sort of thing a girl has to decide for herself--if she can."
"Where ever did you get such notions? A girl never _can_ decide it for
herself."
Muriel's answering smile was rueful.
"_I_ couldn't, at any rate," she said, "and so, even if I'm late about
it, I've come to you."
Mrs. Newberry was reassured. After all, the thing had happened; Muriel's
future--so we fatuous moderns reason--was at last secured. According to
the custom of her time and class, Ethel had always taken it for granted
that a poor girl married to a rich man is as safe as a good girl gone
to Heaven--and more certainly comfortable. She became radiant. It was
necessary only that they make such decent speed as would prevent any
other young woman from interfering.
"Well," she said, "I'm glad you _have_ come, because, since long
engagements aren't fashionable any more, your uncle and I must naturally
have all the warning possible--for your uncle will, of course, provide
the wedding. I think it had better be next month--yes, next month and at
St. Bartholomew's."
Muriel's cheek paled. She turned again to the window and looked out.
"I don't think you quite understand," she said. "I'm not sure----"
"Now, don't be silly," interrupted Mrs. Newberry. "I won't hear any
foolish talk about a home wedding or a quiet wedding. It isn't the
proper thing for a wedding to be quiet; it isn't natural; besides, you
have been living here in your uncle's house, and you owe something to
his position."
"That's not it." Muriel's back was still turned; her eyes were fixed on
the cold rain that was falling.
"Well," asked Mrs. Newberry, in complete bewilderment, "then what _is_
it?"
"I am not sure that I love Mr. Stainton."
The plump Mrs. Newberry again rose. Her face was a pretty blank.
"Love?" she repeated, as if she had heard that word somewhere before
but could not for the life of her recall where. "_Love_, did you say?"
"Yes," replied Muriel; "I don't know whether I love him."
"What next?" asked Ethel. "Love? You don't know whether you love him!
The idea! You're too young to know anything about it, my child. Of
course you love him. You're just too young to know it, that's all."
Muriel displayed a wistful face.
"I'm eighteen."
"A mere baby."
"Then I should think I was too young to marry."
"_Do_ you think so?"
"No, only----"
Mrs. Newberry waxed wise.
"As a matter of fact, Muriel, haven't you," she enquired, "often thought
of marrying even when you were younger than you are now?"
"Oh, yes!"
"_Well_, then!" Mrs. Newberry in the past few weeks had acquired a few
of her husband's mannerisms, together with some of his convictions.
But this convincing argument did not settle matters. Muriel again faced
the window; she seemed to draw inspiration for her incomprehensible
stubbornness from the prospect of dripping Madison Avenue.
"It's not so easy----" she began.
"Isn't he kind?" demanded Mrs. Newberry.
"Yes, he's kind."
"You certainly think him good-looking, child. In fact, _I_ should call
him handsome."
"I think he is _almost_ handsome, Aunty."
"Of course he is. I have heard lots of women simply _rave_ about him.
And he is in love with you? You can't deny that?"
"Did you know it, Aunty?"
"How could anyone help knowing it? He shows it all the time. He can't
keep his eyes off you."
"Then, why didn't you tell me?"
"Because----Why, it was so evident that we took it for granted you
knew."
"We?"
"Your uncle and I, yes."
"Oh! There doesn't seem to be any doubt in _his_ mind that he's in love
with me."
"Exactly, Muriel; and he is rich--quite rich. Why, there are hundreds of
girls in New York who would give their eyes to catch him. Hundreds of
them."
"But he is----" Muriel hesitated.
"Yes?"
"He's not young, Aunty."
"What has that to do with it?"
"I don't know, but I should think it might have a good deal to do with
it. Don't people say that the young love the young?"
"And marry them, you mean? Really, my dear, you have such romantic
notions! In that case, what's to become of the old?"
"They're supposed to have married before they became old, I should
think. Now, I am only eighteen. I don't know--I'm only speculating about
it, and I like Mr. Stainton very much--but when you think of a man of
his age marrying----"
Again Mrs. Newberry interrupted. She had her position to maintain: her
position as Preston Newberry's wife.
"Muriel," she said, "I can guess what is in your mind, but I cannot
guess how it got there. You shock me."
"But, Aunty----"
"That is enough. There are _some_ things that a young girl should not
discuss."
Muriel put her hands to her burning cheeks.
