When Victor McCalloway came home in June he read in the face of the
young man he met there that chapters deeply shadowed had been written
into his life, and Boone was prompt enough in his confessions, though
when he alluded to Anne's approaching marriage his words became meagre
and his utterance flat with a hampering distrust of emotion and
self-betrayal.
McCalloway gazed off grave-eyed across the small door-yard and
mercifully refrained from any hurtful attempt at verbal solace.
Finally when the hum of bees in the honeysuckle had been the only
disturbers of their long silence, the Scotchman spoke--and the younger
features relaxed into relief because the words did not, even in
kindness, touch upon the soreness of his mood. "The old spruce over
there--the one that used to be the tallest thing we saw--it's gone,
isn't it?"
Boone nodded. "The sleet took it down last winter."
Victor McCalloway was sage enough in human diagnosis to divine that,
however much Boone had suffered through a period of months, the
expression of quiet but well nigh unendurable suffering that just now
haunted his eyes had not been constant in them. A man subjected long to
that soul-cramping stress, with no outlet or abatement, would have
become a melancholiac. In one sense it might be a chronic wretchedness,
but today some particular incitement had rendered it acute--acute beyond
the power of stoic blood to hold in concealment.
Repression only made the gnawing ache more burdensome. McCalloway wished
that Boone might have gone, like the less inhibited folk of an elder
generation, to some wailing wall and beat his breast with clenched
fists--and come away less pent with hard control.
"I'll just go in and have a look over my scant accumulation of mail," he
said with the same Anglo-Saxon pretence of armour-plated emotion. "In
these days even the hermit doesn't altogether escape letters."
But when, inside the house, he found among the few and dusty envelopes
one containing a wedding invitation, and when his eyes went,
quick-glancing, to the wall calendar in a comparison of dates, his brain
cleared of its mystification.
Tomorrow was the day of Anne's marriage.
If the number twelve on the calendar's June page bore a black penciling,
like a mourning band, it was palpably a thing that Boone had not meant
other eyes to see or understand.
McCalloway, himself in the shadowed interior, turned his head and could
see through the door a sweep of sun-flooded hills and flawless sky.
Against a background of blossoming laurel and crystal brightness Boone
sat, stiff-postured, with eyes fixed and unseeing. McCalloway carried
the card and its covering to the empty fireplace and touched a match to
its edge. When it had been consumed, he went out again, and the younger
man looked up, slowly, as though bringing himself out of a lethargy, and
spoke with a dull intonation.
"You have said nothing, sir, of what I told you of myself. Saul came
back and I reverted. That night I was a feud killer pure and simple. If
blood didn't flow it was only because--" He broke off and began over,
speaking with the rapidity of one rushing at an obstacle which has
balked him, "it was only because--_she_ stopped me."
"The point is," responded McCalloway soberly, "that blood didn't flow.
You threw your weight into the right pan of the scales."
Boone shrugged his shoulders, disdaining a specious justification. "The
rescue came from outside myself. One must he judged by his motive--and
by that standard I failed."
"Not at all, sir! Damn it, not at all!"
At the sudden tempestuousness of the soldier's outburst, Boone looked
up, surprised. McCalloway, too, had felt and reacted to the tension of
their interview, and now he cleared his throat self-consciously and
proceeded in a manner of recovered calmness.
"You were in the position of infantry just then, my boy, under the fire
of field pieces. You needed artillery support--and, thanks to her, it
came. There are times when no infantry can endure without a curtain of
fire."
* * * * *
"She looked as if she'd been seeing ghosts," announced Anne's
maid-of-honour, with a little shudder of emphasis, as she stood in a
chatting group of wedding attendants just outside the door of Christ
Church.
"I think she's the loveliest thing I've ever seen," declared another
girl. "Anne has a distinction that's positively royal. Don't you think
so, Reed?"
The young man addressed, after a half hour's deprivation inside the
church, was hastening to avail himself of a cigarette. With a match
close to his lips he grunted, and then having inhaled and exhaled, he
supplemented the incoherent affirmative. "You're both right. As for
myself, I'd rather have my bride's royalty less suggestive of Marie
Antoinette riding in a tumbril. I don't like to have it brought home to
me that marriage is life's supreme sacrifice."
Anne herself, sitting beside Morgan Wallifarro as they drove home, was
rather breathless in her silence. Today it had been the rehearsal, but
tomorrow it would be the ceremony itself, and from that there would be
no turning back. An intolerable sense of inevitability seemed to close
and darken in a stifling oppression that left her faint.
