Mrs. Wilson Woodrow - The Black Pearl

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When she awoke it was to find herself alone. Seagreave had left, but she
could hear him moving about in the next room, near at hand if she needed
him. He was evidently bringing in some logs for the fire.

"As if nothing had happened," she muttered, "and things will go on just
the same. We shall eat; we shall sleep. How can it be?"

She got up and began to walk up and down the room. She was young, she
was strong, and the shock of those few moments of wonder and horror had
almost worn off. Her active brain was alert and normal again, and she
thought deeply as she walked to and fro, considering all possible phases
of her present situation.

Then, ceasing to pace back and forth, she leaned against the window and
looked out. The strange, new world lay before her, an earth bereft of
its familiar forests, and which must send forth from its teeming heart a
new growth of tender, springtime shoots to cover its nakedness. And as
she gazed the sun burst through the gray clouds and poured down upon the
wide, bare hillside an unbroken flood of golden splendor.

Hearing a slight sound behind her, she turned quickly. Seagreave had
entered and, approaching the window, stood looking at the white sloping
plain without.

"I couldn't chop any more wood," he said. "It seemed too commonplace
after this thing that we have seen. But you--how are you?"

"I'm all right," she returned. But she did not meet his eyes; her black
lashes lay long on her cheek; her cheek burned. She realized in a
confused way that there was some change in their relative positions. She
had always felt because of his reticence, his withdrawal into self, his
diffidence in approaching her, easily mistress of any situation which
might arise between them; but since those moments when they two had
gazed upon the avalanche, and she in her terror had flung herself upon
his breast, and had wrapped her arms about him and buried her face in
his shoulder, he had assumed not only the tone but the manner of
authority and had adopted again a natural habit of command, dropped or
laid aside from indifference or inertia, but instinctively resumed when
through some powerful feeling he became again his normal self, alive and
alert, vigorous and enthusiastic. It was as if he had suddenly awakened
to a whole world of new possibilities and new opportunities.

Beneath his long, steady gaze her own eyelids fluttered and fell; her
cheeks flushed a deeper rose; her heart beat madly. She was furious at
herself for these revealing weaknesses, and yet she, too, was conscious
of new, undreamed-of possibilities, sweet, poignantly sweet.

"Pearl," his voice was low, shaken by the emotion which had overtaken
both of them, "do you know that, as far as you and I are concerned, we
are the only living human beings in all our world?"

She looked at him and, unknown to herself, her face still held its glow
of rapture; her eyes were pools of love.

Her little rill of laughter was broken and shaken as falling water. "The
sheriff didn't get us, and yet we're prisoners, prisoners of the snow."

"And you, my jailer, will you be kind to me?" But there was nothing
pleading in his tone. It rang instead with exultant triumph.

"Why, Pearl"--a virile note of power as if some long-dreamed-of mastery
were his at last swelled like a diapason through his voice--"we're in
for a thaw, a big thaw, but it will take time to melt down that mountain
out there in the crevasse; and you and I are here--alone--for a
fortnight, at least a fortnight." He emphasized the words, lingering
over them as if they afforded him delight.

"A fortnight! Here! Alone with you!" she cried. "Never, never. There
must be a way--" she murmured confusedly and ran to the window to hide
her agitation and embarrassment, pulling the curtain hastily aside and
looking out unseeingly over the hills. She was trembling from head to
foot.

The wind had risen and was wailing and shrieking over the bare hill and
the air was dim with flying snow; but the spring that hours before had
kissed her cheek and touched her lips like a song rose now in Pearl's
heart. She pressed her tightly clasped hands against her breast and
closed her eyes. A new world! And she and Harry were in it together--and
alone.

CHAPTER XIV

The dawns rose, the suns set, after the avalanche as before, and Pearl
and Seagreave, alone in the cabin, isolated from the world of human
beings, took up their lives together, together and yet apart, in the
great, encompassing silence of this white and winter-locked world.

Winter-locked, yes, but all the mighty, unseen forces of Nature were set
toward spring. Nothing could stop or retard them now. Under sullen,
lowering skies; beneath the blasts which swept down from the peaks; in
spite of flying snow; unseen, unsuspected, in the darkness and stillness
and warmth of the earth, the transformation was going on. The tender,
young banners of green were almost ready for the decking of the trees,
and almost completed was the weaving of pink and blue and lavender
carpets of wild flowers for the hillsides.

