DAYBREAK
There followed the conclusion of the story, an interval of ease. It gave
March, to begin with, a new access of courage, almost of confidence, to
note that she did not fade white again and that the sick look of horror,
banished from her eyes by the mere intensity of her determination to
convey the whole truth to him, did not return to them. She substituted
her other hand for the one he held in order to shift her position a
little and lean against his knees.
Her mind had not detached itself from the story as she made evident by
the reflective way in which she went on thinking aloud about it; dwelling
on some of the curious consequences of the adventure. It was
surprising--she wondered if it indicated anything really abnormal in
her--the way she had felt about it afterward.
She'd felt nothing in the least like shame. Certainly not at first. On
the contrary, she'd taken a deep soul-satisfying pride in it, a kind of
warm sense of readiness for anything.
She told him with a little clutch of embarrassment and resolution, about
another incident that happened somewhat later, attributing an importance
to it which he conceded while he reflected with a smile that most people,
men and women virtuous or otherwise, would have regarded as ridiculously
disproportionate. The incident concerned a man whom she didn't much like,
she said, but found somehow, fascinating. He had been paying her
attentions of a rather experimental sort for weeks, maneuvering,
arranging. He knew she lived by herself and had been angling for an
invitation to come to see her, alone. Finally, he telephoned her office
one day and asked point-blank if he mightn't come to tea that afternoon.
She said he might without telling him that she was expecting Christabel
Baldwin at the same time. An hour later, a restless hour it had been, she
had telephoned Christabel and put her off so that when her other guest
came he found just what he had expected. In the manner of one sure of his
welcome and intent on wasting no time, he had begun making love to her
(she apologized for the employment of that phrase but said she knew no
other that was usable). She admitted that she had never had any real
doubt that this was what he had meant to do and conceded him the right to
think that she had invited it. But she found it, nevertheless,
unendurable. She felt unspeakably degraded by it and presently flew into
a rage and turned the man out of the house, feeling, she added, as much
ashamed of that part of the performance as of anything else.
This encounter, she told March, made a profound change in her feeling
about the other episode--closed a door upon it. Nothing like that could
happen to her again. She simply stopped thinking about it after that,
buried it and it had stayed buried comfortably for the better part of a
year, until Rush came home from France. At least she wasn't aware that it
had troubled her. The twinges of discomfort she'd felt whenever she'd
faced the prospect of coming home, she had attributed to another cause
altogether.
"Paula," he observed. "That's easy enough to see."
"Oh, you are a comfort," she said; "only not Paula by herself. Paula and
father and I, in a sort of awkward triangle, all doing our best and all
nagging one another. That has got terribly worse in the last few days."
She seemed to find no difficulty at all in informing him fully about this
home situation; needed only a question or surmise dropped here and there
to develop the whole story.
It wasn't a chronological narrative. Her mind drifted like a soaring
kingfisher over the whole area between her childhood and the events of
this very morning, swooping down here or there to pick up some incident
wherever a gleam of memory attracted her.
Her spirit was finding compensation for the agonies of the past hours in
a complete detachment. Nothing she told him, no matter how close home it
came, seemed to involve any painful emotion. Her body, pressed so close
against his that he could have felt the faintest muscle quiver, conveyed
no message to him but the relaxation of complete security.
About himself there was a curious duality. One of him was lulled
irresistibly into sharing her mood of serene detachment. The other,
recognizing the transitoriness of hers, knowing that when this interlude
came to an end, as come it must, the storm would break upon them once
more, was casting about desperately for the means of saving her.
He had come to see the situation with her own eyes, fairly felt the
clutch of it upon his own heart. She or some impish power acting through
her agency had certainly made a mess of things. Her father's happiness
destroyed; Rush's partnership broken; and the whole Hickory Hill project
ruined unless some one could be found to buy into it in Graham's place;
Graham humiliated, utterly cast adrift, irreparably hurt. And the
prospect for the future....
She had told him of her tramp about the streets yesterday with her
newspaper clipping and he was able to feel the full terror of it; and,
beyond the terror, the gray emptiness.
There was only one way out of the tangle and this was to marry the man
she loved and knew loved her. Well, he knew with merciless certainty what
her answer would be when he asked her--begged her--to do that. He had
provided her with the answer himself, with his sophomoric talk about
traveling light and refusing to wear harness. And he'd worse than
talked. His flight from her at Hickory Hill was enough to show that these
weren't mere empty phrases. And yet her life depended to-night upon his
ability to persuade her, in the face of those phrases and that fact, to
marry him. So he sat very still, wondering how soon she would divine
these undercurrents of his thought, listening while she talked to him.
The hours were slipping away, too. A glance at the watch braceleted upon
the wrist he held startled him and he covered it with his hand. Had they
already, he wondered, begun a search for her? Her words supplied
presently the answer to that question. She was talking, with a dry sort
of humor, about the commotions of that day.
