letter with a blue French twenty-five-centime stamp upon it, which their
always discreet waiter brought to the rooms one morning with the coffee.
It had been forwarded from New York.
"What's that?" asked Muriel.
Stainton had been reading with his iron-grey brows in a pucker and a
smile on his lips.
"It is a Frenchman trying to write English," he said. "He doesn't
succeed."
"Yes, but what _is_ it?"
"Only business, dear."
"Then I ought to see it," said Muriel.
Stainton laughed.
"What?" he said.
"If it is business, I ought to see it," she repeated.
"Trouble your little head with such matters? Not much."
She came to him as if to kiss him, then quickly seized the letter and
ran laughing away. He pursued her, laughing, too; but she was more
agile than her husband, and she managed easily to evade him until her
eyes had caught enough of the letter to enable her to guess its entire
contents.
"So they want to buy your mine?" she asked. "They say their expert has
returned and reported"--she glanced again at the letter as his fingers
closed on it--"reported favourably."
"Yes," he said; "it's a French syndicate, some wealthy men in Lyons, and
they want to buy the mine."
"But you won't sell?"
"If I can get my figure, I will."
"Your mine?"
"Our mine."
For that she kissed him.
"But, if it's ours, I have something to say about it, and I won't let
you."
"Why not?" he asked, smiling at her pretty assumption.
"Because I think it would be horrid of you to sell it after all the
years you spent looking for it."
"I wasn't looking for it on its own account, dear; I was looking for it
because of what it would bring me."
"I wish you'd take me to see it."
"It's a dull place, Muriel."
"I wish you'd take me. I wouldn't find it dull."
"I shall take you to France instead."
"To sell the mine?"
"To try."
"Horrid!" she pouted.
"But, dearest," he explained, "I don't want to have a mine on my hands.
I have you."
"Do I keep you busy?"
"You are a gold mine. Don't you see? I want to be free. If I can get my
price, we shall be rich."
"I thought we were rich now."
"With a mine run by an agent, yes. But if I sold to this syndicate--now,
you mustn't talk about this outside, you know----"
"Of course I know."
"Or write it home."
"Of course not."
"Well, then, if these people buy, we shall be rich without any more
agents or any more work. I have had enough of mining to make me certain
that I don't want to chain any son of mine down to the business."
"Any----" The word turned her suddenly white. In the midst of the
intimacies of the honeymoon, reference to children painted her cheeks
with scarlet.
Stainton smiled indulgently. He put a strong arm about her and patted
her shoulder.
"Yes, any sons, dear," he said. "Did you never think of that? Did you
never think how sweet it would be if we two that are one should really
see ourselves made one in a little baby?"
To his amazement she burst into tears.
"I don't want a baby!" she wailed, her head on his shoulder, her hands
clasped behind him. "I don't want a baby. No, no, no!"
He tried to persuade her, but he could scarcely make himself heard until
he abandoned the topic.
"There, there," he said, "it's all right. I wouldn't hurt you, dearest;
you know I wouldn't. There will be nothing to worry about."
His heart ached because he had hurt her. He told himself that he should
have remembered that her present nervous condition could not be normal.
He upbraided himself for making to her, no matter how long he might have
been married to her, a frank proposition that her sensitive nature
probably repelled only because of the matter-of-fact way in which he had
suggested what, he thought, should have been more delicately put. He did
not change his design; he merely ceased to speak of it. Throughout the
world the only persons not consulted about the possible bearing of
children are the only persons able to bear them. Stainton no longer made
an exception of Muriel. He decided that the best management of these
matters was to leave them to chance for their occurrence and nature for
their acceptance.
This conversation took place a week or more after their verbal
banishment of sunsets. On the night following, Jim at the demand of his
abounding health, fell asleep earlier than usual and slept, as always,
soundly; but his wife chanced to be nervous and restless. She lay long
awake and she was lonely. Twice she wished to rouse him for her
comforting; twice she refrained. When, finally, she did sleep, her sleep
was heavy, and she awoke late to find him gone. She hurried into the
sitting-room, but he was not there, and it was quite ten minutes later
when he returned, fully dressed and glowing, a newspaper in his hand.
"Where on earth have you been?" she asked. She had crawled back into
bed, and she looked very beautiful as she lay there, her black hair wide
upon the pillows and the lacy sleeves of her night-dress brushed high on
her wide-flung arms.
