The Coming of the Tide

MARCH, 1905

BY MARGARET SHERWOOD

I

UNDER the sun-smitten branches of the woodland and along the open road that curved, all golden with dust, over hill and through hollow, the warm air was full of the breath of pine and juniper and fern, and of the poignant sweetness of the sea. Now leaf shadows fell on the face of the girl who was being driven rapidly in a light carriage toward the east, and then the full sunlight of June lay there. The beat, beat, beat of the horse’s hoofs seemed to set the world in motion; the quick, uneven wind, the fluttering yellow butterflies, the slow black wings of crows overhead, even the gently floating white clouds against the dim blue, were to her full of the sudden joy of those that move and escape. Leaning back in her seat she closed her eyes, opening them now and then to steal a half fearful glance to the right, where, between dark tree trunks or beyond the gray-green tangles of a bit of moorland, the sea lay, incredibly blue. This undreamed beauty was almost hard to bear, bringing new pain to meet the old pain in her heart. Once, a sudden turn at the top of a little hill betrayed to her the wide horizon line, and she gave a little cry, — “Oh, don’t speak to me!” forgetting that she had come on her journey alone. The lank brown driver turned with a New England twinkle in his eye.

“I had n’t cal’lated to, ma’am,” he observed dryly; then stopped, for a laugh such as he had never heard rang out on his ear, mellow, mocking, irresistible. It ran up to clear high notes and down to a soft ripple that ended in a little sob, and it made music all the way.

“I was not speaking to you,” observed his passenger before the laugh had quite died out.

He nodded. “Thought likely not. Git up, Don! Was you talkin’ to anybody in pertikaler ?”

“Only to ghosts,” answered the voice, half merry, half sad.

“Took that way often?”

He missed the laughter in the eyes behind him, being too lazy to look quite far enough around.

“Very often.”

There was a sudden note of sorrow in the voice, that did not escape the large ears of Andrew Lane the third.

“Your trunks ’ull be right over,” he remarked, administering the only consolation that occurred to him.

“I don’t care about the trunks,” was the answer.

This almost tempted Andrew to look all the way around; he had noticed nothing peculiar about this young woman when she had stepped from the train, but surely this was unnatural. As he was considering the problem of a girl with clothes like that, and as many trunks as that, who still said she did not care, he was roused by slow notes of the same odd voice.

“ Blue — and blue — and blue. Why did no one ever tell me, or could no one tell?”

“Air they arter ye again ?” asked Andrew, this time turning round all the way. He got no answer, however, and all that he saw was the face of a girl whose eyes were closed. Through the long dark lashes two tears were forcing their way; the lips were slightly parted, drinking in the fragrant air, and the ungloved hands were outstretched in her lap, as if through the very finger tips some contact could be gained with this encompassing loveliness which made pain within the eyes.

“Mighty queer,” muttered Andrew to his horse, and he drove on, not without apprehension. Once he had heard of an insane woman who had escaped from the state asylum, and had come down to this very bit of coast, where, after haunting the rocks for several days, she had plunged into the sea and been drowned.

“But this here one’s trunks was all O. K.,” he reassured himself. “Lunatic could n’t get away with three on ’em, big as haystacks.”

It was a solitary road, which seemed to lead to the very heart of some world of leafy, tempered beauty, for June was passing along the water ways, and all the land was quick with leaf and blossom. A wind was abroad in the soft marsh grass and in the purpling feathery grasses of the higher meadow lands, where buttercups and daisies nodded in the waving green. Now and then across the shadow of flickering branches came the soft gleam of yellow wings or of blue, and once, from far away, rippled the notes of a young bobolink that was singing madly for the mere joy of living. At long intervals, from out the sheltering branches of elm tree or of maple, rose the dull red chimney of a farmhouse, whose doorways and windows were half hidden by blossoming lilac and syringa bushes; and again, on some green sea-meadow or rocky headland, stood out the rough gray stone walls of a rich man’s summer home. An air of quaint distinction rested upon one old-fashioned place in a sheltered cove at the right, where smoothhewn pillars of granite rock, surmounted by balls of stone, guarded the entrance. A hedge of spiræa, whose long sprays were now in delicate bloom of white, marked the confines of the lawn; a wide graveled driveway, bordered by overarching elms, led to a great colonial mansion, whose white walls and tall pillars gleamed out softly from behind green branches of elm and of pine; and all, perhaps because of some touch of wildness in the uncut grass and the luxuriant foliage, wore a storied look. Neglect, which had not yet brought it an air of desolation, seemed to hint of a full tide of life that had come and gone, and to the eyes of the girl who was gazing at it, window and doorway and threshold were eloquent.

