PART IV.

The White Mulberry Tree

I

The French Church, properly the Church of Sainte-Agnes, stood upon a

hill. The high, narrow, red-brick building, with its tall steeple and

steep roof, could be seen for miles across the wheatfields, though the

little town of Sainte-Agnes was completely hidden away at the foot of

the hill. The church looked powerful and triumphant there on its

eminence, so high above the rest of the landscape, with miles of warm

color lying at its feet, and by its position and setting it reminded

one of some of the churches built long ago in the wheat-lands of middle

France.

Late one June afternoon Alexandra Bergson was driving along one of the

many roads that led through the rich French farming country to the big

church. The sunlight was shining directly in her face, and there was a

blaze of light all about the red church on the hill. Beside Alexandra

lounged a strikingly exotic figure in a tall Mexican hat, a silk sash,

and a black velvet jacket sewn with silver buttons. Emil had returned

only the night before, and his sister was so proud of him that she

decided at once to take him up to the church supper, and to make him

wear the Mexican costume he had brought home in his trunk. “All the

girls who have stands are going to wear fancy costumes,” she argued,

“and some of the boys. Marie is going to tell fortunes, and she sent to

Omaha for a Bohemian dress her father brought back from a visit to the

old country. If you wear those clothes, they will all be pleased. And

you must take your guitar. Everybody ought to do what they can to help

along, and we have never done much. We are not a talented family.”

The supper was to be at six o’clock, in the basement of the church, and

afterward there would be a fair, with charades and an auction.

Alexandra had set out from home early, leaving the house to Signa and

Nelse Jensen, who were to be married next week. Signa had shyly asked

to have the wedding put off until Emil came home.

Alexandra was well satisfied with her brother. As they drove through

the rolling French country toward the westering sun and the stalwart

church, she was thinking of that time long ago when she and Emil drove

back from the river valley to the still unconquered Divide. Yes, she

told herself, it had been worth while; both Emil and the country had

become what she had hoped. Out of her father’s children there was one

who was fit to cope with the world, who had not been tied to the plow,

and who had a personality apart from the soil. And that, she reflected,

was what she had worked for. She felt well satisfied with her life.

When they reached the church, a score of teams were hitched in front of

the basement doors that opened from the hillside upon the sanded

terrace, where the boys wrestled and had jumping-matches. Amédée

Chevalier, a proud father of one week, rushed out and embraced Emil.

Amédée was an only son,—hence he was a very rich young man,—but he

meant to have twenty children himself, like his uncle Xavier. “Oh,

Emil,” he cried, hugging his old friend rapturously, “why ain’t you

been up to see my boy? You come to-morrow, sure? Emil, you wanna get a

boy right off! It’s the greatest thing ever! No, no, no! Angel not sick

at all. Everything just fine. That boy he come into this world

laughin’, and he been laughin’ ever since. You come an’ see!” He

pounded Emil’s ribs to emphasize each announcement.

Emil caught his arms. “Stop, Amédée. You’re knocking the wind out of

me. I brought him cups and spoons and blankets and moccasins enough for

an orphan asylum. I’m awful glad it’s a boy, sure enough!”

The young men crowded round Emil to admire his costume and to tell him

in a breath everything that had happened since he went away. Emil had

more friends up here in the French country than down on Norway Creek.

The French and Bohemian boys were spirited and jolly, liked variety,

and were as much predisposed to favor anything new as the Scandinavian

boys were to reject it. The Norwegian and Swedish lads were much more

self-centred, apt to be egotistical and jealous. They were cautious and

reserved with Emil because he had been away to college, and were

prepared to take him down if he should try to put on airs with them.

The French boys liked a bit of swagger, and they were always delighted

to hear about anything new: new clothes, new games, new songs, new

dances. Now they carried Emil off to show him the club room they had

just fitted up over the post-office, down in the village. They ran down

the hill in a drove, all laughing and chattering at once, some in

French, some in English.

Alexandra went into the cool, whitewashed basement where the women were

setting the tables. Marie was standing on a chair, building a little

tent of shawls where she was to tell fortunes. She sprang down and ran

toward Alexandra, stopping short and looking at her in disappointment.

Alexandra nodded to her encouragingly.

“Oh, he will be here, Marie. The boys have taken him off to show him

something. You won’t know him. He is a man now, sure enough. I have no

boy left. He smokes terrible-smelling Mexican cigarettes and talks

Spanish. How pretty you look, child. Where did you get those beautiful

earrings?”

“They belonged to father’s mother. He always promised them to me. He

sent them with the dress and said I could keep them.”

Marie wore a short red skirt of stoutly woven cloth, a white bodice and

kirtle, a yellow silk turban wound low over her brown curls, and long

coral pendants in her ears. Her ears had been pierced against a piece

of cork by her great-aunt when she was seven years old. In those

germless days she had worn bits of broom-straw, plucked from the common

sweeping-broom, in the lobes until the holes were healed and ready for

little gold rings.

When Emil came back from the village, he lingered outside on the

terrace with the boys. Marie could hear him talking and strumming on

his guitar while Raoul Marcel sang falsetto. She was vexed with him for

staying out there. It made her very nervous to hear him and not to see

him; for, certainly, she told herself, she was not going out to look

for him. When the supper bell rang and the boys came trooping in to get

seats at the first table, she forgot all about her annoyance and ran to

greet the tallest of the crowd, in his conspicuous attire. She didn’t

mind showing her embarrassment at all. She blushed and laughed

excitedly as she gave Emil her hand, and looked delightedly at the

black velvet coat that brought out his fair skin and fine blond head.

Marie was incapable of being lukewarm about anything that pleased her.

She simply did not know how to give a half-hearted response. When she

was delighted, she was as likely as not to stand on her tip-toes and

clap her hands. If people laughed at her, she laughed with them.

“Do the men wear clothes like that every day, in the street?” She

caught Emil by his sleeve and turned him about. “Oh, I wish I lived

where people wore things like that! Are the buttons real silver? Put on

the hat, please. What a heavy thing! How do you ever wear it? Why don’t

you tell us about the bull-fights?”

She wanted to wring all his experiences from him at once, without

waiting a moment. Emil smiled tolerantly and stood looking down at her

with his old, brooding gaze, while the French girls fluttered about him

in their white dresses and ribbons, and Alexandra watched the scene

with pride. Several of the French girls, Marie knew, were hoping that

Emil would take them to supper, and she was relieved when he took only

his sister. Marie caught Frank’s arm and dragged him to the same table,

managing to get seats opposite the Bergsons, so that she could hear

what they were talking about. Alexandra made Emil tell Mrs. Xavier

Chevalier, the mother of the twenty, about how he had seen a famous

matador killed in the bull-ring. Marie listened to every word, only

taking her eyes from Emil to watch Frank’s plate and keep it filled.

