Read Ebook: The Brimming Cup by Fisher Dorothy Canfield

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Ebook has 1866 lines and 137015 words, and 38 pages

He asked her gravely, "Don't you love me? Don't you think that I love you?"

He was silent for some time, his eyes steadily fixed on some invisible realm. When he spoke it was with a firm, natural, unshaken accent. "Why, yes, I think it very likely that I am being fooled all the time. But I don't think it matters the least bit in the world beside the fact that I love you. That's big enough to overtop everything else."

She drew a long sigh and, closing her eyes, murmured, "I feel as though I were lifted up on a great rock." After a moment, opening her eyes, she said, "You are better than I, you know. I'm not at all sure that I could say that. I never knew before that I was weak. But then I never met strength before."

"You're not weak," he told her; adding quaintly, "maybe a little overballasted; with brains and sensitiveness and under-ballasted with experience, that's all. But you haven't had much chance to take on any other cargo, as yet."

She was nettled at this, and leaving her slow, wide-winged poise in the upper airs, she veered and with swallow-like swiftness darted down on him. "That sounds patronizing and elder-brotherish," she told him. "I've taken on all sorts of cargo that you don't know anything about. In ever so many ways you seem positively . . . na?ve! You needn't go thinking that I'm always highstrung and fanciful. I never showed that side to anybody before, never! Always kept it shut up and locked down and danced and whooped it up before the door. You know how everybody always thinks of me as laughing all the time. I do wish everything hadn't been said already so many times. If it weren't that it's been said so often, I'd like to say that I have always been laughing to keep from crying."

"Why don't you say it, if that is what you mean?" he proposed.

This surprised her into a sudden laugh, outright and ringing. He looked down at her sparkling face, brilliant in its mirth as a child's, and said seriously, "You must instantly think of something perfectly prosaic and commonplace to say, or I shall be forced to take you in my arms and kiss you a great many times, which might have Lord knows what effect on that gloomy-minded ticket-seller back of us who already has his suspicions."

He had been listening with an appreciative grin to her nimble-witted chatter, but at this he brought her up short by an astonished, "Who had? What had? What's that . . . Toucl??"

She laughed aloud again, delighted at having startled him into curiosity. "Toucl?. Toucl?. Don't you think it a pretty name? Will you believe me when I say I know all about Ashley?"

"Oh, go on, tell me!" he begged. "You don't mean to say that my Uncle Benton had pep enough to have a scandal in his life?"

He said, pouncingly, "You're running on, inconsequently, just to divert my mind from asking you again who or what Toucl? is."

"You've let the cat out of the bag enough so I've lost my interest in her," he professed. "I can make a guess that she's some old woman, and I bet you I won't see anything remarkable in her. Except that wild name. Is it Miss Toucl?, or Mrs. Toucl??"

The girl burst into laughter at this, foolish, light-hearted mirth which drenched the air all about her with the perfume of young gaiety. "Is it Miss Druid, or Mrs. Druid?" was all she would say.

She looked up at him, her eyes shining, and cried between her gusts of laughter, as if astonished, "Why, I do believe we are going to be happy together. I do believe it's going to be fun to live with you."

She answered, reasonably, "Well, nobody ever is happy together, either in books or out of them. Of all the million, million love-affairs that have happened, does anybody ever claim any one to have been happy?"

She replied very seriously, "Because I can't help myself, dear Neale. Isn't that the only reason you're marrying me?"

He looked at her long, his nostrils quivering a little, gave a short exclamation which seemed to carry away all his impatience, and finally said, quietly enough, "Why, yes, of course, if that's the way you want to put it. You can say it in a thousand thousand different ways."

He added with a sudden fury, "And never one of them will come anywhere near expressing it. Look here, Marise, I don't believe you have the faintest, faintest idea how big this thing is. All these fool clever ways of talking about it . . . they're just a screen set up in front of it, to my mind. It's enough sight bigger than just you or me, or happiness or unhappiness. It's the meaning of everything!"

He said, confidently, "You will, later on."

She ventured, "You mean, maybe, that I'm so shaken up by the little surface waves, chopping back and forth, that I don't feel the big current."

"It's there. Whether you feel it or not," he made final answer to her doubt.

She murmured, "I wonder if there is anything in that silly, old-fashioned notion that men are stronger than women, and that women must lean on men's strength, to live?"