“That’s the Warren place,” observed Andrew, with the air of one who would say that even mentally unbalanced strangers should know of its importance. He got no reply, however, and drove on in silence, turning to the right a few minutes later, into a road, grass-grown and lovely, leading across a bit of moor to the sea. Ahead, upon one of the bold bluffs that jutted into the water, rose the severe gray shingled walls and the red chimneys of the Emerson Inn, set in a space of velvety turf, where gleamed the gold of unnumbered dandelions.

The ladies of the Emerson Inn were seated on the south veranda that afternoon, embroidering, or knitting loosemeshed shawls, or weaving baskets of Indian grass. There were two dark brown heads, and one pale brown head, but most of the heads were gray, and the smoothly parted hair bespoke unimpeachable conservative traditions. The pale brown head was bent over a book, and its owner, in a voice a trifle high and thin, was reading Ibsen aloud, while the very air, as well as the intent expressions of foreheads, eyes, and mouths, betrayed an atmosphere of extreme intellectual stimulus. There was no pause when Andrew drove up with the newcomer. A dozen pairs of spectacled eyes looked up for an instant, but the ladies of the Emerson Inn were ladies, and curiosity was something not to be betrayed. Once, for a second, the voice faltered and almost stopped, as a girl all in soft black, duskyhaired, and with eyelids cast down, sprang to the piazza steps, then, ignoring host, hostess, and the assembled guests, passed swiftly down the worn footpath to the rocks and began to climb over them toward the sea. It was a graceful figure, pausing lightly on one bit of stone and springing to the next, and it moved as if drawn by some attraction too mighty to resist. Mr. Phipps, the landlord, looked questioningly after; Andrew, as he gathered up the reins, touched his forehead significantly with one finger.

“Sunthin’ loose there,” he remarked succinctly.

Mr. Phipps, with his hands behind him, strolled down the grassy knoll toward the rocks, and then back again; at the rear entrance three large trunks arrived and were noisily deposited on the ground; on the veranda Ibsen went on, uninterrupted, though full of a tension that was not Ibsen’s own,for down on the cliff, at the farthest point, where the redbrown rocks met the blue, all motionless lingered a slender black shadow, spoiling the embroidery, spoiling the sight of the eyes behind the glasses, spoiling the play.

“A new guest, Mr. Phipps?” casually inquired the Lady from Cincinnati, the only person there who dared interrupt Ibsen.

“I thought so,” he observed nonchalantly, taking the cigar from his lips, “ but it looks as if I might lose her.”

The girl, who had forgotten them all, stood where the beat of the waves on the rock came to her as a part of her own being: the very pulse of life seemed throbbing there. Suddenly she stretched her arms out to it with a little sob that mingled with the murmur of the waves.

“Mother!” she cried, “mother!” and then, “it rests me so!”

Into her eyes had come the look of those who have won the freedom of the sea.

When the reading was over the ladies on the piazza dispersed, some wandering down to the rocks, some going to their own rooms. Three took a constitutional, strolling round the house.

“She has not registered,” observed the Lady from Cincinnati as they passed through the hall.

“How sad she looked!” remarked the Lady from Wilmington.

“Why, I thought she looked mischievous!” cried the Lady from Boston.

“It was not an intellectual countenance,” said the first speaker severely.

Incidentally on the walk they encountered the trunks.

“Good make,” observed the Lady from Cincinnati silently. “Leather, but with no foreign labels;” and she went upstairs with a puzzled frown. Strangers were rare at the Emerson Inn, and of the few who had come since Miss Black had assumed the responsibilities of Oldest Inhabitant, none had been like this. When she reached her room she noted signs that the vacant apartment next door was occupied at last. It was a corner room, looking eastward toward the sea and northward toward the moor, and was too expensive for Miss Black’s own purse. The elderly lady stopped in amazement, for an unwonted sound met her ears. Over the transom came a ripple of laughter such as had seldom sounded on the New England shore. It was as if the very spirit of mirth were set free, and might be expected to fly in over the transom with fluttering, iridescent wings.

