LOVE WITHOUT JEALOUSY
The young men entered the sitting-room. Mrs. Sage was standing almost
directly under the chandelier, talking to dumpy little Mrs. Grimes; the
light from above fell upon her auburn crown, flooded her magnificent
shoulders and arms, and then wavered timidly, almost helplessly, as it
first came in contact with resplendent opposition. The actress was a
head taller than Mrs. Grimes, who nevertheless bravely stood her ground
and faced comparison with all the hardihood of the righteous. Oliver’s
housekeeper succeeded in disguising the astonishment occasioned by the
gown of silver spangles, but she could not master the wonder and the
admiration that filled her eyes as she gazed upon the smooth, alabaster
arms and neck and bosom of the magnificent Josephine. Nor could she
understand the soft, warm cheeks, or the dusky shadows under the
sparkling eyes, or the moist black lashes that sometimes veiled them.
Mr. Sage, with a distinctly bewildered and somewhat embarrassed
expression keeping company with the proud and doting smile that seemed
to be stamped upon his lean visage, stood across the room with his
daughter and Mrs. Sammy, his hands behind his back, his feet spread
slightly apart the better to allow him the unctuous relaxation of
frequently rising on his toes and then slowly settling back upon his
heels again—another and simple means of indicating partnership in
pulchritude.
“I can remember when there wasn’t a dinner jacket or a dress suit in
Rumley,” said Josephine as the two tall young men approached. “And the
only men who parted their hair in the middle were the ones who didn’t
have any hair in the middle at all, at all. Most of the male member’s of
Herbert’s congregation left the price tags on their Sunday suits for a
whole winter so that people could tell when they were dressed up. Do you
mean to tell me, Oliver, that those blighters intend to begin digging up
your place to-morrow?”
The mere thought of it caused her to waft her handkerchief in front of
her nose, stirring the air with the rare, pungent odor of _nuit de
chine_.
Oliver laughed. “I think we’ll all rather enjoy the excitement, Aunt
Josephine,” he said. “Besides, now that I am in politics, I want to keep
as much in the limelight as possible. I suppose they’ll begin prying up
the kitchen floor to-morrow, or digging trenches in the cellar, or
tearing up the flower-beds. It will be worth coming miles to see.”
She looked at him narrowly. “What utter rot! Do they expect to find your
father buried in the cellar or under the kitchen floor?”
“They don’t expect to find him at all,” replied Oliver, with
unintentional shortness.
“There will be trouble,” said Mrs. Grimes, the light of battle in her
eye, “if they make a mess around this house.”
“Aunt Serepta will fix ’em,” said Oliver, putting his arm around the
little woman’s shoulders. “Won’t you, Auntie?”
“She’ll boil ’em in oil,” said Sammy, very gravely.
Oliver glanced over his shoulder at Jane. Their eyes met and their gaze
held for some seconds. He detected the clouded, troubled look in hers
and was suddenly conscious of what must have seemed to her a serious
intensity in his own. Without a word, he left Mrs. Sage and went to
Jane.
“Don’t worry,” he said to her in a low tone. “You couldn’t have said
anything to Malone that—”
“It isn’t that,” she interrupted nervously. “It is the feeling that we
are all being spied upon.” She hesitated a moment. “I remember one
thing. He asked me what kind of a night it was.”
“Well, there wasn’t any harm in telling him, was there?” he chided.
“That is, if you remembered.”
“I do remember. He said that some one had told him it was a rainy,
stormy night. I assured him he had been misinformed—that it hadn’t
rained for weeks. He—he seemed surprised.”
“Well, what of that?”
Her wide-set gray eyes wavered. They steadied instantly, however, and
she smiled—a confident, disarming smile.
“I suppose it’s the finding out that he was a detective and that he was
pumping me,” she explained.
“Anyhow, you are smiling again,” he half whispered, “and that makes me
want to sing and dance for joy.” He was once more aware that his voice
was throaty and unsteady.
A faint wave of color spread to her cheek and brow, but she did not look
away. When she spoke again it was at the conclusion of a long, deep
exhalation; the sentence ended in a fluttering, breathless murmur.
“Don’t you think mother is perfectly wonderful, Oliver?”
He nodded. He felt that he could not trust his voice. He knew now that
he was in love—that he always had been in love with Jane, that he
always would be in love with her. He compressed his lips and fought
against the strange, mad impulse to shout that he was in love with her,
that she was his—all his—and that no man should take her away from
him.