"Oh, you don't understand!" she cried. "You don't understand at all. I
don't know what you mean! But he's fifty." She almost sobbed. "I don't
care what Uncle Preston says. I _know_ he is fifty!"
It was a trying moment for Mrs. Newberry, but she met it bravely. She
considered Muriel. Then, in the glass, she considered her own image.
"Look at me," commanded Mrs. Newberry.
Her eyes still suffused with unshed tears, Muriel obeyed.
"_I_," said her aunt--"do _I_ look old?"
She did not look young, but Muriel loved her, and those whom a child
loves seldom grow old.
"No," said Muriel, loyally.
"Well," confessed Ethel, "_I_ am fifty." She was fifty-two. It was a
sacrifice, nobly offered, upon the altar of family affection. She saw
nothing in the future for her niece if Stainton could not be made to
suffice. "But," she added, "you must never tell anyone. All I want to
explain to you is that fifty is nothing--absolutely nothing at all."
It is, however, the common fate of sacrifices made for family affection
to go unrecognised by the family. Muriel, honest within the limits of
her limited training, clear-sighted, was unconvinced.
"Anyhow," she decided, "the question isn't whether he is old or young, I
suppose. I guess the only question is: Do I love him? I thought all last
night perhaps you could answer that, but of course I was wrong. I see
that now. I dare say no person can ever really answer such a question
but the person that asks it. I was right in the first place: I have to
find out for myself--and yet I don't seem able to find out for myself,
either."
VII
FIRE AND TOW
Mrs. Newberry's arguments were unavailing. Her pleas failed and so did
her eulogies of Stainton: both of Stainton the hero and Stainton the
rich man. Her tears sufficed not. There was no course but to recall her
luncheon engagement. Her incompetence in the matter sharpened her
tongue.
They quarrelled. Muriel, in a tempest of sobbing anger, fled to her own
room; Mrs. Newberry fled to the luncheon.
Upon her return Ethel found that Muriel had gone out. Preston was in his
"study," studying the stock reports in the Wall Street edition of his
evening paper, and to him she straightway unburdened herself.
"_What_ do you think of it?" She breathlessly enquired.
"I think you meddled," said her husband.
"But, Preston, the child came to me. I didn't go to her."
"If you didn't, it was no fault of yours. You've been trying to get at
her for God knows how long. Let her be. For Heaven's sake, let her be,
Ethel. If you do, she is sure to take him, because I have always
carefully given her to understand that she may expect nothing from me. I
have been conscientious about that. And she must know that we are doing
her a good-sized favour this winter. But if you don't let her alone, she
is bound to botch the whole affair."
He put aside his newspaper and prepared to go to that one of his clubs
at which he could obtain the best cocktail. As he was about to leave the
house, Muriel entered it. Preston smiled.
"Hello," he said. "Been for a walk?"
The girl was flushed and patently troubled.
"Yes, Uncle Preston," she said.
"Hum. Just going myself. How's the weather?"
"Lovely," murmured Muriel. She wanted to hurry to her room.
"What? Why, when I looked out a bit ago, I was sure it was raining."
"Oh, yes; I believe it is raining. I didn't notice."
Preston chuckled. He put out a thick thumb and forefinger and pinched
her cheek.
"I've always heard that love was blind," he said, "but nowadays it seems
to be water-proof, too. Look here, my dear: your aunt has been dropping
a hint or two to me, and I congratulate you."
"On what?" asked Muriel, bristling into immediate rebellion.
Again Preston chuckled.
"Tut, tut!" he said: he always treated her as if she were the child
that he had always maintained to his wife she was not. "You know well
enough. He's a fine fellow and well-to-do. Even if we could afford to
keep you on here indefinitely, which of course we can't, it would be a
good job. Lucky girl!"
He went out after that and left his wife's niece free again to hide
herself. But not entirely. Ethel, unable to resist her desire for
finality, soon tapped at Muriel's door.
"Muriel!" she called.
For some time there was no answer, though Mrs. Newberry made sure that
she heard sounds within the room.
"Muriel!"
"Yes. Who is there?"
"It's me--Aunt Ethel."
"Yes, Aunt Ethel?"
"Well, Muriel--are you all right?"
"Quite, thanks."
"Don't you want anything?"
"No."
"Nothing at _all_?"
"Nothing at all, thank you."
Ethel hesitated.
"But, Muriel----"
The girl apparently waited for her aunt to finish the sentence that
Ethel had not completed.