“That girl! ” exclaimed the Lady from Cincinnati, with an expression.

The girl was standing in the centre of her own room, slowly surveying it, —the sloping roof, the dormer windows, the spotless bare floor, the pale yellow painted walls, the wardrobe made of thirteen hooks suspended from a board to which a cretonne curtain was attached, the twelveinch shelf for books, the china candlestick. The soul of ascetic old New England breathed from all the quaint furnishings, and the newcomer had never seen the like before.

“I shall love it,” she said, wiping her eyes in her laughter; and she bestowed a caressing pat on her thin white counterpane.

II

The twilight of early morning lay over the sea when the swish of the waves on the rocks roused the newcomer from sleep. Half waking, but with eyelids closed, she strove to win her way back to the beautiful dream that was escaping. It had fashioned her to herself as a winged thing skimming the surface of the water with motion swifter than that of gulls; and the wings were not made for mere flying, but sensitive, full of vision, they let the color and beauty and motion in for a moment of brief rapture. When the glory faded, she crept, in dressing-gown and slippers, to the window toward the north, where the moorland lay dusky green in the dim light, and the far calls of waking birds added distance to the stretches of tangled bayberry bushes and scrub pine, then turned to the east, where the mystery of wide ocean lay gray, expectant, under a sky of gray.

As she watched, down the dull, tossing sea crept a ripple of gold, and the yellow rim of the sun rose at the edge of the world. Glimmering softly came the light; bright sparkles of dew and wet gossamer webs shone from the velvety green of the moorland, and a longer pathway of light led across the sea. The girl at the window was on her knees, and her dark head was bowed when the glory reached it and rested there.

There was an unusual calm in the dining-room of the Emerson Inn that morning, a portentous, smiling surface calm that hid the profound agitation of the depths. It was not for the well bred to show excitement for trivial cause, and they did not. The conversation ran along the usual lines: pale hints of metaphysic floated out upon the summer breeze, and all the air was rife with quotations from the poets and bits of literary criticism. Only once was the curtain of reserve rent in twain, and that when George Eliot was the ostensible theme.

“ I noticed that her handkerchiefs were bordered with black,” said the Lady from Wilmington, who was absent-minded. The Lady from Boston delicately plunged into the breach, pretending that she had not understood this bit of mental aberration.

“ But in the case of Tito, you know, the author is hardly fair. She hounds him down the road to ruin in order to prove a moral thesis. A certain lack of spiritual insight” —

Here the door was flung open and the broken sentence remained unfinished, for a vision entered. Clad all in diaphanous white that fluttered as she walked, her dark head rising daintily like a flower from its sheath, came the stranger of yesterday, the dull blue of the wall paper throwing face and motion into fine relief. She paused in hesitation, vainly looking about for a head waiter, for supper had been served in her room the night before, and she did not know at which table to take refuge. Presently the slim, spectacled district schoolmistress who waited on the three tables nearest the door, entered with a plate of Boston brown bread in her hand, and greeted the newcomer with the air that terrified tardy urchins at school.

“You will find a seat there,” she remarked severely, pointing with the forefinger of her left hand; the undertone of her voice added, “You will stand in the corner half an hour afterward for being late.”

The dark eyes of the stranger rested on her with an air of delicious surprise; she nodded gracefully and sank into the chair with twitching lips. Thirty pairs of eyes wandered, willy-nilly, her way, and many a sentence drifted hopelessly away from its verb, never to find it again.

“Grape-nuts,” demanded the schoolmistress peremptorily, “or pettijohn?”

The Lady from Wilmington interrupted the answer with a friendly goodmorning, and the waitress frowned; she was accustomed to prompt replies.

