The Love Story of a Selfish Woman

NEVER did man bear a name better suited to his outward fashion than Pole. Tall, gaunt, stiff, with a certain dignity conferred by height rather than by proportion, the admirable descriptiveness of his name had been promptly discovered during his schooldays, and many a jest, exquisitely humorous to the originators, had resulted from it. At West Point this source of jovial persecution was not neglected, and in the numerous frontier garrisons to which his army career brought him it attracted the delighted attention of his comrades. With the passing of years, however, these obvious analogies between his form and his name came to convey a savor of honor in their fun, as when young Rodney described him to the mess at Lawrence as an admirable “ flagpole,” with always a vision of “ glory ” about his head. For Pole’s calm strength had been proved in many an emergency, and no more brilliant officer than he answered to the roll call of the cavalry. It was promotion after the close of a famous Indian campaign which brought him to Fort Lawrence, where, as usual, his silence and reserve won him esteem rather than intimacy, and where curiosity and amusement divided garrison comment when he joined the ranks of Hilda Randolph’s courtiers.

Hilda was the major’s only daughter, an “ army girl,” who rode as well and shot as straight as any lieutenant, and reigned over her domain of youthful hearts with an imperious waywardness possible only to one who, in her limited kingdom, had never known revolt. Among her young and jolly followers Captain Pole looked out of place, and seemed not unconscious of his incongruity. But he serenely refused to be crowded out; and though he was made to perceive that coldness and formality succeeded his appearance, the subalterns dared not show outward disrespect to their superior officer.

Hilda, however, was unfettered by restrictions of military decorum. Many as were the pranks she played on all who sought her favor, nobody suffered so constantly and so humbly as Pole. Even his careless boyish rivals recognized this with half-shamed regret.

“ It’s a pity to make a laughingstock of him ! ” young Rodney exclaimed one day, when there had been a more than usually conspicuous example of the girl’s perversity. “ He is a splendid chap, if you look at him seriously ! ”

“ Why should I look at him seriously? He amuses me,” she laughed. “I dare say I amuse him, also; and your pity is wasted, for here he comes again, as placid as though he had never been snubbed.”

Yet it was not invulnerability so much as vitality that his devotion displayed. He was often obviously wounded in the fray, but his return to it was immediate.

“ I treated you abominably,” she declared to him one evening, gazing up at his grave countenance with petulant wonder in her eyes. “You were vexed — for a quarter of an hour! Is n’t it possible for you to stay angry ? ”

“ Not with you,” he replied shortly.

“ Why not ? ” she asked, and blushed suddenly over all her face and neck for knowledge of the answer she divined even as she uttered the question.

“ Because I love you,” he said, and walked away down the moonlit veranda.

Somehow, the abruptness of this statement, and its lack of clamor or demand, thrilled her, and her partner in the succeeding waltz found her in a surprisingly gentle mood.

But the mood passed quickly. No mood lasted long with Hilda Randolph except her natural gayety, which, like a golden thread, flashed through everything she did, and made her a delight to all who did not oppose her. For this fair tyrant was turned aside by no such petty obstacles as the fancies and feelings of others. Hence, according to the fashion of human nature, which, despite theories to the contrary, is inclined to adore a tyrant, there were wider dismay and deeper regret when trouble befell her than a greater misfortune to many a worthier dweller in “ officers’ row ” would have aroused.

It was an appalling calamity to associate with the splendid animation of the girl. Those who had not seen the accident spoke with lowered voices of the impossibility of conceiving Hilda Randolph crushed and senseless, while those who were present shuddered away from mention of it.

She had been trying a new horse over some hurdles, and, wild with high spirits, she ordered another rail added, in spite of the entreaties of the lieutenants who stood admiring her. The sight of Pole striding toward the hurdles, with determined remonstrance in his mien, gave the last spur to her recklessness.

“ Behold him! ” she cried, with a taunting laugh. “ Does n’t he look like a pair of huge scissors ambulant ? I ’m sure he intends to clip me from my saddle, if I don’t heed his warning ! ”

She waved her hand gayly to him, and touched her horse with the whip. The animal sprang forward and rose gallantly for the leap ; but either his rider’s haste or his own eagerness made him miscalculate the added height. His rear hoofs caught the top rail with a sharp click, and horse and woman fell in a struggling heap upon the further side of the hurdle.

A week later Pole entered the little sitting room of Major Randolph’s quarters, and found the major red-eyed with weeping. “ My poor girl wants you,” he said, as he grasped Pole’s hand. “ I’ve told her it’s a cruel task she is putting on you — but when you see her ” —

“ Will you let me see her at once ? ” Pole interrupted hoarsely, extricating his hand, and walking toward the door of an inner room.

He knew that she was there, for he had helped to carry her home, and the surgeon had forbidden that she should be taken upstairs to her own room.