And she? She was thinking of that dry, hot night when he came to see her
after leaving his father, out of breath, his shoes covered with fresh
black mud. There had been no rain for weeks. The roads were thick with
dust. And Lansing too had noticed that his shoes were muddy. He had
spoken to her about them, he had wondered where Oliver had been to get
into mud up to his shoe tops! And she, herself, had never ceased to
wonder.
Mr. Sage was speaking to Mrs. Sammy. “Yes, my dear Muriel, I can’t quite
believe I am awake. It all seems like a dream.”
His wife not only overheard this remark but obviously the one that led
up to it.
“Oh, I say, old dear,” she exclaimed, “you must get over the notion that
you are asleep. It’s not complimentary to me to have you going about
everywhere pinching yourself to see whether you’re awake or not. And the
worst of it is, he pinches me every now and then to see whether I am
flesh and blood or merely a hallucination.”
Sammy cleared his throat gallantly. “Permit me to say, Miss Judge, that
you _are_ a dream, and if I was Mr. Sage I’d _never_ wake up.”
She lifted her lorgnon and regarded him with languid interest. “After
that, my dear Sammy, I am sure your wife will like me much better if you
call me Aunt Josephine. Even though I am old enough to be your mother,
I—Why, when I look at Jane I doubt my own eyes. That I, Josephine
Judge, should have a daughter as big as Jane is more than I can grasp. I
am filled with wonder. I—”
“It’s more of a wonder, Josephine Sage,” broke in Mrs. Grimes tartly,
“that you haven’t got any grandchildren.”
“My dear Mrs. Grimes, don’t blame me for that,” said Josephine.
“Supper’s ready,” shouted Lizzie Meggs, the “help” from the center of
the dining-room. Lizzie had a strong voice and she believed in using it.
It saved her many a needless step. She was nearly thirty and thought she
was good enough for Oliver, or any other young man in Rumley. Her
parents brought her up in just that way—with the aid of the movies.
At table the conversation quite naturally dealt with the advent of the
detectives and the task that had been set for them by the universally
despised Mr. Gooch.
“It’s all bally nonsense,” said Mrs. Sage, at Oliver’s right. “Your
father will turn up one day and—Why, look at me. Didn’t I turn up?
Didn’t I come back? Here am I as big as life, after twenty-three years,
and dear old Herbert goes about the house all day long saying that
nothing—absolutely nothing is impossible.”
“Well, you see, Aunt Josephine,” began Oliver, in his good-humored
drawl, “Uncle Herbert did an awful lot of praying.”
“Morning and night I prayed,” said Mr. Sage earnestly. “I prayed, and
then I prayed that my prayers might be answered. God saw fit to—”
“My dear Herbert, when a woman reaches my age she begins to appreciate
the advantages of a husband. If she hasn’t got one, she begins
desperately to look for one. I could have had a dozen or more if I’d
been of a mind, but those were in the days when husbands were looking
for me. I mean other women’s husbands. When it so happens, as in my
case, that a perfectly good and reliable husband has been mislaid in the
haste and confusion of youth, why, Fortune smiles, that’s all. It wasn’t
your praying. I should have come back if you hadn’t prayed a lick.”
“Do not say that, Josephine. I have already begun to pray that you will
never go away again.”
“Don’t let me catch you at it, old dear,” she warned. “I dare say I
shall get jolly well fed up with Rumley, especially after Jane is
married. Besides, I am living in the hope that you may get a call to
Chicago or New York.”
“I shall never leave Rumley, Josephine.”
“That’s what I said about London.”
“What was that you said about Jane?” demanded Oliver.
“Jane? Oh, yes; about her getting married? She absolutely refuses to
tell me who she is going to marry. I fancy I can make a fairly good
guess, however.”
“So can I,” cried Mrs. Sammy. “Oh, you Jane!”
Oliver swallowed hard. “How about it, Jane? Come on! ’Fess up. You’re
among friends.”
Jane smiled mischievously. “I promise, Oliver, to tell you first of all.
I sha’n’t keep you in suspense any longer than I can help.”
“Before you tell your own mother,” cried Josephine.
“Much as I love you, Mother dear, I feel that I must tell Oliver first.
He is my oldest and best friend.”
“I have just been thinking, Josephine,” began Mr. Sage, guiltily and
irrelevantly, “that I quite forgot to take Henry the Eighth out for his
walk this evening. And even worse, I fear I left him hanging by his lead
from the top peg of the hatrack.”
“I really shouldn’t mind, my dear, if he were to expire before we get
home,” said she. “He is a traitor. Would you believe it, Oliver, the
little beast has taken such a fancy to your Uncle Herbert that he has
completely turned against me. Snaps at me, growls at me, barks at me
every time I try to pat him. Hanging is too good for him.”