As the meal went on, the girl in the white gown behaved under these unusual circumstances as any well-bred girl would under ordinary circumstances; “which proves,” the little Bostonian remarked to herself, “that she is a lady.” Of the tension in the air, the newcomer, despite her calm face, was keenly conscious, but, aware that in coming unchaperoned and alone to this strange spot, she was outraging her own traditions much more completely than those of her fellow guests, she was quite cheerful in the face of encompassing criticism. It came to her in friendly glances and in kind words; it vibrated through the air in inquiries that were not made. Just once the Lady from Cincinnati ventured near the edge, as the soft vowels of her new neighbor came to her ear.

“You are Southern, I see.”

“Yes,” was the answer, made with a contagious smile.

“Have you ever been North before ?”

“No.”

“But you have been at the shore ?”

“Never.”

There was a pause. Bits from Huxley, and Mrs. Eddy, and Emerson, floated through the air.

“Are you literary ? ” suddenly asked an elderly lady who had not spoken before.

The smile got into the girl’s voice and into her eyes.

“I am afraid not,” she drawled. “I can read and write — after a fashion.”

In the dead silence that followed, the schoolmistress stood bolt upright against the wall, with her arms hanging stiffly at her sides, and openly looked contempt. The stranger realized that where the South would have smiled the North only looked aghast.

“The schools are so poor in the South,” remarked the Lady from Boston kindly. “Had you ever thought of the possibility of a Northern college?”

The waitress blushed and looked selfconscious; she entered one this fall. It was the stranger’s turn to look shocked.

“My family would never have permitted that,” she answered, wondering.

“I presume you have made it up by reading,” suggested the Lady from Cincinnati. “Do you read Ibsen?”

“Not if I can possibly escape,” said the stranger.

“ Or Browning ? ”

The little look of wickedness that lurked always behind the veiled sadness of her eyes leaped to the surface.

“Browning,” she murmured, “Browning? I have heard the name but” — Here she stopped, penitent. These moments of mischievous girlhood that now and then came rippling into her maturer years always left her with a sense of regret.

Horror smote the room; no one ordered any more food, for desire failed. Conversation flagged, and one by one the guests slipped away, leaving the daughter of the South sitting helplessly between a cup of pale brown coffee and a generous slab of dark brown bread. She touched the sodden, resisting surface of the latter with her fork, delicately, and retreated, to answer the call of the sea whose sunflecked waters gleamed from far through the open windows. Outside she forgot: forgot her hunger, and the hard little bed which had seemed devised as a punishment for sin; forgot her great trunks and the thirteen hooks suspended humorously, it seemed to her, from the board. Had all these pink wild roses bloomed here yesterday ? she asked herself, as she saw them stretching in masses along the cliff, broken by gray, lichen-grown rock,by the fresh fronds of young sumac, and by juniper dark with its new shoots as pale as green sea foam. Surely they must have been here, and the tangled blackberry vines must have been growing in this same wild way, and the fragrance must have been then as sweet as now, but she had not known it, forgetting all things near in her escape to the vastness of the sea. She climbed again over the rocks, dressed most inappropriately, as the spectators from the piazza truthfully remarked, and hid herself for the entire morning in a deep cleft where she could see and hear and feel. The glorious, oncoming great green waves broke rhythmically below her as the tide came in, and they brought a sense of the washing of old sorrow out of the soul. Listening to their mighty beating on the rocks, she paused in reverent wonder, murmuring: —

“To think that I never knew before that the earth is set to music!”

There was consternation at one o’clock when the stranger failed to appear at dinner.

“She is certainly erratic,” remarked an elderly spinster, who was undoubtedly Somebody from Somewhere.

“But is n’t she a beauty!” said the young woman with pale brown hair. “ I’ve never seen such glorious eyes, and her mouth looks as if she had stolen it from some old picture.”

It was the Lady from Cincinnati who voiced, in a whisper, the long-suppressed criticism of the assembly.

“I think that we should be a little careful. In all the years I have been here I’ve never seen anything that looked improper.”

The Lady from Boston bravely took up the glove thus thrown down; there had been many an encounter between these two.

“ It seems to me that we ought to make her one of us. It is evident from what she said this morning about Browning” — the voice sank a little here — “ that she is very ignorant. We could do a great deal for her this summer by guiding her thought into right channels and suggesting standards.”

The stranger, coming in from the rocks sunburned, disheveled, with eyes alight with life and fire, heard the last sentence of this conversation as the guests strolled out into the hall.

