it’s pow’ful persuadin’, and you understand me? You follow me? Well, so long!”
He turned away quickly, and was presently lost among the trees. For an instant the embarrassed Madison thought of following him; but he was confronted by Mrs. McGee’s wicked eyes and smiling face between him and the door. Composing herself, however, with a simulation of perfect gravity she pointed to a chair.
“Sit down, Brother Wayne. If you’re going to convert me, it may take some time, you know, and you might as well make yourself comfortable. As for me, I’ll take the anxious bench.” She laughed with a certain girlishness, which he well remembered, and leaped to a sitting posture on the table with her hands on her knees, swinging her smart shoes backwards and forwards below it.
Madison looked at her in hopeless silence, with a pale, disturbed face and shining eyes.
“Or, if you want to talk as we used to talk, Mad, when we sat on the front steps at Angel’s and pa and ma went inside to give us a show, ye can hop up alongside o’ me.” She made a feint of gathering her skirts beside her.
“Safie!” broke out the unfortunate man, in a tone that seemed to increase in formal solemnity with his manifest agitation, “this is impossible. The laws of God that have joined you and this man”—
“Oh, it’s the prayer-meeting, is it?” said Safie, settling her skirts again, with affected resignation. “Go on.”
“Listen, Safie,” said Madison, turning despairingly towards her. “Let us for His sake, let us for the sake of our dear blessed past, talk together earnestly and prayerfully. Let us take this time to root out of our feeble hearts all yearnings that are not prompted by Him—yearnings that your union with this man makes impossible and sinful. Let us for the sake of the past take counsel of each other, even as brother and sister.”
“Sister McGee!” she interrupted mockingly. “It wasn’t as brother and sister you made love to me at Angel’s.”
“No! I loved you then, and would have made you my wife.”
“And you don’t love me any more,” she said, audaciously darting a wicked look into his eyes, “only because I didn’t marry you? And you think that Christian?”
“You know I love you as I have loved you always,” he said passionately.
“Hush!” she said mockingly; “suppose he should hear you.”
“He knows it!” said Madison bitterly. “I told him all!”
She stared at him fixedly.
“You have—told—him—that—you STILL love me?” she repeated slowly.
“Yes, or I wouldn’t be here now. It was due to him—to my own conscience.”
“And what did he say?”
“He insisted upon my coming, and, as God is my Judge and witness—he seemed satisfied and content.”
She drew her pretty lips together with a long whistle, and then leaped from the table. Her face was hard and her eyes were bright as she went to the window and looked out. He followed her timidly.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, sharply striking away his proffered hand. He turned with a flushed cheek and walked slowly towards the door. Her laugh stopped him.
“Come! I reckon that squeezin’ hands ain’t no part of your contract with Sandy?” she said, glancing down at her own. “Well, so you’re goin’?”
“I only wished to talk seriously and prayerfully with you for a few moments, Safie, and then—to see you no more.”
“And how would that suit him,” she said dryly, “if he wants your company here? Then, just because you can’t convert me and bring me to your ways of thinkin’ in one visit, I suppose you think it is Christian-like to run away like this! Or do you suppose that, if you turn tail now, he won’t believe that your Christian strength and Christian resignation is all humbug?”
Madison dropped into the chair, put his elbows on the table, and buried his face in his hands. She came a little nearer, and laid her hand lightly on his arm. He made a movement as if to take it, but she withdrew it impatiently.
“Come,” she said brusquely; “now you’re in for it you must play the game out. He trusts you; if he sees you can’t trust yourself, he’ll shoot you on sight. That don’t frighten you? Well, perhaps this will then! He’ll SAY your religion is a sham and you a hypocrite—and everybody will believe him. How do you like that, Brother Wayne? How will that help the Church? Come! You’re a pair of cranks together; but he’s got the whip-hand of you this time. All you can do is to keep up to his idea of you. Put a bold face on it, and come here as often as you can—the oftener the better; the sooner you’ll both get sick of each other—and of ME. That’s what you’re both after, ain’t it? Well! I can tell you now, you needn’t either of you be the least afraid of me.”
She walked away to the window again, not angrily, but smoothing down the folds of her bright print dress as if she were wiping her hands of her husband and his guest. Something like a very material and man-like sense of shame struggled up through his crust of religion. He stammered, “You don’t understand me, Safie.”
“Then talk of something I do understand,” she said pertly. “Tell me some news of Angel’s. Your brother was over there the other day. He made himself quite popular with the young ladies—so I hear from Mrs. Selvedge. You can tell me as we walk along the bank towards Sandy’s claim. It’s just as well that you should move on now, as it’s your FIRST call, and next time you can stop longer.” She went to the corner of the room, removed her smart slippers, and put on a pair of walking-shoes, tying them, with her foot on a chair, in a quiet disregard of her visitor’s presence; took a brown holland sunbonnet from the wall, clapped it over her browner hair and hanging braids, and tied it under her chin with apparently no sense of coquetry in the act—becoming though it was—and without glancing at him. Alas for Madison’s ethics! The torment of her worldly speech and youthful contempt was nothing to this tacit ignoring of the manhood of her lover—this silent acceptance of him as something even lower than her husband. He followed her with a burning cheek and a curious revolting of his whole nature that it is to be feared were scarcely Christian. The willows opened to let them pass and closed behind them.
An hour later Mrs. McGee returned to her leafy bower alone. She took off her sunbonnet, hung it on its nail on the wall, shook down her braids, took off her shoes, stained with the mud of her husband’s claim, and put on her slippers. Then she ascended to her eyrie in the little gallery, and gazed smilingly across the sunlit Bar. The two gaunt shadows of her husband and lover, linked like twins, were slowly passing along the river bank on their way to the eclipsing obscurity of the cottonwoods. Below her—almost at her very feet—the unconscious Arthur Wayne was pushing his work on the river bed, far out to the promontory. The sunlight fell upon his vivid scarlet shirt, his bared throat, and head clustering with perspiring curls. The same sunlight fell upon Mrs. McGee’s brown head too, and apparently put a wicked fancy inside it. She ran to her bedroom, and returned with a mirror from its wall, and, after some trials in getting the right angle, sent a searching reflection upon the spot where Arthur was at work.
For an instant a diamond flash played around him. Then he lifted his head and turned it curiously towards the crest above him. But the next moment he clapped his hands over his dazzled but now smiling eyes, as Mrs. McGee, secure in her leafy obscurity, fell back and laughed to herself, like a very schoolgirl.
It was
