Less in words than by a subtle though unmistakable manner, the husband
made it clear to Stuart Farquaharson that his status in this
establishment was to be as intimately free as if he had been the brother
instead of the former lover of Conscience. It was difficult to reconcile
this unqualified acceptance with every impression he had formed of Eben,
and while he unpacked his bag in his bedroom a sense of perplexity
lingered with him. But as he was changing into his bathing suit a
solution presented itself which seemed to bear the stamp of four-square
logic.
Eben Tollman was neither the ogre he had formerly seemed nor yet the
utterly careless husband that his present conduct appeared to indicate.
He had simply recognized in the days of Stuart's ascendancy something
akin to disdain in the Virginian's attitude toward him. Now time had
demonstrated which was the victor, and Tollman was permitting his pride
the pardonable gratification of showing the younger man its security and
confidence.
Conscience had not yet appeared when Stuart came down, and neither was
Eben in evidence, so the visitor stood in the open door with the summer
breeze striking gratefully against his bare arms and legs until he heard
a laugh at the stair-head and wheeled to look quickly up. The picture he
saw there made his heart beat fast and brought a sudden fire into his
eyes.
Conscience stood above him with her arms lifted in an attitude of one
about to dive and in the gay colors of her bathing dress and cap; in the
untrammeled grace of slender curves she seemed the spirit of vivid
allurement. With an answering laugh the man stepped to the lower
landing and raised his own arms.
"Come on!" he challenged. "Jump, I'll catch you."
But as suddenly as though he had been struck, he dropped his arms at his
sides, realizing the wild, almost ungovernable impulse which had swept
him to take her in his arms in contempt of every consideration except
the violence of his wish to do so. Moments like this were
unsettling--and to be guarded against.
Then she had come down to the hall and he was on his knees, as he had
been on that other day at Chatham, tying the ribbons of her bathing
slippers with fingers that were none too steady.
But while they dived in water which was almost unbelievably blue and
clear, they might have been two children as irresponsibly full of sheer
zest and sparkle as the bubbles that leaped brightly up from their
out-thrust and dripping arms. Forty minutes later Stuart was following
her up the twisting path between pines and bayberry bushes while the
salt water streamed from them.
Eben Tollman had not after all found time to join them at the float, and
glancing up from his chair on the terrace where he sat almost completely
surrounded by a disarray of daily papers, he was now somewhat
disconcerted at their early return.
He had been inwardly writhing in a tortured frame of mind which their
arrival brought a necessity for masking and the things which had made
him so writhe had been the reviews in these papers of "The Longest Way
Round."
Eben was not an habitual reader of dramatic comment. The theater itself
he regarded as an amusement designed for minds more tinctured with
childish frivolity than his own.
Yet since Conscience and Stuart had left the house he had been mulling
over, with the fascination of a rising gorge and a bitter resentment,
paragraphs of encomium upon his hated guest. Had he ever indulged
himself in the luxury of profanity it would have gushed now in torrents
of curses over Stuart Farquaharson, upon whom life seemed to lavish her
gifts with as reckless a prodigality as that of a licentious monarch for
an unworthy favorite.
"Nothing but applause!" exclaimed Eben to himself, with a quiet madness
of vituperation--entirely unconscious of any taint of falsity or
injustice. "He makes no effort beyond the easy things of
self-indulgence, yet because he has a supercilious charm, he parades
through life seizing its prizes! Women love him--men praise him--and
every step is a forward step!"
He had, indeed, been reading no ordinary words of praise, bestowed with
the critic's usual guardedness. In Providence last night the unusual had
occurred and the reviewers had found themselves acclaiming a new
luminary in the firmament of present-day playwrights. Later the men with
New York reputations would be claiming Stuart Farquaharson's discovery,
and here in the Rhode Island town they had recognized him first. They
had no intention of relinquishing that distinction which goes with the
first clear heralding of a rising genius.
As Eben Tollman read these details in cold type, each note of their
eulogium scorched a nerve of his own jealous antipathy. Of course,
Conscience would take all this flattery, spread before her lover, as a
mark of genuine merit--as the conqueror's cloth of gold. It seemed that
he himself had succeeded in bringing Stuart on the scene only that the
woman might smell the incense being burned in his honor.
But Eben regulated his features into a calm and indulgent smile as the
two of them came across the clipped lawn.
They made a splendid pair with the sun shining on their wet shoulders;
the woman's neck and arms gleaming softly with the tint of browned
ivory; the man's tanned and strong over rippling muscles. Their drenched
bathing suits emphasized the delicacy of her rounded curves, and his
almost Hellenic fitness of body.
"I've been reading what the critics say, and my congratulations are
ready," announced the elder man calmly with a semblance of sincerity.