“Speaking of hanging,” said Sammy, “old Joe Sikes says he’s got a
perfect alibi for you, Ollie, in connection with that murder up in Grand
Rapids. I mean the chap who was found in a hotel room last night with
his throat cut. Joe says he can prove by thirty reputable witnesses that
you were not within four hundred miles of Grand Rapids last night.”
Oliver grinned. “That’s all he and Silas Link think about these
days—fixing up alibis for me. They grab up the morning paper to see
where the latest murder has occurred and then they hustle out and
establish an alibi for me.”
“How perfectly delicious,” cried little Mrs. Sammy. “Don’t you think it
is really perfectly delicious, Mr. Sage?”
“I beg your pardon?” stammered the pastor apologetically. “I am afraid I
was thinking about Henry the Eighth.”
“Oh, you are _so_ literary, Mr. Sage,” shrieked Mrs. Sammy admiringly.
Oliver was strangely restless during dinner, and immediately after the
company arose from the table at its conclusion he asked Jane to come
with him for a little stroll in the open air.
“I want to speak to you about something,” he urged. “Better throw
something over your shoulders. The night air—”
“Ought you to go off and leave the others, Oliver?” she began, a queer
little catch, as of alarm, in her voice. “Muriel and Sammy—”
“Come along,” he pleaded. “They won’t mind. I must see you alone for a
few minutes, Jane.”
“I will get my wrap,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “It may be
chilly outside.”
“Why, you’re shivering now, Janie,” he whispered anxiously, as he threw
her wrap over her shoulders. “Are you cold?”
She did not reply. He followed her out upon the porch and down the
steps. No word passed between them until they had turned the bend in the
drive and were outside the radius of light shed from the windows. He was
the first to speak.
“See here, Jane,” he blurted out, “I’m—I’m terribly troubled and
upset.” That was as far as he got, speech seeming to fail him.
She laid her hand on his arm.
“Is it about—about the detective, Oliver?” she asked tremulously.
“No,” he answered, almost roughly. “It’s about you, Jane. You’ve just
got to answer me. Are you going to be married?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice so low he could scarcely hear the
monosyllable.
They walked on in silence for twenty paces or more, turning down the
path that led to the swamp road.
“I—I was afraid so,” he muttered. Then fiercely: “Who are you going to
marry?”
She sighed. “I am going to marry the first man who asks me,” she
replied, and, having cast the die, was instantly mistress of herself.
“Have you any objections?” she asked, almost mockingly.
If he heard the question he paid no heed to it. She felt the muscles of
his strong forearm grow taut, and she heard the quick intake of his
breath. She waited. She began to hum a vagrant little air. It seemed an
age to her before he spoke.
“Jane,” he said gently and steadily, “if you were a man and in my
place—I mean in my predicament—would you go so far as to ask the girl
you love better than anything in all the world to marry you?”
“I don’t know just what you mean.”
“I mean, supposing they find my father out there in the swamp and there
are indications that he met with foul play, and I stand the chance of
being accused—”
“Don’t be silly,” she cried.
“Well—would you ask her?”
“There couldn’t be any harm in asking her. She could refuse you, you
know.”
“That’s so. She could, couldn’t she. I—I hadn’t thought of that. Still
you said you were going to marry the first man who asks you.”
“Yes, Oliver, I am—but, of course, I am expecting the man I love to ask
me.”
“There’s the gypsy’s prophecy,” he murmured thickly. “It—it may come
true, Jane.”
“It—it cannot come true,” she cried. “It cannot, Oliver.”
“Still it is something to be considered,” he said heavily and
judicially. His hand closed over hers and gripped it tightly. “If you
were in my place wouldn’t you hesitate about inviting her to—to become
a widow?”
“Oh, I love you, Oliver, when your voice sounds as if it had a laugh in
it,” she whispered.
“In a month I will be thirty,” he went on, his heart as light as air. “I
might ask her to give me a thirty day option, or something like that.”
“You goose!”
He pressed her arm to his side, and was serious when he spoke again,
after a moment’s pause.
“I have never asked a girl to marry me, Jane. Never in all my life. Do
you know why?”
She buried her face against his shoulder. A vast, overwhelming thrill
raced through him. Her warm, supple body suddenly and mysteriously
became that of another woman—a strange woman so unlike Jane that his
senses swam with wonder. What magic was this? This was not Jane—not the
Jane he had known forever! Something incredibly feminine, sensuous,
intoxicating—His arms went about her and drew her close.