When Emil finished his account,—bloody enough to satisfy Mrs. Xavier

and to make her feel thankful that she was not a matador,—Marie broke

out with a volley of questions. How did the women dress when they went

to bull-fights? Did they wear mantillas? Did they never wear hats?

After supper the young people played charades for the amusement of

their elders, who sat gossiping between their guesses. All the shops in

Sainte-Agnes were closed at eight o’clock that night, so that the

merchants and their clerks could attend the fair. The auction was the

liveliest part of the entertainment, for the French boys always lost

their heads when they began to bid, satisfied that their extravagance

was in a good cause. After all the pincushions and sofa pillows and

embroidered slippers were sold, Emil precipitated a panic by taking out

one of his turquoise shirt studs, which every one had been admiring,

and handing it to the auctioneer. All the French girls clamored for it,

and their sweethearts bid against each other recklessly. Marie wanted

it, too, and she kept making signals to Frank, which he took a sour

pleasure in disregarding. He didn’t see the use of making a fuss over a

fellow just because he was dressed like a clown. When the turquoise

went to Malvina Sauvage, the French banker’s daughter, Marie shrugged

her shoulders and betook herself to her little tent of shawls, where

she began to shuffle her cards by the light of a tallow candle, calling

out, “Fortunes, fortunes!”

The young priest, Father Duchesne, went first to have his fortune read.

Marie took his long white hand, looked at it, and then began to run off

her cards. “I see a long journey across water for you, Father. You will

go to a town all cut up by water; built on islands, it seems to be,

with rivers and green fields all about. And you will visit an old lady

with a white cap and gold hoops in her ears, and you will be very happy

there.”

“Mais, oui,” said the priest, with a melancholy smile. “C’est

L’Isle-Adam, chez ma mère. Vous êtes très savante, ma fille.” He patted

her yellow turban, calling, “Venez donc, mes garçons! Il y a ici une

véritable clairvoyante!”

Marie was clever at fortune-telling, indulging in a light irony that

amused the crowd. She told old Brunot, the miser, that he would lose

all his money, marry a girl of sixteen, and live happily on a crust.

Sholte, the fat Russian boy, who lived for his stomach, was to be

disappointed in love, grow thin, and shoot himself from despondency.

Amédée was to have twenty children, and nineteen of them were to be

girls. Amédée slapped Frank on the back and asked him why he didn’t see

what the fortune-teller would promise him. But Frank shook off his

friendly hand and grunted, “She tell my fortune long ago; bad enough!”

Then he withdrew to a corner and sat glowering at his wife.

Frank’s case was all the more painful because he had no one in

particular to fix his jealousy upon. Sometimes he could have thanked

the man who would bring him evidence against his wife. He had

discharged a good farm-boy, Jan Smirka, because he thought Marie was

fond of him; but she had not seemed to miss Jan when he was gone, and

she had been just as kind to the next boy. The farm-hands would always

do anything for Marie; Frank couldn’t find one so surly that he would

not make an effort to please her. At the bottom of his heart Frank knew

well enough that if he could once give up his grudge, his wife would

come back to him. But he could never in the world do that. The grudge

was fundamental. Perhaps he could not have given it up if he had tried.

Perhaps he got more satisfaction out of feeling himself abused than he

would have got out of being loved. If he could once have made Marie

thoroughly unhappy, he might have relented and raised her from the

dust. But she had never humbled herself. In the first days of their

love she had been his slave; she had admired him abandonedly. But the

moment he began to bully her and to be unjust, she began to draw away;

at first in tearful amazement, then in quiet, unspoken disgust. The

distance between them had widened and hardened. It no longer contracted

and brought them suddenly together. The spark of her life went

somewhere else, and he was always watching to surprise it. He knew that

somewhere she must get a feeling to live upon, for she was not a woman

who could live without loving. He wanted to prove to himself the wrong

he felt. What did she hide in her heart? Where did it go? Even Frank

had his churlish delicacies; he never reminded her of how much she had

once loved him. For that Marie was grateful to him.

While Marie was chattering to the French boys, Amédée called Emil to

the back of the room and whispered to him that they were going to play

a joke on the girls. At eleven o’clock, Amédée was to go up to the

switchboard in the vestibule and turn off the electric lights, and

every boy would have a chance to kiss his sweetheart before Father

Duchesne could find his way up the stairs to turn the current on again.

The only difficulty was the candle in Marie’s tent; perhaps, as Emil

had no sweetheart, he would oblige the boys by blowing out the candle.

Emil said he would undertake to do that.

At five minutes to eleven he sauntered up to Marie’s booth, and the

French boys dispersed to find their girls. He leaned over the

card-table and gave himself up to looking at her. “Do you think you

could tell my fortune?” he murmured. It was the first word he had had

alone with her for almost a year. “My luck hasn’t changed any. It’s

just the same.”

Marie had often wondered whether there was anyone else who could look

his thoughts to you as Emil could. To-night, when she met his steady,

powerful eyes, it was impossible not to feel the sweetness of the dream

he was dreaming; it reached her before she could shut it out, and hid

itself in her heart. She began to shuffle her cards furiously. “I’m

angry with you, Emil,” she broke out with petulance. “Why did you give

them that lovely blue stone to sell? You might have known Frank

wouldn’t buy it for me, and I wanted it awfully!”

Emil laughed shortly. “People who want such little things surely ought

to have them,” he said dryly. He thrust his hand into the pocket of his

velvet trousers and brought out a handful of uncut turquoises, as big

as marbles. Leaning over the table he dropped them into her lap.

“There, will those do? Be careful, don’t let any one see them. Now, I

suppose you want me to go away and let you play with them?”

Marie was gazing in rapture at the soft blue color of the stones. “Oh,

Emil! Is everything down there beautiful like these? How could you ever

come away?”

At that instant Amédée laid hands on the switchboard. There was a

shiver and a giggle, and every one looked toward the red blur that

Marie’s candle made in the dark. Immediately that, too, was gone.

Little shrieks and currents of soft laughter ran up and down the dark

hall. Marie started up,—directly into Emil’s arms. In the same instant

she felt his lips. The veil that had hung uncertainly between them for

so long was dissolved. Before she knew what she was doing, she had

committed herself to that kiss that was at once a boy’s and a man’s, as

timid as it was tender; so like Emil and so unlike any one else in the

world. Not until it was over did she realize what it meant. And Emil,

who had so often imagined the shock of this first kiss, was surprised

at its gentleness and naturalness. It was like a sigh which they had

breathed together; almost sorrowful, as if each were afraid of wakening

something in the other.

