Chapter XII: The Master Reveller

"Notely! You will be leading Fluke to go wrong, Notely. He takes no interest at home or in the fishing since you and those pleasure-men you have with you have been keeping open house at the Neck. When he comes home he has been wild and drinking, and is moody. It is a week since you have been away from your home and wife with your yacht anchored here off shore, hunting and cruising, and such times at the old Garrison place at night--it is the talk!"

Notely laughed and rose. Vesty had been standing looking down at him earnestly, where he sat in her doorway: she held her baby asleep on one strong arm, its face against her neck.

Notely turned his own face away a little, jingling the free coin in his pockets. "Why, I have been making money on my own account, Mrs. Gurdon Rafe," he cried gayly, "since I opened the quarry. And no man, nor no woman either, now says to me, Do this or do that, go here or go there. From all accounts, moreover, my wife and mother are enjoying themselves extremely well as ever during my absence. As for Fluke Rafe, he is a good fellow, but he was always wild as a hawk."

"O Notely! if you would only help such men, as you might, instead of being as wild as a hawk with them!"

"It takes a hawk to catch a hawk, my dear: all the ministers will tell you that."

"Is that what you are doing it for?"

"Well, no; since you are a Basin, and only truth avails, there has been hitherto no deep moral design in my merry orgies at the Neck. But to-night, Vesty, is my grand affair; to be hallowed by the presence of all the Basins: my feast and ball to them, you know--my oldest and best friends. And you--why, Vesty," he went on, in another tone, "you remember we had always a dance a week at the Basin, and you and I led them off together. Come, then, for the sake of old times and the feeling of the rest, though you may enjoy it yourself no more."

He spoke with reckless meaning, and his eyes, that had such fatal power of expression in them, looked deep into hers. She paled; the baby threw up a sleeping hand against her face.

"There is another thing, Notely," she said. "Gurdon does not like it that you come here for an hour or more every day to sit and talk alone with me while they are at the fishing. He is not much to suspect, and he was always fond of you and trusted you; but it is not doing right by Gurdon."

Her eyes looked infinitely sorrowful into his; blushes, like pain, dyed her cheeks.

"O Vesty, my pure one!--then tell me that you love me still--love me as you used to do--and I'll go away content, and not come any more. Touch my head as you used to do; kiss me once more, with those words, and----"

The baby's white, sleeping palm pressed hard against the mother's burning cheek.

"Such words must not be any more, Notely. Go away and be the good, powerful man God meant you to be, and I shall love you more than I ever did in my life."

"Saint Vesta! I have lost you!" said Notely: his voice shook with passion; the thin, strong hand that he put up, as if shading his eyes, hid wild and angry tears.

"I have been faithfully engaged in the career to which you so tenderly and considerately dedicated me," he went on. "What will you have? I worked last winter like a dog; nothing is easy won, I think: but there is no young man in this State who has been so flattered with public notice as I. I am making my own money--no young man more shrewdly, they say. What will you have? I have growing fame, prosperity, an accomplished society woman for my wife. Was not that what you wished for me?" His words stung.

Vesty had her dim look; she had turned cold; her speech groped pitifully. "But I think I saw--I think I understood a little, after all--because I loved you--what are you doing it _for_, Notely?"

"Ah, there, indeed!--what for? I have lost my object, you know, Saint Vesta. For fame and frolic and the devil, I suppose--since we are talking face to face with an immortal Basin--and to fill up the time generally."

"I am glad that I did what I did," cried the poor girl, her tongue touched with sudden fire, as if from outside herself; "you loved me a little, but you did not love me much!"

"Ah!" he caught his breath, his deep eyes thrilled her.

"If you had loved me much--such a man as to be true to me through hard work and time and sorrow and all--then you could not have borne to be any less a man, Notely Garrison, though you lost me, or whatever you lost. But if anything could turn you from _that_, then time and trial and all would have turned you, sooner or later, to be unkind and untrue to me. I know it. Before God, I know it! You loved me a little, but you did not love me much!"

"I am glad, for your sake and for my own," she said; "I am glad that I did not marry you."

Then, as the fire flamed out, tears of despair rushed to her eyes, because he looked as though she had hurt him so--his face more like a beautiful cameo than ever, pure and sharp; he who was so debonair and generous with them all, genial toward them always, and familiar with the simplest and poorest. She longed impulsively to take him to her heart, to give him with yearning tenderness the one caress he had pleaded for: but, still seeing dimly where he was blind, she would not.

Notely watched that struggle, saw the impulse fade upon her face into a white resolve; watched her keenly meanwhile with tumultuous hope.

"Vesty, once when we were little more than children, we were playing on Ladle Rock and I fell. You did not leave me, frightened; insensible as I was, you bathed my face and stayed by me. When I came to myself my head was in your lap. You had on a brown cotton frock, made in an old-womanish grave fashion, and you were looking down at me. From that moment all my life changed--who can explain it? I was a child in my feeling toward you no longer, with childish thoughts. I loved you--loved you as I love you now--but you have robbed me of my life."

"No," she said. That sad fire from outside herself came back to her. "You have only been denied one pleasure the more that you wanted, and that would not have been so dear to you long if you had not lost it. Life is above that, you used to tell me, but you have forgotten."

"Rather, I have grown wiser," he said, but for the instant he set his clear, fine face away from her. "It is a distorted notion that our existence here is for cold denial, from however pure an imagination. It is better to run with life, to follow joyfully the great trend of nature."

He looked at her: her staid, unreproachful eyes, her calm and holy face, smote him.

"My pleasure-friends, as you call them, say that the Basins are simple. That is a superficial observation;" he laughed with despair, and proceeded to fill his pipe. "The Basins are like a rock."

"Notely," said she very slowly then, "your face is dear to me as this little one upon my breast; it eats into my heart."

All life's sorrow looked through her, and a faith, a purpose, stronger than life. Notely cast his misery from him with a sigh; the game was over.

"Saint Vesta," said he simply, "I have lost you; that is the sad fact, and I accept it. Still, since you care for me some, I shall be a little merry. Come to my ball--Gurdon promised me you would both come."