THE WAYFARER
By the time Paula had got back to her dressing-room after the long series
of tumultuous curtain calls was over, the rush of her friends to express
their congratulations in person had begun. After the _Tosca_, performance
she had been adamant about seeing anybody but to-night with a laugh she
said, "I don't care. For a few minutes. If they're people I really know."
So Mary took her station beside the Rhadamanthus at the stockade gate--in
a proper opera-house, he would have been the stage door-keeper--to pick
out the sheep from the goat-like herd of the merely curious who, but for
firm measures, would have stormed the place. Those who came down again,
pushed out by the weight of new arrivals, lingered about the gate talking
things over with Mary. It amused her to see how radically their attitude
had changed. Such people as the Averys, the Cravens and the Byrnes, who
in a social way had known Paula well, seemed to regard her now as a
personage utterly remote, translated into another world altogether. And
when they asked about John Wollaston, as most of them did, there was an
undertone almost of commiseration about their inquiries, though on the
surface this didn't go beyond an expressed regret that he hadn't been
here to witness the triumph.
Mary drove them all away at last, even the lingerers in Paula's
dressing-room, left her safely in the hands of her dresser and went out
into the automobile park to get her car. Coming up softly across the
grass and reaching in to turn on the lights, she was startled to discover
that there was a man in it. But before she had time more than to gasp,
she recognized him as her father.
"I didn't want to push my way in with the mob," he explained, after
apologizing for having frightened her. "The car, when I spotted it,
seemed a safe place to wait. And the privacy of it," he added, "will be
grateful, too, since I'm not perfectly sure that Paula won't refuse
outright to see me."
Mary smiled at this and said she hoped he hadn't missed the performance.
"No," he told her somberly, "I didn't miss--any of it." Then on a
different note, "Now we'll see whether those dogs of critics won't change
their tune."
"Paula herself changed the tune," Mary observed. Then, "She's longing to
see you, of course. And there's no reason why you should wait. No one's
with her now except her dresser."
She led the way, without giving him a chance to demur, to the gate to the
stockade and turned him over to the gatekeeper.
"Please take Doctor Wollaston up to his wife's dressing-room," she said.
And with a momentary pleasure in having evaded introducing him as Madame
Carresford's husband, she turned away and went back to the car.
For the moment the spectacle of her father in the rôle of a young lover
touched her no more acutely than with a mild half-humorous melancholy.
She even paid the tribute of a passing smile to the queer reversal of
their rôles, her own and his. She was more like a mother brooding over
the first love-affair of an adolescent son. It was so young of him,
younger, she believed, than any act she herself could be capable of, to
have come to Paula's performance without letting her know and waited
shyly alone in the dark while the herd of her acquaintances crowded in
and monopolized her. Pathetically young, almost intolerably pathetic in
a man in his middle fifties. She wondered if he had come up for _Tosca_
the night before and gone away without a word.
She had spoken quite without authority in assuring him of Paula's
welcome. Paula had not, she thought, spoken of him once either in
connection with her disappointment the night before or with her triumph
to-night. Yet that he would get a lover's welcome she had very little
doubt. It was his moment certainly. Paula left alone up there at last,
sated with an overwhelming success, tired, relaxed...
With an effort of will Mary settled herself a little more deeply in the
seat behind the wheel and lighted a cigarette. She hated having to wait,
having to be found waiting when they came down together. She wished she
could just--disappear. It wasn't possible, of course.
It was not very long before they came down. "She says I may stay two
days," John told Mary as they squeezed into their seats in the little
roadster. "Then, relentlessly, she's going to turn me out." But his voice
was beyond disguise that of a lover who has prospered.
Mary drove them in almost unbroken silence all the way, down the ravine
road and up through the woods to the house in the village. Then she went
on with the car to their garage which stood in a yard of a neighbor, two
or three doors away. She rejected with curt good-humor her father's offer
to help her with this job. It was what she always did by herself, she
said, and took a momentary perverse pleasure, which she despised herself
for, in the obvious fact that this troubled him.