"It would appear that last night was a triumph."
For the next few days Stuart Farquaharson surrendered himself to the
_dolce far niente_ of salt air and sun and the joy of their reviving
influences. All contingent dangers he was satisfied to leave to the
future.
There was a new and spontaneous gayety in the woman's manner, but the
Virginian did not know that it was new. Eben Tollman, however, marked
the contrast and was at no loss in attributing it to its fancied cause.
He gave no thought to the truth that she was splendidly striving to keep
flying at the mast-head of her life the colors of artificial success.
So each in his own way, Eben and Stuart were deceived by Conscience, one
believing her indubitably guilty and the other thinking her
unquestionably happy.
In the elder man a ferment of bitterness was working toward the ends of
deranged deviltry--and its influence was all secret so that its tincture
of insanity left no mark upon his open behavior.
The difficulty of maintaining a surface guise of friendliness toward the
man whom he believed to be successfully wrecking his home might have
appeared insuperable. In point of the actual it was made easy--even a
thing of zest--by virtue of a lapse into that moral degeneracy which was
no longer sane. The growth of craftiness for the forwarding of a single
idea became uncanny in its purposeful efficiency and a morbid pleasure
to its possessor. Eben seemed outwardly to have lain aside his
strait-jacket of bigotry and to have become singularly humanized.
One afternoon Stuart and Conscience went for an all-day sail. The
husband had promised to accompany them, but at the last moment pleaded
an excuse. It was in his plan to continue his seeming of entire
trustfulness--and nothing better furthered that attitude than sending
them away together in the close companionship of a sail boat--while, in
reality, the presence of Ira Forman, tending tiller and sheet, was as
effective as the watchfulness of a duenna or the guardianship of a
harem's chief eunuch.
Ira Forman rose from his task of packing the luncheon paraphernalia on
the white beach near a life-saving station. He had regaled them as they
picniced with narratives of shipwreck and tempest, swelling with the
prideful importance of a singer of sagas. Now he bit into a plug which
looked like a chunk of black cake and spat into the sand.
"See that boat over yon in the norrer channal? You wouldn't never
suspicion that a one-armed man was sailin' her now, would you?"
"No!" Stuart spoke with the rising inflection of a flattering interest.
"Has he only one arm?"
Ira's nod was solemnly affirmative. "He shot the other one off oncet
while he was a-gunnin' and, in a manner of speakin', it was the makin'
of him. Until he lost his right hand an' had to figure out methods of
doin' double shift with the left, he wasn't half as smart as what he is
now. In a manner of speakin' it made a man of him."
The amused glance which flashed between Conscience and her companion at
this bit of philosophy was quickly stifled as they recognized the
gravity which sat upon the face of its enunciator, and Stuart inquired
in all seriousness, "But how does he manage it? There's mains'l and jib
and tiller--not to mention center board and boom-crotch--and sometimes
the reef-points."
The boatman nodded emphatically. "But he does it though. He's educated
his feet an' his teeth to do things God never meant 'em to." Then in a
voice of naïve emphasis he demanded, "Did either one of you ever lose
anything that belonged to you? I mean somethin' that was a part of
yourselves--somethin' that was just tore out by the roots, like?"
Stuart wondered uneasily if the stiffness of his expression was not a
thing which Conscience could read like print; if the simple-minded
clam-digger had not quite unintentionally ripped away the mask which he
had, until now, worn with a reasonable success.
But Conscience had missed the moment of self-betrayal because an
identical anxiety had for the instant blinded her intuition.
"Wa'al," continued Ira complacently, "I ain't never lost a leg nor yet
an arm--but, in a manner of speakin', I cal'late I know just round about
what it's like. A feller's life ain't never the same ag'in. That man
that's handlin' that boat now--he wasn't worth much to hisself nor
nobody else a'fore he went a-gunnin', that time."
He paused, wondering vaguely why his simple recital had brought a
constrained silence, where there had been laughter and voluble
conversation, then feeling that the burden of talk lay with him, he
resorted to repetition.
"The reason I spoke the way I did just now was I wondered if either one
of you ever had anything like that happen to you. Not that I presumed
you'd ever lost a limb--but there's lots of other things folks can lose
that hurts as much; things that can be hauled out by the roots, like;
things that don't never leave people quite the same afterwards."
Stuart smiled, though with a taint of ruefulness.
"I guess, Ira," he agreed, "almost everybody has lost something."
Ira stood nodding like a China mandarin, then suddenly he came out of
his preoccupation to announce:
"I'll begin fetchin' all this plunder back to the boat now. I cal'late
to catch the tide in about half an hour. You folks had better forelay to
come aboard by then."