The major opened the door, without other word than a low “ God help us all! ”

Hilda lay motionless in some contrivance of the surgeon’s intended to ease her injured spine. Her clear-cut face was worn with suffering, and white as the surrounding pillows. Yet she looked younger, even, than she used to look, and her dark eyes gazed up at him with an appeal as helpless and unreserved as a child’s.

He knelt beside the bed, and touched the fingers which crept toward him.

“ You must not tremble,” she said faintly. “ I want you to be strong.”

“ I will be strong,” Pole whispered, and his trembling ceased.

She smiled, — a pale counterfeit of the brilliant smile which had discovered his heart to him when he first came to Lawrence.

“ I never was a conventional girl,” she went on softly ; “ but I am going to do what would not have seemed possible even to me last week. You will only know when you are dying how possible ” —

“ Dying ! ”

“ Dying. I shall lie here and suffer three months, or perhaps six months. Every one is to hear that much about me, but the surgeon promised nobody except father and you should be told that there is no chance of my recovery. I shall die when my injury reaches a certain crisis, which nothing can avert. And I want you to help me to die — bravely ! ”

“ God! ” The cry broke from Pole’s white lips.

“ You believe in him, don’t you ? ” she said. “ Last week I thought I believed in him — if ever I thought about him. To-day I don’t believe in him — or anything, but Death — and you — because you love me.” She shut her eyes. “Don’t stare at me with such a look,” she murmured, “ or I shall find no help in you.”

“ You shall never see such a look again,” he gasped, hiding his quivering face among her pillows. “ Only give me a moment now.”

There was silence, —silence in which the man’s soul went out in prayer, while she lay with frowning brows, suffering through all her tortured body, yet vaguely sorry that the hand which held hers grew so cold.

“ Hilda ! ” he said at last, and the tenderness of the tone in which he uttered her name for the first time brought a fleeting color to her cheek. Very haggard he looked down at her ; but his look was no longer an agonized protest; it was an oath of allegiance, whose loyal strength would never fail her. “ I understand, and I ” —

“ Do you surely understand ? ” she faltered. “ I love you no more than I did last week. But you love me, and there is nobody else who cares very much — not my father or any of those boys — and though I am not afraid — the surgeon says I am a brave girl — yet ” — She shivered. “ Death is strange, and I shall be lonely lying here waiting for it, unless — you hold my hand! ”

He pressed his lips to her clinging fingers.

“ So long as you live, and so long as I live afterward, I shall thank God that you gave me this trust,” he said steadfastly.

Weeks passed. Autumn slipped into winter. The small garrison was duller than usual, during that year’s hibernation within the circle of frozen prairie ; for they sorely missed their queen of revels. But they knew nothing of the sentence of death which overhung her illness ; and when they were told that she and Pole had become engaged, the conditions of that saddest of troth-plighting were withheld from them. The ladies, who were admitted to Hilda’s room at rare intervals of her sufferings, reported that, though a mere passive image physically, she was in spirit almost as gay as ever. The lieutenants, who saw her no more, glanced wistfully at her shaded windows when they went daily to inquire for her ; but they shrank from the chance, which each inquiry risked, of possible admission to her changed presence, and they watched Pole’s grave serenity through the long winter with an interest which deepened respect.

Within that sick-room, where suffering seemed to reign, a power yet mightier struggled for supremacy. Though Hilda’s courage was unfailing, it was the strong patience of the love she had invoked which made those months endurable to her and her nurses. Pole was so gentle that she grew ashamed of her irritability. He was so steadfast that she came to despise her variability. His constant cheerfulness was irresistibly infectious. From being silent, Pole developed an instinct for recounting any event humorous or unusual in the garrison. He discovered that, when Hilda was able to listen, she liked to hear of his adventures or mishaps, even of his theories and his aspirations, and he laid bare his life and his mind to her. Only of his heart, on which she leaned so confidently and whose every throb was for her service, he made no disclosures.

“ You cannot see him look at her or hear him speak to her without knowing that he worships her,” the major said to his wife, who was Hilda’s stepmother, and to whom the hopelessness of her illness had not been revealed. “ Yet I never hear love talk, and I doubt if he has ever kissed her! ”

“ He is to give everything, and she is to give nothing. Those are terms such girls as Hilda are apt to make with such men as Captain Pole, and I shall be surprised if she does n’t throw him over when she is well again.” Mrs. Randolph spoke coldly. She was not an unamiable woman, but she had all a plain woman’s severity for the heedless cruelties to which they who have beauty are tempted. And the major, who was sworn to keep secret the doom toward which those slow weeks tended, turned away in helpless wrath and grief.

