behind their persiflage. "I've all science on my side for the most
direct method." After all, why should he let even the Best Society deal
the cards for him? Should not a man sweep the boards of whatever kept
him from his natural mate?
That was on Tuesday, and the Thursday following he had asked the
Goodwards to motor over to Lighthouse Reef with him. He did not know
quite what he meant to bring about on this occasion; he had so much the
feeling of its being an occasion, the invitation had been so pointedly
given and accepted, it was with difficulty he adjusted himself to the
discovery on arriving at their hotel with the car, that Eunice had gone
to play tennis instead.
"The time is so short," Mrs. Goodward apologized; "she felt she must
make the most of it." She had to leave it there, not being able to make
a game of tennis in the hot sun seem more of a diversion than the steady
pacing of the luxurious car along the road which laced the forest to
the singing beaches. She had to let her sidewise smile do what it could
toward making the girl's bald evasion of her engagement seem the mere
flutter and hesitancy of besieged femininity. For the moment she was as
much "outside" so far as her daughter was concerned as Peter was of the
select bright circle in which she moved.
The way opened before them, beautiful in late bloom and heavy fern,
above which the sea wind kept a perpetual movement of aliveness.
"Eunice _will_ miss it," Mrs. Goodward rallied; "such a perfect
afternoon!" She gave him the oblique smile again, weighted this time
with the knowledge of all that Peter hadn't been able or hadn't tried to
keep from her. "It isn't easy, is it," she went on addressing her speech
to whatever, at the mention of her daughter's name, hung in the air
between them, "to stand by and see other people's great moments hover
over them. One would like so to lend a hand. And one is sure of nothing
so much as that if they are really to _be_ big, one mustn't."
"If you feel that," Peter snatched at encouragement, "that it is really
the big thing for her--what I'm sure you can't help knowing what I
mean--what I hope."
"What _I_ feel----? After all, it's _her_ feeling, my dear Mr.
Weatheral, that we have to take into account. It wouldn't be fair for me
to attempt to answer to you for that!"
"And of course if I can't _make_ her feel...." He did not trust himself
to a conclusion.
They found, however, when the road issued on the coast opposite the
great bursting bulks of spray, that Eunice's desertion and the
extenuation of it to which they had lent themselves, had put them out of
the mood for the high wind and warring surf of the Reef. Accordingly
they turned aside at Peter's suggestion to have tea at a little country
inn farther back in the hills, where the pound of the sea was reduced to
a soft, organ-booming bass to which the shrill note of the needles
countered in perfect tune. The tea garden, the favourite port of call
for afternoon drives from the resorts hereabouts, lay back of the
hostelry in a narrow, ferny glen from which springs issued. As Peter led
the way up its rocky stair, they could hear the light laughter of a
party just rising from one of the round rustic tables. The group
descending poured past them a summer-coloured runnel down the little
glen, and left them face to face with Eunice, who had lingered, her
dress caught on a point of the rustic chair.
"Mamma--you!" She looked trapped, accused, though sheer astonishment
held the others dumb. "We finished the game----" she began and stopped
short; after all, her manner seemed to say, why shouldn't she have tea
there with her friends? She made as if to sweep past after them but Mrs.
Goodward never moved from the narrow path. She was more embarrassed,
Peter saw, than her daughter, and as plainly at bay.
"Now that we are here----" she began in her turn.
"Now that you have followed me here," the girl rang out, "what is it
that you have to say to me?" She was white and a bright flame spot
showed on either cheek.
"I--oh," the elder woman by an effort drew the remnant of the grand
manner about her; "it is Mr. Weatheral, I think, who might have
something to say." She caught the occasion as it were on the wing. Peter
heard the quick breath behind him with which she grasped it. "Now that
you are here, however, I'll tell your party that you will be driving
home with us." She gathered up her draperies and was gone down the path
she had come before either of the others thought to stop her. Eunice had
not made a move to do so. She stood clasping the back of the chair from
which she had freed her dress, and looked across it mutinously at Peter.
"And what," she quivered, "has Mr. Weatheral to say to me?"
"There is nothing," he told her, "that I would say to you, Miss
Goodward, unless you wished to hear it." His magnanimity shamed her a
little.
