"Is there anything unsatisfactory in----"
"No--no indeed. My own affairs entirely, I assure you."
As he had finished supper, Vaughan took him out on the veranda, where
Courtney heard them--or, rather, heard Dick--arguing and protesting.
Presently she drifted into the sitting room, sat at the piano, let her
fingers wander soundlessly over the keys. What should she do? What was
best for him--for her--"and there's Richard, too, who needs him." Why
should he go? How would it help matters? True, she had declared that
to be the right course; but then she was merely theorizing, merely
talking the conventional thing. This was no theory, but actuality,
calling for good common sense. It was not the first time she had found
the facts of life making mockery of the most convincing theories about
it. Presently she felt that Basil was in the window farthest from her,
was watching her--probably with the same loving, despairing expression
she had often seen without a suspicion that it was for her.
"Where's Richard?" inquired she, not looking in his direction.
"In the library."
"You've upset him dreadfully."
"I'm sorry. But things will soon adjust themselves." He advanced a
step, was visible now in the half darkness, looked pallidly handsome in
his becoming dinner suit. "A few weeks at most," he went on, somewhat
huskily, "and I'll be the vaguest sort of a memory here."
She was glad her back was toward him and that the twilight had darkened
into dusk. Of course, he did not really love her. It was simply
another case of a man's being isolated with a woman and his head getting
full of sentimental fancies. Still-- While his love was not real, and
therefore its pain largely imaginary, the pain no doubt seemed real, and
the love, too. So she was sad for him--very sad. As soon as she felt
sure of her voice, she said: "Won't you please light the big lamp for
me? I wore a negligee this evening because I wanted to sew. I'm making
a suit for Winchie--like one I saw in a French magazine."
He lit the lamp beside the table where she worked in the evenings when
she did not go to her own room. "Anything else?" he asked.
"Only sit and talk to me."
"I couldn't talk this evening."
"Then sit and smoke."
She began her work, he smoking in the deep shadow near the window. She
could hardly see him; he could see every wave and ripple in her lovely
hair, every shift of the sweeping dark lashes, every change in that
sweet, small face, in the wide wistful mouth. Even better than playing
on the piano, sewing brings out the charm of delicate, skillful fingers.
She did not need to look at him to feel his gaze, its longing, its
hopelessness. And never before had she thought of him in such a
partial, personal way--the way a woman must feel toward the man she
knows loves her, even though she only likes him.
She had made up her mind what to do, how to deal practically with this
situation. But she had to struggle with her timidity before she could
set about the audacious experiment she had planned and resolved. She
had long had the frankness of thought that is inseparable from
intelligence. The courage to speak her thoughts was as yet in the bud.
"Do you mind my speaking again of what you were saying this afternoon?"
said she as she sewed industriously.
"No," said he.
"I've been thinking about it. At first I was startled--very much
startled. But I soon began to look at it sensibly. I want you to stay.
Richard wants you to stay. There's no reason why you shouldn't stay and
conquer your delusion."
"It's no delusion."
"Real love is always mutual. So yours must be delusion." She was
pointing a thread for the eye of the needle. "You've led a very--very
man sort of life, haven't you?"
He shifted uncomfortably, then confessed: "You know the standards for
men are different from those for women."
She smiled, threaded the needle. "Yes, I know. I don't understand, but
I know. You needn't explain. I don't want to understand. It doesn't
interest me. As I was about to say--" Her courage failed her, and she
sewed a while in silence. At last she dared. It was with no sign of
inward disturbance, but the contrary, that she went on: "You've been
shut in here too long. Go to your old haunts for a few days. You'll
come back cured."
She had practiced saying it, this advice which she believed wise and
necessary in the circumstances. She said it in calm, matter-of-fact
fashion; and it was the less difficult for her to do so because, in
thought at least, she had long since emancipated herself from what she
regarded as the hypocrisies of modesty, and had taught herself to look
at all things rationally and humanly. She knew her frankness would not
please him; so she was not surprised when after a pause he said roughly,
"I don't like to hear you say that sort of thing."
She laughed pleasantly, put quite at ease by his impertinence. "And I
don't in the least care whether you approve of me or not. You men seem
to think you've got a sort of general roving commission to superintend
the propriety of women."
"I beg your pardon."
"Certainly. Give me that pair of scissors--on the stand in the corner."