One March afternoon, when a blizzard raged over the prairie and darkness had shut in early, Pole sat at Hilda’s bedside reading aloud. She was wonderfully free from pain, though, with an invalid’s distrust, she hesitated to confess this immunity, lest it should end. But, as she lay physically at rest, her thoughts wandered from the reading to the reader. Her eyes dwelt wistfully on his worn face, now soberly intent upon the book, and sank to his disengaged hand, which lay on a table that stood within her reach. Slowly she stretched out her own hand and touched him.

He started slightly, and glanced at her, with the look of alert service that had grown familiar to her in his regard.

“ How thin you are! ” she murmured, spreading his strong brown fingers on her pale palm. “ Even my hand seems plump beside yours.”

“ I 'm always thin,” he said, smiling.

“ A modern Don Quixote in body as well as mind ” —

“Nobody ever accused me of a too fantastic imagination,” he interrupted lightly, while his glance returned to the book. “ And such was the chief characteristic of the Knight of La Mancha, as I remember him.”

“ Don’t slander him because you will not let me say nice things to you, even indirectly ! ” she exclaimed. Then, still holding his fingers, she added very softly, “ You may kiss me.”

For an instant his blue eyes burned her with a passionate reproach which transfigured him. Then he drew away his hand, stumbled to his feet, and left the room.

He did not return until his usual hour on the next day, when his manner lacked nothing of its habitual serenity, — a serenity, she assured herself, that she would not again willingly disturb.

Another fortnight elapsed. April had arrived. According to the vagaries of a Northwestern spring, the snow on the prairie had disappeared beneath a couple of days’ sunshine as fervid as July. The windows of Hilda’s room were open to a soft breeze, and she lay watching them for the passing of Pole’s tall figure, with a color in her cheeks and lips which had not been there for months, — a color the sight of which brought a sudden flush to his countenance, and as sudden a pallor, when he entered.

“ You are better ! ” he exclaimed.

“I have just discovered that I am,” she whispered breathlessly.

“I have seen that you were freer of pain, and stronger from day to day, but I dared not” — He broke off, clasping her hand tightly in both his own. “ Being better may not mean getting well. Yet — yet be brave, sweet, even braver than you always are, and I believe life will come back to you, and all life should bring to you.”

His head sank on their joined hands for a moment, during which, amidst the tumult of her soul, her clearest perception was the swift whitening six months had wrought on that bowed head.

“ I would not tell my father until I had told you,” she faltered presently.

He rose. “ He must know at once. There are ways and means we should discuss.”

Then the major strolled in, as was his custom a dozen times a day, and, in the joyous excitement of his reception of her news, Pole left them together.

Upon consultation with the surgeon, who ascertained a positive improvement in her condition, it was decided to summon a noted specialist from Chicago ; and the great man wired that he would arrive within a week.

The hours of that week alternately raced and halted with Hilda Randolph, according as fear or hope prevailed; but Pole betrayed no sign of emotion after the first, — only he refused to discuss chances with her.

“ You will need all your strength to receive the doctor. You cannot afford to waste any of it in maddening conjectures,” he said, and, as always, his steadfastness was the staff upon which she leaned.

Though it was not generally known that life or death hung upon the coming of the specialist, his arrival was watched with many a prayer from barracks as well as from “ officers’ row.” For a garrison bears this resemblance to a large family, that calamity to one of its members draws all close together.

The major and Pole waited at the latter’s quarters for the verdict, after the great doctor’s visit to Hilda. When the two surgeons entered, Pole rose and mechanically stood at attention. The major broke into half-sobbing questions.

“ She will live. She will entirely recover. In fact, she is so nearly well now that only every one’s conviction that her case was hopeless has prevented her improvement from being visible long since.”

The newcomer spoke slowly, gazing keenly at the changes that passed over Pole’s white face.

“ Sit down ! You will fall ! ” he interrupted himself sharply, and with a swift spring forward prevented the fulfillment of his warning, as Pole sank helplessly into his arms.

“ Overload the strongest, mule or man, and he breaks down,” he said testily, in reply to the major’s amazed representations of Pole’s robust vigor. “ I saw that this man had reached the limit of his endurance, at my first glimpse of him when he met me at the railway station.”

Pole returned languidly to consciousness. He submitted to the care bestowed upon him; but when the major said it was his right to see Hilda even before her father, the lids drooped again over his haggard eyes.

“ She must not be left alone, and I cannot go to her — yet,” he faltered.

The major, nothing loath, set forth upon his happy mission, and the physicians presently left Pole to repose. As his senses cleared fully, the thought of Hilda, in this new dawn of life, lacking the one sympathy to which she had clung in the shadow of death rallied the courage which physical exhaustion had for a moment overpowered.

“I am a coward,” he muttered, rising slowly. “ Neither just to her nor just to myself.”