“Surely,” the Lady from Cincinnati was saying (she was accustomed to the last word), “ unless something were wrong that girl would have registered by this time. She has clothes enough for an actress, and beauty enough to excite suspicion anywhere.”

A dimple quivered in the newcomer’s left cheek. She slowly crossed the hall, and, taking up the public pen, wrote her name in the register with a generous scrawl. The dark eyes were full of mischief as she went upstairs to make ready for her late dinner; but the look changed to apprehension as she thought of facing the sternest of maids. Downstairs the Lady from Wilmington, carelessly approaching the open page, read half aloud:

“Miss Frances Wilmot, Richmond, Virginia.”

“Miss Frances Wilmot,” gasped the reader. “Wilmot is a great name in Virginia, a very great name indeed.”

That afternoon the Lady from Boston, still ignorant of the stranger’s name and address, openly adopted her, spreading over her the protection of her dove-gray wings. She showed her all her pet crannies in the rocks; she gently suggested, as the girl’s muslin flounces caught on bits of flinty stone, that a short tweed skirt would be useful.

“We do not dress much here, my dear,” she said; and the Southern girl involuntarily glanced at her new friend’s cotton blouse and serge skirt, with a feeling that the remark was in some way tautological.

Gently the little lady led the conversation into improving paths, incidentally alluding to lectures that she had heard, and to reading courses that she had put herself through. The girl listened to it all, and, though now and then her rebellious lips would twitch with amusement, her eyes were soft with a sense of the kindness shown. Sometimes, when the speaker herself felt that the atmosphere was growing too oppressive intellectually, she glided into anecdotes of the countryside, to be rewarded by a sudden flash of keen interest in her listener’s eyes, for all human story was dear to the girl.

“This is such a rare bit of country; the summer people have not found it out, and if they had, they could not come. There are some great estates left about here, and people who have held the land more than two hundred years live on them. Did you notice a large, white colonial house with a stone gateway just beyond the turning as you came in?”

“Yes,” answered the Southern girl.

“That is the Warren place; it is very beautiful, and it is very, very old. The original Paul Warren came over in 1645 from Devonshire with a single servant from his father’s house, and he worked and cleared the forest and fought the Indians until a great tract of land was given him by the Crown for special services,— thousands of acres. It has been an important family ever since, and the present owner still lives here, though he spends his winters in Boston with his wife. He has a brother who stays here all the time, Mr. Peter Warren, an extremely eccentric character. Joining the Warren place is the old Bevanne estate. Look, and you can see the ragged locust trees just over the top of the little hill. The Bevannes are another old family, but one that has grown poor, perhaps fortunately for us, for they sold Mr. Phipps the land on which the Emerson Inn is built, and but for them we might never have known this lovely bit of shore. The son of that family is a college professor somewhere. Oh, it is very good stock in both cases;” and the little Lady from Boston, who knew good stock and was of it, drew her protégée away to see a special bed of wild pink honeysuckle which had been her delight for seven consecutive years, and forgot old families for a time.

When they came back, breathless from climbing a steep bit of rock, they found a group assembled on the piazza round an odd little man in a white flannel suit and Panama hat. Out of the queer, wizened, wrinkled face, deepset blue eyes shone with one of the lesser orders of intelligence, and the motions of face and hands betokened a mind ceaselessly, aimlessly alert. He was talking rapidly, and the assembled hearers bent their heads with the usual deference of spinsterhood for man, however small.

“There is Mr. Peter Warren now!” exclaimed the Lady from Boston. “Shall I present him to you?”

“Don’t, don’t interrupt him,” begged the girl, lifting a warning hand, and the two stood unobserved on the steps while the shrill voice went on.

“Curious thing, heredity. Now I suppose you think you know all about it, but you can’t, possibly. Nobody does who does n’t know’ me.”

“Indeed,” said an amused voice.

“Fact,” asserted Mr. Peter Warren, slapping his knee. “Listen!” and his voice sank to a mysterious whisper. “I am different from all other people who breathe. You wall say that a man is the sum of his ancestors, that is, the blood, nerves, and brain he has inherited from them all are intermingled. He is no one of them; he is the result of all. A certain balance is kept because the different ingredients counteract one another. Now hear this: I am all my ancestors in succession. No drop of blood, no nerve fibre that I have inherited from any one of them is mingled with any other. When one personality rules me it rules me completely, and I am always at the mercy of the ancestor who enters me last. How do I know? From the complete contrariety of my impulses. Why, when I was a child, would I be lying one minute on the floor, smiling and happy, the next, biting in fury and screaming?”

