Read White Narcissus for Free Online Page A

tiny word. Who had told that love was torture of the being, that love would blast life from him in a flutter of trivialities as oak-leaves are loosed upon the wind after the first frost? Who had told him that love would eat beneath his comfort in accomplishment until he knew himself in his wanderings a lost soul? Beneath everything, his most cherished activities, lay a weary impatience with them and a sense of their irrelevance in the lack of a determining motive to channel their force.
    She turned to him, and it was as though she had descried a vision of beatification in the darkness; she took his hand as though she would warm it in her cold hand. But the light in her face slowly died as her low voice, with pauses, unwonted uncertainties here and there, went on. Again, as though tranced, he had nothing but to listen, given up not to her reasonings, but to her, the spirit beneath, which embraced not only them and her conduct, but the very qualities which made her to him what she was. And it was her hand which was warmed, though a gesture lifted both to her breast.
    “Richard, I know. That is what makes it so hard, that I do understand. Oh, don’t think I don’t want happiness, that I am harsh. But I have found the hardest thing to do. … I see Father going about the farm as though he were lost; and his hair is white. … Like his horses, he is old; like them, he is patient, even in waiting for the end. What should I be doing to leave him? There is some other way. My mother seems daily to give her frail life to the white narcissi; and, while she is not old, she makes me fear the more. You can see how it is with me, and how I must not listen to – the outer world, even to – even as I have….” Her voice broke as if from a weight of longing which would return in days after.
    Richard Milne’s impelling desperation would no longer be kept within bounds. He seemed to find her pleas unanswerable as she had his. He rose from the seat. His voice quivered. A fear that they were cutting themselves off from each other as they had done before did not suffice to temper his embittered discomfiture, which he scarcely cloaked in polite circumstantiality.
    “It is late and I must not keep you, Ada. We must talk again,” he added with a perverse effort at balance. He was facing the window giving on the dark room; across it he saw the crack of light under the door, which showed that life went on in the rear portions of the house. “I hope my intrusion hasn’t kept your mother too long from her bulbs.” To this irrepressible malice in jejune and childish politeness Ada made a vague gesture and rose as he went on: “I am going to have to talk with your parents. They, too, may not be able to understand reason and common logic, but at least they shall listen. It is late now, and I shall not disturb them.”
    She put out her hand. “I’m sorry, Richard.” She said it so simply and with such significance that his anger melted, and he half felt that he was defeated once more. Then his stubborn pugnacity whelmed the feeling. He grasped her extended hand.
    “Give them my regards, please, and tell them that. We’ll see.”
    Smiling a little at his grimness, the tall woman murmured:
    “I’m sure they’ll be glad to see you again. They have so few visitors, and they remember you, of course. Father was asking why you hadn’t seen him the last time you were here.”
    “I look at the whole thing differently now,” he declaredagain. “I must see them both regardless of any kind interest they may have in me.”
    Ada Lethen became grave. “Richard, you mustn’t look at it in that way. There’s nothing to get angry about, nothing to be done.” She looked at him with steadfast, upraised eyes.
    “That remains to be seen, and will be seen. Good night, Ada.”
    Smiling a little, she stood on the veranda and watched him quickly swallowed in the gloom of the night, his footsteps muffled by the grass and pine needles, by the wind roaring