She came to a stop and sat looking out at the phosphorescent sea and the
star-filled skies. Farquaharson leaned forward, his words coming
brokenly and in a heavy misery of embarrassment.
"Marian, I _have_ recognized the new you: I've seen the splendid
development and fulfilment of you. It's only that ... that--" He broke
off and began over impetuously. "I happened to fall in love
with--Conscience before I met you. Of course, that's quite hopeless now
... but it seems permanent." He was struggling with a diffidence which,
in such circumstances, a man must have been very callous to have
escaped. On the lips of his characters, in fiction, words flowed with an
ease of dialogue and broke often into epigram. Now they eluded him,
leaving him in confusion. The situation was one for which he found
himself unprepared. "I doubt if I shall ever feel otherwise--about her,"
he went on somewhat flounderingly. "You and she are women of almost
opposite types in a way and yet--yet I've been realizing while you
talked, that in many respects you are alike."
Marian's lips twisted themselves into a smile, stiff with tension of
spirit, but a whimsical irony tinged her voice.
"The Colonel's lady and Rose O'Grady
Are sisters under their skins,
I suppose we have that kinship, Stuart."
The man's hands closed into a tight grip on the arms of his steamer
chair. In his eyes were regret and sincerity, but his words came with
the firmness of resolve:
"I have, as you say, been dense," he declared, speaking now in even
sentences that had ceased to break disjointedly. "I haven't even done
you the justice of recognizing your more genuine self. You spoke of
drawing me into the web of your troubles--but you didn't say the thing
which you might have mentioned. I was also an adult of supposedly human
intelligence. I should have foreseen the dangers of even so innocent an
affair as was ours. I should have protected you."
"Against myself?" she inquired.
"Against ourselves," he responded quickly. "I should, for instance, have
told you that I was so much in love with one woman, that to me all
others must remain--just others. Now you have done me the honor to say
you love me."
"Please, Stuart!" Marian's face was momentarily drawn in a paroxysm of
pain. "Please don't make me pretty speeches. It isn't necessary--and it
doesn't help."
"I'm not making pretty speeches," he declared. "My love is a hopeless
one, but I can't deny its force without lying. I've helped you spoil
your life and if I can help you mend it--" He broke off there and then
abruptly he said: "Marian, will you marry me?"
She carried her hands to her face and covered her eyes. For a moment she
sat in a stunned attitude and her words came faintly:
"I understand your motive, dear. It's gallant--but it wouldn't do."
"Why?" he demanded and again her head came up with the bearing of pride.
"I've already told you that it's not rehabilitation in the eyes of the
world I seek. For you it would be sacrifice--and for me a failure. If
you asked me because you loved me, and I believed I could make you happy
I think you know what my answer would be. But to marry you without your
loving me--well, that would be--" She paused and then finished: "It
would be sheer Hell."
Stuart leaned over and picked up the pipe. His face was rigid and
self-accusing, and the woman laid her hand on his arm.
"You have ridden with me in the hunting field, Stuart," she irrelevantly
reminded him. "I hope you'll testify that I can take my croppers when
they come. Please don't think I'm whimpering."
"One could hardly think that," he declared.
A sudden thought brought a fresh anxiety to her eyes, as she vehemently
demanded: "Was she--was Miss Williams, influenced by what people said
about you and me?"
"I suppose," he said, "the only version she had was the public one, and
I fancy there were those about her who made use of it, but I don't
believe it affected her decision."
Marian's voice was very low, almost tender now. "It would mean a good
deal to you, wouldn't it, to have her know the truth?"
His hand gripped her own feelingly for a moment and he nodded his head
but, in words, he said only: "Yes--it would."
"I wish I knew her. I wish I could set you straight with her," she told
him and after that she rose. "At all events it was worth the
experiment," she commented. "Well, '_la comedia e finita_.' I think now
I'll go to bed."
* * * * *
Conscience dealt relentlessly with herself in those storms of argument
which arose in her mind and had to be fought out; storms involving the
readjustment of her life to the partnership of marriage.
Yet she must not, if she placed value upon success, fall into the class
of parasite wives who suffer their own independence of thought to
languish.
One day she came into the study while Eben was engaged in those matters
of business which brought the most unaffected pleasure to his eyes and
his attitude was that of such absorption that she did not at once
announce her presence. When he turned at length and saw her, he came
instantly to his feet, but despite the smile of his welcome, Conscience
caught the repressed reluctance with which he shoved back his papers and
pencil.
"Eben," she hazarded, "why can't I make myself useful? Can't you
delegate some part of your work to me?"
Instead of gratification his expression took on the cast of
apprehension, though he laughed.
"What! Do you want to turn business woman, my dear?" he inquired. "Are
you ambitious to come into the firm and have your name on the door?"
"I want to have a hand on the oar because I think you have a sort of
financial genius and I'd like to share a thing which must come that
close to your inner life," she explained, and under the pleasurable
spell of her appreciation Tollman found himself expanding with
responsive pride. To certain forms of flattery he was as susceptible as
a schoolgirl.
"If I have ability," he made modest disavowal, "it's of a slight
caliber."
"I don't know anything about your financial rating," went on his wife.
"I've never asked any questions about that and I don't care so far as
the mere figures go. But I believe you have a gift of business
generalship which, in fields of wider opportunity, might have made you a
millionaire."