He rose, issued from the deep shadow. She could now see into what
confusion her words had thrown him. The hand that held out the scissors
was trembling. He moved to go upon the veranda. "Please," said she.
"I'm not nearly done. Won't you sit down?"
He seated himself.
"You see," she went on lightly, busy with her hem again, "I know your
awful secret."
"You've no right to laugh at me," muttered he.
"I'm not laughing at you.... I'm only looking at it in a friendly,
practical way.... I want to help you.... Why are you going away?"
She sewed on, feeling his emotion gather behind his self-control. The
stillness was unbroken. A light breeze, cool and scented, came
fluttering in at the open windows to play with the soft brilliant hair
that grew so beautifully round her temples. In a low voice, so low that
she scarcely heard, his answer at last came: "Because I love you. I
love you and I am not a cur."
Her needle missed its way into the cloth, pierced her finger. She put
the wounded finger in her mouth. When she looked toward him she was
smiling. "Still you've not answered my question. Because you think you
care for me--that's no reason why you should go.'
"I can't control myself. I--" He made a gesture of helplessness. "I
can't think of you as--as married. You seem like a girl to me--free. I
keep forgetting."
"It doesn't seem to occur to you that I might be trusted to remember."
"I know," said he humbly.
She held the garment at arms' length, eyeing the hem critically. "No,
you don't. You're like all the men. You fancy weak woman can always be
overborne by man, big and strong and superior."
"You wrong me."
"Why else should you talk of going away?"
"Because it's torment to me to be near you--to----"
She stopped sewing, looked at him with anger in her deep green eyes.
"Then your feeling is just what I thought."
"It is not! It is love!"
Again she sewed a long time in silence. It was very calm there, in that
quiet room with its flowers and tasteful, gracefully arranged furniture,
and the single lamp like a jewel shedding all its radiances upon her
small industrious figure. "Then tell me," she said in her sweet, gentle
way, without looking up or pausing, "what do you want that you cannot
have? You can see me as much as you like. You can talk as freely as
you like. You can count on sympathy, on friendship. And, if you want
to, you can keep right on loving me in that exalted way you profess.
Nobody's going to hinder you."
She sewed on in silence, he motionless watching her, perplexity in his
honest, rather boyish face. After a while her voice broke the silence.
"Love!" She laughed with raillery that did not sting. "My dear friend,
don't you see I was right? Go away for a few days and----"
"For God's sake, don't suggest that again."
"Then don't say it's love that makes you want to leave and upset
everything." She put the needles, thread, and thimble into her workbox,
rolled up the little suit, rose. "It's always the same story," she said,
sad rather than bitter. "A woman means only one thing to a man. Yes, I
think you had best go."
"You're too severe," he cried. "It's true there's such a thing as
passion without love. And I'll admit that I, like all men have felt it
often--have lied to myself as well as to the woman--and have called it
love. But it's also true there's no love without some passion--at
least, _you_ couldn't hope to inspire it. And though in your innocence
you may think so, you'd not want to have less than all love has to
give--if you loved."
Her eyes, large and softly brilliant, were burning into the darkness
beyond the open window. "I'm not innocent," she said. "And I try not
to be a hypocrite. If I loved, I'd want all."
There was a long silence, she at the window gazing out into the
gathering night. Then he said: "You were right. It was not love that
made me feel like flight. I can conquer that feeling. Will you let me
stay?"
She turned slowly. In the look she fixed on him there was doubt,
hesitation. "You've made me a little uneasy--a little afraid."
In his eagerness he sprang up. "Don't!" he cried. "Don't send me away.
I'll never speak of love again. You've taught me my lesson."
"I do want you to stay," said she. "It'd seem very lonely here with you
gone. For I've come to depend on you as a friend. It hurts to find you
seeking your own selfish pleasure under the pretense of a feeling for
me."
He winced--not because he felt scandalized by her candor, but because he
felt convicted by it. "How well you understand men!" he exclaimed.
"Better than they understand themselves."
"In that one way I do," was her reply, an arresting hardness in the deep
voice that was usually altogether sweet. These last few days she was
understanding a great many things about the relations of men and
women--or, perhaps, was letting herself realize that she understood
them.