“Were you?” asked an amazed feminine voice. “I cannot imagine it.”

He nodded solemnly. “Once, when I was a youngster, I remember spending two hours nursing a hurt blue-bottle fly. I was my mother then, I think, and she was one of the saints of the earth. That very morning I went out and killed my pet dog. Something drove me to it; many people would say it was the devil; I say it was my great-great-grandfather Warren, who was rather a brute. That murderous impulse, which I remember as perfectly as if it had come to-day, was simply his spirit entering in. Then there is my — my taste for good wine; I can no more help that than I can help having two arms and two legs. It was settled for me long before I was born. In fine,” he concluded, with a theatrical gesture of his arms, “I am not the resultant of my ancestors: I am their victim. How else,” and he touched his chest, “can you account for the acts of this singular mechanism which calls itself Peter Warren, and whose acts seem so illogical interpreted in the narrower way ?”

In the impressive pause which followed these words, the speaker caught sight of the listeners standing on the steps, and rose with a gallant bow.

“There is nothing so interesting as human nature,” he observed, smiling, as the Lady from Boston murmured his name by way of introduction. “And where does one know human nature so well as in one’s self ? Little, after all, of supreme concern to man except himself. Don’t you think so ?” he added, looking toward the girl.

The answer came quickly in her soft Southern voice. “I have seen many things that would make me believe it.”

Mr. Peter Warren very soon took his departure, with many polite bows and graceful little speeches. As his hostesses remarked afterward, his manner belonged to the old school. He must hasten home, he observed in parting, for his brother was ill, very ill, and might need him, A little chorus followed him as he went strolling down the road with his great cane. “ Is n’t he odd! ” said one. “ Is n’t he original!” said another. “Such interesting theories!” said a third. But the girl with pale brown hair whispered lightly in Frances Wilmot’s ear, having seen the amazement in the newcomer’s eyes, “He’s just a harmless sort of lunatic, I think.”

It was late afternoon when they let her go, and, escaping, she wandered along a path at the top of the cliffs to a point where the rocks, parting, left space for a kind of amphitheatre guarding a curving sand beach. Tall, soft grass, chased by the sea wind, waved on its steep slope; and buttercups and dandelions, long of stem, nodded there. The girl nestled down among the grasses, watching the mighty actor, the sea, playing his eternal play over the dark rocks beyond the beach; and she sighed deeply as for weariness, so many different kinds of wonder had been crowded into one day! Wide and infinitely blue the water stretched out before her, the outermost rim of the sea meeting the pearly blue of the sky in a line that seemed to ring the world.

“No poet has told its beauty; perhaps no poet could,” she murmured to herself. “Rossetti’s

is too much like the tracing of a graven tool to let the sea’s life in. Swinburne has caught the color and the motion, but he could not reach the soul of you. Oh, if Swinburne had not been Swinburne, what sealike poems he might have written!”

Sunset came and found her there, watching the faint flush across the eastern sky, and the golden light gleaming on one far white sail, and on the nearer outspread wings of one white gull. Twilight gathered, and still she lingered, for long grasses touched face and hand in friendly fashion; cool damp air gently caressed cheek and forehead, and the soft, immemorial swish of the water roused a sense as of something within her beating back to the very beginning of time. One by one along the shore, as darkness deepened, golden lights gleamed out beyond gray water and dim rocks, while all about her hylas and softly singing creatures of summer nights piped to the music of the sea.