Conscience and Stuart strolled along the stretch of beach until, around
a jutting elbow of sand dunes, the woman halted by a blackened fragment
of a ship's skeleton. She sat for a while looking out with a reminiscent
amusement in her eyes--and something more cryptic.
The man turned his gaze inward to the green of the beach-grass beyond
the sand where he could make out a bit of twisting road. There was
something tantalizingly familiar about that scrap of landscape;
something which stirred yet eluded a memory linked with powerful
associations.
Then abruptly it all came back.
His car had been standing just at that visible stretch of road on the
afternoon when Conscience had begged him not to criticize her father and
he had retorted bitterly. He could see again the way in which she had
flinched and hear again the voice in which she had replied, "You know
why I listen to him, Stuart. You know that I didn't listen ... before
his stroke. I didn't listen when I told him that if you went, I went,
too, did I?"
That was long ago. Now she was studying him with a grave scrutiny as she
inquired, "I've been wondering, Stuart, why you have never married. You
ought to have a home."
The man averted his face quickly and pretended to be interested in the
vague shape of a steamer almost lost in the mists that lay along the
horizon. Those sweetly curved lips had been torturing him with their
allurement. From them he wanted kisses--not dispassionate counsel--but
he replied abstractedly:
"I'm a writer of fiction, Conscience. Such persons are under suspicion
of being unstable--and temperamental. Matrimonially they are considered
bad risks."
Her laughter rang with a teasing mockery, but, had he known it, she had
caught and been startled by that absorption which had not been wholly
banished from his eyes. It was not yet quite a discovery, but still it
was something more than a suspicion--that he still loved her. In its
breaking upon her was a strange blending of fright and elation and it
directed her subsequent questions into channels that might bring
revelations to her intuition.
"I've known you for some time, Stuart," she announced with a whimsical
smile which made her lips the more kissable. "Much too long for you to
attempt the pose of a Don Juan. I hate to shatter a romance, but the
fact is, you are perfectly sane--and you could be reliably constant."
This constancy, he reflected, had already cost him the restlessness of a
Salathiel, but his response was more non-committal than his thought.
"If my first reason is rejected," he said patiently, "I suppose I must
give another. A writer must be absolutely unhampered--at least until his
storehouse is well stocked with experience."
"Being unattached isn't being unhampered," she persisted with a spirited
flash in her eyes. "It's just being--incomplete."
"Possibly I'm like Ira's one-armed man," he hazarded. "Maybe 'in a
manner of speakin' I wouldn't be half as smart as what I am' if I didn't
have to face that affliction."
But with her next question Conscience forced him from his defense of
jocular evasiveness.
"Did you know, Stuart, that--that Mrs. Holbury came to see me?"
He feared that she had caught his flinch of surprise at that
announcement but he replied evenly:
"Marian wrote to me that she had seen you. How you two happened to meet,
I have never guessed."
"She came here, Stuart, to explain things which she thought put you in
an unsightly light--and to say that whatever blame there was belonged to
her."
"She did that?" Stuart Farquaharson's face reddened to the temples and
his voice became feelingly defensive. "If Marian told you that she had
been more to blame than I, she let her generosity do her a wrong. I
can't accept an advantage gained at such a cost, Conscience. I think all
of her mistakes grew out of an exaggerated innocence and she's paid high
enough for them. Marian Holbury is a woman who needs no defense unless
it's against pure slander."
"Stuart," Conscience's voice was deep with earnestness, "a woman only
sets herself a task like that because she loves a man."
"Oh, no," he hastily demurred. "It may be from friendship, too."
But his companion shook her head. "With her it was love. She told me
so."
"Told you so!" Farquaharson echoed the words in tones of almost militant
incredulity, and Conscience went on thoughtfully:
"I was wondering if, after all, she might not make you very happy--and
might not be very happy herself in doing it."
If she was deliberately hurting him it was not out of a light curiosity
or any meanness of motive. Her own tranquillity was severely pressed,
but she must know the truth, and if a love for herself, which could come
to no fruition, stood between him and possible happiness, she must do
what she could to sweep it away. This was a new thought, but a grave
one.
For a while Stuart was silent, as he studied the high colors of the sea
and sky, contracting his eyes as if the glare pained them, and in his
face Conscience read, clear, the truth of her suspicion.
"Conscience," he said at last, "I asked Marian to marry me two years
ago--and she refused. That's all I can say."
But for the woman it was enough. She needed no explanation of why Marian
had refused an offer from the lips and unseconded by the heart. She came
to her feet, and her knees felt weak. She was afraid to let this
conversation progress. He loved her--and if he could read the prohibited
eagerness of her heart he would come breaking through barriers as a
charging elephant breaks its way through light timber.
"Ira is calling," she announced lightly, "and he speaks with the voice
of the tide. We must hurry or we won't make it back across the
shallows."