"I broke my engagement to you," she admitted, "broke it to come here
with--the others. I haven't any excuse to offer you."
"And when," Peter demanded of her, "have I asked any other excuse of you
for anything that you chose to do except that you chose it. There _was_
something I wished to say to you, that I hoped for a more auspicious
occasion...." He hurried on with it suddenly as a thing to be got over
with at all hazards. "It was to say that I hoped you might not find it
utterly beyond you to think of marrying me." He saw her sway a little,
holding still to her chair, and moved toward her a step, dizzy himself
with the sudden onset of emotion. "But now that it is said, if it
distresses you we will say no more about it." She waved him back for a
moment without altering her strained, trapped attitude.
"Have you said this to mamma? And has she--has she said anything to you?
About me, I mean; how I might take it, or anything?"
"She said that she couldn't answer for you; that it was your feeling
that must be taken into account. She put me, so to speak, on my own feet
in so far as _that_ was concerned." He waited for her answer to that,
and none coming, though he saw that she grew a little easier, he went on
presently. "There is, however, much that I feel ought to be said about
my feeling for you, what it means to me, what I hoped----" She stopped
him with a gesture; he could see her lovely manner coming back to her as
quiet comes to the surface of a smitten pool.
"That--one may take for granted, may one not? Since you _have_ asked me,
that the feeling that goes to it is all I have a right to ask?"
"Quite, quite," he assured her. "It may be," he managed to smile upon
her here for the easing of her sweet discomposure, "it may very easily
be that I was thinking too much of my pleasure in saying it."
"It would, then, be a pleasure?" She had the air of snatching at that as
something concrete, graspable.
"It would, and it wouldn't. I mean if you were bothered by it. You could
take everything for granted, everything."
"Even," she insisted, "to the point of taking it for granted that you
would take things for granted from me: that you wouldn't expect
anything--any expression, anything more than just accepting you?"
"Ah!" he cried, the wonder, the amazement of success breaking upon him.
"If you accepted me what more _could_ I expect." He had clasped the hand
which she held out to check him and held it against his heart firmly
that she shouldn't see how he trembled.
"I haven't, you know," she reminded him, "but if I was sure--very sure
that you wouldn't ask any more of me than thinking, I ... might think
about it." She was trembling now, though her hand was so cold, and
suddenly a tear gathered and dropped, splashing her fine wrist.
"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he cried, moved more than he had thought it
possible to be; "you can be perfectly sure that there will never be
anything between you and me that shall not be exactly as you wish." He
suited his action to the word, kissing the wet splash and letting her
go.
"Why, then," she recovered herself with the smile that was now strangely
like her mother's, sweeter for being smiled a little awry, "the best
thing you can do is to find poor mamma and let us give her a cup of
tea."
IV
"Peter, have you any idea what I am thinking about?"
"Not in the least, Ellen," which was not strictly the truth. He
supposed she must be thinking naturally of the news he had told her not
an hour since, of his engagement to Eunice Goodward. It lay so close to
the surface of his own mind at all times that the slightest stir of
conversation, like the wind above a secret rose, seemed always about to
disclose it. They were sitting on the porch at Bloombury and the pointed
swallows pitched and darted about the eaves.
"It was the smell of the dust that reminded me," said Ellen, "and the
wild rose at the turn of the road; you can smell it as plain as plain
when the air lifts a little. Do you remember a picnic that we were
invited to and couldn't go? It was on account of being poor ... and I
was just finding it out. I found out a good many things that summer;
about my always going to be lame and what it would mean to us. It was
dreadful to me that I couldn't be lame just by myself, but I had to mix
up you and mother in it."
"We were glad, Ellen, to be mixed up in it if it made things easier for
you."
"I know ... times I felt that way about it too, but that was when I was
older ... as if it sort of held us all together; like somebody who had
belonged to us all and had died. Only it was me that died, the me that
would have been if I hadn't been lame.... Well, I hadn't thought it out
so far that first summer; I just hated it because it kept us from doing
things like other people. You were fond of Ada Brown, I remember, and it
was because I was lame and we were so poor and all, that you couldn't go
with her and she got engaged to Jim Harvey. I hope you don't think I
have a bad heart, Peter, but I was always glad that Ada didn't turn out
very well. Every time I saw her getting homelier and kind of bedraggled
like, I said to myself, well, I've saved Peter from that at any rate. I
couldn't have borne it if she had turned out the kind of a person you
ought to have married."