Tollman broke unexpectedly into a peal of laughter. He complacently
accepted the tribute to his powers, but would have preferred it laid on
with greater lavishness. Quite casually he remarked:
"When I said slight caliber, I spoke comparatively. If the occasion
arose, I fancy I could sign a check now--not only for a million but for
several."
Conscience's dark eyes must have mirrored their amazement: an amazement
which was entirely natural, and which concerned not only the revelation
of wealth in itself, but more complex things as well.
The disturbing thought intruded itself that in a land of such sparse
opportunities these returns could be wrung out only by a policy so
tight-fisted as to be merciless. It must mean draining resources to
their dregs. That was an unpleasant suspicion which she instantly
expelled with the reminder that her husband had inherited wealth and
that in supplementing it he had not been limited to a local field of
operation.
The next unwelcome thought suggested that if Eben were so rich as that
his generosity to her father and herself was discounted. Out of
abundance he had given a moiety and because of it she had put her life
into a yoke. But that idea, too, she met with the answer that his
conduct must not be measured by a given cost but by its spirit and
willingness.
"You are surprised?" His smiling inquiry called her back from her
disturbing reverie with a sense of guilty criticism.
"Only at the degree of your success, Eben," she told him gravely; "I had
not supposed it so large."
But as time went on, an intelligence less keenly edged than hers would
have recognized that it was only to the anterooms of his financial
interests that he admitted her.
This was inevitable, and obviously he could not explain what she felt to
be a rebuff. To make full disclosure of certain transactions would have
stripped Eben Tollman of disguise and brought results as parlous as
those he had feared on the afternoon when he left his strong box
unlocked. Structures of self-delusion might have fallen into shapeless
débris under the batteries of her frank questioning. Eben Tollman could
dismiss from thought the woman who has lost her way or the man who has
succumbed to a destructive thirst. That required only the remembrance
that the "wages of sin is death." But if real estate which he owned in
poor, even disreputable sections of distant cities brought him in
surprisingly large rentals, he did not conceive that his duty required
an investigation of the characters of his tenants.
Of course should his agents tell him that his property was being
prostituted to evil ends for gain he would have to sever relations with
them, but he selected agents who troubled him with no such embarrassing
details. This was a practical attitude, but something told him that in
it Conscience would hardly see eye to eye with him.
It was late in May that Jimmy Hancock wrote a note to the girl with whom
he had ridden horseback in the Valley of Virginia.
"I've just had a stroke of luck," he said, "in meeting our old friend
Stuart Farquaharson, who is touring the world, crowned gorgeously with
bays of literary fame. I ran into him yesterday in Yokohama and from him
learned for the first time of your marriage. If I am the last to
congratulate you, at least I am among the first in heartiness and
sincerity....
"There are some charming Americans here--though I don't think of any
others whom I should mention as common acquaintances. Or did you know
Mrs. Larry Holbury? She has been reigning graciously over us, and I am
among the smitten. However, since both she and Stuart are to sail on the
_Nippon Maru_ I have no great modicum of hope."
Poor Jimmy! Never was man less bent on purveying morsels of deleterious
gossip. Never was man, in effect, more stupidly blundering.
He wrote the day after the dance on his cruiser and he spoke of the
things near his current thoughts.
When Conscience had read the note, her eyes wandered thoughtfully and at
the end her lips curled. "So she followed him across the world, did
she?" she said half aloud, since she was quite alone. Then she added
quietly: "Still I guess she didn't pursue him without knowing that she
would be welcome. It was just as well that the dream ended in time."
Until his stroke had disabled the Reverend William Williams, his
congregation had thought of him less as an individual than as an
institution. In their minds he had shared the permanence of the church
steeple. Trained through two generations to his intensity and fiery
earnestness they saw in other clergymen a tame half-heartedness.
Exponents of more modern and liberal thinking had since come and gone
leaving the men and women who had been reared on the thundered Word as
expressed in his firstlies, secondlies, thirdlies and finalies unable to
fill their pulpit to their satisfaction.
Then it was that Sam Haymond, D.D., came to them, as a visiting preacher
for a single Sabbath. He came heralded by tidings of power in oratory
and zeal of spirit beyond the ordinary. Report had it that his shoulders
were above the heads of mediocrity and that, like Saul of Tarsus, he had
entered upon his ministry, not through the easy stages of ecclesiastical
apprenticeship, but with the warrior-spirit of a man wholly converted
from the ranks of the scoffers. Accordingly it was appropriate that he
should come as the guest of Eben Tollman, the keystone in the arch of
the church's laity and of the old minister who still held power as a
sort of director _emeritus_.
Eben being engaged by peremptory affairs in his study, Conscience drove
to the station to meet him on a fine young Saturday morning at the
beginning of June. She set out from the house which maintained a sort
of lordly aloofness among pine-covered hills, more than usually
conscious of the lilt of summer in air and landscape.
The Tollman farm had been one of goodly size when Eben had inherited it
and outlying tracts had since augmented it by virtue of purchase and
foreclosure, until the residence, which faced a lake-like cove, was
almost isolated of site. On either side of the sandy road, as Conscience
drove to the station, elms and silver oaks and maples were wearing new
and tender shades of green. Among the sober pines they reminded her of
fashionables flaunting their finery in the faces of staid conservatives.
Between the waxen profusion of bayberry bushes, wild-flowers sprinkled
the carpet of pine needles and blackberry trailers crawled in a bright
raggedness.