"Downstairs. You were fast asleep and you looked so comfy I hadn't the
heart to waken you. It's a wonderful morning----"
"But, Jim, I woke up all alone! I was afraid!"
He sat on the bed beside her. He took her in his arms, flattered. He
gave her the chuckling consolation that the strong, knowing their
strength, vouchsafe the weak. He was sorry that she should have felt
badly, but he was immensely proud that she should be dependent.
"Too bad, too bad!" he said. "But it won't happen again. Next time I'll
either rouse you or else sit tight till your dear eyes open of their own
accord."
He was still holding the newspaper in one of his embracing hands. It
rustled against her back, and, freeing herself, she saw it.
"What's that?" she asked.
"A newspaper, of course. I thought I should like to see what was going
on in the world. It suddenly struck me that I hadn't looked at a
newspaper since I read the notice of our wedding--five hundred years
ago."
But Muriel pouted.
"Then," she said, "I don't see why you should begin now."
"One has to begin sometime."
"I don't see why. Is anything between us different to-day from
yesterday?"
"Certainly not, sweetheart."
"Well, I thought we weren't going to be like other people. I thought we
were always going to be enough to each other."
"We are. Of course we are. But you were asleep, and, anyhow, I said I
was never going to run away again. Besides, Muriel----"
"I don't see why," Muriel maintained.
He tried to quiet her with kisses. He held her close and pressed her
face to his.
During all that month, these were the only occasions when they so much
as approached a difference of opinion. They lived, instead, in that
crowded winter resort, like a man and a girl made one upon a new island
in a deserted sea. They walked, hand in hand, and, as it seemed to them,
heart to heart, through a wonderful world that was new to them.
Happiness sparkled in their eyes and trembled at their lips. There were
times when their happiness almost made them afraid. Heaven was very
near.
Then, as the month ended, the blasting idea came to Muriel: she was
going to have a child.
It came like that. Just when everything was perfect, just when love had
realized itself. The thought lay beside her on a morning that she had
expected to wake to so differently. Muriel felt as if it were the
thought that had wakened her.
She cast a frightened look at Stainton, who was lying beside her, his
iron-grey hair disordered, his mouth slightly open, snoring gently.
"Jim!" she said. She clutched at his pajama jacket and tried to shake
him. "Jim! Jim!"
He awoke, startled. He rubbed his eyes:
"Eh? What?"
"Jim!"
Then he saw her face.
"My God! What is it, dearie?"
She gasped her fear.
"Muriel!" he cried, and held her tight to his heart. His first feeling
was a flash of gratitude: his desire had been granted; he was to be the
father of a child.
But Muriel only clung to him and cried. She did not want a baby. She
was horrified at thought of it. She was panic-stricken.
Stainton watched her grief with a sore heart and essayed to soothe it;
yet, all the while, his heart swelled with a reasonless pride that
appeared to him supremely reasonable: he had performed the Divine Act;
within the year he would see a living soul clothed in his own flesh and
moulded in his own image. Like hers, his eyes, though from a vastly
different cause, were dimmed by tears.
"My dear, my dear!" he whispered. "O, my dear!"
Muriel, broken-hearted, wept hysterically.
Stainton stroked her blue-black hair. All women were like this, he
reflected; it was a law of nature. It was the same law that, in the
lower animals, first drove the female to repulse the male and then
submit to him. In mankind it began by making the woman dread the
accomplishment of her natural destiny and ended by awakening the
maternal instinct, seemingly so at variance with its preceding action.
Suddenly Muriel looked up and saw his expression. Hers grew wild.
"You--did you know it would be?" she stammered.
"There, there!" said Stainton, stroking her hair.
She drew herself free.
"You did know!"
Stainton prepared to yield to the natural law.
"Of course, I didn't _know_, dear. How could I be certain?"
"Oh, but you were, you were!" she cried. "You knew. And I didn't. I
didn't know! I didn't know! And you did--_you_!"
"Dearest," said Stainton. He tried to take her hand.
She was sitting straight up in bed, looking down at him, her hair
falling over her nightgown.
"And you told me I wouldn't----You told me it wouldn't be!" she accused.
"I?"
