The Way of a Man, Emerson Hough [ebook reader macos .TXT] 📗
- Author: Emerson Hough
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"Yes," said I.
"But there must be witnesses—there must be ceremony—else there is no marriage," she went on. Her woman's brain clung to the safe, sane groove which alone can guide progress and civilization and society—that great, cruel, kind, imperative compromise of marriage, without which all the advancement of the world would be as naught. I loved her for it. But for me, I say I had gone savage. I was at the beginning of all this, whereas it remained with her as she had left it.
"Witnesses?" I said. "Look at those!" I pointed to the mountains. "Marriages, many of them, have been made with no better witnesses than those."
My heart stopped when I saw how far she had jumped to her next speech.
"Then we two are all the people left in the world, John Cowles? When I am old, will you cast me off? When another woman comes into this valley, when I am bent and old, and cannot see, will you cast me off, and, being stronger than I am, will you go and leave me?"
I could not speak at first. "We have talked too much," I said to her presently. But now it was she who would not desist.
"You see, with a woman it is for better, for worse—but with a man—"
"With a Saxon man," I said, "it is also for better, for worse. It is one woman."
She sat and thought for a long time. "Suppose," she said, "that no one ever came."
Now with swift remorse I could see that in her own courage she was feeling her way, haltingly, slowly, toward solution of problems which most women take ready solved from others. But, as I thank God, a filmy veil, softening, refining, always lay between her and reality. In her intentness she laid hold upon my arm, her two hands clasping.
"Suppose two were here, a man and a woman, and he swore before those eternal witnesses that he would not go away any time until she was dead and laid away up in the trees, to dry away and blow off into the air, and go back—"
"Into the flowers," I added, choking.
"Yes, into the trees and the flowers—so that when she was dead and he was dead, and they were both gone back into the flowers, they would still know each other for ever and ever and never be ashamed—would that be a marriage before God, John Cowles?"
What had I brought to this girl's creed of life, heretofore always so sweet and usual? I did not answer. She shook at my arm. "Tell me!" she said. But I would not tell her.
"Suppose they did not come," she said once more. "It is true, they may not find us. Suppose we two were to live here alone, all this winter—just as we are now—none of my people or yours near us. Could we go on?"
"God! Woman, have you no mercy!"
She sat and pondered for yet a time, as though seriously weighing some question in her mind.
"But you have taught me to think, John Cowles. It is you who have begun my thinking, so now I must think. I know we cannot tell what may happen. I ask you, 'John Cowles, if we were brought to that state which we both know might happen—if we were here all alone and no one came, and if you loved me—ah, then would you promise, forever and forever, to love me till death did us part—till I was gone back into the flowers? I remember what they say at weddings. They cling one to the other, forsaking all others, till death do them part. Could you promise me—in that way? Could you promise me, clean and solemn? Because, I would not promise you unless it was solemn, and clean, and unless it was forever."
Strange, indeed, these few days in the desert, which had so drawn apart the veil of things and left us both ready to see so far. She had not seen so far as I, but, womanlike, had reasoned more quickly.
As for me, it seemed that I saw into her heart. I dropped my hands from my eyes and looked at her strangely, my own brain in a whirl, my logic gone. All I knew was that then or elsewhere, whether or not rescue ever came for us, whether we died now or later, there or anywhere in all the world, I would, indeed, love her and her only, forsaking all others until, indeed, we were gone back into the sky and flowers, until we whispered again in the trees, one unto the other! Marriage or no marriage, together or apart, in sickness or in health—so there came to me the stern conviction—love could knock no more at my heart, where once she had stood in her courage and her cleanness. Reverence, I say, was now the one thing left in my heart. Still we sat, and watched the sun shine on the distant white-topped peaks. I turned to her slowly at length.
"Ellen," I said, "do you indeed love me?"
"How can I help it, John Cowles," she answered bravely. My heart stopped short, then raced on, bursting all control. It was long before I could be calm as she.
"You have helped it very long," I said at last, quietly. "But now I must know—would you love me anywhere, in any circumstances, in spite of all? I love you because you are You, not because you are here. I must be loved in the same way, always."
She looked at me now silently, and I leaned and kissed her full on the mouth.
She did not rebel or draw away, but there was that on her face, I say, which left me only reverent. Her hand fell into mine. We sat there, plighted, plighted in our rags and misery and want and solitude. Though I should live twice the allotted span of man, never should I forget what came into my soul that hour.