And the spring that had arisen glorious in Pearl's heart when she had
realized that she and Harry were prisoners of the avalanche was still
resurgent. For the first day or two of their isolation she lived,
breathed, moved in the splendor of her heart's dream. It encompassed her
with the warmth and radiance of a flood of sunshine.

In spite of her protests and appeals, Seagreave would not permit her to
help much with the household tasks, but busied himself almost constantly
with them, maintaining with a sort of methodical pleasure the inspired
order of his cabin. It is possible that he gave to each task a more
exhaustive and undeviating attention than even he considered necessary,
and this to cover the sense of embarrassment he felt in adapting himself
not only to this pervasive, feminine presence, but to the exigencies of
an unwonted companionship hedged about with restrictions.

He often felt as if he were entertaining a bird of brilliant tropical
plumage in his cabin, as if it had flown thither from glowing southern
lands and brought with it sensuous memories of color and fragrance, and
wafts of sandalwood.

Sometimes he and Pearl walked about on the barren hillside, constantly
washed more bare of snow by the daily rains which had begun to fall, and
sometimes he read aloud to her a little, but in spite of Pearl's
intelligence she had never cared much for books. She craved no record of
another's emotions and struggles and passions. No life at second hand
for her. She was absorbed in the living.

But if in the day there were many tasks to be done, and Harry could
occupy more or less time in the hewing of wood and carrying of water,
and all of the practical duties which that phrase may stand for, there
were long evenings when he and Pearl sat in the firelight, their speech
and their silence alike punctuated by the wail of the mountain wind
about the cabin and the singing of the burning logs upon the hearth.

And it was during those evening hours that Seagreave felt most the
shyness which her constant presence induced in him. By day he busied
himself in securing her comfort, but by night he was tormented by his
own chivalrous and fastidious thought of her, by his desire to reassure
her mind, without words, if possible, as to the consequences of their
isolation.

But sometimes after he had lighted her candle and she had said
good-night, and had entered the little room where she slept, he would
either sit beside the glowing embers or else build up afresh the great
fire which was never permitted to die out night or day during the winter
months, his thoughts full of her, dwelling on her, clinging to the
memories of the day.

Jose's personality had been neither ubiquitous nor dominating. Seagreave
had noticed him no more about the cabin than he had the little mountain
brook which purled its way down the hill; but now his housemate was
feminine, and with every passing hour he was more conscious of it. At
night, after Pearl had gone to bed, he felt her presence as definitely
as though she were still there. Some quality of her individuality
lingered and haunted the room and haunted his thoughts as the sweet,
unfamiliar odor of an exotic blossom permeates the atmosphere and
remains, even when the flower is gone.

And as for Pearl, whether she walked on the barren hillsides or dreamed
by the fire, or stood at the window watching Harry chop wood or carry
water from the rushing mountain brook, her mind held but one thought,
her heart but one image--him.

The studious abstraction, the ordered calm which characterized
Seagreave's cabin, made fragrant by burning pine logs and fresh with the
cold winds from the mountain tops, had altered by imperceptible and
subtle gradations until the atmosphere was now strangely electrical,
throbbing with vital life, glowing with warmth and color. In outer
semblance nothing was changed, no more than was the appearance of the
world outside, and yet beneath the surface of the lives in the cabin, as
beneath the surface of the earth without, all the mighty forces of
Nature were bent to one end.

Without, the spring thaws which were to melt down the mountain of snow
in the ravine below were no longer presaged, but at hand. The rain fell
for hours each day, but the dull and weeping skies, the heavy air,
oppressed Seagreave's spirits and made him now sad and listless, but for
the most part curiously restless.

Strive as he would, he could not escape nor ignore it, this atmosphere
of the exotic which filled his cabin, the atmosphere of Pearl's beauty
and magnetism and of her love for him. He did not recognize it as that.
He only felt it as some strange, disturbing element which, while it
troubled his thought, yet claimed it. His growing love for her filled
him with a sort of terror. It seemed to him a mounting tide which would
sweep him, he knew not whither, and with all the strength of his nature
he struggled to hold to the resolution he had made the first day they
were alone in the cabin, not to press his love upon her until she had
left the shelter of his roof and was back again with her father.

