It was the Friday following the close of the competition, and there
were indications of a coming thaw in the big Colonial house. The girls
had betaken themselves to Mrs. Ascott’s arbour, as soon as dinner was
over. They spent every available minute at Vine Cottage--to make up for
their mother’s open hostility. And their mother, seeing how happy they
were, had dispatched Larimore to tell them that they were to accompany
her to Mrs. Henderson’s on some inconsequential errand. When they had
gone, Lary let himself wearily down on the bench at Mrs. Ascott’s side.
All the boyishness was gone from his face and his eyes were deeply
circled and dull. No word passed between them. The man reflected,
feeling the warm presence so close to him, that most women chattered,
preached or philosophized without cessation, as if the one thing
demanded of femininity were an unbroken flow of talk. Judith Ascott
knew when speech was obtrusive. She knew, too, when to break the thread
of Lary’s morbid musings.
“Have you been watching that sunset? Theo called my attention to it,
before you came out. She saw, in those clouds, the form of a woman with
streaming red curls. ‘The red-haired wife of the sun,’ she called it.
Now the locks are straight and almost gray. I never saw such sunsets as
you have here, not even in Italy.”
“I didn’t know what bewitching colour effects we had, until I began
to sit here on this bench with you. My father has often called us to
enjoy a peculiarly beautiful sky with him. Mamma usually spoils it by
reminding him that all the wealth of tints is produced by particles of
dirt in the atmosphere. She hates dirt, even when it reveals itself in
a form that doesn’t menace her housekeeping. If she had gone on living
in Olive Hill, I believe she would have died of disgust.”
“Does the town--the immediate environment--make any difference, Lary?
Olive Hill or Springdale, Florence or Pelham. I have been as wretchedly
unhappy and ... alone ... in a crowded Paris café as ever I was on the
deck of a steamer, in mid-ocean, when I wanted to climb overboard and
end it, in the inviting black water.”
“You? Judith! I thought your life had been eminently
satisfactory--barring the one sorrow.”
“You must not think I have been a happy woman. I have only been a
coward--shutting the trap door on my failures. But I don’t want to talk
about myself. I have a favour to ask. Will you--” Her voice took on the
quality of appeal.
“What is it, Judith? A favour?”
She drew from its envelope a letter that had come, that afternoon,
from her attorney. His partner, Mr. Sanderson, was planning to build a
home on Long Island, as a wedding gift to his only daughter. She knew
the girl’s taste. She wanted to send the plans that Mrs. Marksley had
rejected. With such entrée as the Sandersons could give him, Larimore
Trench ought to find success in New York. He was wasting his talents in
Springdale.
“It’s good of you, my dear. But that kind of success--or
failure--doesn’t mean much to me.”
“Then what would satisfy you, Lary? You have so much ability.”
“A little of the right kind of recognition--perhaps. I used to think
I would experience the thrill at the acceptance of a poem or essay by
some discriminating editor. The first time such an acceptance came, it
left me numb and cold with disappointment ... in myself, I mean--my
inability to rise to the occasion.”
“May I tell you what you want--what you demand of life?” Some one had
struck a match in her darkness.
“I--wish you would.”
“The thing you have attained, Lary, the height you have reached ...
is under your feet. You--_you_ are superior to it. The only thing
that could satisfy you is--” she paused, a fervid instant--“the
unattainable.”
Larimore Trench turned and looked into her eyes.
Dusk had settled on the garden, but Luna’s fire illuminated her face.
His body stiffened, and a dull anguish smote him.
“Judith--God help me--the unattainable is ... you!”
V
Judith Ascott had dreamed of the time when love should come, not such
love as Raoul had given her in her romantic girlhood. Nor that other
love, that had marched with slow musical cadence into the discord of
her early maturity. It must be the masterful love, austere and tender,
a discipline and a refuge for her unruly spirit. And now it was come
... the only love that had ever mattered to her--the only man she had
known whose very faults and weaknesses were precious, and she had but
one impulse--to fold him in her arms and soothe his aching spirit.