Back in the cottage living-room, ten minutes later perhaps, she found him
alone and heard then, the explanation of his having come. They had got
the Sunday papers out at Hickory Hill as usual in the middle of the
morning but had found no reference to the performance of _Tosca_ the
night before. John had spent a good part of the day fretting over the
absence of any news as to how Paula's venture had succeeded and puzzling
over the lack of it in the papers. Then the obvious explanation had
struck one of the boys, that the papers that came out to Hickory Hill on
Sunday were an early edition.
He had had old Pete drive him straight into town, at that, and there he
had found the news-stand edition containing the criticisms. The
unfairness of them had disturbed him greatly. Orders or no orders, he
hadn't been able to endure the thought of leaving Paula to suffer under
the sting of a sneer like that without making at least an effort to
comfort her. He had driven out to Ravinia without any idea that she was
to sing again that night; had been told of it at the park where he had
stopped for the purpose of picking up some one who could conduct him to
her house. Learning that she was about to sing again, he had exerted all
his will power and waited until this second ordeal should be over.
"It was as much one for me as it could have been for her," he concluded.
"I don't know what stage fright is, but vicarious stage fright is the
devil. I never was so terrified in my life. I hope nobody I knew saw me.
I took pains they shouldn't, for I must have looked like a ghost."
"There's nothing the matter with your looks now," she told him. "Hickory
Hill must be just the place for you."
"It would be," he assented, "if it were possible for me to be
whole-heartedly there. By the way, we've got a visitor. Anthony March."
She felt herself flush at that with clear pleased surprise. "Oh, that's
as nice as possible," she said. "But how in the world did it happen? How
did you find him? Paula was trying to and couldn't."
"Was she?" Her father's voice, she thought, flattened a little on the
question. "Why, he found us. He turned up on foot--Friday morning, it
must have been--with a knapsack on his shoulders; came to the farm-house
door and asked if he should tune the piano. Luckily, I happened to be
about and caught him before he could get away. He was combining a walking
trip, he said, with his own way of earning a living and I persuaded him
to stay for a few days and make us a visit."
The last part of that sentence, Paula, coming down into the room from
up-stairs, heard.
"Who?" she asked. "Who's the visitor you've been persuading?"
It was just a good-natured way of showing her interest in anything that
her husband might happen to be talking about. But when he answered,
"Anthony March," she came into focus directly.
"Thank goodness, you've found him!" she said. "I had about given him
up.--And I really need him."
"I thought," said John, "that you had given him up. Are you going to do
his opera, after all?"
"Opera!" said Paula blankly, as if she had never heard of such a thing.
"No, I want him to see if he can fix this beastly piano they've given me
so that it's fit to work with."
And John, after a moment-laughed.
It was a shattering sort of laugh to Mary. She stared at the man who
uttered it as if he were--what he had for the moment become--a stranger.
He was not, certainly, the man who, down in North Carolina had talked
about March with her, regretted the "rough justice" he had had from Paula
and considered the possibility of repairing it. That momentary blank look
of his had shown that he perceived the insensitive egotism of his wife's
attitude. Not even now that her success was an established thing had she
a regretful thought for the man who had hoped to share it with her. She
had forgotten those hopes. All she remembered now about Anthony March was
that he could tune pianos better than any one else.
This Mary's father saw and yet he laughed. A cruel laugh. He had felt
for the moment a recurrence of the old jealousy. In his relief from it,
he, a reassured lover, triumphed in the humiliation of one he had
supposed his rival.
Mary managed to hide her face from him--superfluously because he wasn't
looking at her--and thought up, desperately, a few more questions about
how they were getting on at Hickory Hill.
But she went on feeling from moment to moment more horribly in the way,
and at last with a simulated yawn she said she was going to bed.
"This--vicarious success is rather tiring," she told her father; "almost
as bad as vicarious stage fright." And then to Paula, "Is there any
reason, if you're going to keep father here for two days, why I shouldn't
steal a holiday?"
"Go away, do you mean?" Paula asked with a faint flush. "Why,--where
would you go?"
