ALL the heat and glare from the long illuminated table, about which the
fumes of many courses still hung in a savoury fog, seemed to surge up
to the ladies' gallery, and concentrate themselves in the burning
cheeks of a slender figure withdrawn behind the projection of a pillar.
It never occurred to Margaret Ransom that she was sitting in the shade.
She supposed that the full light of the chandeliers was beating on her
face--and there were moments when it seemed as though all the heads
about the great horse-shoe below, bald, shaggy, sleek, close-thatched,
or thinly latticed, were equipped with an additional pair of eyes, set
at an angle which enabled them to rake her face as relentlessly as the
electric burners.
In the lull after a speech, the gallery was fluttering with the rustle
of programmes consulted, and Mrs. Sheff (the Brant girl's aunt) leaned
forward to say enthusiastically: "And now we're to hear Mr. Ransom!"
A louder buzz rose from the table, and the heads (without relaxing
their upward vigilance) seemed to merge, and flow together, like an
attentive flood, toward the upper end of the horse-shoe, where all the
threads of Margaret Ransom's consciousness were suddenly drawn into
what seemed a small speck, no more--a black speck that rose, hung in
air, dissolved into gyrating gestures, became distended, enormous,
preponderant--became her husband "speaking."
"It's the heat--" Margaret gasped, pressing her handkerchief to her
whitening lips, and finding just strength enough left to push back
farther into the shadow.
She felt a touch on her arm. "It _is_ horrible--shall we go?" a voice
suggested; and, "Yes, yes, let us go," she whispered, feeling, with a
great throb of relief, _that_ to be the only possible, the only
conceivable, solution. To sit and listen to her husband _now_--how
could she ever have thought she could survive it? Luckily, under the
lingering hubbub from below, his opening words were inaudible, and she
had only to run the gauntlet of sympathetic feminine glances, shot
after her between waving fans and programmes, as, guided by Guy
Dawnish, she managed to reach the door. It was really so hot that even
Mrs. Sheff was not much surprised--till long afterward....
The winding staircase was empty, half dark and blessedly silent. In a
committee room below Dawnish found the inevitable water jug, and filled
a glass for her, while she leaned back, confronted only by a frowning
college President in an emblazoned frame. The academic frown descended
on her like an anathema when she rose and followed her companion out of
the building.
Hamblin Hall stands at the end of the long green "Campus" with its
sextuple line of elms--the boast and the singularity of Wentworth. A
pale spring moon, rising above the dome of the University library at
the opposite end of the elm-walk, diffused a pearly mildness in the
sky, melted to thin haze the shadows of the trees, and turned to golden
yellow the lights of the college windows. Against this soft suffusion
of light the Library cupola assumed a Bramantesque grace, the white
steeple of the congregational church became a campanile topped by a
winged spirit, and the scant porticoes of the older halls the
colonnades of classic temples.
"This is better--" Dawnish said, as they passed down the steps and
under the shadow of the elms.
They moved on a little way in silence before he began again: "You're
too tired to walk. Let us sit down a few minutes."
Her feet, in truth, were leaden, and not far off a group of park
benches, encircling the pedestal of a patriot in bronze, invited them
to rest. But Dawnish was guiding her toward a lateral path which bent,
through shrubberies, toward a strip of turf between two of the
buildings.
"It will be cooler by the river," he said, moving on without waiting
for a possible protest. None came: it seemed easier, for the moment, to
let herself be led without any conventional feint of resistance. And
besides, there was nothing wrong about _this_--the wrong would have
been in sitting up there in the glare, pretending to listen to her
husband, a dutiful wife among her kind....
The path descended, as both knew, to the chosen, the inimitable spot of
Wentworth: that fugitive curve of the river, where, before hurrying on
to glut the brutal industries of South Wentworth and Smedden, it
simulated for a few hundred yards the leisurely pace of an ancient
university stream, with willows on its banks and a stretch of turf
extending from the grounds of Hamblin Hall to the boat houses at the
farther bend. Here too were benches, beneath the willows, and so close
to the river that the voice of its gliding softened and filled out the
reverberating silence between Margaret and her companion, and made her
feel that she knew why he had brought her there.
"Do you feel better?" he asked gently as he sat down beside her.
"Oh, yes. I only needed a little air."
"I'm so glad you did. Of course the speeches were tremendously
interesting--but I prefer this. What a good night!"
"Yes."
There was a pause, which now, after all, the soothing accompaniment of
the river seemed hardly sufficient to fill.
"I wonder what time it is. I ought to be going home," Margaret began at
length.
"Oh, it's not late. They'll be at it for hours in there--yet."
She made a faint inarticulate sound. She wanted to say: "No--Robert's
speech was to be the last--" but she could not bring herself to
pronounce Ransom's name, and at the moment no other way of refuting her
companion's statement occurred to her.
The young man leaned back luxuriously, reassured by her silence.
"You see it's my last chance--and I want to make the most of it."