Until now she had been telling herself, as one will tell oneself
specious things to prop a tottering resolution, that the ghosts of
incertitude and panic would hold dominion only over the days and weeks
of waiting. If she could keep her courage steadfast until she had
actually become Morgan's wife, the forces that support one in one's duty
would rally in closer order to uphold her.
But there in the church, going through the formula of the rehearsal,
that fallacious self-bolstering had collapsed, and the misgivings of
these days stood revealed as prefatory only to a more permanent and
chafing thraldom.
If Boone had been there she felt that there was no law within herself
strong enough to have prevented her from fleeing to him--and terror had
seized upon her.
Then it was that the something came into her eyes which the
maid-of-honour had described as the appearance of one seeing ghosts.
Morgan owed every success in life, or at least attributed every success,
to his refusal to admit the possibility of failure. Like the Nervii, "he
was strong because he seemed strong." Anne had brought him, at times,
close to an acknowledgment of defeat in his paramount resolve--but his
perseverance, he believed, had conquered, and his fears were over.
Now he looked into a face from which the colour had ebbed and in which
the eyes were far from radiant--but Morgan told himself that it should
be his privilege to bring the bloom of happiness back, and his colossal
self-confidence was not daunted by any serious misgiving.
It was not until they had entered the house and stood alone in the same
room where Boone had listened to his edict of banishment, that she
turned slowly and said in a voice both terrified and defiant:
"Morgan--I can't do it.... For God's sake release me from my promise!"
She stood facing him and braced for the recoil of that indignant
protestation which she had every right to expect from him. She was not
only withdrawing the promise upon which she had let him plan the entire
edifice of his future, but doing so with a tardiness that made it, for
him, inescapably conspicuous and mortifying.
But Morgan was a master of the strategy of surprise. His jaw did not
drop in stricken amazement. His left hand, holding the glove just drawn
from the right, did not clench in dramatic tensity. His eyes did not
even smoulder into that suppressed rage which mischievously she used to
tease into them for the pleasure of seeing them snap.
If anything, the prominent out-thrust of the clean-cut jaw was less
emphatic than usual, and the girl felt the sinking helplessness of one
who, keyed to a hard battle, launches the attack and encounters no
opposition.
Morgan had seen the wild, almost irrational, terror of her eyes, and
they had silenced argument. For once he recognized a defeat that he
could avoid only by an ungenerous victory to which he could not bring
himself, and he had no reproach because he could see that, in her effort
to perform her promise, she had goaded herself to the breaking point.
His face showed every thoroughbred and manly quality of its blood as he
inquired, with as great a deference as though her sudden announcement
came with entire reasonableness: "Are you sure--you can't?"
When she had nodded her head miserably, Morgan argued his cause. He
talked with a quiet and earnest eagerness but without reproach, as if he
were for the first time pleading his love.
But the arguments held nothing new. She herself had lain awake at night
repeating them until they were like parrot reiterations. They interposed
no answer to the monstrous fact that a marriage which she faced in such
unwillingness would be a thing that divorced the heart from the body.
That she had so long beguiled herself into believing it possible, filled
her now with self-scorn, but to the untimeliness of her decision he
offered no protest.
They talked, all things considered, with surprising calmness, and at
length Morgan glanced down and, seeing on the table near his hand the
plans for the house they had meant to build, picked them up absently,
glanced at them and tossed them back. It was the gesture of accepting a
finality.
"I suppose, Anne," he said, with a rather more than merely decent
assumption of whatever fault existed, "I've refused to see the truth
because I was blindly selfish, but I couldn't seek to hold you--if it
costs you both happiness and self-respect." He paused and then added. "I
ask only one thing, now. Don't make this decision final. Think it over
for three months--"
"Morgan dear," she interrupted in a gasping voice, "for more than three
months, I've thought of nothing else."
"I know." The gentleness of his speech was the more telling by its
contrast with his aggressive habit of self-assertion. "But you were
thinking then with a sense of being bound. Complete freedom may make a
difference. At least leave me that hope."
"I'm afraid," she faltered, "I'm very certain."
"Anyway," he reminded her, as he forced a rueful smile, "it will be
easier to tell your mother in that fashion. She is on my side, you
know."
Possibly Morgan had long ago counted this over-ardent advocacy on the
part of Mrs. Masters as a hurtful partisanship. He knew that Anne's
spirit had been fretted, ragged under the maternal insistence, even when
it was tempered with finesse. He knew too that in this final declaration
of freedom, the girl could not escape the knowledge that for her mother
as well as herself she was wrecking every provident prospect and raising
the ghosts of shabby, genteel poverty.
"I think," said Morgan, with a delicacy of tact which one would hardly
have expected from him, "you'd better let me tell her--that we've
decided to wait until I come back from abroad."