"Yes. Yes, you did. You said there would be nothing to worry about.
Those were your very words, Jim."
"Well, but, dear, there won't be anything to worry about."
"Nothing to worry about!" she repeated. She put her fingers to her
temples. "Not for _you_, of course!"
Stainton was hurt: "Dearie, you know that if I could----"
"And anyhow," she interrupted, "you didn't mean that. You meant me to
think what I did think."
He felt that, in a sense, she was right: he had meant at least to quiet
her, to divert her thoughts. He was ashamed of that. He sought to
comfort her.
"Perhaps you are mistaken," he said.
"No, no!" she said. She got up and, slipperless, began to pace the room.
Stainton struggled to his elbow.
"But, dearie," he said, seeking relief in logic, "you must have known
that when a girl married, she must expect--it was expected of her--it
was her duty----"
She continued to walk, her head bent.
"Yes," she answered; "but I didn't know she would have to right away, or
when she didn't want to, or----"
Genuinely amazed and genuinely pained, Stainton swung his legs from the
covers and sat on the edge of the bed, his hands clasped between his
knees, his mouth agape.
"Sweetheart," he asked, "don't you love me?"
"Of course, I love you, Jim."--She was still walking.
"Then what did you think marriage was for?"
She stopped before him. "I thought it was for love," she said; and,
crumpling at his feet, put her face upon his knees.
He bent over her, stroking her hair, calling her by the names that they
had invented for each other, waiting for the natural law to assert
itself again and trying, meanwhile, to alleviate her apprehensions.
"Perhaps, after all, you are mistaken."
This was the burden of his consolation.
Nevertheless, she was not mistaken, and the succeeding days proved it.
Nor was the natural law swift in asserting itself.
"Don't you think," he once tried to urge the law, "that it would be
beautiful if we should have a little baby?"
"_I_ sha'n't be beautiful!" she wailed. "I shall lose my looks. I----"
"Muriel!"
"Yes, I shall. I know. I have seen it--on the street--lots of places. I
shall grow--I shall----And all my lovely clothes!--Oh!"--She broke off
and hid her eyes--"I shall grow vulgar looking and horrid!"
They were walking along a country lane, and Stainton glanced about
nervously, fearing that her words, spoken in a tone altogether
unrestrained, would certainly be heard by more ears than his own. The
road, however, was empty. He drew her aside to a spot where the woods
met the lane and where, a few paces to the left of the lane, the trees
hid them. He took her into his arms.
"Muriel," he said, "if I could go through this for you, I would; you
know that."
"I know you can't go through it for me," she wept, "and so it's easy
enough for you to say."
"No," said Jim, "I can't go through it for you, and so you see, it must
be God's will that it should be as it is to be."
She was worn out by the days of worry, but she made one more appeal.
"Jim," she said, "can't you do something else for me?"
He knitted his brows.
"Something else?" he wondered. "I can love you; I can back you up with
all the love of my body and brain and soul. You may always count on
that, sweetheart."
"But"--her eyes looked straight into his--"can't you _do_ something?"
He understood. He fell back a step, his face grey.
"Muriel!" he whispered.
"I've read of such things in the papers," she said.
"Muriel!"
His eyes were so horrified that she hung her head.
"Oh, it's wrong; I know it's wrong," she said. "But, oh, if you knew how
afraid I was of this and how I hate and how--O, Jim, Jim!"
She tottered forward, and his arms received her.
"Muriel, my dear wife," he said. "My own dear little girl, to think that
when God has put a life into our keeping, you----Why, Muriel, that is
murder!"
That word won Stainton's victory. Muriel succumbed. For her it was like
the safe passing of one of those physical crises when the patient had
rather die than face the pain of further living; for him it was the
sealing of his happiness.
IX
ANOTHER ROAD
It was a few days later that Muriel, the reconciled, decided that she
wanted to leave Aiken.
"Don't you think," she asked, for she had come unconsciously often to
use phrases characteristic of Jim, "that a change of scene would be good
for us both?"
Stainton had not thought so. He had wandered so much in his life that,
now wandering was no longer a necessity of life, he was tired of it.
Besides, he was eminently satisfied with Aiken.
"I don't know," he said. "I think it's splendid here. Haven't we
been--aren't you happy, dear?"