One evening the two sat in the cabin together, as usual, Seagreave on
one side of the fire reading--that is, his eyes were upon the book and
he seemed apparently absorbed in its contents--but in reality his entire
thought was focused upon Pearl, who sat opposite him in a low chair, her
hands clasped idly in her lap, and he struggled desperately to maintain
his attitude of friendly comradeship when he addressed her.

The leaping of the flames on the hearth made quaint arabesques of shadow
on the rough walls and the wind sighed and sobbed in the chimney. Thus
they sat for an hour or two in silence and then Seagreave lifted his
eyes and stole one of his swift and frequent glances at Pearl. Something
he saw riveted his attention and he continued to gaze, forgetful of his
book, of his past resolutions, of anything in the world but her.

She was just loosening the cord which bound the throat of a small black
leather bag, and while he watched her she poured its contents into her
lap and sat bending over a handful of loose and sparkling jewels. She
was not aware of his scrutiny, but sat in complete absorption, her dark,
shining head bent over them, lifting them, turning them this way and
that to catch the firelight, letting them trickle through her long,
brown fingers.

There, sparkling in the fire-glow, was the desire of the world, the
white, streaming flame of diamonds, the heart's blood of rubies, and
sapphires--the blue of the sea and the sky--all their life and radiance
imprisoned in a dew-drop.

"How beautiful they are!" he cried involuntarily, but what he really
meant was, "How beautiful you are!"

She started and looked up at him in surprise. "Yes, they are," she said.
"I have been gathering them for a long time. There are only a few, but
every one is flawless."

"I never considered jewels before." He bent forward the better to see
them. "I have often seen women wear them, but I just regarded them as a
part of their decoration. Yet I can understand now why you love them.
They are very beautiful, unset that way." He looked at her deeply. "But
I believe it is for some reason deeper than that that they have a
fascination for you. You are like them."

She let them fall like drops of rainbow water through her fingers; then
she lifted her lashes. "Am I hard and cold like them?" She sent darting
and dazzling full in his eyes her baffling, heart-shivering smile.

He did not answer at once, and she, still gazing at him, saw that he
paled visibly, every tinge of color receding from his face; his eyes,
deep and dark, held hers, as if reading her soul and demanding that she
reveal the strange secrets of her nature.

The forces of life ready to burst through the harsh crust of the earth
without and express themselves in the innocent glory of flower and grass
and tender, green leaves, and the sound of birds, were now seeking
expression through denser and more complex human avenues. All the love,
all the longing which Seagreave had so sternly suppressed during these
days he and Pearl had spent together, rose in his heart and threatened
to sweep away in a mighty tide of elemental impulses all of those
resolutions of restraint to which he had clung so hardly.

He arose and leaned his arm on the mantel-piece, still gazing at her as
if he could never withdraw his eyes. "You are so--so beautiful," he
stammered, scarcely knowing what he said. "The world will claim you. You
have so much to give it and all your nature, all your heart turns to it.
You will soon forget this hut in the mountains, and--and all that it has
meant." He buried his head in his arms.

She, too, rose and laid the handful of her jewels on the table without
another glance at them. "These mountains!" She threw wide her arms and
drew a long, ecstatic breath. She came near to him and touched his arm.
"I hated them once, I love them now." She smiled up at him, her darkly
slumbrous, scarlet-lipped smile.

He leaned toward her as if to clasp her close, but the vows he had sworn
to himself a thousand times since she had been in his cabin alone with
him still held him. Slowly he drew back and with all the strength of his
nature fought for self-control. He called upon every force of his will,
and in that supreme moment his face hardened to the appearance of a
sculptured mask; all of its finely-drawn outlines seemed set in stone.

She turned angry shoulders to him and stirred the stones on the table
with impatient fingers until they rolled about, flashing darts of light.
Symbols of power, of material and deadening splendor; eternal
accompaniments of imperial magnificence! The sapphires sang triumph, the
diamonds conquest, the rubies passionate and fulfilled love.

