Then they sat upon the wooden swing.
The house seemed to sleep in darkness.
Helen and Eliza came presently from its very quiet depth.
“How’s your hand, ‘Gene?” Helen asked.
“It’s all right,” he said.
“Let me see!
O-ho, you’ve got a nurse now, haven’t you?” she said, with a good laugh.
“What’s that?
What’s that?
Hurt his hand?
How’d you do that?
Why, here — say — I’ve got the very thing for it, son,” said Eliza, trying to bustle off in all directions.
“Oh, it’s all right now, mama.
It’s been fixed,” he said wearily, reflecting that she had the very thing always too late.
He looked at Helen grinning:
“God bless our Happy Home!” he said.
“Poor old Laura!” she laughed, and hugged the girl roughly with one hand.
“It’s too bad you have to be dragged into it.”
“That’s all right,” said Laura.
“I feel like one of the family now anyhow.”
“He needn’t think he can carry on like this,” said Eliza resentfully.
“I’m not going to put up with it any longer.”
“Oh forget about it!” said Helen wearily.
“Good heavens, mama.
Papa’s a sick man.
Can’t you realize that?”
“Pshaw!” said Eliza scornfully.
“I don’t believe there’s a thing in the world wrong with him but that vile licker.
All his trouble comes from that.”
“Oh — how ridiculous!
How ridiculous!
You can’t tell me!” Helen exclaimed angrily.
“Let’s talk about the weather,” said Eugene.
Then they all sat quietly, letting the darkness soak into them.
Finally Helen and Eliza went back into the house: Eliza went unwillingly, at the girl’s insistence, casting back the doubtful glimmer of her face upon the boy and girl.
The wasting helve of the moon rode into heaven over the bulk of the hills.
There was a smell of wet grass and lilac, and the vast brooding symphony of the million-noted little night things, rising and falling in a constant ululation, and inhabiting the heart with steady unconscious certitude.
The pallid light drowned out the stars, it lay like silence on the earth, it dripped through the leafy web of the young maples, printing the earth with swarming moths of elvish light.
Eugene and Laura sat with joined hands in the slowly creaking swing.
Her touch shot through him like a train of fire: as he put his arm around her shoulders and drew her over to him, his fingers touched the live firm cup of her breast.
He jerked his hand away, as if he had been stung, muttering an apology.
Whenever she touched him, his flesh got numb and weak.
She was a virgin, crisp like celery — his heart shrank away from the pollution of his touch upon her.
It seemed to him that he was much the older, although he was sixteen, and she twenty-one.
He felt the age of his loneliness and his dark perception.
He felt the gray wisdom of sin — a waste desert, but seen and known.
When he held her hand, he felt as if he had already seduced her.
She lifted her lovely face to him, pert and ugly as a boy’s; it was inhabited by a true and steadfast decency, and his eyes were wet.
All the young beauty in the world dwelt for him in that face that had kept wonder, that had kept innocency, that had lived in such immortal blindness to the terror and foulness of the world.
He came to her, like a creature who had travelled its life through dark space, for a moment of peace and conviction on some lonely planet, where now he stood, in the vast enchanted plain of moonlight, with moonlight falling on the moonflower of her face.