"You shouldn't have worried, Ellen; very few men marry the first woman
they are interested in."
"There was a girl you used to write home about--at that boarding-house.
I used to get you to write. I daresay you thought I was just curious.
But I was trying to find out something that would make me perfectly sure
she wasn't good enough for you. She was a typewriter, wasn't she?"
"Something of that sort."
"Well!" Ellen took him up triumphantly, "you wouldn't have wanted to be
married to a typewriter _now!"_
"I never really thought of marrying one, Ellen. I'm sure everything has
turned out for the best."
"That's what I'm trying to tell you. You see I was determined it should
turn out that way. I said, what was the use of being lame and being a
burden to you unless there was something _meant_ by it. I'd have fretted
dreadfully if I hadn't felt that there was something to come out of it.
And it has come.... Peter, you'd rather I'd saved you for this than
anything that might have happened?"
"Much rather, Ellen."
It had surprised him in the telling, to see how accurately his sister
had gauged the worldly advantage of his marriage. If Eunice Goodward had
been a piece of furniture, Ellen couldn't have appraised her better at
her obvious worth: beauty and character and family and the mysterious
cachet of society. Clarice had been at work there, too, he suspected.
Miss Goodward fitted in Ellen's mind's eye into her brother's life and
fortune as a picture into its frame.
"I'm very glad you feel that way about it, Ellen," he said again; he was
on the point of telling her about the House of Shining Walls. The
material from which he had drawn its earliest furnishings lay all about
them, the receding blue of the summer sky, the aged, arching apple
boughs. The scent of the wilding rose came faintly in from the country
road--suddenly his sister surprised him with a flash of rare insight.
"I guess there can't anything keep us from the best except ourselves,"
she said. "Being willing to put up with the second best gives us more
trouble than the Lord ever meant for us. Think of the way I've always
wanted children--but if they'd been my real own, they'd have been
sickly, likely, or even lame like me, or just ordinary like the only
kind of man who would have married me. As it is, I've had Clarice's and
now----" She broke off with a quick, old-maidish colour.
Ellen had gone so far as to name all of Peter's children in the days
when nothing seemed so unlikely; now in the face of his recent
engagement she would have thought it indelicate.
"_She_ would have liked you marrying so well, Peter," she finished with
a backward motion of her head toward the room where the parlour set,
banished long ago from the town house, symbolized for Ellen the brooding
maternal presence.
"Yes, she would have liked it." There came back to him with deep
satisfaction his mother's appraisement of young Mrs. Dassonville, who
must, as he recalled her, have been shaped by much the same frame of
life as Eunice Goodward--the Lovely Lady. The long unused phrase had
risen unconsciously to his lips on the day that he had brought Eunice
her ring. He had spent a whole week in the city choosing it; three
little flawless, oblong emeralds set with diamonds, almost encircling
her finger with the mystic number seven. He had discovered on the day
that she had accepted him, that it had to be emeralds to match the
green lights that her eyes took on in the glen from the deep fern, the
mossy bank and the green boughs overhead. On the terrace at Lessings'
under a wide June sky he had supposed them to be blue; but there was no
blue stone of that sky colour of sufficient preciousness for Eunice
Goodward.
She had been very sweet about the ring, touched with grateful surprise
for its beauty and its taste. Something he could see of relief, of
assurance, flashed and fell between the two women as she showed it to
her mother. They had taken him so beautifully on trust, they couldn't
have known, he reflected, whether he would rise at all to the delicate,
balanced observation of life among them; it was evidence, the emerald
circlet, of how satisfyingly he had risen. The look that passed between
mother and daughter was like a spark that lighted as it fell, an
unsuspected need of him as man merely, the male element, security,
dependability, care. His first response to it was that of a swimmer who
has struck earth under him; he knew in that flash where he was, by what
familiar shores; and the whole effect, in spite of him was of the
sudden shrinkage of that lustrous sea in which his soul and sense had
floated. It steadied him, but it also for the moment narrowed a little
the horizon of adventure. It was the occasion that Eunice took to define
for him his status as an engaged man.
