin Hall had poured its audience out into the moonlight.  Margaret felt a rush of relief, followed by a receding wave of regret.  She had the distinct sensation that her hour—­her one hour—­was over.

One of the groups just ahead broke up as they approached, and projected Ransom’s solid bulk against the moonlight.

“My husband,” she said, hastening forward; and she never afterward forgot the look of his back—­heavy, round-shouldered, yet a little pompous—­in a badly fitting overcoat that stood out at the neck and hid his collar.  She had never before noticed how he dressed.