When the lights came on again, everybody was laughing and shouting, and

all the French girls were rosy and shining with mirth. Only Marie, in

her little tent of shawls, was pale and quiet. Under her yellow turban

the red coral pendants swung against white cheeks. Frank was still

staring at her, but he seemed to see nothing. Years ago, he himself had

had the power to take the blood from her cheeks like that. Perhaps he

did not remember—perhaps he had never noticed! Emil was already at the

other end of the hall, walking about with the shoulder-motion he had

acquired among the Mexicans, studying the floor with his intent,

deep-set eyes. Marie began to take down and fold her shawls. She did

not glance up again. The young people drifted to the other end of the

hall where the guitar was sounding. In a moment she heard Emil and

Raoul singing:—

“Across the Rio Grand-e

There lies a sunny land-e,

My bright-eyed Mexico!”

Alexandra Bergson came up to the card booth. “Let me help you, Marie.

You look tired.”

She placed her hand on Marie’s arm and felt her shiver. Marie stiffened

under that kind, calm hand. Alexandra drew back, perplexed and hurt.

There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the

fatalist, always disconcerting to very young people, who cannot feel

that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms;

unless its strings can scream to the touch of pain.

II

Signa’s wedding supper was over. The guests, and the tiresome little

Norwegian preacher who had performed the marriage ceremony, were saying

good-night. Old Ivar was hitching the horses to the wagon to take the

wedding presents and the bride and groom up to their new home, on

Alexandra’s north quarter. When Ivar drove up to the gate, Emil and

Marie Shabata began to carry out the presents, and Alexandra went into

her bedroom to bid Signa good-bye and to give her a few words of good

counsel. She was surprised to find that the bride had changed her

slippers for heavy shoes and was pinning up her skirts. At that moment

Nelse appeared at the gate with the two milk cows that Alexandra had

given Signa for a wedding present.

Alexandra began to laugh. “Why, Signa, you and Nelse are to ride home.

I’ll send Ivar over with the cows in the morning.”

Signa hesitated and looked perplexed. When her husband called her, she

pinned her hat on resolutely. “I ta-ank I better do yust like he say,”

she murmured in confusion.

Alexandra and Marie accompanied Signa to the gate and saw the party set

off, old Ivar driving ahead in the wagon and the bride and groom

following on foot, each leading a cow. Emil burst into a laugh before

they were out of hearing.

“Those two will get on,” said Alexandra as they turned back to the

house. “They are not going to take any chances. They will feel safer

with those cows in their own stable. Marie, I am going to send for an

old woman next. As soon as I get the girls broken in, I marry them

off.”

“I’ve no patience with Signa, marrying that grumpy fellow!” Marie

declared. “I wanted her to marry that nice Smirka boy who worked for us

last winter. I think she liked him, too.”

“Yes, I think she did,” Alexandra assented, “but I suppose she was too

much afraid of Nelse to marry any one else. Now that I think of it,

most of my girls have married men they were afraid of. I believe there

is a good deal of the cow in most Swedish girls. You high-strung

Bohemian can’t understand us. We’re a terribly practical people, and I

guess we think a cross man makes a good manager.”

Marie shrugged her shoulders and turned to pin up a lock of hair that

had fallen on her neck. Somehow Alexandra had irritated her of late.

Everybody irritated her. She was tired of everybody. “I’m going home

alone, Emil, so you needn’t get your hat,” she said as she wound her

scarf quickly about her head. “Good-night, Alexandra,” she called back

in a strained voice, running down the gravel walk.

Emil followed with long strides until he overtook her. Then she began

to walk slowly. It was a night of warm wind and faint starlight, and

the fireflies were glimmering over the wheat.

“Marie,” said Emil after they had walked for a while, “I wonder if you

know how unhappy I am?”

Marie did not answer him. Her head, in its white scarf, drooped forward

a little.

Emil kicked a clod from the path and went on:—

“I wonder whether you are really shallow-hearted, like you seem?

Sometimes I think one boy does just as well as another for you. It

never seems to make much difference whether it is me or Raoul Marcel or

Jan Smirka. Are you really like that?”

“Perhaps I am. What do you want me to do? Sit round and cry all day?

When I’ve cried until I can’t cry any more, then—then I must do

something else.”

“Are you sorry for me?” he persisted.

“No, I’m not. If I were big and free like you, I wouldn’t let anything

make me unhappy. As old Napoleon Brunot said at the fair, I wouldn’t go

lovering after no woman. I’d take the first train and go off and have

all the fun there is.”

“I tried that, but it didn’t do any good. Everything reminded me. The

nicer the place was, the more I wanted you.” They had come to the stile

and Emil pointed to it persuasively. “Sit down a moment, I want to ask

you something.” Marie sat down on the top step and Emil drew nearer.

“Would you tell me something that’s none of my business if you thought

it would help me out? Well, then, tell me, _please_ tell me, why you

ran away with Frank Shabata!”

Marie drew back. “Because I was in love with him,” she said firmly.

“Really?” he asked incredulously.

“Yes, indeed. Very much in love with him. I think I was the one who

suggested our running away. From the first it was more my fault than

his.”

Emil turned away his face.

“And now,” Marie went on, “I’ve got to remember that. Frank is just the

same now as he was then, only then I would see him as I wanted him to

be. I would have my own way. And now I pay for it.”

“You don’t do all the paying.”

“That’s it. When one makes a mistake, there’s no telling where it will

stop. But you can go away; you can leave all this behind you.”

“Not everything. I can’t leave you behind. Will you go away with me,

Marie?”

Marie started up and stepped across the stile. “Emil! How wickedly you

talk! I am not that kind of a girl, and you know it. But what am I

going to do if you keep tormenting me like this!” she added

plaintively.

“Marie, I won’t bother you any more if you will tell me just one thing.

Stop a minute and look at me. No, nobody can see us. Everybody’s

asleep. That was only a firefly. Marie, _stop_ and tell me!”

Emil overtook her and catching her by the shoulders shook her gently,

as if he were trying to awaken a sleepwalker.

Marie hid her face on his arm. “Don’t ask me anything more. I don’t

know anything except how miserable I am. And I thought it would be all

right when you came back. Oh, Emil,” she clutched his sleeve and began

to cry, “what am I to do if you don’t go away? I can’t go, and one of

us must. Can’t you see?”

Emil stood looking down at her, holding his shoulders stiff and

stiffening the arm to which she clung. Her white dress looked gray in

the darkness. She seemed like a troubled spirit, like some shadow out

of the earth, clinging to him and entreating him to give her peace.