He kept as far as he was able his compact of expecting nothing of her,
except of course that he couldn't avoid expecting that their arrangement
would lead in the natural course to marriage. She had met him more than
halfway in that, agreeing to an earlier date than he had thought
compatible with the ritual of engagements in the Best Society. She had
managed, however, that Peter should present her with her summer freedom:
the engagement was not even to be announced until their return to town.
And in the meantime Peter was to find a house. He had offered her travel
for that first year. Europe, which he had scarcely glimpsed, glittered
and allured. But travel, Eunice let him know, went much better when you
had a place to come back to. He saw at once how right was everything she
did. Well, then, a house on Fillmore Avenue?
"Oh--shall we be so rich as that, Peter?" He divined some embarrassment
in her as to the scale in which they were to live. "We'll want something
in the country, too," she reminded him.
"I've a couple of options at Maplemont----"
"Oh, Maplemont----" She liked that also, he perceived.
"And a place in Florida. Lessing and I bought it the winter the children
had the diphtheria. They've a very pretty bungalow; we could put up
something like it for ourselves--if you wouldn't mind my sister
occasionally. Ellen isn't happy at hotels."
"Mind! with all you're giving me! You won't think it's just the money,
Peter;" she had a very charming hesitancy about it. "It's what money
stands for, beauty, and suitability--and--everything." He was very
tender with her.
"It's not that I have such a pile of it either," he assured her, "though
I turn over a great deal in the course of a year. It's easier making
money than people think."
"Easier for everybody?" There was a certain eagerness in the look and
voice.
"Easier for those who know how. I'm only forty, and I've learned;
there's not much I couldn't get if I set about it. It's a kind of a
gift, perhaps, like painting or music, but there's a great deal to be
learned, too."
"And some haven't the gift to learn, perhaps." For some reason she
sighed.... He was turning all this over in his mind when suddenly Ellen
recalled him.
"Have you told Clarice yet?"
"I mean to, Sunday, if you don't mind my not coming down to you. Miss
Goodward is spending the week end at Maplemont, and by staying at
Julian's----"
"Of _course_." Ellen sympathized. "I shall want to know what Clarice
says." She never did know exactly, for when Clarice gave Peter her
congratulations in the terrace garden after dinner, she missed,
extraordinarily for her, the felicitous note.
"I'm so happy for Eunice, you can't imagine," she insisted. "I've always
said we've none of us known what Eunice can do until she's had her
opportunity. And now with all the background you can give her---- You'll
see!"
He didn't quite know what he was to see except that if Eunice were to be
in the picture it was bound to be satisfying. But Mrs. Lessing was not
done with him. "For all her being so beautiful and so well placed," she
went on, "Eunice has never had any life at all, not what you might call
a life. And she might so easily have missed this. It is hard for girls
to realize sometimes that the success of marriage depends on real
qualities in the man, in mastery over things and not just over her
susceptibilities. It is quite the most sensible thing I've known Eunice
to do."
"Only," Peter reminded her for his part, "I'm not just exactly doing it
because it is sensible." Her "of course not" was convinced enough to
have stilled the vague ruffling of his mind, without doing it. He didn't
object to having his qualifications as Eunice Goodward's husband taken
solidly, but why dwell upon them when it was just the particular
distinction of his engagement that it had the intensity, the spiritual
extension which was supposed to put it out of reach of material
considerations. Even Ellen had done better by him than this.
He was forced, however, to come back to the substance of Mrs. Lessing's
comment a few days later when he was being dined at the club by a
twice-removed cousin of the Goodward's, the upright, elderly symbol of
the male sanction which was the most that his fiancée's fatherless
condition could furnish forth. The man was cordial enough; he was even
prepared to find Peter likable; but even more on that account to measure
his relation to Miss Goodward in terms of its being a "good thing."
"It's not, you know," his host couldn't forebear to remind him, "exactly
the sort of a marriage we expected of Eunice; but if the girl is
satisfied----"
"If I hadn't satisfied myself on that point----" Peter reminded him in
his turn.