It was the post dinner hour, and he encountered nobody as he walked up the parade to the major’s quarters. The door of Hilda’s room was ajar, and, after hearing a faint sound that seemed to answer his knock, he entered.

He went no further than the threshold.

Hilda lay with her face hidden, her whole figure shaken with such sobs as no suffering, bodily or mental, had ever before forced from her.

Pole leaned back against the wall and stared at her. She was less ready to meet life, when it now suddenly confronted her, than a long winter’s training had made her to meet death.

A moment he stood motionless ; then, quietly, as he had come, he went away.

The garrison delighted in discussing several facts and many rumors in the course of the ensuing week. First, there was general rejoicing over the announcement that Hilda Randolph would soon be among them again, as blithe and bonnie as she had ever been. Then, Captain Pole was reported too ill for duty, and, oddly enough, the colonel’s visits to him were more numerous than the surgeon’s. Lastly, they woke one morning to the news that Pole had departed, by the early train, on a “ six months’ leave of absence, with permission to go beyond seas.”

Such were the facts. As for the rumors, only a community as idle and as intimate as that of a frontier post can reckon the number of them. They were rumors which included a whisper that Captain Pole had applied for an exchange to another regiment, and were not discredited by the assertions of Major Randolph and his wife that Hilda’s engagement was unbroken, but prolonged until Captain Pole’s return from a necessary visit to Europe.

And all the while there lay on Hilda’s restless, eager heart, as she began to resume the ordinary ways of life, a letter, — a letter written firmly in the large, clear writing which concerned itself mostly with “ company accounts ; ” for Pole had no family, and few correspondents.

MY DEAREST [this letter said], — I may so address you, because there is no claim in words which merely declare a truth of which you are as well aware as I. You will forgive me for leaving Lawrence without seeing you, when I tell you that the first thought the assurance of your safety brought me was bitterness that life would take you from me more utterly than death could have taken you. Sweet, I cannot stay, and break, as I am in honor bound to break, the bond between us, which was pledged only for a need which has ceased. You are free to welcome the youth and happiness to which you are restored, and you must not shadow your freedom with any selfreproach for me. You gave me a trust, the remembrance of which will always be precious to me. God bless you !

After a brief stay in England, Pole went to Switzerland. Having spent most of the years of his manhood upon the plains and prairies of our frontier, he had long desired to climb some of the world’s high mountains. In this crisis of his life, he treated himself with the courageous common sense that he would have bestowed upon a friend in similar case.

He offered his days and nights of weariness, his hours of despair, such chance of forgetfulness as the scenes he had desired and the occupations he believed would be congenial might give them. He had never been beaten in any undertaking. He did not mean to be beaten now.

He was gratified to prove an excellent mountain climber, patient, unflagging, and wary. He liked the cheery comradeship of the guides, and they liked him. It was when he rested, between expeditions, in the large towns that the battle he was waging threatened most to go against him, and he longed for the moment when the guides, who prescribed these periods of repose, agreed that work should begin again.

One afternoon he returned to his hotel at Vevay, after arranging for an ascent of the Dent du Midi the next day. He was standing on the terrace, inspecting with satisfaction a sky which promised fine weather for the morrow, when the porter informed him that an American lady, who had just arrived, wished to see him in her private sitting room. She had mentioned no name, merely saying that she was an old friend. Nor was there anything to be learned from the hotel books, as the gentleman of the party had not yet registered.

Vaguely curious, — for he had few old friends outside the army, and none whom he was likely to meet in Switzerland, — Pole followed the servant upstairs. Then he heard himself announced from the threshold of a small room, and the door closed behind him.

Through a glory of sunset light he beheld Hilda advancing to meet him, but such a Hilda as he had known only in his most blessed dreams, — a Hilda whose eyes were sweet, whose outstretched hands were tremulous with something that needed no translating, and he took her in his arms.

Hours later, they sat together in one of those vine-hung balconies which adorn Swiss hotels in such profusion. He had been told all about her futile endeavors to write him a letter that would bring him back to her, and all about her successful efforts to persuade an uncle to bring her to Europe for the summer, and to this old town, whither, his London bankers had informed her, his letters were forwarded.

“ I used to think many thoughts of you, through those weeks and months last winter,” she said softly. “ But I never thought so good a soldier would run away.”

“ Even a soldier should run away to avoid a greater defeat,” he answered, smiling. “ I feared that, if I stayed, I should allow your gratitude to make you sacrifice yourself.”

“ And you are not afraid that it may be my gratitude which has brought me half across the world ? ”

“ It is not gratitude,” he murmured, bending closer to her.

“ No, it is not gratitude, — nor is it remorse! I am as selfish as I have always been, dear, dear, dearest,” she whispered. “ But the woman who needed your help to meet death has discovered that she cannot live without you.”

Ellen Mackubin.