Behind her the fireflies were weaving in and out over the wheat. He put

his hand on her bent head. “On my honor, Marie, if you will say you

love me, I will go away.”

She lifted her face to his. “How could I help it? Didn’t you know?”

Emil was the one who trembled, through all his frame. After he left

Marie at her gate, he wandered about the fields all night, till morning

put out the fireflies and the stars.

III

One evening, a week after Signa’s wedding, Emil was kneeling before a

box in the sitting-room, packing his books. From time to time he rose

and wandered about the house, picking up stray volumes and bringing

them listlessly back to his box. He was packing without enthusiasm. He

was not very sanguine about his future. Alexandra sat sewing by the

table. She had helped him pack his trunk in the afternoon. As Emil came

and went by her chair with his books, he thought to himself that it had

not been so hard to leave his sister since he first went away to

school. He was going directly to Omaha, to read law in the office of a

Swedish lawyer until October, when he would enter the law school at Ann

Arbor. They had planned that Alexandra was to come to Michigan—a long

journey for her—at Christmas time, and spend several weeks with him.

Nevertheless, he felt that this leave-taking would be more final than

his earlier ones had been; that it meant a definite break with his old

home and the beginning of something new—he did not know what. His ideas

about the future would not crystallize; the more he tried to think

about it, the vaguer his conception of it became. But one thing was

clear, he told himself; it was high time that he made good to

Alexandra, and that ought to be incentive enough to begin with.

As he went about gathering up his books he felt as if he were uprooting

things. At last he threw himself down on the old slat lounge where he

had slept when he was little, and lay looking up at the familiar cracks

in the ceiling.

“Tired, Emil?” his sister asked.

“Lazy,” he murmured, turning on his side and looking at her. He studied

Alexandra’s face for a long time in the lamplight. It had never

occurred to him that his sister was a handsome woman until Marie

Shabata had told him so. Indeed, he had never thought of her as being a

woman at all, only a sister. As he studied her bent head, he looked up

at the picture of John Bergson above the lamp. “No,” he thought to

himself, “she didn’t get it there. I suppose I am more like that.”

“Alexandra,” he said suddenly, “that old walnut secretary you use for a

desk was father’s, wasn’t it?”

Alexandra went on stitching. “Yes. It was one of the first things he

bought for the old log house. It was a great extravagance in those

days. But he wrote a great many letters back to the old country. He had

many friends there, and they wrote to him up to the time he died. No

one ever blamed him for grandfather’s disgrace. I can see him now,

sitting there on Sundays, in his white shirt, writing pages and pages,

so carefully. He wrote a fine, regular hand, almost like engraving.

Yours is something like his, when you take pains.”

“Grandfather was really crooked, was he?”

“He married an unscrupulous woman, and then—then I’m afraid he was

really crooked. When we first came here father used to have dreams

about making a great fortune and going back to Sweden to pay back to

the poor sailors the money grandfather had lost.”

Emil stirred on the lounge. “I say, that would have been worth while,

wouldn’t it? Father wasn’t a bit like Lou or Oscar, was he? I can’t

remember much about him before he got sick.”

“Oh, not at all!” Alexandra dropped her sewing on her knee. “He had

better opportunities; not to make money, but to make something of

himself. He was a quiet man, but he was very intelligent. You would

have been proud of him, Emil.”

Alexandra felt that he would like to know there had been a man of his

kin whom he could admire. She knew that Emil was ashamed of Lou and

Oscar, because they were bigoted and self-satisfied. He never said much

about them, but she could feel his disgust. His brothers had shown

their disapproval of him ever since he first went away to school. The

only thing that would have satisfied them would have been his failure

at the University. As it was, they resented every change in his speech,

in his dress, in his point of view; though the latter they had to

conjecture, for Emil avoided talking to them about any but family

matters. All his interests they treated as affectations.

Alexandra took up her sewing again. “I can remember father when he was

quite a young man. He belonged to some kind of a musical society, a

male chorus, in Stockholm. I can remember going with mother to hear

them sing. There must have been a hundred of them, and they all wore

long black coats and white neckties. I was used to seeing father in a

blue coat, a sort of jacket, and when I recognized him on the platform,

I was very proud. Do you remember that Swedish song he taught you,

about the ship boy?”

“Yes. I used to sing it to the Mexicans. They like anything different.”

Emil paused. “Father had a hard fight here, didn’t he?” he added

thoughtfully.

“Yes, and he died in a dark time. Still, he had hope. He believed in

the land.”

“And in you, I guess,” Emil said to himself. There was another period

of silence; that warm, friendly silence, full of perfect understanding,

in which Emil and Alexandra had spent many of their happiest

half-hours.

At last Emil said abruptly, “Lou and Oscar would be better off if they

were poor, wouldn’t they?”

Alexandra smiled. “Maybe. But their children wouldn’t. I have great

hopes of Milly.”

Emil shivered. “I don’t know. Seems to me it gets worse as it goes on.

The worst of the Swedes is that they’re never willing to find out how

much they don’t know. It was like that at the University. Always so

pleased with themselves! There’s no getting behind that conceited

Swedish grin. The Bohemians and Germans were so different.”

“Come, Emil, don’t go back on your own people. Father wasn’t conceited,

Uncle Otto wasn’t. Even Lou and Oscar weren’t when they were boys.”

Emil looked incredulous, but he did not dispute the point. He turned on

his back and lay still for a long time, his hands locked under his

head, looking up at the ceiling. Alexandra knew that he was thinking of

many things. She felt no anxiety about Emil. She had always believed in

him, as she had believed in the land. He had been more like himself

since he got back from Mexico; seemed glad to be at home, and talked to

her as he used to do. She had no doubt that his wandering fit was over,

and that he would soon be settled in life.

“Alexandra,” said Emil suddenly, “do you remember the wild duck we saw

down on the river that time?”

His sister looked up. “I often think of her. It always seems to me

she’s there still, just like we saw her.”

“I know. It’s queer what things one remembers and what things one

forgets.” Emil yawned and sat up. “Well, it’s time to turn in.” He

rose, and going over to Alexandra stooped down and kissed her lightly

on the cheek. “Good-night, sister. I think you did pretty well by us.”

Emil took up his lamp and went upstairs. Alexandra sat finishing his

new nightshirt, that must go in the top tray of his trunk.

IV

The next morning Angélique, Amédée’s wife, was in the kitchen baking

pies, assisted by old Mrs. Chevalier. Between the mixing-board and the

stove stood the old cradle that had been Amédée’s, and in it was his

black-eyed son. As Angélique, flushed and excited, with flour on her

hands, stopped to smile at the baby, Emil Bergson rode up to the

kitchen door on his mare and dismounted.