He lowered his eyes, that he might not read her thoughts, that she might
not read the same thoughts in his own mind. "You often make me think of
the lake out there," said he. "There's the surface one sees at a
glance. Then there's a little distance below the surface, that one sees
when he looks intently straight down. And then there's fathoms on
fathoms where all sorts of strange things--strange thoughts and
feelings--lie hid. Sometimes--for an instant--one of them shows or
almost shows at the surface."
"When one lives alone a great deal, one gets the habit of living within
oneself--don't you think?"
"I suppose that's it--partly. A brook couldn't hide very much--and most
people are like brooks or ponds. The ones that seem to have depth seem
so simply because the water's muddy."
She looked admiringly at him; and her admiration of his originality and
insight did not lessen when he added, "At least, so a friend of mine
used to say." He returned to _the_ subject. "Then--I may stay?"
Her face brightened. In her eyes as they looked at a smile slowly
dawned. Quickly all her features were responding, especially that wide,
expressive fascinating mouth. "I hope you will. But--no more
dreariness!"
"I hate gloom as much as you do." He glanced round the room--at the
harmonies of woodwork and walls and furnishing, with here and there
bright flowers always in the restraint of those of gentle hue. "As much
as you do," repeated he. "And that's saying a great deal. How _do_ you
manage it!--house and garden, always gay yet never gaudy--and such
variety! Is there no end to your variety?"
"Oh, one's a new person every day, isn't one?--and different."
"_You_ certainly are. But no one else I ever saw." He colored
furiously at his finding himself, without intending it, upon the
forbidden ground. She had turned away, and was leaving the room--the
safest course, since it enabled her to hide her pleasure in the
compliment that peculiarly appealed to her, and also seemed to give him
a sufficient yet not harsh rebuke.
Her aversion to restraint was perhaps stronger than is the average
woman's--certainly had more courage. She had been too thoroughly
trained in the conventionalities not to have the familiar timidity as to
action, so strong in all conventionally bred people, so dominant over
women. But the "unhand-me" spirit of her time was finding outlet in
thought and feeling. Reflecting much in her aloneness, she had reached
many audacious conclusions about life and the true meaning of its comedy
drama--that meaning so different from what we pretend, from what usually
passes as truth in history, philosophy, and literature, based as they
are upon man's cheap hankering for idealistic strut. The audacities of
thought that occasionally showed at her surface in speech or commentary
of smiling eyes and lips were conventional in comparison with whole
schools of deep-swimming ideas and fancies that kept hours of aloneness
from being hours of loneliness. Physically, her passion for freedom
showed itself in her dislike of tight or stuffy garments. She could
pass her hand round her waist inside her closest-fitting corset. Her
liking for few clothes and for as little yoke and sleeves as custom
allowed came not from the thought for the other sex that often explains
this taste, but from aversion to restraint.
As usual, the first thing she did that night, when she was alone in her
rooms, was to rid herself of all her clothing and put on the thinnest of
thin white nightgowns, almost sleeveless, and cut out at the neck. She
thrust her feet into bedroom slippers, braided her long hair with its
strands of red almost brown, with its strands of brown almost gold. She
turned out the light, threw open all the long shutters screening her
windows, to let her bedroom fill with warm, perfumed freshness from lake
and gardens. She stepped out on the balcony to take the breathing
exercises that kept her body straight, her chest high, her bosom firm as
a girl's, and her form slim and supple. The fireflies were floating and
darting in the creepers and the near-hanging boughs. The slight
agitations of the air stole among the folds of her gown and over her
neck and arms like charmed fingers. There was no moon; but she did not
miss it in the dim splendor of the thronging stars.
"Aren't you about ready to come in?"
She startled, suppressed a scream. She turned. Richard was standing in
the window. Her blood which had rushed to her heart surged out again
and into her brain in an angry wave. She hated to be taken by surprise.
It was on the tip of her tongue to cry furiously, "I detest being spied
upon." But she had resolved soon after Winchie was born never to speak
angrily to him, never to let him hear her speak angrily. The habit
restrained her now, as it had scores of times. Instead, she said: "Why,
how did you get in? I'm sure I locked my door."
"So you did," replied Dick in the cheerful unconscious way that so
irritated her in certain moods. Not always could she bear with
composure his masculine assumption that whatever pleased him must
delight his wife. "So you did," said he. "And it's still locked. But
there was the window from the front balcony into your sitting room--and
the door from your sitting room to this room. You see, I was determined
to find you."