"Everybody's got to lean on his own strength, sooner or later," he told her with a touch of grimness.

"You just won't be romantic!" she cried admiringly.

"I really love you, Marise," he answered profoundly; and on this rock-like assurance she sank down with a long breath of trust.

The sun was dipping into the sea now, emblazoning the sky with a last flaming half-circle of pure color, but the light had left the dusky edges of the world. Already the far mountains were dimmed, and the plain, passing from one deep twilight color to another more somber, was quietly sinking into darkness as into the strong loving arms of ultimate dissolution.

The girl spoke in a dreamy twilight tone, "Neale dear, this is not a romantic idea . . . honestly, I do wish we could both die right here and never go down to the plain any more. Don't you feel that? Not at all?"

His voice rang out, resonant and harsh as a bugle-note, "No, I do not, not at all, not for a single moment. I've too much ahead of me to feel that. And so have you!"

"I don't promise you anything about it," he answered, taking her hand in his. "Only I'm not a bit afraid of the plain, nor the way that's before us. Come along with me, and let's see what's there."

"No, I don't know, now," he answered undismayed. "But I think we will know it as we go along because we will be together."

The darkness, folding itself like a velvet mantle about the far mountains, deepened, and her voice deepened with it. "Can you even promise that we won't lose each other there?" she asked somberly.

At this he suddenly took her into his arms, silently, bending his face to hers, his insistent eyes bringing hers up to meet his gaze. She could feel the strong throbbing of his heart all through her own body.

She clung to him as though she were drowning. And indeed she felt that she was. Life burst over them with a roar, a superb flooding tide on whose strong swelling bosom they felt themselves rising, rising illimitably.

The sun had now wholly set, leaving to darkness the old, old plain, soaked with humanity.

March 15, 1920. 8:30 A.M.

Marise fitted little Mark's cap down over his ears and buttoned his blue reefer coat close to his throat.

"Now you big children," she said, with an anxious accent, to Paul and Elly standing with their school-books done up in straps, "be sure to keep an eye on Mark at recess-time. Don't let him run and get all hot and then sit down in the wind without his coat. Remember, it's his first day at school, and he's only six."

She kissed his round, smooth, rosy cheek once more, and let him go. Elly stooped and took her little brother's mittened hand in hers. She said nothing, but her look on the little boy's face was loving and maternal.

Paul assured his mother seriously, "Oh, I'll look out for Mark, all right."

Their mother looked for a moment deep into the eyes of her older son, so clear, so quiet, so unchanging and true. "You're a good boy, Paul, a real comfort," she told him.

To herself she thought, "Yes, all his life he'll look out for people and get no thanks for it."

She could not bear to let them leave her and stood with them in the open door-way for a moment. Elly rubbed her soft cheek against her mother's hand. Paul, seeing his mother shiver in the keen March air, said, "Mother, if Father were here he'd make you go in. That's a thin dress. And your teeth are just chattering."

"Yes, you're right, Paul," she agreed; "it's foolish of me!"

The children gave her a hearty round of good-bye hugs and kisses, briskly and energetically performed, and went down the stone-flagged path to the road. They were chattering to each other as they went. Their voices sounded at first loud and gay in their mother's ears. Then they sank to a murmur, as the children ran along the road. The dog bounded about them in circles, barking joyfully, but this sound too grew fainter and fainter.

When the murmur died away to silence, there seemed no sound left in the stark gray valley, empty and motionless between the steep dark walls of pine-covered mountains.

Marise stood for a long time looking after the children. They were climbing up the long hilly road now, growing smaller and smaller. How far away they were, already! And that very strength and vigor of which she was so proud, which she had so cherished and fostered, how rapidly it carried them along the road that led away from her!

They were almost at the top of the hill now. Perhaps they would turn there and wave to her.

She looked after them, yearning. Although they were so far, she could see them plainly in the thin mountain air. They were running mostly, once in a while stopping to throw a stone or look up into a tree. Then they scampered on like squirrels, the fox-terrier bounding ahead.

Now they had disappeared, without a backward look.

She continued gazing at the vacant road. It seemed to her that the children had taken everything with them.

A gust of icy wind blew down sharply from the mountain, still snow-covered, and struck at her like a sword. She turned and went back shivering, into the empty house.

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