The girl sat down on the couch and motioned him down beside her. Neither of them said anything; there was no sound but the wind outside, and the dog scratching and whimpering timidly at the door of the chamber.
At last the girl spoke. "You are of the Saxon," said she gravely.
"Don't hold it against me," said Ringwood. "My people came here in 1656. Of course, that's yesterday to the Gaelic League, but still I think we can say we have a stake in the country."
"Yes, through its heart," said she.
"Is it politics we're going to talk?" said he, putting an Irish turn to his tongue. "You and I, sitting here in the firelight?"
"It's love you'd rather be talking of," said she with a smile. "But you're the man to make a blunder and a mockery of the poor girls of Eire."
"You misjudge me entirely," said Ringwood. "I'm the man to live alone and sorrowful, waiting for the one love, though it seemed something beyond hoping for."
"Yes," said she. "But yesterday you were looking at one of the Connell girls as she drove her kine along the lane."
"Looking at her? I'll go so far as to say I did," said he. "But when I saw you I forgot her entirely."
"That was my wish," said she, giving him both her hands. "Will you stay with me here?"
"Ah, that I will!" cried he in a rapture.
"Always?" said she.
"Always," cried Ringwood. "Always and forever!" for he felt it better to be guilty of a slight exaggeration than to be lacking in courtesy to a lady. But as he spoke she fixed her eyes on him, looking so much as if she believed him that he positively believed himself.
"Ah," he cried. "You bewitch me!" And he took her in his arms.
He pressed his lips to hers, and at once he was over the brink. Usually he prided himself on being a pretty cool hand, but this was an intoxication too strong for him; his mind seemed to dissolve in sweetness and fire, and at last the fire was gone, and his senses went with it. As they failed he heard her saying "For ever! For ever!" and then everything was gone and he fell asleep.
He must have slept some time. It seemed he was wakened by the heavy opening and closing of a door. For a moment he was all confused and hardly knew where he was.
The room was now quite dark, and the fire had sunk to a dim glow. He blinked, and shook his ears, trying to shake some sense into his head. Suddenly he heard Bates talking to him, muttering as if he, too, was half asleep, or half drunk more likely. "You would come here," said Bates. "I tried hard enough to stop you."
"Hullo!" said Ringwood, thinking he must have dozed off by the fire in the inn parlor. "Bates? God, I must have slept heavy! I feel queer. Damn it so it was all a dream! Strike a light, old boy. It must be late. I'll yell for supper."
"Don't, for Heaven's sake," said Bates, in his altered voice. "Don't yell. She'll thrash us if you do."
"What's that?" said Ringwood. "Thrash us? What the hell are you talking about?"
At that moment a log rolled on the hearth, and a little flame flickered up, and he saw his long and hairy forelegs, and he knew.
INCIDENT ON A LAKE
Mr. Beaseley, while shaving on the day after his fiftieth birthday, eyed his reflection, and admitted his remarkable resemblance to a mouse. "Cheep, cheep!" he said to himself, with a shrug. "What do I care? At least, I wouldn't except for Maria. I remember I thought her kittenish at the time of our marriage. How she has matured!"
He knotted his thread-like necktie and hurried downstairs, scared out of his life at the thought of being late for breakfast. Immediately afterwards he had to open his drugstore, which then, in its small-town way, would keep him unprofitably busy till ten o'clock at night. At intervals during the day, Maria would drop in to supervise, pointing out his mistakes and weaknesses regardless of the customers.
He found a brief solace every morning when, unfolding the newspaper, he turned first of all to the engaging feature originated by Mr. Ripley. On Fridays he had a greater treat: he then received his copy of his favourite magazine, Nature Science Marvels. This reading provided, so to speak, a hole in his otherwise hopeless existence, through which he escaped from the intolerable into the incredible.
On this particular morning the incredible was kind enough to come to Mr. Beaseley. It came in a long envelope and on the handsome note paper of a prominent law firm. "Believe it or not, my dear," Mr. Beaseley said to his wife, "but I have been left four hundred thousand dollars."
"Where? Let me see!" cried Mrs. Beaseley. "Don't hog the letter to yourself in that fashion."
"Go on," said he. "Read it. Stick your nose in it. Much good may it do you!"
"Oh! Oh!" said she. "So you are already uppish!"
"Yes," said he, picking his teeth. "I have been left four hundred thousand dollars."
"We shall be able," said his wife, "to have an apartment in New York or a little house in Miami."
"You may have half the money and do what you like with it," said Mr. Beaseley. "For my part, I intend to travel."
Mrs. Beaseley heard this remark with the consternation she always felt at the prospect of losing anything that belonged to her, however old and valueless. "So you would desert me," she said, "to go chasing about after some native woman? I thought you were past all that."
"The only native women I am interested in," said he, "are those that Ripley had a picture of those with lips big enough to have dinner plates set in them. In the Nature Science Marvels Magazine they had some with necks like giraffes. I should like to see those, and pygmies, and birds of paradise, and the temples of Yucatan. I offered to give you half the money because I know you like city life and high society. I prefer to travel. If you want to, I suppose you can come along."
"I will," said she. "And don't forget I'm doing it for your sake, to keep you on the right path. And when you get tired of gawking and rubbering around, we'll have an apartment in New York and a little house in Miami."
So Mrs. Beaseley went resentfully along, prepared to endure Hell herself if she could deprive her husband of a little of his Heaven. Their journeys took them into profound forests, where, from their bare bedroom, whose walls, floor, and ceiling were austerely fashioned of raw pine, they could see framed in every window a perfect little Cezanne, with the slanting light cubing bluely among the perpendiculars of pine trees or exploding on the new green of a floating spray. In the high Andes, on the other hand, their window was a square of burning azure, with sometimes a small, snow-white cloud like a tight roll of cotton in a lower corner. In the beach huts on tropical islands, they found that the tide, like an original and tasteful htelier, deposited a little gift at their door every morning: a skeleton fan of violet seaweed, a starfish, or a shell. Mrs. Beaseley, being one of the vulgar, would have preferred a bottle of Grade A and a copy of The Examiner. She sighed incessantly for an apartment in New York and a house in Miami, and she sought endlessly to punish the poor man for depriving her of them.
If a bird of paradise settled on a limb above her husband's head, she was careful to let out a raucous cry and drive the interesting creature away before Mr. Beaseley had time to examine it. She told him the wrong hour for the start of the trip to the temples of Yucatan, and she diverted his attention from an armadillo by pretending she had something in her eye. At the sight of a bevy of the celebrated bosoms of Bali, clustered almost like grapes upon the quay, she just turned around and went straight up the gangplank again, driving her protesting husband before her.