The Naulahka | Page 3

you can't rest. You'll find it all in the
Sunday papers. You want to stay right where you are, young lady!'
She stopped a moment in the road they were following back to Topaz
and glanced at his face in the moonlight. He took her hand, and, for all
his masterfulness, awaited her word with parted lips.
'You're a good man, Nick, but,' she drooped her eyes, 'I'm going to sail
on the 31st for Calcutta.'

II
Beware the man who's crossed in love, For pent-up steam must find its
vent; Step back when he is on the move, And lend him all the
Continent. The Buck and the Saw.
TO sail from New York on the 31st she must leave Topaz by the 27th
at latest. It was now the 15th. Tarvin made the most of the intervening
time. He called on her at her home every evening, and argued it out
with her.
Kate listened with the gentlest willingness to be convinced, but with a
dread firmness round the corners of her mouth, and with a sad wish to
be good to him, if she could, battling in her eyes with a sadder
helplessness.
'I'm called!' she cried. 'I'm called. I can't get away from it. I can't help
listening. I can't help going.'
And, as she told him, grieving, how the cry of her sisters out of that
dim misery, that was yet so distinct, tugged at her heart--how the
useless horror and torture of their lives called on her by night and by
day, Tarvin could not refuse to respect the solemnly felt need that drew
her from him. He could not help begging her in every accent he knew
not to hearken to it, but the painful pull of the cry she heard was not a
strange or incredible thing to his own generous heart. He only urged
hotly that there were other cries, and that there were other people to
attend to this one. He, too, had a need, the need for her; and she another,
if she would stop a moment to listen to it. They needed each other; that
was the supreme need. The women in India could wait; they would go
over and look them up later, when the Three C.'s had come to Topaz,
and he had made his pile. Meanwhile there was happiness; meanwhile
there was love! He was ingenious, he was deeply in love, he knew what
he wanted, and he found the most persuasive language for making it
seem to be what she wanted in disguise. Kate had to strengthen her
resolution often in the intervals between his visits. She could not say

much in reply. She had no such gift of communicating herself as Tarvin.
Hers was the still, deep, voiceless nature that can only feel and act.
She had the kind of pluck and the capacity for silent endurance which
goes with such natures, or she must often have faltered and turned back
from the resolve which had come upon her in the schoolgarden that
spring day, in the two years that followed it. Her parents were the first
obstacle. They refused outright to allow her to study medicine. She had
wished to be both physician and nurse, believing that in India she
would find use for both callings; but since she could follow only one,
she was content to enrol herself as a student at a New York
training-school for nurses, and this her parents suffered in the
bewilderment of finding that they had forgotten how to oppose her
gently resolute will through the lifelong habit of yielding to it.
Her ideas had made her mother wish, when she explained them to her,
that she had let her grow up wild, as she had once seemed certain to do.
She was even sorry that the child's father had at last found something to
do away from the awful railroad. The railroad now ran two ways from
Topaz; Kate had returned from school to find the track stretching a
hundred miles to the westward, and her family still there. This time the
boom had overtaken them before they could get away. Her father had
bought city lots in the acre form and was too rich to move. He had
given up his calling and had gone into politics.
Sheriff's love for his daughter was qualified by his general flatness; but
it was the clinging affection not uncommon with shallow minds, and he
had the habit of indulgence toward her which is the portion of an only
child. He was accustomed to say that 'what she did was about right,' he
guessed, and he was usually content to let it go at that. He was anxious
now that his riches should do her some good, and Kate had