After a time I turned from her, and from the hills, and from the sky, and looked about us at the poor belongings with which we were to begin our world. All at once my eye fell upon one of our lighter robes, now fairly white with much working. I drew it toward me, and with her still leaning against my shoulder, I took up a charred stick, and so, laboriously, I wrote upon the surface of the hide, these words of our covenant:
"I, John Cowles, take thee, Ellen Meriwether, to be my lawful, wedded wife, in sickness, and in health, for better of for worse, till death do us part."
And I signed it; and made a seal after my name.
"Write," said I to her. "Write as I have written."
She took a fresh brand, blackened at the end, and in lesser characters wrote slowly, letter by letter:
"I, Ellen Meriwether, take thee, John Cowles, to be my lawful, wedded husband—" She paused, but I would not urge her, and it was moments before she resumed—"in sickness and in health, for better or for worse—" Again she paused, thinking, thinking—and so concluded, "till death do us part."
"It means," she said to me, simply as a child, "until we have both gone back into the flowers and the trees."
I took her hand in mine. Mayhap book and bell and organ peal and vestured choir and high ceremony of the church may be more solemn; but I, who speak the truth from this very knowledge, think it could not be.
"When you have signed that, Ellen," I said to her at last, "we two are man and wife, now and forever, here and any place in the world. That is a binding ceremony, and it endows you with your share of all my property, small or large as that may be. It is a legal wedding, and it holds us with all the powers the law can have. It is a contract."
"Do not talk to me of contracts," she said. "I am thinking of nothing but our—wedding."
Still mystical, still enigma, still woman, she would have it that the stars, the mountains—-the witnesses—and not ourselves, made the wedding. I left it so, sure of nothing so much as that, whatever her way of thought might be, it was better than my own.
"But if I do not sign this?" she asked at length.
"Then we are not married."
She sighed and laid down the pen. "Then I shall not sign it—yet," she said.
I caught up her hand as though I would write for her.
"No," she said, "it shall be only our engagement, our troth between us. This will be our way. I have not yet been sufficiently wooed, John Cowles!"
I looked into her eyes and it seemed to me I saw there something of the same light I had seen when she was the masked coquette of the Army ball—the yearning, the melancholy, the mysticism, the challenge, the invitation and the doubting—ah, who shall say what there is in a woman's eye! But I saw also what had been in her eyes each time I had seen her since that hour. I left it so, knowing that her way would be best.
"When we have escaped," she went on, "if ever we do escape, then this will still be our troth, will it not, John Cowles?"
"Yes, and our marriage, when you have signed, now or any other time."
"But if you had ever signed words like these with any other woman, then it would not be our marriage nor our troth, would it, John Cowles?"
"No," I said. And, then I felt my face grow ashy cold and pale in one sudden breath!
"But why do you look so sad?" she asked of me, suddenly. "Is it not well to wait?"
"Yes, it is well to wait," I said. She was so absorbed that she did not look at me closely at that instant.
Again she took up the charred stick in her little hand, and hesitated. "See," she said, "I shall sign one letter of my name each week, until all my name is written! Till that last letter we shall be engaged. After the last letter, when I have signed it of my own free will, and clean, and solemn—clean and solemn, John Cowles—then we will be—Oh, take me home—take me to my father, John Cowles! This is a hard place for a girl to be."
Suddenly she dropped her face into her hands, sobbing.
She hid her head on my breast, sore distressed now. She was glad that she might now be more free, needing some manner of friend; but she was still—what? Still woman! Poor Saxon I must have been had I not sworn to love her fiercely and singly all my life. But yet—
I looked at the robe, now fallen loose upon the ground, and saw that she had affixed one letter of her name and stopped. She smiled wanly. "Your name would be shorter to sign a little at a time," she said; "but a girl must have time. She must wait. And see," she said, "I have no ring. A girl always has a ring."
This lack I could not solve, for I had none.
"Take mine," she said, removing the ring with the rose seal. "Put it on the other finger—the—the right one."
I did so; and I kissed her. But yet—
She was weary and strained now. A pathetic droop came to the corners of her mouth. The palm of her little hand turned up loosely, as though she had been tired and now was resting. "We must wait," she said, as though to herself.
But what of me that night? When I had taken my own house and bed beyond a little thicket, that she might be alone, that night I found myself breathing hard in terror and dread, gazing up at the stars in agony, beating my hands on the ground at the thought of the ruin
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