"Muriel----"
"Yes?"
Ethel softly tried the door: as she had supposed, it was locked.
"O, Muriel, do open the door and let me in."
"Why?"
"Because, Muriel."
"But why? I'm--I'm dressing."
"But--surely you know why, Muriel. Why won't you confide in me?"
There was a long wait for the answer to this question, but the answer,
when it came, was resolute enough:
"I've nothing to confide. Please go away now, Aunt Ethel, and leave me
alone. Please do."
Ethel went. She returned, of course, from time to time, whenever she
could think of a new excuse or a new suggestion; but she was always
worsted.
Muriel did not descend to dinner that night until she was sure that Mr.
Newberry, whose deterrent attitude she instinctively counted upon, was
there with her aunt. She contrived to be left alone not once with Ethel.
It was the habit of the members of the Newberry household to breakfast
together only by chance, which meant that they generally ate separately.
When Thursday's luncheon was announced, Muriel sent down word that she
had a headache.
"_What_ do you do when a girl locks her door on you?" asked Ethel of her
husband.
"They never lock their doors on me," said Preston.
"Do be serious. What in the world do you make of all this?"
"My dear," answered Newberry, "the only thing I am bothered about is
what _you_ may already have made of it. I'm afraid you have made a
mess."
"But, Preston----"
"There is nothing to be done now but to wait, my dear."
So it befell that when, exactly at nine o'clock that evening, Stainton's
card was sent up to Miss Stannard, Miss Stannard's guardians, one of
whom stayed long in the library with ears vainly intent, were as much at
sea regarding their ward's decision as was Stainton himself.
Muriel's own emotional condition was no more enlightened. Like all young
people, she had had her visions of romance, and, like the visions of
most young people, hers had been uninstructed, misdirected, misapplied.
All women, it has been said, begin life by having in their inmost heart
a self-created Prince Charming, who proves the strongest rival that
their destined husbands have to endure. Such a prince was as much
Muriel's as he is other girls'! She had created him unknowingly from the
books she had read, from the pictures she had seen, out of blue sky and
sunshine and the soft first breezes of Spring: the stuff of dreams. But
she was eighteen and no longer in school, and Stainton had given her a
glimpse of the great happy thing that she accepted as life.
What lacked? Something. While she descended the stairs she counted his
attributes in her aching brain. He was handsome, brave, well esteemed.
If he was not young, he did not seem anything but young. What was youth,
that it should be essential? What did it amount to if it were but the
unit of measurement for a life--a mere figure of speech--something
simply verbal? This man had, it appeared, the reality without the name.
What was this quality worth if its virtue resided in its name and not in
its substance? Why should she even ask these questions--and why, when
she asked, could she find no answer?
She paused. It struck her suddenly that the fault might lie in her.
Perhaps it was she that lacked. Perhaps--as a traveller may see an
unfamiliar landscape by a lightning flash--she saw this now; the loss
might be not in Stainton; it might be something that she had not yet
acquired.
Therein, to be sure, was the clew to the muddle. Nearer than that
lightning flash of the situation she did not come. Love, as we know it
in our civilisation, is not an element: it is a composite. In this girl,
descending to meet the man that wanted to marry her and even now
ignorant of the answer she should give him, there lay the Greater
Ignorance. Companionship, affection, kindly feeling--all these things
and more--she had for him; but the omnipotent force that welds and
dominates and forges these elements into one, unified, spiritual,
intellectual, and bodily love, the law that begets this and nourishes
it--this she did not as yet know, had never known.
The Newberry drawing-room was as it had been two weeks before. The
crackling fire danced over its gilt-and-white prettiness, the heavy,
ivory curtains, which folded behind her, shut out all the world.
Stainton rose from a seat beside the fire, much as if he had been there
since last she saw him. The interval of a fortnight seemed as nothing.
She noticed again how tall and strong and fine he seemed, how virile,
how much the master, not only of his own fate but of himself. He came
forward with outstretched hands.
"Have you thought things over?" he asked.
There was no manoeuvring now, no backing and filling. The time for
pretence was passed.
"Yes," she said. "I have thought of nothing else, and yet--and yet----"
His brows contracted slightly, but he kept his steady hand upon the
tight rein by which he was accustomed to drive himself.
"And yet you aren't sure?" he supplied. "You have not been able to make
up your mind?"
