Gladys was now twenty-four and was even more anxious to marry than is
the average unmarried person. She had been eleven years a wanderer;
she was tired of it. She had no home; and she wanted a home.
Her aunt--her mother's widowed sister--had taken her abroad when she
was thirteen. John was able to defy or to deceive their mother. But
she could and did enforce upon Gladys the rigid rules which her
fanatical nature had evolved--a minute and crushing tyranny. Therefore
Gladys preferred any place to her home. For ten years she had been
roaming western Europe, nominally watched by her lazy, selfish, and
physically and mentally near-sighted aunt. Actually her only guardian
had been her own precocious, curiously prudent, curiously reckless
self. She had been free to do as she pleased; and she had pleased to do
very free indeed. She had learned all that her intense and catholic
curiosity craved to know, had learned it of masters of her own
selecting--the men and women who would naturally attract a lively young
person, eager to rejoice in an escape from slavery. Her eyes had
peered far into the human heart, farthest into the corrupted human
heart; yet, with her innocence she had not lost her honesty or her
preference for the things she had been brought up to think clean.
But she had at last wearied of a novelty which lay only in changes of
scene and of names, without any important change in characters or plot.
She began to be bored with the game of baffling the hopes inspired by
her beauty and encouraged by her seeming simplicity. And when her
mother came--as she said to Pauline, "The only bearable view of mother
is a distant view. I had forgot there were such people left on
earth--I had thought they'd all gone to their own kind of heaven." So
she fled to America, to her brother and his wife.
Dumont stayed eight days at the Eyrie on that trip, then went back to
his congenial life in New York--to his business and his dissipation.
He tempered his indulgence in both nowadays with some exercise--his
stomach, his heart, his nerves and his doctor had together given him a
bad fright. The evening before he left he saw Pauline and Gladys
sitting apart and joined them.
"Why not invite Scarborough to spend a week up here?" he asked, just
glancing at his wife. He never ventured to look at her when there was
any danger of their eyes meeting.
Her lips tightened and the color swiftly left her cheeks and swiftly
returned.
"Wouldn't you like it, Gladys?" he went on.
"Oh, DO ask him, Pauline," said Gladys, with enthusiasm. Like her
brother, she always went straight to the point--she was in the habit of
deciding for herself, of thinking what she did was above criticism, and
of not especially caring if it was criticised. "Please do!"
Pauline waited long--it seemed to her long enough for time to wrinkle
her heart--before answering: "We'll need another man. I'll ask him--if
you wish."
Gladys pressed her hand gratefully--she was fond of Pauline, and
Pauline was liking her again as she had when they were children and
playmates and partners in the woes of John Dumont's raids upon their
games. Just then Langdon's sister, Mrs. Barrow, called Gladys to the
other end of the drawing-room. Dumont's glance followed her.
"I think it'd be a good match," he said reflectively.
Pauline's heart missed a beat and a suffocating choke contracted her
throat.
"What?" she succeeded in saying.
"Gladys and Scarborough," replied Dumont. "She ought to marry--she's
got no place to go. And it'd be good business for her--and for him,
too, for that matter, if she could land him. Don't you think she's
attractive to men?"
"Very," said Pauline, lifelessly.
"Don't you think it would be a good match?" he went on.
"Very," she said, looking round wildly, as her breath came more and
more quickly.
Langdon strolled up.
"Am I interrupting a family council?" he asked.
"Oh, no," Dumont replied, rising. "Take my chair." And he was gone.
"This room is too warm," said Pauline. "No, don't open the window.
Excuse me a moment." She went into the hall, threw a golf cape round
her shoulders and stepped out on the veranda, closing the door-window
behind her. It was a moonless, winter night--stars thronging the
blue-black sky; the steady lamp of a planet set in the southern horizon.
When she had been walking there for a quarter of an hour the
door-window opened and Langdon looked out. "Oh--there you are!" he
said.
"Won't you join me?" Her tone assured him that he would not be
intruding. He got a hat and overcoat and they walked up and down
together.
"Those stars irritate me," he said after a while. "They make me
appreciate that this world's a tiny grain of sand adrift in infinity,
and that I'm----there's nothing little enough to express the human atom
where the earth's only a grain. And then they go on to taunt me with
how short-lived I am and how it'll soon be all over for me--for ever.
A futile little insect, buzzing about, waiting to be crushed under the
heel of the Great Executioner."
"Sometimes I feel that," answered Pauline. "But again--often, as a
child--and since, when everything has looked dark and ugly for me, I've
gone where I could see them. And they seemed to draw all the fever and
the fear out of me, and to put there instead a sort of--not happiness,
not even content, but--courage."
They were near the rail now, she gazing into the southern sky, he
studying her face. It seemed to him that he had not seen any one so
beautiful. She was all in black with a diamond star glittering in her
hair high above her forehead. She looked like a splendid plume dropped
from the starry wing of night.
"The stars make you feel that way," he said, in the light tone that
disguises a compliment as a bit of raillery, "because you're of their
family. And I feel as I do because I'm a blood-relation of the
earthworms."
Her face changed. "Oh, but so am I!" she exclaimed, with a passion he
had never seen or suspected in her before. She drew a long breath,
closed her eyes and opened them very wide.
"You don't know, you can't imagine, how I long to LIVE! And KNOW what
'to live' means."
"Then why don't you?" he asked--he liked to catch people in their
confidential moods and to peer into the hidden places in their hearts,
not impudently but with a sort of scientific curiosity.
"Because I'm a daughter--that's anchor number one. Because I'm a
mother--that's anchor number two. Because I'm a wife--that's anchor
number three. And anchor number four--because I'm under the spell of
inherited instincts that rule me though I don't in the least believe in
them. Tied, hands and feet!"
"Inherited instinct." He shook his head sadly. "That's the skeleton
at life's banquet. It takes away my appetite."
She laughed without mirth, then sighed with some self-mockery. "It
frightens ME away from the table."