"I could drive over to Hickory Hill," Mary said, "either by myself in the
little car or with Pete in the big one. Whichever you wouldn't rather
have here."
"I think that's a capital idea," John said. "Oh, you'd better take the
big car with Pete. It would be rather a long drive for you all by
yourself in the little one."
This was not the real reason, of course. He wouldn't want a chauffeur
under foot while he was honeymooning about with Paula.
Owing to a late start and an errand which at the last moment Paula wanted
done in Chicago, it was getting on toward four o'clock when Pete drove
Mary up to the loading platform of the old apple house at Hickory Hill.
The farm Ford was standing there idling in a syncopated manner and
apparently on the point of departure somewhere. Where, was explained a
moment later by the emergence of Sylvia Stannard in her conventional farm
costume of shirt and breeches with a two-gallon jug in each hand.
"Oh," she said, "then the big car can take Miss Wollaston over to Durham,
can't it?--so she won't have to ride in the Ford which she hates. How do
you do? I'm awfully glad you've come. We weren't expecting you, were we?
Was anybody, I mean?"
Mary allowed herself a laugh at this young thing with her refreshing way
of saying first whatever first came into her head and letting this serve
as a greeting, said she was sure the big car and Pete were equal to
taking her aunt to the four-miles-distant village.
"That's all right then. I won't have to wait for her," said Sylvia,
letting down her jugs into the tonneau of the Ford. "I'll run
straight along with this. They must be simply perishing for it. Isn't
it hot, though!"
Mary wanted to know who they were and what they were perishing for.
"Lemonade," said Sylvia, "for the boys out in the hay field. It's
perfectly gorgeous out there but hot enough to frizz your hair."
"Where is the hay field?" Mary asked. "Is it very far?"
"It's just over in the northeast eighty," said Sylvia, with a rather
conscious parade of her mastery of bucolic vernacular. "But you don't
want to walk. It would be awfully jolly if you would come along with me."
"Wait two minutes until I've said hello to Aunt Lucile and I will," said
Mary, and turned to go into the house.
"Don't step on any of the piano," Sylvia called after her. "It's spread
all over the place."
They had made a good many changes in the apple house since Mary had gone
to Ravinia, but the thing that drew a little cry of surprise from her was
this old square piano. The case of it stood snugly in the corner of the
west wall. But the works were spread about the room in a manner which
made Sylvia's warning less far-fetched than it seemed.
The feeling that caught Mary at sight of it was more than just surprise.
Its dismantled condition brought to her a half-scared but wholly happy
reassurance that Anthony March was really here.
Her journey to Hickory Hill had been, so she had told herself at
intervals during the day, merely a flight from her father and Paula.
There was no real reason for thinking that she would find March at the
end of it. Week-end visits usually ended Monday morning, and it was
probable that he would have gone hours before she arrived. She was
conscious now of having commanded herself not to be silly when she was
fretting over the late start from Ravinia and Paula's errand in town. It
_would_ be nice to see him again! He was probably out in the hay field
with the others.
She gave her aunt a rather absent-minded greeting and a highly condensed
summary of her news. Her father was well and was stopping on with Paula
for a day or two.
"He's taken over my job," she concluded mischievously, "maid, chauffeur
and chaperon. Paula doesn't mind now that she's made such an enormous hit
and she doesn't sing again until Thursday. Pete will take you in the big
car to Durham."
"Well, that's Heaven's mercy," exclaimed Miss Wollaston. "I don't like to
drive with Sylvia in any car and I don't like riding in a Ford no matter
who drives. But Sylvia driving a Ford--her own car's broken down
somehow--is simply frightful."
"She's waiting for me now," said Mary, "to take me out to the hay field.
I must run before she grows any more impatient."
And run was precisely what she did, down the slope to where Sylvia
awaited her, a lighter-hearted creature altogether than she had supposed
this morning that it was possible for her to be.