“’Médée is out in the field, Emil,” Angélique called as she ran across

the kitchen to the oven. “He begins to cut his wheat to-day; the first

wheat ready to cut anywhere about here. He bought a new header, you

know, because all the wheat’s so short this year. I hope he can rent it

to the neighbors, it cost so much. He and his cousins bought a steam

thresher on shares. You ought to go out and see that header work. I

watched it an hour this morning, busy as I am with all the men to feed.

He has a lot of hands, but he’s the only one that knows how to drive

the header or how to run the engine, so he has to be everywhere at

once. He’s sick, too, and ought to be in his bed.”

Emil bent over Hector Baptiste, trying to make him blink his round,

bead-like black eyes. “Sick? What’s the matter with your daddy, kid?

Been making him walk the floor with you?”

Angélique sniffed. “Not much! We don’t have that kind of babies. It was

his father that kept Baptiste awake. All night I had to be getting up

and making mustard plasters to put on his stomach. He had an awful

colic. He said he felt better this morning, but I don’t think he ought

to be out in the field, overheating himself.”

Angélique did not speak with much anxiety, not because she was

indifferent, but because she felt so secure in their good fortune. Only

good things could happen to a rich, energetic, handsome young man like

Amédée, with a new baby in the cradle and a new header in the field.

Emil stroked the black fuzz on Baptiste’s head. “I say, Angélique, one

of ’Médée’s grandmothers, ’way back, must have been a squaw. This kid

looks exactly like the Indian babies.”

Angélique made a face at him, but old Mrs. Chevalier had been touched

on a sore point, and she let out such a stream of fiery _patois_ that

Emil fled from the kitchen and mounted his mare.

Opening the pasture gate from the saddle, Emil rode across the field to

the clearing where the thresher stood, driven by a stationary engine

and fed from the header boxes. As Amédée was not on the engine, Emil

rode on to the wheatfield, where he recognized, on the header, the

slight, wiry figure of his friend, coatless, his white shirt puffed out

by the wind, his straw hat stuck jauntily on the side of his head. The

six big work-horses that drew, or rather pushed, the header, went

abreast at a rapid walk, and as they were still green at the work they

required a good deal of management on Amédée’s part; especially when

they turned the corners, where they divided, three and three, and then

swung round into line again with a movement that looked as complicated

as a wheel of artillery. Emil felt a new thrill of admiration for his

friend, and with it the old pang of envy at the way in which Amédée

could do with his might what his hand found to do, and feel that,

whatever it was, it was the most important thing in the world. “I’ll

have to bring Alexandra up to see this thing work,” Emil thought; “it’s

splendid!”

When he saw Emil, Amédée waved to him and called to one of his twenty

cousins to take the reins. Stepping off the header without stopping it,

he ran up to Emil who had dismounted. “Come along,” he called. “I have

to go over to the engine for a minute. I gotta green man running it,

and I gotta to keep an eye on him.”

Emil thought the lad was unnaturally flushed and more excited than even

the cares of managing a big farm at a critical time warranted. As they

passed behind a last year’s stack, Amédée clutched at his right side

and sank down for a moment on the straw.

“Ouch! I got an awful pain in me, Emil. Something’s the matter with my

insides, for sure.”

Emil felt his fiery cheek. “You ought to go straight to bed, ’Médée,

and telephone for the doctor; that’s what you ought to do.”

Amédée staggered up with a gesture of despair. “How can I? I got no

time to be sick. Three thousand dollars’ worth of new machinery to

manage, and the wheat so ripe it will begin to shatter next week. My

wheat’s short, but it’s gotta grand full berries. What’s he slowing

down for? We haven’t got header boxes enough to feed the thresher, I

guess.”

Amédée started hot-foot across the stubble, leaning a little to the

right as he ran, and waved to the engineer not to stop the engine.

Emil saw that this was no time to talk about his own affairs. He

mounted his mare and rode on to Sainte-Agnes, to bid his friends there

good-bye. He went first to see Raoul Marcel, and found him innocently

practising the “Gloria” for the big confirmation service on Sunday

while he polished the mirrors of his father’s saloon.

As Emil rode homewards at three o’clock in the afternoon, he saw Amédée

staggering out of the wheatfield, supported by two of his cousins. Emil

stopped and helped them put the boy to bed.

V

When Frank Shabata came in from work at five o’clock that evening, old

Moses Marcel, Raoul’s father, telephoned him that Amédée had had a

seizure in the wheatfield, and that Doctor Paradis was going to operate

on him as soon as the Hanover doctor got there to help. Frank dropped a

word of this at the table, bolted his supper, and rode off to

Sainte-Agnes, where there would be sympathetic discussion of Amédée’s

case at Marcel’s saloon.

As soon as Frank was gone, Marie telephoned Alexandra. It was a comfort

to hear her friend’s voice. Yes, Alexandra knew what there was to be

known about Amédée. Emil had been there when they carried him out of

the field, and had stayed with him until the doctors operated for

appendicitis at five o’clock. They were afraid it was too late to do

much good; it should have been done three days ago. Amédée was in a

very bad way. Emil had just come home, worn out and sick himself. She

had given him some brandy and put him to bed.

Marie hung up the receiver. Poor Amédée’s illness had taken on a new

meaning to her, now that she knew Emil had been with him. And it might

so easily have been the other way—Emil who was ill and Amédée who was

sad! Marie looked about the dusky sitting-room. She had seldom felt so

utterly lonely. If Emil was asleep, there was not even a chance of his

coming; and she could not go to Alexandra for sympathy. She meant to

tell Alexandra everything, as soon as Emil went away. Then whatever was

left between them would be honest.

But she could not stay in the house this evening. Where should she go?

She walked slowly down through the orchard, where the evening air was

heavy with the smell of wild cotton. The fresh, salty scent of the wild

roses had given way before this more powerful perfume of midsummer.

Wherever those ashes-of-rose balls hung on their milky stalks, the air

about them was saturated with their breath. The sky was still red in

the west and the evening star hung directly over the Bergsons’

wind-mill. Marie crossed the fence at the wheatfield corner, and walked

slowly along the path that led to Alexandra’s. She could not help

feeling hurt that Emil had not come to tell her about Amédée. It seemed

to her most unnatural that he should not have come. If she were in

trouble, certainly he was the one person in the world she would want to

see. Perhaps he wished her to understand that for her he was as good as

gone already.

Marie stole slowly, flutteringly, along the path, like a white

night-moth out of the fields. The years seemed to stretch before her

like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same

patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the

same yearning, the same pulling at the chain—until the instinct to live

had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the

chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released. Marie

walked on, her face lifted toward the remote, inaccessible evening

star.