Anne sickened at the thought of her mother's disappointment and at the
thought too of how, for her, the future was to be met. Then as if that
were too gigantic a problem, her mind veered to lesser, yet disturbing,
complications.
Today's papers had printed advance details of the wedding. The type of
one heading seemed to stand at the moment before her eyes, "Happy Event
of Interest to Society," but when she spoke somewhat timidly of these
things to Morgan he contemptuously waved them aside.
"Damn the invitations and the wedding guests," he exclaimed. "We weren't
getting married for their benefit. Leave that to me. The papers will
announce that I've got to go to Europe--and that because of a turn in
your mother's condition you've decided to defer the wedding until I come
back. That's all they need to know."
He turned to the window and after a minute wheeled suddenly back.
"I have one thing still to ask. I have no longer any claim, of course.
But until three months have passed--you won't send for Boone Wellver,
will you?"
The girl's head came up with a tilted chin.
"I shall never send for him," she vehemently declared. "He's done with
me and that's all there is to it!"
It was not undiluted fiction which Morgan gave to the morning papers
that night, as he regretfully reported the sudden heart attack of Mrs.
Masters, which necessitated an eleventh hour postponement of his
wedding. There had been a heart attack which might have been averted had
the good lady been able to receive his tidings with a less flurried
spirit, but that he did not regard it necessary to explain, and a flinty
something in his eye discouraged unnecessary questions.
So Morgan set out alone on the trip which was to have been a honeymoon,
and the lady whose dreams of a rehabilitated place in society had been
dashed afforded her daughter a fulness of anxiety by hanging
precariously between life and death.
It is doubtful whether those circles in which Anne and Morgan moved were
wholly beguiled, and it is certain that sympathy followed the traveller.
"The engagement will never be renewed," mused an elderly lady who had
been fond of Anne from childhood. "She won't take up again with her wild
man of the mountains either, you may rest assured of that."
"But why?" challenged the gentleman to whom these sage observations were
addressed. "Presumably a persistent interest in young Wellver caused
this break with--"
A quiet laugh interrupted him, and the gentleman's eyes for some reason
grew grave. He and the woman with whom he talked had been lovers once,
engaged years upon years ago, and society had always wondered that
neither of them had ever married. Now with snow upon both their heads he
still sedately marched where he had once danced attendance upon her.
"Because," she soberly replied, "there is such a thing as letting the
psychological moment go by. Life isn't all mating season."
"As to that," he entered dignified demurrer, "we have always disagreed."
The lady, ignoring the observation, went on, holding intact the thread
of her reflections. "If the break with Boone had been remediable it
would never have widened till so many months ran between them. No, she
has given each his _conge_, and she hasn't a penny of her own in the
world and--" She paused dramatically, and the man finished the sentiment
for her in a less alarmed tone.
"It would seem to leave her flat; still she has a good mind and
wonderful charm."
"Yes,"--the retort was dry. "The mind is untrained, and the charm is a
menace."
Mrs. Masters died early that summer, though the physicians assured her
self-accusing daughter that no possible connection of cause and effect
could be traced between her death and the heart attack provoked by the
doldrums of disappointment. But the girl's eyes were haunted when she
came back from the funeral to the empty house, which was not her own
house, and sat down, ghost-pale, against the black of her mourning. The
world which she must now face was an absolutely changed world from
which, as from dismantled furniture, all the easy cushioning and
draperies had been ripped away, leaving sharp and uncovered angles of
contact.
In it there was no place for her, save such a place as she could gain by
invoking some miracle, for which she had no formula, to exchange
butterfly beauty for the provident effectiveness of the ant hill.
Morgan, whose frequent letters had gone unanswered, became obsessed with
an anxiety which drove him homeward by a fast steamer that had seemed to
him intolerably slow.
When its voyage had ended, a fog had held it in the harbour for half a
day, and during that half day Morgan paced the decks, fuming over a
dozen apprehensions.
It was to a Morgan Wallifarro unaccustomedly pale and agitated that the
same lady, who had pessimistically forecast Anne's future, gave him, on
his arrival at home, what information she could.
"No one seems to have her address, Morgan," she said. "I suppose she
wanted, for a while, to be in new surroundings. As for myself, I had a
brief note sent back with a book I'd lent her. She said that she was
going to New York--but that was all, and when I telephoned she had
gone."
"But her affairs must be arranged for her. She has nothing," protested
the man desperately. "In God's name what is she going to do? How did she
suppose I was going to find her?"
The lady laid a hand on the young man's elbow, and tears came into her
own eyes,
"She didn't confide in me, Morgan. What I think is only guess-work--but
I don't believe she wanted you to find her."