Page:Century Magazine v069 (centuryillustrat69holl).pdf/756

"It seems to be her whole personality. One never gets near her. One can't. Even I, with all my common sense, have to nerve myself to kiss her. But there is a reason—at least it 's the only one I can think of—her mother, her life."

"What was her mother? What was her life?"

"Her mother was foolish, selfish, and beautiful. Before. Madeline's birth she fell into a state of despairing terror. Poor Hugh, who adored her, told me about it all. She was convinced that she would die; she loved life, and she hated the child that was to rob her of it. No persuasion or reasoning could shake her, and it was apparently her mere terror that killed her; for she did die when Madeline was born. Madeline passed her life in wandering about the world with her father and governesses and masters. He did his duty by her unflinchingly, but he saw her as little as possible. Before he died he told me that Madeline, from the hour of her birth, was horrible to him."

"Good God!" broke from Maverley. He sprang to his feet, thrusting indignant hands into his pockets. "Is n't that reason enough! She has been blighted from birth—from before birth! She was born with a curse on her."

"Yes, she really was. Poor Madeline!"

"She knows?"

"She must know what her father felt. He told me that he used to try to force himself to tenderness when she was a child, and that she always shrank from him, as if she guessed his horror of her."

"Her mother's horror, her father's horror, are in her blood. That is why she seems horrible."

"Yes. It is all most unnatural, most perplexing," said Mrs. Graham, with a sigh, as if feeling the incongruity of her own connection with such morbidities.

"And what disgusts me with myself," she went on presently, "is that I never dare talk it out with her. After all, what could I say? 'My poor girl, why is it that people find you horrible?' My only hope is that she does n't know it."

"She seems to you happy, then?"

"She seems to me impassive and perfectly indifferent."

"Ah! But is she? Is she?" cried Maverley, striding to the end of the little room and back again.

"Well, that is the question; that is what I don't dare have out with her. If she is unconscious I might make her conscious, and that would be lamentable. But I can't think her really unhappy; a person so active can hardly be unhappy. She is always doing something. She never broods. If she were unhappy she would n't seem so uncanny. It 's her not seeing, not caring, that is part of her dreadfulness—her not feeling any of it."

"Ah! But does n't she?" broke again from Maverley.

Mrs. Graham, tapping her fingers on the table, watched their rapid rhythm.

"My dear Vivian," she presently suggested, "since you care—so much, why don't you find out?"

He stopped before her now, taking in the significance of her downcast eyes. It was only after a long pause that he said, putting the fact before himself as well as before her. "I suppose because she frightens nobody as she does me."

Mrs. Graham could not tell whether it was confession or repudiation.

"Why don't you try to get over being frightened?" was her final comment.

Maverley was trying to get over it as he walked in the woods that afternoon. Madeline's story had raised a passion of pity that could no longer hoodwink itself, and it called upon all his manliness, all his courage, to trust it as a deeper instinct than his dread.

The test to his trust was almost immediately presented to him in the sudden sight of Madeline. He had emerged from closely growing trees and bushes upon a little grassy clearing, a sunny knoll, flecked with dancing shadows from three tall beeches crowning it like a group of slender nymphs metamorphosed into three woodland forms while they danced.

The sky above was blue, the grass was long and thick, and lying in it, a book before her, her hat tilted over her eyes, was Madeline, a streak of sunlit whiteness in the green. She had not heard or seen him. Maverley, as he looked at her, felt the pause of contemplation to be beautiful, beneficent, as he had felt the moment to be when he had recognized the white flowers on the grave. For this was a different Madeline. She was not faintly smiling—the difference that he first felt; her eyes