She got an explanation of the piano from Sylvia. She had gone with Rush
and Mr. March to an auction sale late Saturday afternoon at a farm three
or four miles away. Just for a lark. They hadn't meant seriously to buy
anything. But this old piano, Mr. March having sworn that he would make
it play despite the fact that half the keys wouldn't go down at all and
the rest when they did made only the most awful noises, they had bought
for eleven dollars, and had fetched home in the truck on Sunday.
"I think he's terribly nice," Sylvia confided. "You know him, don't you?
He's quite old, of course.--Well, over thirty he says; but he's
awfully--don't you know--well preserved. There are a whole lot of things
he can do."
Mary laughed. "That is remarkable. How old are you, you nice young thing?
Going on six? Lookout! You'll smash the lemonade!"
"We're going to surprise them," Sylvia announced when they had arrived,
miraculously without disaster, at the northeast eighty. They had careened
through the wagon gate and halted under an oak tree at the edge of the
field. "I'll go and tell them I've brought the lemonade, but I won't say
anything about you. You keep out of sight behind the tree. Then Graham
won't want to go and brush his hair."
It startled Mary to realize that she had forgotten all about Graham. Not
even the sight of his sister had recalled the--highly special nature of
the state of things between them nor suggested the need for preparing an
attitude to greet him with. At all events she wouldn't follow Sylvia's
suggestion and pop out at him from behind a tree.
He was, it happened, the first person the child encountered in her flight
across the field; the others, indistinguishable at that distance, were in
a group a little farther away. Mary walked out to meet him when she saw
him coming toward her and competently gave the encounter its tone by
beginning to talk to him--about how hot it was and how nice the hay
smelled and how good it seemed to be back here at Hickory Hill--while
they were still a good twenty paces apart. You couldn't strike any sort
of sentimental note very well when you had to begin at a shout. Then she
led him back to the lemonade, gave him a cigarette and answered at length
and with a good deal of spontaneous vivacity his obligatory questions
about Paula and the opening of the Ravinia season.
She was in the full tide of this--and was, since she had sat down upon a
small boulder Graham had insisted she take possession of, screened by the
trunk of the tree--when Sylvia hailed her brother from, not very far away
with the statement that Rush wouldn't stop for anything or anybody until
once more around the field. It was March, then, who was audibly coming
along with her. Mary rose, broke off about Paula, and moved the single
step it needed to give her sight of him.
She saw nothing else but him. She saw his head go back as from the actual
impact of the sight of her. She saw the look, unmistakable as a blast
from a trumpet, that flamed into his face. And then her world swam. Paula
wasn't singing now, "Hither, my love! Here I am! Here!" Nor could Paula
come upon him now, from anywhere, and take him by the shoulders and kiss
his cheek and lead him away with her. This moment was not
Paula's--whatever the other had been.
And the rest, standing there looking on, hadn't seen the bolt fall! They
were talking as idly and easily as if this were nothing but a hot summer
afternoon in the hay field.
"I told him," she heard Sylvia saying, "that there was another nice old
person he knew here with the lemonade, who thought I was only about
six.--Were you surprised when you saw who she was?--I'm going to take
him back to the apple house with us, now that Mary's come, so that he
can have the piano ready to dance by to-night." This last, apparently,
to Graham.
She even heard herself join in,--the voice was hers anyhow--when Graham,
commenting upon the view across the field, remarked that it was so
intensely farm-like that it had almost the look of a stage setting.
"It is like something," she said then. "It's like the first act of _Le
Chemineau_. We ought to have a keg of cider instead of two jugs of
lemonade and we should have brought it in a wheelbarrow instead of in
the Ford."
"Well, we couldn't take Mr. March back in a wheelbarrow," Sylvia said,
"so I'm glad it isn't the first act of whatever-you-call-it. Because he's
simply got to fix the piano well enough for jazz."
Mary couldn't remember that he spoke a word, but he got into the back
seat of the Ford with her when Sylvia slid under the wheel.
"If you'll promise," Sylvia said to March at the end of the breathless
mile back to the apple house, "if you'll promise to go straight to work
at it and never stop until it'll play the _Livery Stable Blues_, then
I'll go back to the hay field and see that Rush gets some of the lemonade
before those laborers drink it all up. You'll see to him, won't you,
Mary? Stand right over him and be severe, so that we can dance to-night.