"Your last chance?" How stupid of her to repeat his words on that
cooing note of interrogation! It was just such a lead as the Brant girl
might have given him.
"To be with you--like this. I haven't had so many. And there's less
than a week left."
She attempted to laugh. "Perhaps it will sound longer if you call it
five days."
The flatness of that, again! And she knew there were people who called
her intelligent. Fortunately he did not seem to notice it; but her
laugh continued to sound in her own ears--the coquettish chirp of
middle age! She decided that if he spoke again--if he _said
anything_--she would make no farther effort at evasion: she would take
it directly, seriously, frankly--she would not be doubly disloyal.
"Besides," he continued, throwing his arm along the back of the bench,
and turning toward her so that his face was like a dusky bas-relief
with a silver rim--"besides, there's something I've been wanting to
tell you."
The sound of the river seemed to cease altogether: the whole world
became silent.
Margaret had trusted her inspiration farther than it appeared likely to
carry her. Again she could think of nothing happier than to repeat, on
the same witless note of interrogation: "To tell me?"
"You only."
The constraint, the difficulty, seemed to be on his side now: she
divined it by the renewed shifting of his attitude--he was capable,
usually, of such fine intervals of immobility--and by a confusion in
his utterance that set her own voice throbbing in her throat.
"You've been so perfect to me," he began again. "It's not my fault if
you've made me feel that you would understand everything--make
allowances for everything--see just how a man may have held out, and
fought against a thing--as long as he had the strength.... This may be
my only chance; and I can't go away without telling you."
He had turned from her now, and was staring at the river, so that his
profile was projected against the moonlight in all its beautiful young
dejection.
There was a slight pause, as though he waited for her to speak; then
she leaned forward and laid her hand on his.
"If I have really been--if I have done for you even the least part of
what you say ... what you imagine ... will you do for me, now, just one
thing in return?"
He sat motionless, as if fearing to frighten away the shy touch on his
hand, and she left it there, conscious of her gesture only as part of
the high ritual of their farewell.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked in a low tone.
"_Not_ to tell me!" she breathed on a deep note of entreaty.
"_Not_ to tell you--?"
"Anything--_anything_--just to leave our ... our friendship ... as it
has been--as--as a painter, if a friend asked him, might leave a
picture--not quite finished, perhaps ... but all the more exquisite...."
She felt the hand under hers slip away, recover itself, and seek her
own, which had flashed out of reach in the same instant--felt the start
that swept him round on her as if he had been caught and turned about
by the shoulders.
"You--_you_--?" he stammered, in a strange voice full of fear and
tenderness; but she held fast, so centred in her inexorable resolve
that she was hardly conscious of the effect her words might be
producing.
"Don't you see," she hurried on, "don't you _feel_ how much safer it
is--yes, I'm willing to put it so!--how much safer to leave everything
undisturbed ... just as ... as it has grown of itself ... without
trying to say: 'It's this or that'...? It's what we each choose to call
it to ourselves, after all, isn't it? Don't let us try to find a name
that ... that we should both agree upon ... we probably shouldn't
succeed." She laughed abruptly. "And ghosts vanish when one names
them!" she ended with a break in her voice.
When she ceased her heart was beating so violently that there was a
rush in her ears like the noise of the river after rain, and she did
not immediately make out what he was answering. But as she recovered
her lucidity she said to herself that, whatever he was saying, she must
not hear it; and she began to speak again, half playfully, half
appealingly, with an eloquence of entreaty, an ingenuity in argument,
of which she had never dreamed herself capable. And then, suddenly,
strangling hands seemed to reach up from her heart to her throat, and
she had to stop.
Her companion remained motionless. He had not tried to regain her hand,
and his eyes were away from her, on the river. But his nearness had
become something formidable and exquisite--something she had never
before imagined. A flush of guilt swept over her--vague reminiscences
of French novels and of opera plots. This was what such women felt,
then ... this was "shame." ... Phrases of the newspaper and the pulpit
danced before her.... She dared not speak, and his silence began to
frighten her. Had ever a heart beat so wildly before in Wentworth?
He turned at last, and taking her two hands, quite simply, kissed them
one after the other.
"I shall never forget--" he said in a confused voice, unlike his own.
A return of strength enabled her to rise, and even to let her eyes meet
his for a moment.
"Thank you," she said, simply also.
She turned away from the bench, regaining the path that led back to the
college buildings, and he walked beside her in silence. When they
reached the elm walk it was dotted with dispersing groups. The
"speaking" was over, and Hamblin Hall had poured its audience out into
the moonlight. Margaret felt a rush of relief, followed by a receding
wave of regret. She had the distinct sensation that her hour--her one
hour--was over.
One of the groups just ahead broke up as they approached, and projected
Ransom's solid bulk against the moonlight.
"My husband," she said, hastening forward; and she never afterward
forgot the look of his back--heavy, round-shouldered, yet a little
pompous--in a badly fitting overcoat that stood out at the neck and hid
his collar. She had never before noticed how he dressed.