Muriel was looking out of the window of their hotel sitting-room.
"Of course I'm happy," she said in a low voice. "At least," she added,
"I know I ought to be, and I know I never knew what happiness was till I
had you. It was only that I thought it would be--perhaps it would be
good for me--now--if we travelled."
Stainton cursed himself for a negligent brute.
"What a beast I am!" he said, his arm encircling her waist. "We shall go
wherever you want, and we shall go to-morrow."
Muriel smiled ruefully.
"Perhaps," she submitted, "the real reason is only that I've always
wanted so to travel and have never had the chance before."
But Stainton would hear of no reason but her first. He upbraided himself
again for his stupidity in not guessing her need before she could have
given it expression.
"I've been cruel to you!" he declared.
She stopped him with a swift embrace.
"You're never anything," she contritely vowed, "but just darling to me.
I only thought----"
"I know, I know. Where shall we go, Muriel? How about France? I ought to
see that syndicate, you know: I ought to meet those men personally. Then
there's Paris. I have always longed for Paris myself, and now I shall
have you for my guide there."
"Your guide, Jim?"
"Well, you speak French like a book, and I have forgotten nearly all of
the little I ever learned."
"I speak school-French," Muriel corrected him.
"At any rate," he assured her, "yours is fluent, and I can only stammer
in the language. Then, too," he went on, "there will be the trip across.
That will be good for you. Sea air ought to be good for you." She
winced, and so he hurried to add: "I think I need a bracer, too.--Are
you a good sailor, Muriel?"
"I don't know. I've never been on the ocean. Are you?"
"I used to be." His eyes darkened. "It's a good many years since I have
tried the water. But I know I shall be all right. I am in such splendid
shape. Where is a newspaper? Wait a minute; I'll ring for one. Aren't
you glad for newspapers now? They carry shipping advertisements, you
see. We'll look up the sailings. We have found our first five heavens in
America; we must find the sixth in France, and then we must come back
here so that our seventh will happen on American soil."
Considering the fact that he did not wish to go, he was
self-sacrificingly energetic. He was so energetic that they left Aiken
on the next morning and, three days later, were aboard their steamer.
The Newberrys were out of town, still enjoying the rest that they had
earned by settling Muriel for life. George Holt was, however, there and
had come all the way to Hoboken to see them off.
"And as a German steamship captain once said to me when I asked him to
lunch with me at my club," explained Holt, "it's a terribly long way
from Hoboken to America."
"It was good of you to come," said Muriel, while the crowd of
second-class passengers and the friends of passengers jostled about the
first-class promenade deck. "Don't you wish you were coming along?"
"Better," said Stainton, already in his steamer cap.
"Thanks, no," said Holt, and then, as the siren blew: "If you'd asked my
advice before you bought your tickets, old man, I'd have told you:
'Don't go to sea; but if you do go, don't play cards; but if you do play
cards, cut the cards. They'll cheat you anyhow, but it'll take longer.'"
He waved a plump farewell and bared a bald head and waddled down the
gang-plank. The band began to play, and Stainton and his wife went to
their stateroom to unpack: they were travelling without a maid because
Muriel had said something about wanting to secure one in France.
By sunrise next morning the _Friedrich Barbarossa_ was racing through
the grey Atlantic with even speed. It was late winter--it was really
early spring--and she had already encountered a storm and heavy seas,
but the lean ocean express dove through the former and rode the latter
as easily as if she had been a railway train running on tried rails
along a perfect roadbed. There was no reason in the world why anybody
should be sick aboard her; few others were sick; yet, Stainton, on that
second day out, remained below.
He could not account for it. He did not like to confess it. He
especially hated to confess, when he awoke to see his wife putting the
finishing touches to her toilet in the far corner of their big
stateroom. But this was manifestly a case where discretion must triumph
over valour: he no sooner got to his feet than he got off them again.
"It's no use," he sighed. "I don't know what it was. I wish they didn't
have such good dinners on this boat, for it must have been something I
ate."
Muriel was all consolation.
"Let me ring for the steward to bring your breakfast here," she said.
"Not if you don't want to kill me! Don't mention food again, please--I
wonder if that lobster were just fresh."