You aren't as excited about it as you ought to be. I think I'll come in
and start him."
And this she did while the Ford executed a little jazz rhythm of its own
outside. She didn't stay more than a minute or two though. When she saw
him fairly occupied, tools in hand, over his task, she darted away again
with a last injunction to severity upon Mary.
She had seen nothing. The two were left alone.
Mary sat where she could watch his fine skilled hands at work. The
negligent precision with which they accomplished their varied tasks
occupied her, made it possible to continue for a while the silence she
needed until her world should have stopped swimming; until the blindness
of that revelation should have passed.
She had been wrong about him again. He was not an Olympian. (But, of
course, Olympians themselves weren't, if it came to that; not always.)
He could never, she had been telling herself since that day when they
had had their one talk together, belong to any one. He did not--save
himself up for special people. He was just there, the same for
everybody, like, she had half humorously observed to her father, a
public drinking fountain.
If that was the rule, she, Mary Wollaston, was the exception to it. Not
Paula with her opulent armory, but she who had listened with him,
clinging to him, while Paula sang; she, who had talked to him while Paula
fought for her husband's life; she, whom he had come upon in the shade of
the oak tree at the edge of the hay field; she who sat near him, silent
now. This was the meager total that outweighed those uncounted hours of
Paula's. Somehow she had acquired a special significance for him.
Was she trying to evade saying that he had fallen in love with her. What
was the good--except that it sounded sweet--of using a phrase which could
be packed like a hand-bag with anything you chose to put into it? Graham
was in love with her. That boy in New York, whom she had found in a
panic of lonely terror lest he should prove a coward in the great ordeal
he was facing overseas had been for a few hours in love with her. What
would be the content of the phrase for a man like this?
Was she in love with him? Her thoughts up to now had been deep,
submerged, almost formless, but this question came to the surface and
touched her lips with a smile. Well, and what did the phrase mean to her?
All she could think of as she sat so still watching him, was those fine
hands of his, working as skillfully and swiftly as her father's ever
worked but at this humble task. She kept her eyes away for just a
little longer from his face. She wanted those hands. She wanted them
with an intensity that made it impossible at last to let the silence
endure any longer.
"Paula..." she said, and stopped in sheer surprise that her voice had
come at all; then began again, "Paula wanted you to tune her piano.
At Ravinia. I was angry, at that, until she reminded me that you
wouldn't be."
His hand laid down the small, odd shaped tool it held, but the next
moment picked it up again.
"I shouldn't have minded tuning her piano," he told her.
"I know," she said. "I knew as soon as I had had a minute in which
to--gather you up. And when I had done that, I helped her try to find
you. I had a special reason, a different one from Paula's, for hoping
that we could. And for my reason," she went on, trembling a little
and finding it harder to make her words come steadily, "it
isn't--yet, too late.
"You see if you were there with her where she could see you every
day--there'd be a lot of pianos there she said; enough to keep you
going--she'd remember you again. She is like that. Lots of people are, I
suppose. When she doesn't see you, she forgets. But if she remembered how
much she liked you and how good your opera was,--the real one, the one
you wrote for yourself--she might do something about it.--To get it
played--so that you could hear it. Now that she's had a great success,
she could do almost anything quite easily, I think. Infinitely more than
I. I've been trying, but I haven't got very far."
He laid down the tool once more and locked his hands together. "You have
been trying?" he repeated. The tension, like the grip of his hands, was
drawing up almost unbearably.
"There's a French baritone there, Fournier, who could play your officer's
part. As you meant it to be played, I think. But he doesn't sing in
English. I thought it might be possible, if you didn't mind its being
sung in French, to translate it. That's one of the things I've
been--trying to do."
And then with a gasp and a sob, "Oh, don't,--don't hurt them like that!"
she reached out and took the hands she wanted.