She hung her head. On the edge of the hearth-rug she traced a stupid
figure with the toe of her bead-embroidered slipper.
"I can't tell," she said, "I've tried. I've tried very hard----"
"To love me?"
"No." She wished to be honest; she determined upon being honest. She
owed him that, even should it hurt him. "No," she said, "not to love
you; for if I had to try to love you, it wouldn't be real love at all,
would it? What I tried to find out was whether I do love you now."
It was on his lips to say that, as surely as trying to love would not
create love, so, if love was, it need not be sought. But she raised her
face when she ended, and, when the light fell upon that, he forgot all
casuistry. Her slim figure just entering upon womanhood, her blue-black
hair, her damp red lips and her great dark eyes: she was as he had seen
her first, like an evening in the woods, he reflected: warm and dusky
and bathed in the light of stars.
Quite suddenly and wholly without premeditation he came to her and
seized her hot palms in his cool hands. For years he had mastered
passion; now, at this sight of her after the two weeks' separation,
passion mastered him. The rein had snapped.
"Muriel," he said, "I can make you love me. You don't know--there are
things you don't know. I can make you love me. Do you hear that? Muriel?
Answer! Do you understand? I will make you love me. I will!"
She looked up at his face. It was alight as she had never yet seen any
man's. Then, before she had gathered her breath to give him an answer,
she was seized by him. She was crushed to him; she was held tight in his
strong arms. She was hurt, and, as she was hurt, their lips met.
The miracle--oh, she was sure now that it was the miracle--happened.
Something new clutched at her throat. Something new, wonderfully,
terrifyingly, deliciously new, gripped at her heart and set her whole
body athrill and trembling. The blood pounded in her temples. She tried
to look at him, but a violet mist covered her eyes and hid him.
"Kiss me!" she was whispering as his lips left hers. "Kiss me again. I
know now. I love you!"
VIII
"THE WORLD-WITHOUT-END BARGAIN"
And so they were married. Mrs. Newberry had her way: they were married
within the month and within the church.
Preston's troubles, meanwhile, were hard to bear, and were not borne in
silence. By faith, as has been noted, he was a Presbyterian; but by
reason of his social position it was incumbent to attend
occasionally--so often, in fact, as he went to church at all--an
establishment of the Protestant Episcopal persuasion. Yet it appeared,
when he came to arrange for the wedding of his wife's niece, which was
the first he had ever arranged for, that there were ecclesiastical
distinctions about weddings concerning which he had never previously
dreamed. There were certain churches where one was expected to be a
regular Sunday attendant; but when it came to a wedding, these would not
serve: a wedding, to be socially correct, must occur in one of two or
three churches in which, apparently, nothing else ever occurred. They
seemed to be set aside for the exclusive business of marrying, and they
married only exclusive people. Through one's sexton one rented one of
these as one rents the Berkeley Lyceum, save that, in the matter of the
wedding church, its rector is thrown in for good measure; then, when one
proposed to introduce one's friend Buggins, the composer, to play the
wedding-marches, one was told that only the church's regular organist
was permitted to play the church's superb organ, and that, if one really
required music, the regular organist could be hired at so much--and "so
much" was not so pleasantly indefinite as it sounded.
"I never before realised what my father-in-law went through for me,"
said Preston.
"Things are never so hard as you think they'll be," said his wife in an
effort at comfort.
"Things are always worse," replied the uncomforted Newberry. "Thank the
Lord, I'll never have to arrange for another marriage. I thought that
was Heaven's business, anyhow: I thought marriages were made in heaven.
I'd rather be the advance agent of a minstrel show."
Still, in some fashion or other--and Mrs. Newberry and the papers were
satisfied that it was the very best fashion--the thing was accomplished.
There was an immediate "Engagement Dinner" given by Ethel; there were
other dinners given by Jim; there were luncheons given by friends of
Muriel and the Newberrys; then, at last, there was Stainton's
bachelor-supper to George Holt and the ushers-to-be, whom Holt had
collected, held at Sherry's, whence everybody except the host departed
in one of the four socially requisite stages of drunkenness, and so the
climax, with the hired church, the hired parson, the frock coats, the
staring eyes, the odour of flowers, the demure bridesmaids, and the
hired organist playing Wagner and Mendelssohn and "The Voice That
Breathed O'er Eden."