She insisted for a long time that she would remain below with him, but
he overruled her. He said that the open air would be good for her, even
if she did not seem to need it, and he meant that, although he meant
also--what he dared not say--that he wanted to struggle alone with his
malady. Finally, therefore, Muriel descended to the big dining saloon
alone and surprisedly found herself breakfasting with enjoyment, in
spite of her husband's absence.
She walked the long sweep of the promenade deck and sat for a while in
her steamer chair, next Jim's, where, for a few beautiful hours on the
evening before, Jim had sat with her. She read a little from a frothy
novel that fell short of the realities of love as she knew it, and
failed to touch on that great reality which still so heavily oppressed
her; and she watched the long, oily swell of the now green waters,
beating to crests of foam, here and there, and forming an horizon-line
for all the world like distant mountain-peaks seen, as Stainton had so
often seen such peaks, from a peak that is higher than them all. She
went to look after Jim every quarter of an hour, but, just before the
band began to play on deck and the deck-stewards came smilingly about
with their trays of bouillon and sandwiches, she found him sleeping and
resolved not again to disturb him. She knew that she was very lonely,
but she lunched on herring salad, clam chowder, farced turkey-wings,
oysterplant menagere, succotash, biscuit japonais and nougat parfait.
She had finished and was sitting idly at her table watching the awkward
motions with which a line of otherwise commonplace passengers walked by
on their way upstairs, when her notice was caught by a man whose gait
had all the certainty of a traveller upon a level road.
He was tall and slender, with a figure altogether built for grace and
agility; but what especially impressed her was his air of abounding
youth. His face was, in fact, that of a mere boy--a boy not five years
her senior. It was a perfect oval, that face, flushed with health and
alight with freshness. Even the fiercely waxed little blond moustache
above its full red lips failed to give it either age or experience, and
the clear eyes, intensely blue, looked on all they met with the frank
curiosity of the young that are in love with life. They met Muriel's own
interested scrutiny and, when they answered it with an honest smile,
whipped a sudden blush into her pale cheeks.
Muriel hastened from the saloon. She went to look after Jim; but Jim
still slept.
She went on deck again. She knew that the blond young man would be
there, though how she knew it she could not guess, and yet she argued
that there was no reason why his presence should banish her from the
free air.
She sat down. She saw him coming past, on a walk about the deck, and
looked away. The second time he passed she glanced at him, and he smiled
and raised his steamer cap. A gust of wind fluttered her rug, and he
stooped to rearrange it.
"Thank you," stammered Muriel. "It's not necessary, really. The
steward----"
The young man bowed. It was a bow that, in New York, would have struck
her as absurdly elaborate; here she liked it.
"But it is, I assure you, a pleasure," he protested.
He spoke English without an accent, but with a precision that, for all
its ease, betrayed a Teutonic parentage and education.
"Thank you," repeated Muriel, and she blushed again.
The young man stood before her, his arms folded, swaying in serene
certainty with the rolling rhythm of the boat.
"May I sit down?" he asked, indicating, with a gesture of his hand, the
row of empty chairs beside her.
Muriel made, by way of reply, what she conceived to be a social
masterstroke.
"Certainly," she answered; "but I am here only for a few moments. I'll
soon have to be running downstairs--I mean 'below'--to look after my
husband."
The stranger's handsome face expressed concern, yet the concern, it
immediately appeared, was not because of Muriel's marital state, but
because of her husband's physical plight.
"I am so sorry," he said, taking Jim's chair. "He is ill then, your
husband?"
Muriel did not seem to like this.
"Not very," said she. "He is"--she searched for a phrase characteristic
of Stainton--"he is just a bit under the weather."
"So," sighed the stranger, unduly comprehending. "Ah, perhaps Madame has
made more voyages than has he?"
"No, this is the first trip across for both of us."
"Indeed? But you seem to be so excellent a sailor! Is it only youth that
makes you so?"
"I don't know." She was clearly, her will to the contrary, a little
flattered. "I seem to take naturally to the water."
"But not so your husband!"
"He will be all right to-morrow."
"Only to-day he is, your husband, not all right? I am so sorry. Perhaps
he is not so young as you are?"
Muriel felt herself again flushing. She at once became more angry at her
anger than she was at what, upon reflection, she decided to be nothing
more than frank curiosity on the part of her interlocutor.
"Of course he is young!" she heard herself saying.