"You knew Lucy when she was a little girl, but you didn't see her often
when she was growing up, did you? Her best friend never thought that
she would ever settle to any one man. She was the most outrageous
little flirt you ever saw. No, not outrageous, because each time she
thought she was really in love herself. It was one boy after another,
all crazy about her, and she about them. Then it was one man after
another. What Lucy doesn't know about moonlight and verandas, and the
sad sounds of the sea at night, isn't worth knowing. But all the time,
from the time she was fifteen, there was John Fulton in the background.
He was never first favorite till she actually accepted him and married
him, but he was always in the running, in second or third place, and
whether he won her down by faithfulness and devotion nobody knows.
Nobody quite knows how or why she changed toward him. I don't believe
she does. He was just about the last man anybody thought she'd marry.
But anyway her young and flighty affections got round to him at last,
and fastened to him. They fastened to him like leeches. No man was
ever loved as hard as she loved him when she got round to it. She made
up for all the sorry dances she'd led him. She was absolutely
shameless. She made love to him in public, she----"
"She still does, Evelyn," I said. "I think that's one reason why I
like her so much, and him. There's nobody else so frank and natural
about their feelings for each other. Why, it's beautiful to see."
"Archie," said Evelyn, "for short periods of time she loved some of the
men she didn't marry almost as hard."
After a moment's silence, she said with hesitation,
"It's a lucky thing for her that all the men she thought she cared
about were gentlemen. You must have noticed yourself how little
yesterday means to her, how less than nothing tomorrow means, until it
becomes today."
"Well," I said, "it all bolls down to this, that after many
vicissitudes, she found her Paradise at last."
"Who can be sure that a girl who had as many love affairs as she had
is--all through!"
Just then Dawson Cooper came back and took Evelyn away with him. I was
immensely interested in all that she had told me about Lucy. I rather
wished that I might, for a while, have been one of the many. And I was
annoyed to learn that people were undertaking to make our business
theirs.
"I'll tell John about it when he comes back," I said, "and if he thinks
best, why I won't see so much of her."
But when he came back it did not seem worth while to tell him.
X
I had forgotten that John Fulton was to return Monday, until Lucy gave
it as a reason for not being able to ride on that afternoon.
"Even if the train is on time," she said, "I don't think I ought to go
chasing off, do you? He'd like us all to be at home together and maybe
later he'd like me to take him for a little drive."
She was rather solemn for Lucy. I did not in the least gather that she
would rather ride with me than play around with her husband. I did
gather that she was not using her own wishes and preferences as an
excuse, but the physical fact of John's home-coming. And I learned in
the same moment that I wished his return might be indefinitely
postponed, and that Monday afternoon with no Lucy to ride with promised
to be a bore.
I saw her doing chores in the village, Jock and Hurry crowded into the
seat beside her, just before the arrival of the New York train. From
the back of the runabout dangled the reed-like, moth-eaten legs of
Cornelius Twombley. For him, too, the return of the master was a
joyous occasion; there would be a quarter for him if he had been a good
boy, and some inner voice evidently was telling him that he had. There
was a red-and-white-striped camellia in his buttonhole, and his narrow
body was beautified by a dirty white waistcoat.
The New York train whistled. Lucy flicked the horse with the whip,
three handsome hatless heads were jerked backward, Cornelius Twombley's
peanut-shaped head was jerked forward, the voices of Jock and Hurry
made noises like excited tree frogs, and away they all flew toward the
station.
It was easy to picture the beaming faces that John Fulton could see
when he got off the train; it was [Transcriber's note: two words
obliterated here] hear the happy joyous voices all going at once, that
would greet him. If there was trouble in his life he would forget it
in those moments.
I turned into the Aiken Club feeling a little lonely. How good, I
thought, it would be to be met, even once, as Fulton is being met.
And now I must set down things that I did not know at this time, and
only found out afterward. And other things that are only approximately
true, things that wouldn't happen in my presence, but which I am very
sure must have happened.
When Lucy drove off at such a reckless pace to get to the station
before the train, I don't think it even occurred to her that during his
absence her feelings for her husband had changed in any way. It was
he, I think, who was the first to know that there was a change. He did
not realize it at the station or on the way home. How could he with
Jock and Hurry piled in his lap, and both talking two-forty, and Lucy
at his side, trying to make herself heard and even understood? No man
could. It must have been shortly after he got home, at that moment,
indeed, when he was alone with her, and his arms went out to her with
all the love and yearning accumulated at compound interest during
absence. Habit, and the wish to hurt no one, must have carried her
arms to tighten a little about him, and to lift her lips to him. Then
I think she must have turned her head a little, so that it was only her
cheek that he kissed. I imagine that until that time Fulton's
love-making had always found the swiftest response, that with those two
passion had always been as mutual and spontaneous as passion can be;
and that now, perhaps the very first time, his fire met with that which
it could not kindle into answering flame.
I do not think that he at once let her go. I think that first his arms
that held her so close loosened (already the pressure had all gone out
of hers). I think she was sorry they had to loosen, and glad that they
had. Then his arms must have dropped to his sides. He did not at once
turn away, but kept on looking at her, as she at him--he, hurt, he did
not know why, but brimming with love and compassion and tenderness and
a little desperate with the effort to understand and to make allowances
for whatever might have to be understood. Her great blue eyes looked
almost black for once, prayer upon prayer was in their depths, they
were steady upon his and unfaltering. It was as if she was giving him
every opportunity to look down through them and see what was in her
soul.
It could not have been till many days later that a whole sequence of
episodes which hurt and could not be understood forced him into speech.
I think he must suddenly in a moment of trial, have come out with
something like this:
"Why, Lucy, it sometimes seems as if you didn't love me any more."
When she didn't answer, it must have flashed through him like a streak
of ice-cold lightning that perhaps she really didn't.
I am glad that it is only in imagination that I can hear his next
question and her answer. There must have been a something in his voice
from which the most callous-hearted would have wished to run, as from
the deathbed of a little child.
"_Don't_ you, Lucy?"
And how terribly it must have hurt her to answer that question!
Considering what he had been to her and she to him, for how long a
period of time neither had been able to see anything in this world
beyond the other, and considering with even more weight than these
things their own children for whom the feelings of neither could ever
really change, I think that Lucy ought to have lied. I think she ought
to have lied with all her might and main, lied as John Fulton would
have lied if the situation had been reversed, and that thereafter,
until his death or hers, she ought to have acted those lies, with
unflagging fervor and patience. Tenderness for him she never lost.
She might, upon that foundation, have built a saintly edifice of
simulated love and passion.
But it was not in her nature to lie. I think she probably said: "I
don't know. I'm afraid not." And then I think her sad face must have
begun to pucker like that of a little child going to cry, and I think
it is very likely, so strong is habit, that she then hurried into her
husband's arms and had her cry upon his breast.