III

The wide, old-fashioned hall of the Warren house was open to the night, and through the great double doors, flung open at each end, the stars were shining. The breeze that blew gently through, making the candles on the mantel over the huge fireplace flicker, brought with it murmurs of the shore, where the waves were breaking heavily at the turning of the tide. The air was full of the soft sounds of a summer night, the low, sweet lovesongs of unnumbered tiny creatures calling to one another in the dark. Scarcely louder, came from the bedroom at the left of the hall the sound of whispered prayers, for the master of the house lay dying in the great four-posted mahogany bed, and his wife, kneeling at the bedside with the single candle on the little table flaming above her beautiful gray head, was reading prayers for the visitation of the sick. The nurse sat silent in the corner; there was nothing to be done now, save wait the great inevitable moment. Outside in the hall the son of the house was walking softly up and down through the darkness and the faint light of the wind-blown candles; his step was measured and slow, with a suggestion of suppressed agitation. The face, when the dim rays half lighted it in the darkness, showed the deadly calm that often covers, in strong natures, passionate excitement. Upon it the shadows of night met the shadow of coming sorrow.

“Peace be to this house, and to all that dwell in it,” repeated the sweet, tremulous voice of the kneeling woman. “Remember not, Lord, our iniquities, nor the iniquities of our forefathers; spare us, good Lord, spare thy people” —

When the voice ceased, there was silence in the house, save for the sick man’s laboring breath, and the faint melodies that came from out of doors. Paul Warren stopped abruptly in his walk, looking out at the golden stars that shone through the eastern door, then at those that shone from the west, with the wide darkness beyond, and his expressive face changed with a sudden sense of the likeness of all this to human life, the little, roofed-in space between two infinites.

“Paul, come, he wants you,” said his mother’s voice in a quick whisper.

A swift spasm of pain passed over the young man’s face as he entered the death chamber; it was hard to witness the helpless suffering of the strong. Propped on huge, old-fashioned pillows lay his father, his grand physique emphasizing the pathos of this moment of supreme weakness. Head, arms, and shoulders were of noble proportions, but the eyes were dim and the great muscles powerless. The face, with its bold forehead and fine, deep eyes, was that of one who had known the thick of the conflict; scars of strong passions were visible; there was also, not yet relaxed, a certain dominant control of the firm mouth, partly hidden under the flowing gray beard.

“Paul,” murmured the dying lips. “Is that Paul?”

“Yes, father.” The young man’s voice was less steady than that of the older one.

John Warren’s wasted eyelids were lifted, as far as he could lift them, and there was silence, while father and son looked at each other. In the awfulness of the moment the veils of life were drawn away; even in this supreme hour the two, who had said so little and had felt so much, shrank from the exposure as their naked souls met face to face. It was only for an instant, for the sense of slipping, slipping, left no time for pause, and the shyness of a lifetime was broken.

“Paul,” came the broken voice, “take care of your mother.”

The young man knelt and laid his hand upon his father’s; despite a profound affection there had not been so much of a caress between these two for years.

“I will,” he answered, in a voice whose very strength betrayed its weakness.

“I — have n’t — always — made — out to be — myself,” came the faltering voice of the sick man; but his wife was on her knees by his side, sobbing, with her face buried in the bed-clothes.

“Oh yes, you have, you have!” she cried, with that tender mendacity with which we meet the failures of the dying and the dead.

The emotional strain of the situation was too much for the man who was finding his way to death’s door. His grim sense of humor had never left him in life; it did not leave him now.

“ Keep your — Uncle Peter here — as long — as you can stand it, and let — him talk — about, himself as — much as he — wants to.”

A gleam came into Paul’s eyes. These two had never yet seen the day when they could not smile together; they smiled together for the last time now, for a faint flicker passed over the dying man’s face and was reflected in the son’s.

“I will,” he promised, pressing his father’s hand, “and I will listen.”

The kneeling woman trembled with a little shiver of non-comprehension that had often come over her in listening to her husband and her son.

“Be a good boy,” the fading lips said, and there was a touch of pressure from the weak old hand. Paul Warren gave one great dry sob.

“And fight —fight Bevanne.”

“Oh, John,” moaned his horrified wife, lifting her face from the sheet that was wet with her tears, “not now! Don’t talk like that!”

A wave of color swept over the dying man’s face; the muscles of his arms swelled a little, and the veins of his forehead, so sunken a minute before, knotted for a moment almost in the old way; then the blood receded, leaving them more hollow than before.

“Yes, fight him, —watch out for him — and all his — brood. They are —slippery as rattlesnakes. I — wanted to — have it out with him — before I went.”