When she reached the stile she sat down and waited. How terrible it was

to love people when you could not really share their lives!

Yes, in so far as she was concerned, Emil was already gone. They

couldn’t meet any more. There was nothing for them to say. They had

spent the last penny of their small change; there was nothing left but

gold. The day of love-tokens was past. They had now only their hearts

to give each other. And Emil being gone, what was her life to be like?

In some ways, it would be easier. She would not, at least, live in

perpetual fear. If Emil were once away and settled at work, she would

not have the feeling that she was spoiling his life. With the memory he

left her, she could be as rash as she chose. Nobody could be the worse

for it but herself; and that, surely, did not matter. Her own case was

clear. When a girl had loved one man, and then loved another while that

man was still alive, everybody knew what to think of her. What happened

to her was of little consequence, so long as she did not drag other

people down with her. Emil once away, she could let everything else go

and live a new life of perfect love.

Marie left the stile reluctantly. She had, after all, thought he might

come. And how glad she ought to be, she told herself, that he was

asleep. She left the path and went across the pasture. The moon was

almost full. An owl was hooting somewhere in the fields. She had

scarcely thought about where she was going when the pond glittered

before her, where Emil had shot the ducks. She stopped and looked at

it. Yes, there would be a dirty way out of life, if one chose to take

it. But she did not want to die. She wanted to live and dream—a hundred

years, forever! As long as this sweetness welled up in her heart, as

long as her breast could hold this treasure of pain! She felt as the

pond must feel when it held the moon like that; when it encircled and

swelled with that image of gold.

In the morning, when Emil came down-stairs, Alexandra met him in the

sitting-room and put her hands on his shoulders. “Emil, I went to your

room as soon as it was light, but you were sleeping so sound I hated to

wake you. There was nothing you could do, so I let you sleep. They

telephoned from Sainte-Agnes that Amédée died at three o’clock this

morning.”

VI

The Church has always held that life is for the living. On Saturday,

while half the village of Sainte-Agnes was mourning for Amédée and

preparing the funeral black for his burial on Monday, the other half

was busy with white dresses and white veils for the great confirmation

service to-morrow, when the bishop was to confirm a class of one

hundred boys and girls. Father Duchesne divided his time between the

living and the dead. All day Saturday the church was a scene of

bustling activity, a little hushed by the thought of Amédée. The choir

were busy rehearsing a mass of Rossini, which they had studied and

practised for this occasion. The women were trimming the altar, the

boys and girls were bringing flowers.

On Sunday morning the bishop was to drive overland to Sainte-Agnes from

Hanover, and Emil Bergson had been asked to take the place of one of

Amédée’s cousins in the cavalcade of forty French boys who were to ride

across country to meet the bishop’s carriage. At six o’clock on Sunday

morning the boys met at the church. As they stood holding their horses

by the bridle, they talked in low tones of their dead comrade. They

kept repeating that Amédée had always been a good boy, glancing toward

the red brick church which had played so large a part in Amédée’s life,

had been the scene of his most serious moments and of his happiest

hours. He had played and wrestled and sung and courted under its

shadow. Only three weeks ago he had proudly carried his baby there to

be christened. They could not doubt that that invisible arm was still

about Amédée; that through the church on earth he had passed to the

church triumphant, the goal of the hopes and faith of so many hundred

years.

When the word was given to mount, the young men rode at a walk out of

the village; but once out among the wheatfields in the morning sun,

their horses and their own youth got the better of them. A wave of zeal

and fiery enthusiasm swept over them. They longed for a Jerusalem to

deliver. The thud of their galloping hoofs interrupted many a country

breakfast and brought many a woman and child to the door of the

farmhouses as they passed. Five miles east of Sainte-Agnes they met the

bishop in his open carriage, attended by two priests. Like one man the

boys swung off their hats in a broad salute, and bowed their heads as

the handsome old man lifted his two fingers in the episcopal blessing.

The horsemen closed about the carriage like a guard, and whenever a

restless horse broke from control and shot down the road ahead of the

body, the bishop laughed and rubbed his plump hands together. “What

fine boys!” he said to his priests. “The Church still has her cavalry.”

As the troop swept past the graveyard half a mile east of the town,—the

first frame church of the parish had stood there,—old Pierre Seguin was

already out with his pick and spade, digging Amédée’s grave. He knelt

and uncovered as the bishop passed. The boys with one accord looked

away from old Pierre to the red church on the hill, with the gold cross

flaming on its steeple.

Mass was at eleven. While the church was filling, Emil Bergson waited

outside, watching the wagons and buggies drive up the hill. After the

bell began to ring, he saw Frank Shabata ride up on horseback and tie

his horse to the hitch-bar. Marie, then, was not coming. Emil turned

and went into the church. Amédée’s was the only empty pew, and he sat

down in it. Some of Amédée’s cousins were there, dressed in black and

weeping. When all the pews were full, the old men and boys packed the

open space at the back of the church, kneeling on the floor. There was

scarcely a family in town that was not represented in the confirmation

class, by a cousin, at least. The new communicants, with their clear,

reverent faces, were beautiful to look upon as they entered in a body

and took the front benches reserved for them. Even before the Mass

began, the air was charged with feeling. The choir had never sung so

well and Raoul Marcel, in the “Gloria,” drew even the bishop’s eyes to

the organ loft. For the offertory he sang Gounod’s “Ave Maria,”—always

spoken of in Sainte-Agnes as “the Ave Maria.”

Emil began to torture himself with questions about Marie. Was she ill?

Had she quarreled with her husband? Was she too unhappy to find comfort

even here? Had she, perhaps, thought that he would come to her? Was she

waiting for him? Overtaxed by excitement and sorrow as he was, the

rapture of the service took hold upon his body and mind. As he listened

to Raoul, he seemed to emerge from the conflicting emotions which had

been whirling him about and sucking him under. He felt as if a clear

light broke upon his mind, and with it a conviction that good was,

after all, stronger than evil, and that good was possible to men. He

seemed to discover that there was a kind of rapture in which he could

love forever without faltering and without sin. He looked across the

heads of the people at Frank Shabata with calmness. That rapture was

for those who could feel it; for people who could not, it was

non-existent. He coveted nothing that was Frank Shabata’s. The spirit

he had met in music was his own. Frank Shabata had never found it;

would never find it if he lived beside it a thousand years; would have

destroyed it if he had found it, as Herod slew the innocents, as Rome

slew the martyrs.

San—cta Mari-i-i-a,

wailed Raoul from the organ loft;

O—ra pro no-o-bis!

And it did not occur to Emil that any one had ever reasoned thus

before, that music had ever before given a man this equivocal

revelation.