“God! Is—is this you, Jane?” he whispered. “Is it really you?”
She lifted her head. A little sob of joy broke on her lips. Gazing up
into his eyes, bright even in the darkness, she murmured a bewildered
question.
“Yes—you are some other girl,” he replied, dazed by ecstasy. “You can’t
be Jane Sage. You don’t feel like Jane Sage. You don’t—”
She laughed softly. “Do you think you ought to be holding a strange girl
in your arms—and do you think I could possibly allow you to do it if I
were not Jane Sage?” A pause, then, faintly: “Oh, Oliver—dear Oliver!”
“You—you are sure there isn’t any one else, Janie? I—I am not too
late? Tell me.”
“There never has been any one else, Oliver. It has always been you.”
“I never realized it, Jane—I never even thought of it till just a
little while ago—but now I know that I have always loved you. That’s
why I’ve never asked any one else to—to marry me. I understand now why
I couldn’t possibly have asked any one else. All these years it has been
you—and I never knew. It was settled long ago—ages ago, without my
knowing it, that there was but one girl I could ever ask to be my
wife—only one girl that I could ever really love.” He drew in a deep,
long, quivering breath.
Her arm stole up about his neck, she raised her chin.
“I began calling myself your wife, Oliver, when I was a very little
girl—when we first began playing house together, and you were my
husband and the dolls were our children. That was twenty years ago. I
have been true to you ever since—all these years I have been a true and
faithful wife.” Their lips met—their first kiss of passion, of love
exalted. Then, a little later on, breathlessly: “Do you realize that
this is the first time you have kissed your wife since she was ten years
old?”
He kissed her again, rapturously. “It—it wasn’t like this when you were
ten, Janie darling—nothing like this! Oh, my God!” he burst out.
“You’ll never know how miserable I have been these last few weeks—how
horribly jealous I’ve been.”
She stroked his cheek—possessively. “I haven’t been very happy myself,”
she sighed. “I—I wasn’t quite sure you would ever give me the chance to
say I loved you, Oliver—I wasn’t sure you would ever ask me to be your
wife.”
“That reminds me,” he cried boyishly. “Will you marry me, Miss Sage?”
“Of course I will. Didn’t I say I would marry the first—What was that?”
As she uttered the exclamation under her breath, she drew away from him
quickly, looking over her shoulder at the thick, shadowy underbrush that
lined the road below them.
“I didn’t hear anything,” said he, turning with her. “It must have been
my heart trying to burst out of its—”
“I heard some one—or some thing,” she said, in a voice of dismay. “Oh,
Oliver, some one saw you kiss me, some one heard what we—”
“Suppose he did,” cried he jubilantly. “Why should we care? I’d like the
whole world to know how happy—how absolutely happy—I am, Jane. I’ve
half a notion to start out right now and run through the streets
shouting that I’m in love with you and am going to marry you. When will
you marry me, Jane? _When?_”
The woman in her replied. “I must have time to get some clothes and—”
“You don’t need any,” he broke in. “I mean any more than you have now.
I’m not marrying your clothes, dear—I’m marrying _you_. Sh! Listen!
There _is_ some one over there in the brush. Damn his sneaking eyes!
I’ll—”
“Don’t! Don’t go down there!” she cried, clutching his arm. “You must
not leave me alone. I’m—I’m afraid, Ollie. I am always afraid when I am
near that awful swamp. No matter if some one did see us. Let him go.
Besides, it may have been a dog or some other animal—”
“Let’s walk down the road a little way, Jane,” said he stubbornly.
“Don’t be afraid. I’ll stick close beside you.”
“You won’t go down into the swamp?” she cried anxiously.
“No. Just along the road.”
They ran down the little embankment into the road. She clung tightly to
his arm, feeling strangely secure in the rigid strength of it—and proud
of it, as well. The night was dark, the road among the trees darker
still. After fifteen or twenty paces, Oliver pressed her arm warningly
and stopped to listen. Ahead of them, some distance away, they heard
footfalls—the slow, regular tread of a man walking in the road.
“I will not go a step farther,” she whispered, holding back as he
started to go forward.
He submitted. They stood still, listening. Suddenly the footfalls
ceased.
“He knows we have stopped,” said Oliver. “He’s listening to see if we
are following.”
She was silent for a moment. “You remember what I said about being spied
upon, Oliver. I feel it, I feel it all about me. You are being watched
all the time, Oliver. Oh, how hateful, how unfair!”