"Quite so, quite so ... girls have notions sometimes; one never quite
knows ... You'll keep on with your--just _what_ is it you do such
tremendous things with; one hears of course that you _do_ do them----"
"Real estate, brokerage," Peter enlightened him. "I shall certainly keep
on with it. Isn't one supposed to have all the more need of it when
there's an establishment to keep up?"
The symbol waved a deprecating hand. "You'll find it rather an
occupation to keep up with Eunice, I'm thinking. I've a notion she'll go
it, once she has the chance."
"If by going it, you mean going out a great deal, seeing the world and
having it in to see her, well, why shouldn't she, so long as I have the
price?" He could only take it good-naturedly. It was amusing when you
came to think of it, that a man who would contribute to the sum of his
wife's future perhaps, the price of a silver tea salver, should so hold
him to account for it. Nevertheless the talk left a faint savour of
dryness. It was part of his new pride in himself as a possession of hers
that he should in all things come up to the measure of men, but the one
thing which should justify his being so ticketed and set aside by them
as the Provider, the Footer-up of Accounts, was the assurance which only
she could give, of his being the one thing, good or bad, which could be
made to answer for her happiness.
Walking home by the river to avoid as far as possible the baked,
oven-smelling streets, he was aware how strangely the whole earth ached
for her. He was here walking, as he had been since his first seeing her,
at the core of a great light and harmony, and walking alone in it. If
just loving her had been sufficient occupation for his brief courtship,
for the present it failed him. For he was not only alone but lonely. He
saw her swept aside by the calculating crowd--strange that Ellen and
Clarice should be a part of it--not only out of reach of his live
passion, but beyond all speech. Alone in his room he felt suddenly faint
for the want of her. He turned off the light with which he had first
flooded it, for the flare of the street came feebly in through the
summer leafage, and sat sensing the need of her as a thing to be handled
and measured, a benumbing, suffocating presence. As he sat, a sound of
music floated by, and a thin pencil of light from a pleasure barge on
the river flitted from window to window, travelling the gilt line of a
picture-frame and the dark block of a picture that hung over his bed.
And as it touched in passing the high ramping figure of a knight in
armour, the old magic worked. He felt himself flung as it were across
great distances, and dizzy with the turn, to her side. He was there to
maintain in the face of all worldly reckoning, the excluding, spiritual
quality of their relation. The more his engagement to Eunice Goodward
failed of being the usual, the expected thing, the more authority it
derived for its supernal sources. It took the colour of true romance
from its unlikelihood. Peter turned on the light, and drawing paper to
him, began to write.
"Lovely Lady," the letter began, and as if the words had been an
incantation, the room was full and palpitating with his stored-up
dreams. They came waking and crowding to fill out the measure of his
unconsummated passion, and they had all one face and one likeness. Late,
late he was still going on with it....
"And so," he wrote, "I have come to the part of the story that was not
in the picture, that I never knew. The dragon is slain and the knight
has just begun to understand that the Princess for whom it was done is
still a Princess; and though you have fought and bled for them,
princesses must be approached humbly. And he did not know in the least
how to go about it for in all his life the knight could never have
spoken to one before. You have to think of that when you think of him at
all, and of how he must stand even with his heart at her feet, hardly
daring to so much as call her attention to it. For though he knows very
well that it is quite enough to hope for and more than he deserves, to
be able to spend his whole life serving her, love, great love such as
one may have for princesses, aches, aches, my dear, and needs a
comforting touch sometimes and a word of recognition to make it beat
more steadily and more serviceably for every day."
He went out that night to post his letter when it was done, for though
there was not time for an answer to it, he was going down to her on
Saturday, he liked to think of it running before him as a torch to light
the way which, even while he slept, he was so happily traversing. He was
quite trembling with the journey he had come, when on Saturday she met
him, floating in summer draperies and holding out a slim ringed hand,
and a cool cheek to glance past his lips like a swallow.
"You had my letter, dear?"
"Such a lovely letter, Peter, I couldn't think of trying to answer it."
"Oh, it wasn't to be answered--at least not by another----" He released
her lest she should be troubled by his trembling.