He could not be sure he was getting it quite straight, for she was
commenting upon events rather than narrating them. Apparently she had
telephoned to her brother at Hood's apartment immediately after young
Stannard left the house the evening or afternoon before, telling him not
to bother about her, as she was going straight to bed. Let him go to a
show and be careful not to wake her when he came in. She'd done this and
gone to sleep at once, not waking until she'd heard him getting ready
for bed in the adjoining room. But after that she hadn't been able to
get off again.
March reflected, with a shudder, what a ghastly procession of hours those
must have been. Had it been then, he wondered, that, looking for some
harmless thing to help her sleep, she had come upon the deadlier stuff?
Her encounter with her brother at breakfast, which she had prepared, was
their first, it seemed, since her visit to Hickory Hill and Rush had been
shocked at her wan, lifeless appearance. He'd guessed, of course, that
his friend's suit hadn't prospered and now took the line, which no doubt
seemed to him the most tactful and comforting one available, that she was
too ill to attempt any final decision on such a subject just now and
that things would look different when better health had driven morbid
thoughts away.
Her vehemence in trying to convince him that she had acted finally in the
matter, that Graham now acquiesced fully in her decision and no longer
wanted to marry her, and that Rush _must_ let him alone--not even try to
talk with him about it--had only made him the more confident in his
diagnosis.
It must have been pat in the middle of this scene that Graham's
midnight-written letter arrived. Rush's attitude toward his partner's
flight--after the first moments of mere incredulity--had been one of
contemptuous irritation, the natural attitude for any young man who sees
a comrade taking no more of a matter than a disappointment in love with
an evident lack of fortitude. This was heightened, too, by a rapidly
developed sense of personal grievance. What the devil did Graham think
was going to happen to him with Hickory Hill left on his hands like that?
There was more than enough work for the two of them. And then the
financial aspect of it! Mr. Stannard, who had just been brought to the
point of loosening up and letting them have a little more money, would of
course leave Rush to his fate. If he didn't call his loans and sell him
out! Ruin them altogether! Graham must simply be found and dragged back
before his father learned of his flight.
He couldn't have been paying his sister much attention while he ran on
like that! Unwisely, perhaps, but inevitably, Mary attempted to defend
the fugitive--in the only way she thought of as possible; namely, by
showing her brother what the true situation was.
She didn't try to tell March what she said. The thing which, with a
forlorn smile, she dwelt upon, was the terrified vehemence with which
Rush had stopped her at his first inkling of what she was trying to make
him see. She was simply out of her head. A bad case, he pronounced, of
neurasthenia. Her having set out yesterday to find a job should have made
that plain enough. What she needed was a nurse and a doctor--and he meant
to provide both within the next few hours. He then compromised by saying
that the nurse he had in mind was for the moment Aunt Lucile and the
doctor their father.
With an alternation of truculence and cajolery, he had got her to lie
down and to promise not to talk--that was the important thing--and this
accomplished he devoted half an hour to the composition of a note to Miss
Wollaston (whom it was difficult to tell anything to over the telephone,
particularly with long distance rural connections) which he despatched,
in charge of Pete, in the big car. Pete would get back with her by three
at the latest.
Rush then had a long talk by telephone with his father at Ravinia. Mary
didn't know, of course, what they had said, beyond that John had promised
to come down immediately after lunch, but she got the idea that the
professional medical attitude had been one of less alarm than the amateur
one. Mary confessed to March, with a flicker of ironic amusement, that
she had supported this lighter view so successfully that, a little before
noon, Rush had confided to her his wish--if she were perfectly sure she
didn't need him--to take the one o'clock train to Lake Geneva. He and
Graham were still expected there for the week-end and on a good many
accounts it would be well if he didn't fail them. He dreaded going, of
course, but he felt he could meet the situation better on the ground
whatever turned up. He could wait for the three o'clock train, but this
was the one Mr. Stannard always took and he'd like to get in a talk with
Sylvia first. She was a great pal of her brother's and might well have
some real information about He'd have Pete's wife come in and look after
Mary--get lunch and so on. And father would be down about two.
March thought the forlorn smile with which she told him this the most
heart-breaking thing he had ever seen. Damn Rush! Damn all the
sentimentalists in the world. Dressing up their desires in altruistic
clothes. Loving themselves in a lot of crooked mirrors!
The rest of the story told itself in very few words. John Wollaston
telephoned, about three, from Ravinia, to say that Paula wasn't
well--meant to sing to-night as she was billed to do (she took great
pride in never disappointing her audiences)--but very much wanted him at
hand through the ordeal. If Mary was feeling as much better as her voice
sounded would she mind his not coming until to-morrow morning.
She'd assured him, of course, that she wouldn't mind a bit. Aunt Lucile
hadn't arrived yet but she would be coming any minute now. Rush had been
making a great fuss about nothing, anyway. She did not volunteer the
information that Rush had already gone to Lake Geneva.
At five o'clock a telegram, addressed to Rush, had come from Miss
Wollaston. Pete had broken one of the springs of the big car and had had
to go to Durham for another. She hoped Rush and his father would be able
to take care of Mary until to-morrow morning when she would arrive with
one of the servants and take charge.