The confirmation service followed the Mass. When it was over, the

congregation thronged about the newly confirmed. The girls, and even

the boys, were kissed and embraced and wept over. All the aunts and

grandmothers wept with joy. The housewives had much ado to tear

themselves away from the general rejoicing and hurry back to their

kitchens. The country parishioners were staying in town for dinner, and

nearly every house in Sainte-Agnes entertained visitors that day.

Father Duchesne, the bishop, and the visiting priests dined with Fabien

Sauvage, the banker. Emil and Frank Shabata were both guests of old

Moise Marcel. After dinner Frank and old Moise retired to the rear room

of the saloon to play California Jack and drink their cognac, and Emil

went over to the banker’s with Raoul, who had been asked to sing for

the bishop.

At three o’clock, Emil felt that he could stand it no longer. He

slipped out under cover of “The Holy City,” followed by Malvina’s

wistful eye, and went to the stable for his mare. He was at that height

of excitement from which everything is foreshortened, from which life

seems short and simple, death very near, and the soul seems to soar

like an eagle. As he rode past the graveyard he looked at the brown

hole in the earth where Amédée was to lie, and felt no horror. That,

too, was beautiful, that simple doorway into forgetfulness. The heart,

when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has

no fear of death. It is the old and the poor and the maimed who shrink

from that brown hole; its wooers are found among the young, the

passionate, the gallant-hearted. It was not until he had passed the

graveyard that Emil realized where he was going. It was the hour for

saying good-bye. It might be the last time that he would see her alone,

and today he could leave her without rancor, without bitterness.

Everywhere the grain stood ripe and the hot afternoon was full of the

smell of the ripe wheat, like the smell of bread baking in an oven. The

breath of the wheat and the sweet clover passed him like pleasant

things in a dream. He could feel nothing but the sense of diminishing

distance. It seemed to him that his mare was flying, or running on

wheels, like a railway train. The sunlight, flashing on the

window-glass of the big red barns, drove him wild with joy. He was like

an arrow shot from the bow. His life poured itself out along the road

before him as he rode to the Shabata farm.

When Emil alighted at the Shabatas’ gate, his horse was in a lather. He

tied her in the stable and hurried to the house. It was empty. She

might be at Mrs. Hiller’s or with Alexandra. But anything that reminded

him of her would be enough, the orchard, the mulberry tree... When he

reached the orchard the sun was hanging low over the wheatfield. Long

fingers of light reached through the apple branches as through a net;

the orchard was riddled and shot with gold; light was the reality, the

trees were merely interferences that reflected and refracted light.

Emil went softly down between the cherry trees toward the wheatfield.

When he came to the corner, he stopped short and put his hand over his

mouth. Marie was lying on her side under the white mulberry tree, her

face half hidden in the grass, her eyes closed, her hands lying limply

where they had happened to fall. She had lived a day of her new life of

perfect love, and it had left her like this. Her breast rose and fell

faintly, as if she were asleep. Emil threw himself down beside her and

took her in his arms. The blood came back to her cheeks, her amber eyes

opened slowly, and in them Emil saw his own face and the orchard and

the sun. “I was dreaming this,” she whispered, hiding her face against

him, “don’t take my dream away!”

VII

When Frank Shabata got home that night, he found Emil’s mare in his

stable. Such an impertinence amazed him. Like everybody else, Frank had

had an exciting day. Since noon he had been drinking too much, and he

was in a bad temper. He talked bitterly to himself while he put his own

horse away, and as he went up the path and saw that the house was dark

he felt an added sense of injury. He approached quietly and listened on

the doorstep. Hearing nothing, he opened the kitchen door and went

softly from one room to another. Then he went through the house again,

upstairs and down, with no better result. He sat down on the bottom

step of the box stairway and tried to get his wits together. In that

unnatural quiet there was no sound but his own heavy breathing.

Suddenly an owl began to hoot out in the fields. Frank lifted his head.

An idea flashed into his mind, and his sense of injury and outrage

grew. He went into his bedroom and took his murderous 405 Winchester

from the closet.

When Frank took up his gun and walked out of the house, he had not the

faintest purpose of doing anything with it. He did not believe that he

had any real grievance. But it gratified him to feel like a desperate

man. He had got into the habit of seeing himself always in desperate

straits. His unhappy temperament was like a cage; he could never get

out of it; and he felt that other people, his wife in particular, must

have put him there. It had never more than dimly occurred to Frank that

he made his own unhappiness. Though he took up his gun with dark

projects in his mind, he would have been paralyzed with fright had he

known that there was the slightest probability of his ever carrying any

of them out.

Frank went slowly down to the orchard gate, stopped and stood for a

moment lost in thought. He retraced his steps and looked through the

barn and the hayloft. Then he went out to the road, where he took the

foot-path along the outside of the orchard hedge. The hedge was twice

as tall as Frank himself, and so dense that one could see through it

only by peering closely between the leaves. He could see the empty path

a long way in the moonlight. His mind traveled ahead to the stile,

which he always thought of as haunted by Emil Bergson. But why had he

left his horse?

At the wheatfield corner, where the orchard hedge ended and the path

led across the pasture to the Bergsons’, Frank stopped. In the warm,

breathless night air he heard a murmuring sound, perfectly

inarticulate, as low as the sound of water coming from a spring, where

there is no fall, and where there are no stones to fret it. Frank

strained his ears. It ceased. He held his breath and began to tremble.

Resting the butt of his gun on the ground, he parted the mulberry

leaves softly with his fingers and peered through the hedge at the dark

figures on the grass, in the shadow of the mulberry tree. It seemed to

him that they must feel his eyes, that they must hear him breathing.

But they did not. Frank, who had always wanted to see things blacker

than they were, for once wanted to believe less than he saw. The woman

lying in the shadow might so easily be one of the Bergsons’

farm-girls.... Again the murmur, like water welling out of the ground.

This time he heard it more distinctly, and his blood was quicker than

his brain. He began to act, just as a man who falls into the fire

begins to act. The gun sprang to his shoulder, he sighted mechanically

and fired three times without stopping, stopped without knowing why.

Either he shut his eyes or he had vertigo. He did not see anything

while he was firing. He thought he heard a cry simultaneous with the

second report, but he was not sure. He peered again through the hedge,

at the two dark figures under the tree. They had fallen a little apart

from each other, and were perfectly still—No, not quite; in a white

patch of light, where the moon shone through the branches, a man’s hand

was plucking spasmodically at the grass.

Suddenly the woman stirred and uttered a cry, then another, and

another. She was living! She was dragging herself toward the hedge!