He put his arm around her. “Jane dear, I am just beginning to
understand. They really suspect me. They really think I may have had a
hand in—Why, curse them, they—”
“Hush, Oliver!” she cried softly. “The very worst thing you can do is to
fly into a rage over this silly—”
“Oh, my Lord!” he gasped, drawing back in sheer astonishment. “_You_
too, Jane? I’ve heard nothing for twenty years but—Hang it all, dear, I
_want_ to get mad! I want to rage like a lion and tear things to pieces.
Every time I frown the whole blamed town smooths my back and says
‘Now-now!’ And Joe Sikes and Silas Link—”
“I know, I know,” she interrupted gently. “But you mustn’t, just the
same. You must treat this thing as a—a sort of joke.”
Many seconds passed before he spoke. “It’s pretty difficult to see
anything humorous in being suspected of—Oh, I can’t even say it! It’s
too awful—too unspeakable!”
“We’d better be going back to the house, Oliver,” she began.
“See here, Jane, I’ve been thinking. It’s wrong for me to ask you to
marry me till all this mess is over. It’s wrong for me to even ask you
to consider yourself engaged to me. We must wait. I mean it, dear. I’m
under a cloud. There’s no getting around that fact. The—”
“Nobody believes you had anything to do with—”
“My dear girl, nobody knows _what_ to believe,” said he seriously.
“That’s the worst of it. My father is gone. I was, so far as any one
knows, the last to see him. As you say, no one may believe that I had
anything to do with it, but—_where is he?_ That’s the question they are
all asking—and no one answers. He is somewhere, living or dead. That’s
sure. He may be out there in that swamp. And, Jane, here’s the horrible
part of it. If he is out there, no one will believe he committed
suicide. No one will believe that he made way with himself deliberately.
He may have wandered into the swamp while out of his head—but he was
not contemplating suicide. If that had been his intention, why did he
draw all that money out of the bank? A queer thing has just happened.
You know Peter Hines—that queer old bird who has always lived in the
cabin at the lower end of the swamp? You can see it from the road in the
daytime. He has skipped out. Boarded up the door and windows and—”
He started violently, the words dying on his lips. Off to the south,
beyond the almost impenetrable wall of night, gleamed far-off lights in
the windows of Peter Hines’s shack.
“He must have returned,” he said, in an odd voice. “Those lights—”
“Let us go in, dear,” she pleaded. “I—I hear something moving among the
weeds down there. It’s grisly, Oliver—creepy.”
They were at the foot of the porch steps when he kissed her tenderly.
“We must wait a little while, Janie, before telling them about—us. Till
all this is cleared up and I am—”
She faced him, her hands on his shoulders.
“I shall tell them to-night,” she said resolutely. “To-morrow I shall
tell everybody I know. What do you think I am? A fraidy-cat?”
He laughed quietly. “Have your own way, dear. You always have had it
where I am concerned. But,” and here he dropped into his dry, whimsical
drawl, “if I were you I wouldn’t begin getting a trousseau together
until after my birthday next month. You might be wasting a lot of time
and money.”
“Oh, Oliver, don’t say such things!” she cried hotly. “I wish that old
gypsy were here. I’d wring her neck!”
Mrs. Sage was holding forth in her most effective English as they
entered the sitting-room. She may have eyed them narrowly for a second
or two, but that was all. She had an attentive audience; the division of
interest due to the return of absentees was of extremely short duration;
she knew how to hold the center of the stage once she got it.
“As a matter of fact, they’re shorter in Rumley than they are in London.
I’ve seen more knees since I got back to Rumley than I saw all the time
I was in London. And that, my dear Mrs. Grimes, despite the fact that
London has more knees than any other city in the world. My daughter has
provided me with a hundred surprises since—I don’t mean that she has a
hundred knees, of course—what I mean to say is that Jane merely yawns
when I begin in a hushed voice to tell her of the very latest crazes and
vices of London. She yawns, I say, and proceeds to inform me that they
are all old in Rumley—_old_, mind you. It really seems that just about
the time poor old London is struggling to learn a new dance, Rumley is
completely fed up with it. I go about in a sort of daze. I wish—I
devoutly wish—I could remember all the things I’ve learned since I got
back to Rumley. Poor Herbert maintains that—”
At this juncture Sammy Parr, who had been observing Oliver very closely,
got up from his chair and marched across the room, his hand extended.
“Congratulations, old man!” he shouted joyously.
And little old Mrs. Grimes, from her place on the sofa, remarked as she
leaned back with a sigh of content:
“Well, goodness knows it’s about time.”
Proving that since the entrance of the lovers the great Josephine had
failed signally to hold her audience spellbound.