Stainton did not long remember all these things, was never even aware
that at this wedding, as at all the other public demonstrations that go
by the same name, the young girls wondered what it portended and the
young men smirked because they knew. After a brief engagement in which
the flames of his desire had grown in expectant intensity upon the fuel
of those minor favours which conventional engagements make the right of
the man, he was hurried into the church in no state of mind that a sane
man would willingly describe as sane. He remembered only that he felt
white and solemn; that he had an interminable wait in the vestry with
Holt, a silently reconciled best-man, and a second wait at the altar
rail, where he was the centre of interest and commiseration until the
bride appeared, when he fell to an importance scarcely equal to that of
the clergyman and far below that of the pew opener. Only these things he
remembered, and that Muriel, with her sweetly serious face admirably set
off by the white in which she was clad, looked all that he wished her to
look and strangely spiritual besides. The next event of which he was at
all certainly conscious was the hurried reception and the swiftly
following bridal breakfast where Preston Newberry made truly pathetic
references to some "lamp of sunshine" that had been "filched forever"
from the Newberry home.
Preston was more than a little relieved. He found it in his heart to
wish Muriel well.
"Good-bye, youngster," he said, when she came to him in her going-away
gown. "Good-bye." ("For the sake of goodness, Ethel, stop that
snivelling!") "He's a fine old buck and he'll be kind to you, I'm sure."
("My dear, _stop_ it! Hasn't the girl got what you've wanted her to have
ever since you set eyes on him?")
Muriel heard the asides addressed to Mrs. Newberry and winced at the
adjective openly applied to Jim, but she bit her lip and tossed her head
and went away radiant for the first month of their honeymoon in Aiken,
where she was happy with new and tremendous delights that received and
asked and gave and demanded and grew.
She had not before adequately guessed at happiness of this sort. It was
as if her material world had always been at twilight--a soft, luminous,
fragrant twilight, but twilight nevertheless--and that now, without the
intervention of darkness, there had come the undreamed of wonder of
dawn. She ran forth to meet the sunlight. She was eager, primal. She
opened her arms to it. She gave herself to it because she gloried in
it. Unsuspected capacities, unknown emotions welled in her, and she gave
them forth and seized their purchase price. Her husband became in her
eyes something glorious and marvellous. There was no more question of
his years; she thought no more of that than any Greek girl would have
questioned the youth of a condescending Zeus. He revealed; he seemed
even to be the maker of what he revealed. She knew love at last; she was
certain that she knew love. She was in love with love.
For Stainton, and strangely in the same manner, that same magic
prevailed. Alone with her he could not keep his hands from her
loveliness; before strangers his eyes ravished it--his eyes shone and
his cheeks flushed and his brain turned dizzy with the thought that this
was his, all his own. In the desert of his life he had come finally to
the long desired oasis. The journey to it, the waiting, the molten
moons, and the weary afternoons of march had not robbed him of the
ability to reach it and enjoy it. He was young--he was still young!
"Let's climb the hill and see the sunset," he said to her.
This was toward the end of their second week. They were in their sitting
room in the hotel, Jim seated, in flannel shirt and walking trousers,
but Muriel still in a flowing kimono, at rest on the floor, her head,
with its wealth of blue-black hair, resting on her husband's knee, her
arms about his waist.
"No, no," she answered. "I don't want to see the sunset. Sunsets are so
sad. They mean the end of something, and I don't want to think of
endings, dear. We mustn't think of them, because we are at our
beginning."
He smiled and stroked her hair, and the touch, as always, thrilled him
to a great tenderness.
"Beginning?" he echoed. "Yes, that's it. It must be the beginning of
something that will never have an end."
Her dusky eyes glowed.
"Never!" she repeated, and then, as an unreasoned wistfulness shot
through her, she whispered: "It never will end, will it, Jim?"
"How could it, sweetheart?"
"But I mean it will always go on like this--just like this. I don't want
us just to grow used to each other, just stupid and merely
satisfied--just--just affectionate and fond."
"We can never come to that. We love too much, Muriel."
"Then don't let's forget ever," she pleaded, her arms tightening. "It
must all be honeymoon, forever and forever."
He raised her face and kissed her.
"Always," he said--"always morning. We will never let the shadows
lengthen; we will hold back the hands of the clock." He kissed her
again. "You know that we will?" he asked.
"I know--I know," she answered.
They had no quarrels. There was only one matter in which she deviated so
much as a hair's breadth from his ideal of her and there was but one
occasion when she was hurt by any act of his.