That cleared the board. To-morrow they would descend upon her with their
fussy attentions, their medical solemnities, their farcical search for
something--for anything except the truth they wouldn't let her tell--to
account for her nervous breakdown. But for a dozen hours she was,
miraculously, to be let alone, with blessed open spaces round her. No
need for any frantic haste. Plenty of time. The whole of that hot still
summer night.
And then, at six o'clock, a man named James Wallace had telephoned! And
Jennie MacArthur had decided to drop in that evening for a visit with
Sarah! Fate had played its part; given March his chance.
"So that's why you decided to go away," he said.
He had been nerving himself during a long slow silence for that. He could
almost as easily have struck her a blow, and indeed the effect of it was
precisely that. But though she tried to shrink away he held her tighter
and went on. "I don't believe there's anything in the whole picture now
that I don't see and understand. But--but the way out ... Oh, Mary
darling, it isn't the one you are trying to take. There's happiness for
both of us if you'll take the other way--with me."
She was struggling now to get free from his hands. "No!" she gasped
wildly. "I won't do that. I'll do anything--_anything_ else rather than
that. Let me go now."
But he held her fast. Presently she relaxed and lay back panting in her
chair. "Won't you please let me go?" she pleaded. "You haven't understood
at all if you don't see that you must. Oh, but you do understand! You've
comforted me ... I didn't think there could be any comfort like that. Let
me go now--in peace. Don't ask the other. I've spoiled things for
everybody else, but I won't for you. I couldn't endure that."
All the pleas, the arguments, the convincing phrases which he had been
mustering while she talked to him so contentedly, to convince her of the
truth, the blinding truth that he wanted her now for his wife, that life
no longer seemed a possible thing for him upon any other terms--all that
feeble scaffolding of words was, to his despair, swept now clean away in
the very torrent of his passion. He could do nothing for a while but go
on holding her. At last, words burst from him.
"I won't let you go. Not alone. Wherever you go, I'll go with you."
She looked up, staring into his face and he saw an incredulous surmise
deepen into certainty. She had seen, heard in that cry of his, the
truth--that he understood what she meant to do. Then her face contorted
itself like a child's, ineffectually struggling to keep back tears, and
she broke down, weeping.
That broke the spell that had fallen upon him. He took her up, carried
her over to the big armchair and sat down with her in his arms.
His own terror, which had never more than momentarily receded since she
had first spoken to him from the doorway, was, he realized, gone;
replaced by an inexplicable thrilling confidence that he had won his
victory. He didn't speak a word.
The tempest was soon spent. It was a matter only of minutes before the
sobbing ceased. But for a long while after she was quiet, all muscles
relaxed, she lay just as he held her, a soft dead weight like a sleeping
child. He wondered, indeed, if she had not fallen asleep and finally
moved his head so that he could see her eyes. They were open, though, and
at that movement of his she stirred, sighed and sat erect.
"I think I would have dropped off in another minute," she said. Then she
put her hands upon his shoulders. "I won't do that. I promise, solemnly,
I won't do what--what we both thought I meant to do. I don't believe I
could now, anyway. Now that the nightmare is gone."
She smiled then and bent down and kissed him. "But I won't do the other
thing either, my dear. I'll find some other way. Really go to Omaha
perhaps. But I won't marry you. You see why, don't you?"
"Oh, yes," he said. "I can tell you exactly why. You don't want to take
away my freedom. You want me to be a sort of--what was that opera you
spoke about at Hickory Hill?--_Chemineau_. Doing nothing but what I
please. Wandering off wherever I like." He smiled. "Mary, dear, do you
realize that you're proposing to deal with me exactly as Graham Stannard
would have dealt with you? Trying to make an image of me?"
She started from his knees, retreated a pace or two and turned and
confronted him.
"That's not true," she protested. "That can't possibly be true!"
He did not answer. He had plenty of arguments with which to establish the
parallel, his mind was aflame with phrases in which to plead his cause
with her. Somehow they wouldn't come to his tongue. It didn't occur to
him that fatigue had anything to do with this. He was filled with a
sudden fury that he could not talk to her.
She had turned away, restlessly, and moved to one of the dormer windows.
Following her with his eyes he saw the dawn coming.
He rose stiffly from his chair. "I guess I had better take you home
now," he said.
She nodded and got her hat. When he found her at the door after he had
put out the lamp she clung to him for a moment in the dark and he thought
she meant to speak, but she did not.
He helped her down the irregular shaky stair and then, along the gray
cool empty street he walked with her toward the brightened sky.
She said, at last, "Graham wouldn't let me tell him what the real me was
like. Tell me the truth about the real you."
"There isn't much to tell. I guess I'm pretty much like any one else when
it comes down to--to ... I don't want to go on, alone. I want to be
woven in with you. I want..."
He stood still in a vain effort to make the words come. "I can't talk!"
he cried, and his voice broke in a sob.
"You needn't," she said; and pressing his hand against her breast she led
him on again. She was trembling and her hand was cold.
Nothing more was said between them, all the way. But when they reached
her door and managed to open it she stood for a moment peering through
the dusk into his face.
"If it's true..." she said. "If you really want a home and a wife--like
me... Oh, yes, I know it's true!"