His tone of laughing tenderness helped her half to guess, half to make
out his expression. Usually she accepted without a protesting thought
the whole of the routine of married life. But to-night she grew hot
with a burning blush of imperiled modesty as he advanced toward her.
"Don't," she said; "I'm doing my exercises."
"No--you were dreaming. Of what?" Then, without waiting for an answer
about a matter of so little importance, "Gallatin tells me he has
decided to stay on--if he can arrange it--and he seems to think he can.
So I'm feeling fine. You don't know what a jolt he gave me at supper.
Did you talk with him about it?"
"Yes."
"Urged him to stay?"
"I tried to show him he ought to stay."
"Ever so much obliged."
She stopped in her exercises to say quickly: "Oh, I didn't do it for
you. I did it for myself."
"Why, you dislike him."
"He's some one to talk with--some one that listens and answers. And--I
don't dislike him."
Richard laughed. "That's right. Try to make the best of it. Well, if
you're not coming in----"
"Not for an hour or longer."
"Then--good night. I must be up early. I think I'll sleep down at the
Smoke House. I'm so glad about Gallatin--just as much obliged as if
you'd done it for me. And I believe you did." He put his arms round her
to kiss her good night. As soon as his lips touched her cheek she drew
away, disengaged herself. "What's the matter, Courtney?" She had long
since learned that for all his absent-mindedness and ignoring of things
that didn't directly interest him, he became as sensitive--and as
accurate--as photographic plate to light, the instant his attention
happened to be caught. "What's the matter? Why do you draw away?"
"I don't know," replied she--truthfully, yet with a sense of being
untruthful. "I seem not to like to be touched to-night."
"I don't remember you being that way before."
She went on with her exercises; he yawned and departed.
*VIII*
The morning after Courtney and Basil came to this clear and promising
understanding, she got down to the seven-o'clock breakfast perhaps ten
minutes late. She expected to find the two men and Winchie there, and
was thinking of asking Gallatin to go to town with her and Winchie.
When she entered the dining room, there was the table in its usual
morning place, in the wide-flung door windows to the cast, and at it sat
Winchie only, sunbeams sifting through the trellised morning glories to
dance upon his shock of tawny hair.
"Where are the others?" she asked.
Winchie, forgetful of his teaching, had his mouth full, far too full for
immediate speech--unless he gulped it empty, and that would have been
breaking another rule. So Lizzie, who was just entering from the kitchen
hall, answered: "Mr. Richard telephoned up at half past six, and made me
wake Mr. Gallatin. They had breakfast down at the Smoke House long
ago."
Winchie had climbed from his high chair and had come round to kiss his
mother good morning. He was dressed for the trip to town--all white
except dark blue edging round his wide collar, and a dark blue belt.
His features suggested his father's and his mother's, yet were those of
neither. That morning their usual suggestions of will and character
were lost in a general expression of sweet good humor. He looked a
sturdy bronzed cherub. After searching his mother's face with those
inquiring, seeing eyes of his, he said: "Mamma's happy this morning,"
and resumed breakfast.
"Indeed she is!" exclaimed Courtney.
She drew the bowl of yellow daisies and pink-white mountain holly from
the center of the table, and fell to rearranging them. Each blossom
seemed to glide into just its right position, as if there were magic in
her fingers. She could not remember when she had felt quite so content
and hopeful. And her spirits rose as the day advanced. On the way to
town she stopped at the Vaughan farm across the highroad to inquire into
a slight falling off in quality of butter and milk. She had never seen
the farm so fascinating. The very dock weed and dog fennel carpeting
the barnyard had an air and a charm. And the road to town, as she and
Winchie sped along in the runabout--what a shady lane through Paradise
it was! In town everyone seemed so agreeable, so glad to see her.
After lunch with Sarah Carpenter, she shopped, made several calls. They
did not start home until late, and supper was on the table when they
arrived. At the table--always in the middle of the room for the evening
meal, and formally set--at the table was Richard, alone, eating and
figuring on his everlasting yellow pad.
"Hello!" said he, with barely a glance away from his pencil point.
"Glad to have company."
"Where's Mr. Gallatin?" asked Winchie.
"Gone," was Dick's curt answer in the tone of an interrupted man. "I
sent him away."
Courtney, crossing the room, halted. A moment of horrible silence.
"Gone!" she echoed hoarsely, her eyes wide, as if a monster had suddenly
appeared open-jawed in her very face. "You--sent--him away!"