He responded to the caress, as before, so quickly that one could
hardly have known where it began; only Mary did know. She looked up
then into his face, steadily, open-eyed, though she could not see much
for the blur.
"This time," he said, laboriously,--"this time it isn't the song."
She shook her head.
"I couldn't have waited, like that," he told her, three breaths later,
"except for being afraid that if I tried to touch you, you wouldn't be
there at all. Like a fairy story;--or a dream. I have never been sure
that the other time wasn't."
"It's real enough," she said. "You're sure now, aren't you?"
His answer, the one she meant him to make, was to draw her up into a
deep embrace, his lips upon hers.
"What does it mean?" he asked, when they had drawn back from it.
She smiled at that. "You don't need ask. That's the Wollaston trick, to
ask for meanings and reasons." She added, a moment later, "It means
whatever it says to your heart."
It was at her half-humorous suggestion that he went back, presently, to
work at the piano. She settled contentedly near him where with an
outstretched hand she could occasionally respond to his touch. They
hadn't, either of them, very much to say.
Once the work was interrupted, when he asked, rather tensely, "Do you
want me to come to Ravinia?"
She found herself at a loss for a categorical reply. She'd have thought
that a whole-hearted yes would have been the only thing she could say.
"I don't want you--tortured any more with unheard melodies," she answered
after a moment's reflection.
His nod, decisive as it was, struck her as equivocal. But she was too
happy to probe into anything this afternoon. There would be plenty of
time; unstinted hours. It was with no more than a mild regret that she
heard, under the windows, the return of the big car with Aunt Lucile.
This inextinguishable happiness expressed itself in the touch of impudent
mischief with which she slipped up close behind Anthony March and, in the
last possible instant before her aunt's entrance into the room, bent down
and kissed him; then flashed back to her decorously distant chair.
It was funny how calm she was. This day that was closing down over the
hill behind the apple house couldn't be, it seemed, the same that had
dawned over the lake at Ravinia. The whole Ravinia episode, even as she
told Lucile and March about it, seemed remote, like something out of a
book; but became for that very reason, rather pleasant to dwell upon.
Sylvia came in pretty soon for a critical survey of what March had
accomplished with the piano, volunteered to help and attempted to. But
having pled some of Anthony's arrangements of loose parts, she was
sacked off the job and sent back to the hay field to bring the boys in
for supper.
After supper the excitement over the piano increased. They all gathered
round March like people watching a conjurer's trick when he slid the
action into place and proved, chromatically, that every hammer would
strike and every key return.
"But it isn't tuned at all," Sylvia wailed. "It will be hours before you
can play on it."
"Minutes," March corrected with a grin. And they watched, amazed,--but
less so really than an ordinary piano tuner would have been,--at the way
he caught octaves, fifths and fourths, sixths and thirds up and down that
keyboard like a juggler keeping seven tennis balls in the air.
"There you are," he said suddenly, before it seemed that he could be
half-way through and began playing a dance.
"But you can play tunes!" cried Sylvia. "I thought you only did terribly
high-brow things. That's what Rush said."
"I was pianist in the best jazz orchestra in Bordeaux," March told her.
He stayed there at the piano quite contentedly for more than an hour.
Some of the musical jokes he indulged in (his sense of humor expressed
itself more easily and impudently in musical terms than in any other)
were rather over his auditors' heads. Parodies whose originals they
failed to recognize, experiments in the whole-tone scale that would have
interested disciples of Debussy, but his rhythms they understood and
recognized as faultless.
And Mary danced. With Graham when she must, with Rush when she could. The
latter happened oftener than you would have supposed.
"Those Wollastons can certainly dance," Sylvia remarked to her brother.
"I wonder they'll have anything to do with us. Let's just watch them for
a minute.--Here, we'll turn the piano around so Mr. March can see, too."
It was queer, Mary reflected, how easy it was for her and also, she was
sure, for her lover, to acquiesce in a spending of the hours like that;
how little impatient she was of the presence of these others that kept
them apart. She gave no thought to any maneuver, practicable or
fantastic, for stealing away with him, not even when, as the party
broke up for the night it became evident that chance was not going so to
favor them.