"They are what you really care for." He spoke huskily; his voice sounded
thick and uncertain in his ears. "That and--and your wonderful dancing,
and applause--and success and money. It's natural that you should--but
it all makes me realize--clearly, that I can't even try to force myself
into your life. There's no place for me. Even--even if you were
kind--you sometimes seem to--to--to suggest that you would be--I'd be
just a useless cog, soon to be dropped. It's all complete without me.
But, for God's sake, I'm begging you, I'm begging you, Pearl, not to be
kind to me for the rest of the time that we're here together."

"And what about me?" she flashed. "You've thought everything out from
your own side, and you've just been telling it. Don't you think I've got
a side, too? I guess so."

He looked at her in surprise, the emotion that had changed and broken
his expression fading into wonderment and puzzle.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Kiss me, and I'll show you," she said audaciously. All the allurement,
the softness and sweetness of the south was in her mouth and eyes.

"How can we go on like this?" His voice was a mere broken whisper. He
yearned to her, leaned toward her, and yet refrained from holding her.

"Like _this_," she murmured, and threw her arms about him and laid her
head on his heart, her face upturned to his.

"I told you"--so close was she held that she scarcely knew that she was
breathing--"I told you--that if I once held you in my arms I'd never let
you go."

"You may have told yourself; you never told me before. But I'm content."

"Content! That's no word for this," he cried between kisses. The
mounting tide he had feared had become a mighty torrent sweeping away
all his carefully built up mental barriers, and with that obliterating
flood came a sense of power and freedom. All the youth in his heart rose
and claimed its share of life and love and happiness.

"Let me go," she said at last, and drew away from him, flushed as a dawn
and rapturous as a sunrise.

"No, never again," and stretched out his arms, but she slipped behind
the table, putting it between them. "Sit down," she commanded, "and
build up the fire. I want to talk, talk a long time, all night maybe."

"I hope so," he said ardently, and, obeying her, stooped to place fresh
logs on the embers. "But what is there to talk about? We've said and
will continue to say all there is in the world worth saying. I love you.
Do you love me?"

"Maybe you won't want to say that after you've heard me." She had
leaned forward, her arms on her knees, her eyes on the flames which
leaped from dry twig to dry twig of the burning logs and on the shower
of sparks which every minute or so swept up the chimney.

"You hit it off pretty well when you said that all I really cared for
was money and jewels and my dancing and the big audiences and all that."
Her eyes had narrowed so that the gleaming light that shone through her
lashes was like a mere line of fire. "You see, I got to play the game. I
got to. Nothing but winning and winning big ever's going to suit me. I
saw that when I was awful young. I sort of looked out on life and it
seemed to me that most people spent their lives like flies, flying
around a while without any purpose, trying to buzz in the sun if they
could, and by and by dropping off the window pane."

"Nothing but winning will suit you," he said drearily. "You are only
repeating what I told you." All the life, the passion had gone out of
his voice. "And I'm no prize, heaven knows!"

"I ain't through yet," she said. "I never did talk much. I guess I'm
going to talk more to-night than I ever talked in my life, but I always
saw everything that was going on around me, and it didn't take me long
to make out that all you'll get in life is a kick and a crust if you
haven't got some kind of power in your hands."

"God, you're hard, hard as iron!" The room rang with the echoes of his
mirthless laughter. "Five, three minutes ago, you were in my arms, soft,
yielding, trembling, giving me back kiss for kiss, and now you sit
there expounding your merciless philosophy."

"It ain't me that's merciless," she returned, apparently unmoved, "it's
life. You think my dancing's great, so does everybody; so it is. Well,
it didn't grow. I made it." Here she lifted her head with pride, and
folded her arms on her chest. "Maybe you don't think it took some
training. Maybe you don't think it took some will and grit when I was a
little kid to keep right on at my exercises when I ached so bad that the
tears would run down my cheeks all the time I was at them. My mother
knew that you had to begin young and keep at 'em all the time, but mom
never would have had the nerve to keep me to it. She used often to cry
with me.

"When I was a girl I'd liked to have had a good time, just in that
careless way like other girls, but I gave that up, too, so's I could
work at my dancing. When I'd get tired and blue I'd look at the stones
I'd begun to collect with the money I'd earned. I'm hard, yes, I guess
you're right. I guess you got to have a streak of hardness in you to be
one of the biggest dancers in the world, or to be the biggest anything,
but"--here she ran across the room and was down on her knees beside his
chair--"I'm not hard any longer. Those jewels there," pointing to the
table behind her, "they don't mean a thing to me any longer, nor my
dancing, either, nor money, nor applause, nor anything in the world but
you."