“But, John,” pleaded Mrs. Warren, “he is dead; he has been dead twenty years.”

Her husband’s eyes looked questioningly at her.

“ So he is, — I keep — forgetting. Look out — for the young one — then. Young rattlesnakes — are just as — poisonous — as old ones.”

A great sense of wonder swept over Paul Warren at this sudden revelation of hatred which had smouldered, unknown to him, in his father’s breast for all these years, and with it came envy of the nature that could hate in this strong way.

“Don’t think of such dreadful things now,” begged Emily Warren. “Do you know, do you understand, John, where you are ? That you are — dying ? ” The wavering voice broke into sobs.

“I know, Emily,” said the old man simply. “I am not afraid.”

“Are you sure?” she pleaded, — “I have sometimes been fearful, you are so irregular about going to church, — are you sure you believe in God?”

“Yes,” said John Warren grimly from his pillow. “Who would n’t — that had any sense ?”

Hardly knowing what he did, Paul Warren flung open the windows of the room. Somewhere, long ago, he had read of a people who set doors and windows wide that the souls of the dying might be set free to join the great procession of the dead, always sweeping, sweeping through the air. To the tensely strained ears it almost seemed as if, through the murmur of wind and of sea, he could hear the coming of that great train; and at the centre of his being was a bewildered sense of great doors opened wide, at whose threshold he paused, shrinking, unable to go farther. Suddenly, with a bound and a rush, a huge dark object came leaping into the room. Mrs. Warren screamed aloud in terror, and even Paul started, for his tear-dimmed eyes refused to do him service; but the dying man smiled feebly on his pillow.

“It’s — only—Robin,” he said, weakly lifting up a hand and groping blindly for the familiar touch. A minute later the great collie’s head was lying in it, the dog’s heart beating in quick throbs as he whimpered out his joy at finding him from whom he had so long been shut away. A broken rope at his throat showed how mighty were the bonds he could break for love of the master who lay dying.

“Take him away, Paul,” said Mrs. Warren, who stood trembling.

Paul shook his head; he could not do it while that look of satisfaction was on his father’s face. The candles flickered and sputtered; they, too, were burning low. The young man shaded his eyes with his hand, for the pain of looking had grown intolerable, and so they waited, at the ebbing of the tide.

A rough, bearded face appeared shortly after at the window, and a great voice whispered: —

“Is Robin here ? He’s broke loose.”

“Come and take him away,” said the mistress of the house.

Tiptoeing, the man entered the room and laid his hand on the dog’s collar. It was Andrew Lane the second, the farmer who had charge of the place.

“Come,Robin; come, Robin,”he said, gently pulling at the rope.

A low growl was the result, becoming louder and more menacing as the man held on. The dog’s head lay still in his master’s grasp, and into the animal’s eyes came a dangerous gleam, breaking their soft love-light. Andrew fell back, dropping the rope.

“Go, Robin,” begged the mistress.

The great beast did not stir.

“Go out, Robin,” said Paul Warren sternly; the dog only growled.

Then the sick man moved, and his breath came in quick gasps.

“Go, Robin,” he commanded, raising his head; then he fell back and died.

The dog slunk broken-heartedly out into the hall, obeying the last command he was ever sure was right; brushed, growling, past the doctor, who had come too late, and ran out into the darkness.

An hour later Paul Warren was again pacing the great dark hall, while subdued sounds came from his father’s chamber, where the last services were being done for the dead. Weeping, through the dusk came the old colored cook, Aunt Belinda, her hands full of red roses with their leaves damp with dew..

“Now, Mas’r Paul, you go ’long and rest, and don’t you take it so hard,” she said in her deep, rich voice. “I just goin’ in to lay dese by old Mas’r. He did n’t care nuffin fur ’em when he was alive, but I reckon he knows better now;” and she passed on in a glow of color to the death chamber.

A poignant sense of encompassing mystery, and of the life that was quick all about in the cool night air, shot through him as swift pain. Lifting his eyes now and then, as he walked, with his head bent and his hands clasped behind him, he saw a splendid white moth flutter in at the western door, and, flying uncertainly, float out toward the great stars in the east. The young man watched it with passionate question and wonder and grief written on his face, making it even more of an enigma than it had been before.

(To be continued.)