She realized afterward that there had been something factitious about her
tranquillity. What he had said in the moment before their first embrace
had been on that same note. He had been afraid to touch her for fear
that--as in a fairy story, or a dream,--she wouldn't be there. All that
afternoon and evening, despite an ineffable security in their miracle,
she had walked softly and so far as the future was concerned, avoided
trying to look.
Something in his gaze when he said good night to her, gave her a
momentary foreboding, though she told herself on the way up to the tent
she was to share with Sylvia that this was nothing but the scare that
always comes along with a too complete happiness.
But in the morning when her aunt told her that March had gone, she
realized that it had been more than that.
It was in the presence of the others who had gathered in the apple house
for breakfast that she heard the news, and this was perhaps a mercy; for
the effort she had to make to keep from betraying herself rallied her
forces and prevented a rout.
To the others his having gone like that seemed natural enough,--likably
characteristic of him, at any rate. In his note to Miss Wollaston he had
merely said that he realized that he must be off and wished to make the
most of the cool of the morning. He hoped she would understand and pardon
his not having spoken of his intention last night.
"It's the crush Sylvia had on him that accounts for that," Graham
observed. "He was afraid of the row she'd make if he let on."
Sylvia's riposte to this was the speculation that Mary had scared him
away, but one could see that her brother's explanation pleased her.
"Anyhow," she concluded, "he was good while he lasted."
What held Mary together was the obvious fact that none of them saw--no
more than they had seen--anything. Not one curious or questioning glance
was turned her way. A sense she was not until later able to find words
for, that she was guarding something, his quite as much as her own, from
profaning eyes, gave her the resolution it needed to carry on like that
until she could be alone. Naturally,--or at all events plausibly--alone.
She wouldn't run away from anybody.
Toward eleven o'clock chance befriended her. She hid herself in the old
orchard, lay prone upon the warm grass, her cheek upon her folded
forearms, and let herself go. She did not cry even now. Grief was not
what she felt, still less resentment.
She was lonely as she had never been before, and frightened by her
loneliness. All the familiar things of her life seemed far away, unreal.
She wanted a hand to hold;--his--oh, one of his!--until she could find
her way into a path again.
She had known, she reflected,--somewhere in the depths of her she had
known--from the first moment of their meeting, that he would go away.
This was why she had been so careful not to look beyond the moments as
they came; not to tempt Nemesis by asking nor trying for too much.
There happened to be, rather uncannily, a genuine proof that this was
true. While she had been still dazed with that first look of his, there
in the oak shade at the edge of the field, she had said that it was like
the first act of _Le Chemineau_. That had been speaking all but with the
tongue of prophecy. Deeply as the story had impressed her when she heard
it, she had spoken with no conscious sense of the likeness between that
wayfarer--whom neither love nor interest nor security could tempt away
from the open road which called him,--and Anthony March. It was an inner
self that knew and found a chance to speak. It was that same self who had
answered for her when he asked whether she wanted him to come to Ravinia.
He had come to his decision then, with just that nod of the head. And
she, forlorn, was glad he had cast this temptation aside. That he was
plodding now sturdily along his highway. She flushed with shame at the
thought of him, ubiquitous among those egotists at Ravinia, enlisting
their interest, reminding Paula how much she liked him.
Why had he not hated her for suggesting such a thing? He had loved her
for it, she knew, because he understood the longing to comfort and
protect him which lay behind it. But that sort of comfort was not for
him. The torture of the unheard melodies, instead.
He did love her. This, utterly, she knew. His going away, even with no
farewell at all, cast no flaw upon the miraculous certainty of that.
Their one unreserved embrace remained the symbol of it.
She pressed her hands to her face and with a long indrawn breath
surrendered to the memory of it. It was hers--for always.
The family were sitting at dinner when she came down to the apple
house, and after a rather startled look at her, demanded to know where
she had been.
"Asleep in the orchard," she said. "And not altogether awake yet."
But she knew she must get away from them. The look she saw in Graham's
face would have decided that.