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To Him Who Waits
by
“You’re just the same,” said the hermit. “Come in and sit down. Sit on that limestone rock over there; it’s softer than the granite.”
“I can’t understand it, old man,” said Binkley. “I can see how you could give up a woman for ten years, but not ten years for a woman. Of course I know why you did it. Everybody does. Edith Carr. She jilted four or five besides you. But you were the only one who took to a hole in the ground. The others had recourse to whiskey, the Klondike, politics, and that similia similibus cure. But, say–Hamp, Edith Carr was just about the finest woman in the world–high-toned and proud and noble, and playing her ideals to win at all kinds of odds. She certainly was a crackerjack.”
“After I renounced the world,” said the hermit, “I never heard of her again.”
“She married me,” said Binkley.
The hermit leaned against the wooden walls of his ante-cave and wriggled his toes.
“I know how you feel about it,” said Binkley. “What else could she do? There were her four sisters and her mother and old man Carr–you remember how he put all the money he had into dirigible balloons? Well, everything was coming down and nothing going up with ’em, as you might say. Well, I know Edith as well as you do–although I married her. I was worth a million then, but I’ve run it up since to between five and six. It wasn’t me she wanted as much as–well, it was about like this. She had that bunch on her hands, and they had to be taken care of. Edith married me two months after you did the ground-squirrel act. I thought she liked me, too, at the time.”
“And now?” inquired the recluse.
“We’re better friends than ever now. She got a divorce from me two years ago. Just incompatibility. I didn’t put in any defence. Well, well, well, Hamp, this is certainly a funny dugout you’ve built here. But you always were a hero of fiction. Seems like you’d have been the very one to strike Edith’s fancy. Maybe you did–but it’s the bank – roll that catches ’em, my boy–your caves and whiskers won’t do it. Honestly, Hamp, don’t you think you’ve been a darned fool?”
The hermit smiled behind his tangled beard. He was and always had been so superior to the crude and mercenary Binkley that even his vulgarities could not anger him. Moreover, his studies and meditations in his retreat had raised him far above the little vanities of the world. His little mountain-side had been almost an Olympus, over the edge of which he saw, smiling, the bolts hurled in the valleys of man below. Had his ten years of renunciation, of thought, of devotion to an ideal, of living scorn of a sordid world, been in vain? Up from the world had come to him the youngest and beautifulest–fairer than Edith–one and three-seventh times lovelier than the seven-years-served Rachel. So the hermit smiled in his beard.
When Binkley had relieved the hermitage from the blot of his presence and the first faint star showed above the pines, the hermit got the can of baking-powder from his cupboard. He still smiled behind his beard.
There was a slight rustle in the doorway. There stood Edith Carr, with all the added beauty and stateliness and noble bearing that ten years had brought her.
She was never one to chatter. She looked at the hermit with her large, thinking, dark eyes. The hermit stood still, surprised into a pose as motionless as her own. Only his subconscious sense of the fitness of things caused him to turn the baking-powder can slowly in his hands until its red label was hidden against his bosom.