Was this love? Or mayhap the thwarted motherhood within her, that
perceived in Lary and Eileen the void left by the rebellious aversion
of the woman who was their mother in the flesh? A long moment she
scrutinized, challenged the stranger that had arisen, unheralded and
undesired, in her own heart. Then she said, resolutely:
“No, Lary. I am the unattainable, only so long as I retain the wisdom
to hold myself beyond your reach. I should prove as disappointing as
all the others--the achievements that were to give you joy. The real
Judith is not the peerless being your imagination has fashioned. Would
you shrink from me in repugnance and horror if I should tell you that
my husband is not dead?”
“You are another man’s wife?”
“I was. The divorce was granted a few days before I came to Springdale,
less than three months ago.”
Lary breathed a sigh so sharp that it cut him like a knife.
“But that isn’t all. There was another man ... a man I fancied I loved.
Perhaps I pitied him. Most of all, I pitied myself. I was more than
willing to listen to his arguments. We would go to some place where no
one knew us. We had not the courage to brush away the falsehoods and
conventions of society. I faced all the consequences. It was no impulse
of youth. I was twenty-five, and had been married almost seven years.
We both knew what we were doing when I told him I would go.”
All at once she felt the man at her side shrink--involuntarily, she
was sure. It was as if his body had repulsed her, while his mind was
striving to be just, even magnanimous. She had thought it all out,
after Theodora’s revelation, knowing that some day Lary would come to
her with the pure white offering of his love. And she had resolved
to tell him of Herbert Faulkner--not the fiasco, but the fact of her
elopement. Perhaps it was this submerged thought that had leaped to
the surface, in her talk with Lary’s mother. With him she would not
take refuge in the timely intervention of a broken axle and a prudent
father. Her sin was as complete as if she had carried elopement to
its inevitable conclusion. He must hear the story in all its sordid
aspect. She waited for him to speak. The clear outline of his face cut
the shadow, incisive and still as an Egyptian profile in stone. Not a
quiver of the lips betrayed his emotion. Yet Judith Ascott knew she had
dealt him the cruelest blow of his life.
“You won’t let it interfere with our friendship, Lary?” It was a
stupid, girlish question, such as Eileen or Kitten Henderson might have
asked. She felt incredibly young and inexperienced. When the man spoke,
his voice was hoarse with pain.
“I don’t want friendship. I want, oh, God! the unattainable. Judith, it
is not what you have done. I am not such a cad as to judge you. I long
since freed myself from the tyranny of an absolute thing called virtue.
That isn’t the--the obstacle. At bottom I am a selfish brute, jealous
and unreasonable. If there is another man in the world who has meant
that much to you.... Oh, not that I blame him. If I had known you when
you were another man’s wife, I wouldn’t have scrupled to take you from
him. You are my other self. I have known it--from the moment I looked
into your eyes, under the little apricot lamp. All my life I have been
heart-hungry, wanting something I couldn’t find. Zeus cleft us apart,
in the beginning of time. And now that you are here--” He set his teeth
hard and his frame shook.
A long, long time they sat silent. The night settled about them and
clouds covered the face of the moon. In the great house next door,
lights gleamed here and there as the family came home and prepared for
bed. Mrs. Trench had arrived in Hal Marksley’s touring car, with the
girls. Apparently they had been for a ride. As she went to the back
door, to be sure Drusilla had put out the milk bottles, she caught
sight of the two motionless figures in the summer house. She went to
the sun room and turned on a light that shimmered faintly through the
Venetian blinds. Judith saw, without perceiving it. The whole irony of
life lay between her and that impatient light.
The tower clock chimed eleven, when, like a stage illumination, the
garden was bathed in golden glory. With a single impulse the two on the
settee turned and looked up through the roof of the summer house, where
the vines were thin. And there, in a little clear blue lake, piled
high around the marge with mountains of sombre clouds, the yellow moon
floated, serene and detached. Lary took the fevered hands between his
cold, moist palms.
“Will you wait for me ... wait till I can search myself? Perhaps there
is a man, hidden somewhere in the husk of me. If I find him ... I will
come and lay him at your feet.”