United States or Cook Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I say all this in vindication of Graham Vane, if, though a very clever man in his way, and by no means uninstructed in human nature, he had utterly failed in comprehending the mysteries which to this poor woman-child seemed to need no key for one who really loved her. But we have said somewhere before in this book that music speaks in a language which cannot explain itself except in music.
If you can steer just a little, I will try to row for both of us. The woman-child set her paddle listlessly in the water, steering with it as best she could, until pride and returning stamina enjoined her to paddle on her own. They continued on in this way for several hours, resting at intervals, gradually, so gradually drawing nearer the rocky shoals of the great island.
She was either magnificently sacrificial and fearless, or she cunningly calculated that the regulators would take no chances of killing a woman-child, for she kept between their guns and her two companions, trying to cover and shield the latter with her frail body. "Shoot, Lige," called Watts. "If we fire from here we'll hit the girl. Shoot!"
She knew this; but she was young; she was a woman-child; she had the ardor of passionate youth in her veins, she had the desolation of abandoned youth in her heart. And honor looked so cold beside love! She rose impetuously; the night was far spent, the camp was very still, the torches had long died out, and a streak of dawn was visible in the east.
She was the same frank, affectionate, merry, puzzling woman-child that she had been at first; yet as he saw more and more how much she knew of books which he did not know, of people, and of affairs of which he had never heard how fluently, graciously, and even wisely she could talk, he felt himself cut off from her.
"By the day," writes the author, "I trotted from one object which attracted me to another, singing a little song of made-up phrases about everything I saw while I waded catching fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields, or following a bird with a hair in its beak; much of the time I carried the inevitable baby for a woman-child, frequently improvised from an ear of corn in the silk, wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets."
He wanted to yield and to trust, and if it had been his life alone he might have done so. But the more the woman-child railed and pulled away from him, the more he knew that she was family in the deepest sense. Nothing she could do or say made him feel any less bound to her, one with her, or responsible for her safety and well-being. There was nothing else for it.
'You have been both a teacher and a killer, he said. 'But I have no further need of you, nor would I ask another to follow down your dark and treacherous path. And he threw them into the sea. Then together they knelt in the cool and cleansing waters, and washed the sins from their hands. Then returning to the narrow stretch of sand, the woman-child lay back.
Should she take advantage of his goodness to remain and sully the beauty of his palace for to her it seemed little less by her unworthy presence? No, woman-child as she was, she shrank from the thought; then caught up her hat and arose, resolute. "He will think me ungrateful," she murmured with half-closed eyes. "He will think no matter, he will forget me before half an hour.
She was on the alert to meet his only half-seeing gaze, and to give back a glance of tender sympathy and protection the true mother's look that is to be found when occasion calls for it in every good woman's face, ay, it may even be seen in the precociously earnest, kindly eyes of many a loving woman-child.
Word Of The Day