The Indian on the Trail | Page 3

time I come in sight of him crouched on the trail!"
"Do you know," complained her lover, "that you haven't told me once to-day?"
"Well--I do."
"How much?"
"Oh--a little!"
"A little will not do!"
"Then--a great deal."
"I want all--all!"
Her eyes wandered towards the Indian on the trail, and the bow of her mouth was bent in a tantalizing curve.
"I have told you I love you. Why doesn't that satisfy you?"
"It isn't enough!"
"Perhaps I can't satisfy you. I love you all I can."
"All you can?"
"Yes. Maybe I can't love you as much as you want me to. I am shallow!"
"For God's sake, don't say you are shallow! There is deep under deep in you! I couldn't have staked my life on you, I couldn't have loved you, if there hadn't been! Say I have only touched the surface yet, but don't say you are shallow!"
The girl shook her head.
"There isn't enough of me. Do you know," she exclaimed, whimsically, "that's the Indian on the trail! You'll never feel quite sure of me, will you?"
Maurice's lips moved. "You are my own!"
She kept him at bay with her eyes, though they filled slowly with tears.
"I ama child of the devil!" exclaimed Lily, with vehemence. "I give people trouble and make them suffer!"
"She classes me with 'people'!" Maurice thought. He said, "Have I ever blamed you for anything?"
"No."
"Then don't blame yourself. I will simply take what you can give me. That is all I could take. Forgive me for loving you too much. I will try to love you less."
"No," the girl demurred. "I don't want you to do that."
"I am very unreasonable," he said, humbly. "But the rest of the world is a shadow. You are my one reality. There is nothing in the universe but you."
She brushed her eyes fiercely. "I mustn't cry. I'll have to explain it if I do, and the lids will be red all day."
The man felt internally seared, as by burning lava, with the conviction that he had staked his all late in life on what could never be really his. She would diffuse herself through many. He was concentrated in her. His passion had its lips burned shut.
"I am Providence's favorite bag-holder," was his bitter thought. "The game is never for me."
"Good-bye," said Lily.
"Good-bye," said Maurice.
"Are you coming into the casino to-night?"
"If you will be there."
"I have promised a lot of dances. Good-bye. Go back and work."
"Yes, I must work," said Maurice.
She gave him a defiant, radiant smile, and ran towards the Indian on the trail. He turned in the opposite direction, and tramped the woods until nightfall.
At first he mocked himself. "Oh yes, she loves me! I'm glad, at any rate, that she loves me! There will be enough to moisten my lips with; and if I thirst for an ocean that is not her fault."
Why had a woman been made who could inspire such passion without returning it? He reminded himself that she was of a later, a gayer, lighter, less strenuous generation than his own. Thousands of men had waded blood for a principle and a lost cause in his day. In hers the gigantic republic stood up a menace to nations. The struggle for existence was over before she was born. Yet women seemed more in earnest now than ever before. He said to himself, "I have always picked out natures as fatal to me as a death-warrant, and fastened my life to them."
The thought stabbed him that perhaps his wife, whom he had believed satisfied, had carried such hopeless anguish as he now carried. Tardy remorse for what he could not help gave him the feeling of a murderer. And since he knew himself how little may be given under the bond of marriage, he could not look forward and say, "My love will yet be mine!"
He would, indeed, have society on his side; and children--he drew his breath hard at that. Her ways with children were divine. He had often watched her instinctive mothering of, and drawing them around her. And it should be much to him that he might look at and, touch her. There was life in her mere presence.
He felt the curse of the artistic temperament, which creates in man the exquisite sensitiveness of woman.
Taking the longest and hardest path home around the eastern beach, Maurice turned once on impulse, parted a screen of birches, and stepped into an amphitheatre of the cliff, moss-clothed and cedar-walled. It sloped downward in three terraces. A balcony or high parapet of stone hung on one side, a rock low and broad stood in the centre, and an unmistakable chair of rock, cushioned with vividly green-branched moss, waited an occupant. Maurice sat down, wondering if any other human being, perplexed and tortured, had ever domiciled there for a brief time. Slim alder-trees and maples were clasped