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Updated: May 13, 2025
If she could but creep down there now, a false-sworn, unloving wife, out of this man's sight, out of God's sight! "Will you go?" looking up with blanched cheek. "You were never so noble as now, Paul Blecker, when you left me to myself to judge. If you had only touched my love" "You would have yielded. I know. I'm not utterly base, Grey.
He had not come there to tempt her by passionate evil: she saw that. This pain he had fought with in his soul all night, trying to see what God meant by it, had left his face subdued, earnest, sorrowful. Perhaps since Paul Blecker left his mother's knee he had never been so like a child as now. "Yes, I must go. He will not claim me. I am glad I was spared that.
The Gurneys were so wretchedly poor, that might be the cause of her look. She was a woman now. Well, and then? Why, nothing then. He was Uncle Dan still, of whom she was less afraid than of any other living creature; that was all. Thinking, as he stood with Paul Blecker, leaning over the gate, of how she had brought him a badly-made havelock that morning. "You're always so kind to me," she said.
"I am not fit to be any man's wife. If you had come to me when I was a child, it might have been, it ought to have been," with an effort to draw her hands from him. Blecker only smiled, and seated her gently on the mossy boll of the beech-tree. "Stay. Listen to me," he whispered.
She dared not repeat that prayer now; but it had gone up once out of a childish trust, and was safely written down above. Let us pass over five or six months, and follow Paul Blecker to Fredericksburg, the night after that bloodiest day for the Federal forces, in December. It was the fourth battle in which he had taken part.
"And very well they turn out," sneered Blecker. "She is a woman," said the Captain, blushing, differently from the lady, however. "And if she is?" turning suddenly. "She has the nature of a Bowery rough. Pah, McKinstry! Sexes stand alike with me. If a woman's flesh is weaker-grained a bit, what of that? Whoever would earn esteem must work for it."
Not knowing that through the changeful face, and fierce, pitiful eyes of the boy, the man Paul Blecker looked coolly out, testing, labelling them. The boy in him, that they saw, Nature had made; but years of a hand-to-hand fight with starvation came after, crime, and society, whose work is later than Nature's, and sometimes better done.
'That is a true marriage, heart and soul and ways of thinking. God fitted those two into one another. Some matches, Doctor Blecker, put me in mind of my man Kellar, making ready the axes for winter's work, little head on big heft, misjoined always: in consequence, thing breaks apart with no provocation whatever. "When God wants work done down here, He makes His axes better, eh?"
The little woman's stumpy white fingers were very motherly, touching Grey's forehead. "I promised Doctor Blecker you would see him in half an hour." "It is not best," the girl said, standing up, leaning against the mantel-shelf. "It is best. Yes. You say you will not consent to the marriage: are going with me to-night. So, so. I ask no questions. No, child. Hush!" with a certain dignity.
Yet Grey bent longest over her own flower, that every childlike soul loves best, mignonette. She chose some of its brown sprigs to fasten in her hair, the fragrance was so clean and caressing. Paul Blecker, even at the other end of the field, and in the gathering twilight, caught a glimpse of his wife's face pressed against the pane.
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