Wild Youth | Page 4

be. It was only the
kindness of her nature expressing itself. Talking seemed like the
exercise of a foreign language to her, but her smiling was free and
unconstrained, and it belonged to all, without selection.
The Young Doctor, looking at her one day as she sat in a buggy while
her monster-man was inside the chemist's shop, said to himself:
"Sterilized! Absolutely, shamefully sterilized! But suppose she wakes
up suddenly out of that dream between life and death--what will
happen?"
He remembered that curious, sudden, delicate catch of his palm on the
day when they first shook hands at the railway-station, and to him it
was like the flutter of life in a thing which seemed dead. How often he
had noticed it in man and animal on the verge of extinction! He had not
mistaken that fluttering appeal of her fingers. He was young enough to
translate it into flattering terms of emotion, but he did not do so. He
was fancy-free himself, and the time would come when he would do a
tremendous thing where a woman was concerned, a woman in
something the same position as this poor girl; but that shaking, thrilling
thing was still far off from him. For this child he only felt the healer's

desire to heal.
He was one of those men who never force an issue; he never put
forward the hands of the clock. He felt that sooner or later Louise
Mazarine--he did not yet know her Christian name--would command
his help, as so many had done in that prairie country, and not
necessarily for relief of physical pain or the curing of disease. He had
helped as many men and women mentally and morally as physically;
the spirit of healing was behind everything he did. His world
recognized it, and that was why he was never known by his name in all
the district--he was only admiringly called "The Young Doctor."
He had never been to Tralee since the Mazarines had arrived, though he
had passed it often and had sometimes seen Louise in the garden with
her dog, her black cat and her bright canary. The combination of the cat
and the canary did not seem incongruous where she was concerned; it
was as though something in her passionless self neutralized even the
antagonisms of natural history. She had made the gloomy black cat and
the light- hearted canary to be friends. Perhaps that came from an
everlasting patience which her life had bred in her; perhaps it was the
powerful gift of one in touch with the remote, primitive things.
The Young Doctor had also seen her in the paddock with the horses,
bare- headed, lithe and so girlishly slim, with none of the unmistakable
if elusive lines belonging to the maturity which marriage brings. He
had taken off his hat to her in the distance, but she had never waved a
hand in reply. She only stood and gazed at him, and her look followed
him long after he passed by. He knew well that in the gaze was nothing
of the interest which a woman feels in a man; it was the look of one
chained to a rock, who sees a Samaritan in the cheerless distance.
In the daily round of her life she was always busy; not restlessly, but
constantly, and always silently, busy. She was even more silent than
her laconic half-breed hired woman, Rada. There was no talk with her
gloating husband which was not monosyllabic. Her canary sang, but no
music ever broke from her own lips. She murmured over her lovely
yellow companion; she kissed it, pleaded with it for more song, but the
only music at her own lips was the occasional music of her voice; and it

had a colourless quality which, though gentle, had none of the
eloquence and warmth of youth.
In form and feature she was one made for emotion and demonstration,
and the passionate play of the innocent enterprises of wild youth; but
there was nothing of that in her. Gray age had drunk her life and had
given her nothing in return--neither companionship nor sympathy nor
understanding; only the hunger of a coarse manhood. Her obedience to
the supreme will of her jealous jailer gave no ground for scolding or
reproach, and that saved her much. She was even quietly cheerful, but it
was only the pale reflection of a lost youth which would have been
buoyant and gallant, gay and glad, had it been given the natural thing in
the natural world.
There came a day, however, when the long, unchanging routine, gray
with prison grayness, was broken; when the round of household duties
and the prison discipline were interrupted. It was as sudden as a storm
in the tropics, as final