Frank dropped his gun and ran back along the path, shaking, stumbling,

gasping. He had never imagined such horror. The cries followed him.

They grew fainter and thicker, as if she were choking. He dropped on

his knees beside the hedge and crouched like a rabbit, listening;

fainter, fainter; a sound like a whine; again—a moan—another—silence.

Frank scrambled to his feet and ran on, groaning and praying. From

habit he went toward the house, where he was used to being soothed when

he had worked himself into a frenzy, but at the sight of the black,

open door, he started back. He knew that he had murdered somebody, that

a woman was bleeding and moaning in the orchard, but he had not

realized before that it was his wife. The gate stared him in the face.

He threw his hands over his head. Which way to turn? He lifted his

tormented face and looked at the sky. “Holy Mother of God, not to

suffer! She was a good girl—not to suffer!”

Frank had been wont to see himself in dramatic situations; but now,

when he stood by the windmill, in the bright space between the barn and

the house, facing his own black doorway, he did not see himself at all.

He stood like the hare when the dogs are approaching from all sides.

And he ran like a hare, back and forth about that moonlit space, before

he could make up his mind to go into the dark stable for a horse. The

thought of going into a doorway was terrible to him. He caught Emil’s

horse by the bit and led it out. He could not have buckled a bridle on

his own. After two or three attempts, he lifted himself into the saddle

and started for Hanover. If he could catch the one o’clock train, he

had money enough to get as far as Omaha.

While he was thinking dully of this in some less sensitized part of his

brain, his acuter faculties were going over and over the cries he had

heard in the orchard. Terror was the only thing that kept him from

going back to her, terror that she might still be she, that she might

still be suffering. A woman, mutilated and bleeding in his orchard—it

was because it was a woman that he was so afraid. It was inconceivable

that he should have hurt a woman. He would rather be eaten by wild

beasts than see her move on the ground as she had moved in the orchard.

Why had she been so careless? She knew he was like a crazy man when he

was angry. She had more than once taken that gun away from him and held

it, when he was angry with other people. Once it had gone off while

they were struggling over it. She was never afraid. But, when she knew

him, why hadn’t she been more careful? Didn’t she have all summer

before her to love Emil Bergson in, without taking such chances?

Probably she had met the Smirka boy, too, down there in the orchard. He

didn’t care. She could have met all the men on the Divide there, and

welcome, if only she hadn’t brought this horror on him.

There was a wrench in Frank’s mind. He did not honestly believe that of

her. He knew that he was doing her wrong. He stopped his horse to admit

this to himself the more directly, to think it out the more clearly. He

knew that he was to blame. For three years he had been trying to break

her spirit. She had a way of making the best of things that seemed to

him a sentimental affectation. He wanted his wife to resent that he was

wasting his best years among these stupid and unappreciative people;

but she had seemed to find the people quite good enough. If he ever got

rich he meant to buy her pretty clothes and take her to California in a

Pullman car, and treat her like a lady; but in the mean time he wanted

her to feel that life was as ugly and as unjust as he felt it. He had

tried to make her life ugly. He had refused to share any of the little

pleasures she was so plucky about making for herself. She could be gay

about the least thing in the world; but she must be gay! When she first

came to him, her faith in him, her adoration—Frank struck the mare with

his fist. Why had Marie made him do this thing; why had she brought

this upon him? He was overwhelmed by sickening misfortune. All at once

he heard her cries again—he had forgotten for a moment. “Maria,” he

sobbed aloud, “Maria!”

When Frank was halfway to Hanover, the motion of his horse brought on a

violent attack of nausea. After it had passed, he rode on again, but he

could think of nothing except his physical weakness and his desire to

be comforted by his wife. He wanted to get into his own bed. Had his

wife been at home, he would have turned and gone back to her meekly

enough.

VIII

When old Ivar climbed down from his loft at four o’clock the next

morning, he came upon Emil’s mare, jaded and lather-stained, her bridle

broken, chewing the scattered tufts of hay outside the stable door. The

old man was thrown into a fright at once. He put the mare in her stall,

threw her a measure of oats, and then set out as fast as his bow-legs

could carry him on the path to the nearest neighbor.

“Something is wrong with that boy. Some misfortune has come upon us. He

would never have used her so, in his right senses. It is not his way to

abuse his mare,” the old man kept muttering, as he scuttled through the

short, wet pasture grass on his bare feet.

While Ivar was hurrying across the fields, the first long rays of the

sun were reaching down between the orchard boughs to those two

dew-drenched figures. The story of what had happened was written

plainly on the orchard grass, and on the white mulberries that had

fallen in the night and were covered with dark stain. For Emil the

chapter had been short. He was shot in the heart, and had rolled over

on his back and died. His face was turned up to the sky and his brows

were drawn in a frown, as if he had realized that something had

befallen him. But for Marie Shabata it had not been so easy. One ball

had torn through her right lung, another had shattered the carotid

artery. She must have started up and gone toward the hedge, leaving a

trail of blood. There she had fallen and bled. From that spot there was

another trail, heavier than the first, where she must have dragged

herself back to Emil’s body. Once there, she seemed not to have

struggled any more. She had lifted her head to her lover’s breast,

taken his hand in both her own, and bled quietly to death. She was

lying on her right side in an easy and natural position, her cheek on

Emil’s shoulder. On her face there was a look of ineffable content. Her

lips were parted a little; her eyes were lightly closed, as if in a

day-dream or a light slumber. After she lay down there, she seemed not

to have moved an eyelash. The hand she held was covered with dark

stains, where she had kissed it.

But the stained, slippery grass, the darkened mulberries, told only

half the story. Above Marie and Emil, two white butterflies from

Frank’s alfalfa-field were fluttering in and out among the interlacing

shadows; diving and soaring, now close together, now far apart; and in

the long grass by the fence the last wild roses of the year opened

their pink hearts to die.

When Ivar reached the path by the hedge, he saw Shabata’s rifle lying

in the way. He turned and peered through the branches, falling upon his

knees as if his legs had been mowed from under him. “Merciful God!” he

groaned.

Alexandra, too, had risen early that morning, because of her anxiety

about Emil. She was in Emil’s room upstairs when, from the window, she

saw Ivar coming along the path that led from the Shabatas’. He was

running like a spent man, tottering and lurching from side to side.

Ivar never drank, and Alexandra thought at once that one of his spells

had come upon him, and that he must be in a very bad way indeed. She

ran downstairs and hurried out to meet him, to hide his infirmity from

the eyes of her household. The old man fell in the road at her feet and

caught her hand, over which he bowed his shaggy head. “Mistress,

mistress,” he sobbed, “it has fallen! Sin and death for the young ones!

God have mercy upon us!”