He shrank away from her as if he feared the subduing magnetism of her
touch. "The useless cog to drop away when you get tired of him! I told
you your life was all rounded and complete."

"It's not," she cried passionately, "without love. Without your love.
I've got it and you can't take it away from me."

He brushed the wing of hair back from his pallid face. "My love!" His
voice seemed to drip the bitterness of gall. "Where in heaven's name is
there any place for it?"

"There isn't much room for anything else," she returned, "and that's the
truth. I've told you that all those things that you say make my life
complete, don't mean that," she snapped her long fingers, "not that to
me any more. I've told you that I'd give them all up for you if you
asked me, but," and here she swept to her feet, as if upborne by a rush
of earnestness so intense and deeply felt that it was in itself a
passion, "but I'll give 'em up, for it's a lot to give, for the man I
know you are and--and not for the man that's been shirking life."

Since the first moments after she had begun to voice her experiences,
and what he called her merciless philosophy, he had crumpled down in his
chair, and when she had sprung up, he had risen perfunctorily and
wearily to his feet, but at her last words he had straightened up as if
involuntarily every muscle grew tense, an outward and visible indication
of his mental attitude. Inherited and traditional pride was in the
haughty and surprised uplift of his head; a bright flush had risen on
his cheek and his eyes sparkled with a thousand wounded and angry
reflections.

Whether or not she had intended to produce this effect by her words,
she was undaunted by it, and went on: "Jose tells me that you got a big
place in England, just waiting for you to come and claim it, and you
quit it and everything there because a girl turned you down. It was sure
a baby act."

"I--" he began to interrupt her. There were few men who would have cared
to ignore that chilled steel quality of Seagreave's voice or, for the
matter of that, the chilled steel look on his face.

But there were certain emotions the Pearl had never known, and they
included remorse and fear. "I ain't finished yet," the gesture with
which she imposed his silence held her accustomed languor. "I got to say
that the man--that's you--that fought all through the Boer war was no
shirker, and the man who did some of the things you did in India--you
got some kind of a medal, didn't you?--what was it Jose called
you?--soldier of fortune--well, you weren't a quitter, anyway."

She stretched out her arms to him and smiled, her compelling
heart-shattering smile. Ardor enveloped her like an aura; the beauty and
color of her were like fragrance on the air. "That's the kind of man I
want to marry, Harry, not a man that's willing to live outside of life
and work, and stay dead and buried here in these mountains."

He did not bend to her by an inch. Her smiles and her ardor splintered
against chilled steel and fell unheeded. "Is there anything else?" he
asked, after a slight interval of silence, during which he had the
appearance of waiting with a pronounced and punctilious courtesy for
further words from her.

She made no answer, merely continued to look at him, but he, apparently
unmindful and indifferent to that gaze, lifted his book from the table
beside him and, still standing, because she did so, began to read.

For a moment or two she seemed dazed and then, with trembling fingers,
she gathered up her jewels and placed them in the little black bag.

This task accomplished, she started with all the scornful grace, the
indifferent languor of a Spanish duchess to sweep from the room, but in
passing him and noting him still absorbed in his book, her hot blood
flushed her cheek, her eyes glittered with angry fire. Her slight pause
caused him to look up and, seeing the anger on her face, he smiled
amusedly, insufferably. The next second she sprang at him like a cat and
slapped him across his insolently smiling face, and then flung Spanish
oaths at him with such force and heat that they seemed to splutter in
falling upon the chill of the air. Then she flashed from the room.

But the maddening smile still lingered on his lips as he bent to pick up
the book her blow had sent flying to the floor. And, still smiling, he
stood for a moment caressing the white dents her fingers had left on his
cheek. Finally he replenished the fire, filled and lighted his pipe and,
drawing his chair near to the hearth, sat, thinking, thinking, the
greater part of the night.

Pearl was out early the next morning, and walked halfway down the hill.
When she returned to the cabin she found Seagreave sitting in his chair
by the hearth as if he had not moved during the night; his haggard gaze
was fixed on the dead ashes of the fire. Without speaking to him, Pearl
stooped down and, with some paper and bits of wood, began to build up a
blaze again.

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