The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Kate Chopin [86]
But Mildred would not bend the outward conditions of her life to serve any shameful whim that chanced to visit her soul, like an ugly dream. She would avoid nothing. She would go and come as always.
In the morning she found in her chair upon the porch the book she had left by the river. A fresh indignity! But she came and went as she intended to, and sat as usual upon the porch amid her familiar surroundings. When the Offender passed her by she knew it, though her eyes were never lifted. Are there only sight and sound to tell such things? She discerned it by a wave that swept her with confusion and she knew not what besides.
She watched him furtively, one day, when he talked with Farmer Kraummer out in the open. When he walked away she remained like one who has drunk much wine. Then unhesitatingly she turned and began her preparations to leave the Kraummer farmhouse.
When the afternoon was far spent they brought letters to her. One of them read like this:
“My Mildred, deary! I am only now at Narragansett, and so broke up not to find you. So you are down at that Kraummer farm, on the Iron Mountain. Well! What do you think of that delicious crank, Fred Evelyn ? For a man must be a crank who does such things. Only fancy! Last year he chose to drive an engine back and forth across the plains. This year he tills the soil with laborers. Next year it will be something else as insane—because he likes to live more lives than one kind, and other Quixotic117 reasons. We are great chums. He writes me he’s grown as strong as an ox. But he hasn’t mentioned that you are there. I know you don’t get on with him, for he isn’t a bit intellectual—detests Ibsen and abuses Tolstoi.118 He doesn’t read ‘in books’—says they are spectacles for the short-sighted to look at life through. Don’t snub him, dear, or be too hard on him; he has a heart of gold, if he is the first crank in America.”
Mildred tried to think—to feel that the intelligence which this letter brought to her would take somewhat of the sting from the shame that tortured her. But it did not. She knew that it could not.
In the gathering twilight she walked again through the wheat that was heavy and fragrant with dew. The path was very long and very narrow. When she was midway she saw the Offender coming toward her. What could she do? Turn and run, as a little child might? Spring into the wheat, as some frightened four-footed creature would? There was nothing but to pass him with the dignity which the occasion clearly demanded.
But he did not let her pass. He stood squarely in the pathway before her, hat in hand, a perturbed look upon his face.
“Miss Orme,” he said, “I have wanted to say to you, every hour of the past week, that I am the most consummate hound that walks the earth.”
She made no protest. Her whole bearing seemed to indicate that her opinion coincided with his own.
“If you have a father, or brother, or any one, in short, to whom you may say such things—”
“I think you aggravate the offense, sir, by speaking of it. I shall ask you never to mention it again. I want to forget that it ever happened. Will you kindly let me by.”
“Oh,” he ventured eagerly, “you want to forget it! Then, maybe, since you are willing to forget, you will be generous enough to forgive the offender some day?”
“Some day,” she repeated, almost inaudibly, looking seemingly through him, but not at him—“some day—perhaps; when I shall have forgiven myself.”
He stood motionless, watching her slim, straight figure lessening by degrees as she walked slowly away from him. He was wondering what she meant. Then a sudden, quick wave came beating into his brown throat and staining it crimson, when he guessed what it might