THE BREED OF GAIL
Who was that tall, severely correct gentleman waiting at the station,
with a bunch of violets in his hand, and the light in his countenance
which was never on sea or land? It was Gerald Fosland, and he astonished
all beholders by his extraordinary conduct. As the beautiful Arly
stepped through the gates, he advanced with an entirely unrepressed
smile, springing from the ball of his feet with a buoyancy too active to
be quite in good form. He took Arly’s hand in his, but he did not bend
over it with his customary courteous gallantry. Instead, he drew her
slightly towards him, with a firm and deliberate movement, and, bending
his head sidewise under the brim of her hat, kissed her; kissed her on
the lips!
Immediately thereafter he gave a dignified welcome to Gail, and with
Arly’s arm clutched tightly in his own, he then disappeared. As they
walked rapidly away, Arly looked up at him in bewilderment; then she
suddenly hugged herself closer to him with a jerk. As they went out
through the carriage entrance, she skipped.
It was good to see Allison, big, strong, forceful, typical of the city
and its mighty deeds. His eye had lighted with something more than
pleasure as Gail stepped out through the gates of the station; something
so infinitely more than pleasure that her eyes dropped, and her hand
trembled as she felt that same old warm thrill of his clasp. He was so
overwhelming in his physical dominance. He took immediate possession of
her, standing by while she greeted her uncle and aunt and other friends,
and beaming with justifiably proud proprietorship. Gail had laughed as
she recognised that attitude, and she found it magnificent after the
pretentions of Howard Clemmens. The difference was that Allison was
really a big man, one born to command, to sway things, to move and shift
and re-arrange great forces; and that, of course, was his manner in
everything. She flushed each time she looked in his direction; for he
never removed his gaze from her; bold, confident, supreme. When a man
like that is kind and gentle and considerate, when he is tender and
thoughtful and full of devotion, he is a big man indeed!
She let him put her hand on his arm, and felt restful, after the
greetings had been exchanged, as he led her out to the big touring car,
asking her all sorts of eager questions about how she found her home and
her friends, and if the journey had fatigued her, and telling her, over
and over, how good she looked, how bright and how clear-eyed and how
fresh-cheeked, and how charming in her grey travelling costume. She felt
the thrill again as he took her hand in his to help her into the car,
and she loved the masterful manner in which he cleared a way to their
machine through the crowded traffic. In the same masterful air, he
gently but firmly changed her from the little folding seat to the big
soft cushions in the rear, beside her Aunt Grace.
The Reverend Smith Boyd was at the steps of the Sargent house to greet
her, and her heart leaped as she recognised another of the dear familiar
faces. This was her world, after all; not that world of her childhood.
How different the rector looked; or was it that she had needed to go
away in order to judge her friends anew? His eyes were different;
deeper, steadier and more penetrating into her own; and, yes, bolder.
She was forced to look away from them for a moment. There seemed a warm
eagerness in his greeting, as if everything in him were drawing her to
him. It was indescribable, that change in the Reverend Smith Boyd, but
it was not unexplainable; and, after he had swung back home, with the
earnest promise to come over after dinner, she suddenly blushed
furiously, without any cause, while she was talking of nothing more
intense than the excellent physical condition of Flakes.
Gay little Mrs. Babbitt brought her husband, while the family group was
still jabbering over its coffee, and after them came the deluge; Dick
Rodley and the cherub-cheeked Marion Kenneth, and Willis Cunningham, and
a host of others, including the Van Ploons, father, son, and solemn
daughter. The callow youth who had danced with her three times was
there, with a gardenia all out of proportion to him, and he sat in the
middle of the Louis XIV salon, where he was excessively in everybody’s
road, and could feast on Gail, for the most of the evening, in numb
admiration; for his point of vantage commanded a view into the library
and all the parlours.
With a rapidity which was a marvel to all her girl friends, Gail had
slipped upstairs and into a creamy lace evening frock without having
been missed; and she was in this acutely harmonious setting when the
Reverend Smith Boyd called, with his beautiful mother on his arm. The
beautiful mother was in an exceptional flurry of delight to see Gail,
and kissed that charming young lady with clinging warmth. The rector’s
eyes were even more strikingly changed than they had been when he had
first met her on the steps, as they looked on Gail in her creamy lace,
and after she had read that new intense look in his eyes for the second
time that evening, she hurried away, with the license of a busy hostess,
and cooled her face at an open window in the side vestibule. There was a
new note in the Reverend Smith Boyd’s voice; not a greater depth nor
mellowness nor sweetness, but a something else. What was it? It was a
call, that was it; a call across the gulf of futurity.
They came after her. Ted and Lucile had arrived. She was in a vortex.
Dick Rodley hemmed her in a corner, and proposed to her again, just for
practice, within eye-shot of a dozen people, and he did it so that
onlookers might think that he was complimenting her on her clever
coiffure or discussing a new operetta; but he made her blush, which was
the intention in the depths of his black eyes. It seemed that she was in
a perpetual blush to-night, and something within her seemed to be
surging and halting and wavering and quivering! Her Aunt Helen Davies,
rather early in the evening, began to act stiff and formal.
“Go home,” she murmured to Lucile. “All this excitement is bad for
Gail’s beauty.”
She felt free to give the same advice to the gay little Mrs. Babbitt,
and the departure of four people was sufficient to remind the stiff Van
Ploon daughter of the conventions. She removed the elder Van Ploon’s
eyes from Gail, and gathered up Houston, who was energetically talking
horse with Allison. After that the exodus became general, until only the
callow youth and Allison and the Reverend Smith Boyd remained. The
latter young gentleman had taken his flutteringly happy mother home
early in the evening, and he had resorted to dulness with such of the
thinning guests as had seemed disposed to linger.
It was Aunt Helen who, by some magic of adroitness, sent the callow
youth on his way. He was worth any amount of money to which one cared to
add ciphers, and his family was flawless except for him; but Aunt Helen
had decisively cut him off her books, because he was so well fitted to
be the last of his line. She thought she had better go upstairs after
that, and she glanced into the music room as she passed, and knitted her
brows at the tableau. The Reverend Smith Boyd, who seemed unusually fine
looking to-night, stood leaning against the piano, watching Gail with an
almost incendiary gaze. That young lady, steadily resisting an impulse
to feel her cheek with the back of her hand, sat on the end of the piano
bench furthest removed from the rector, and directed the most of her
attention to Allison, who was less disconcerting. Allison, casting an
occasional glance at the intense young rector, seemed preoccupied
to-night; and Mrs. Helen Davies, pausing to take her sister Grace with
her, walked up the stairs with a forefinger tapping at her well-shaped
chin. She seemed to have reversed places with her sister to-night; for
Mrs. Sargent was supremely happy, while Helen Davies was doing the
family worrying.
She could have bid Allison adieu had she waited a very few minutes. He
was a man who had spent a lifetime in linking two and two together, and
he abided unwaveringly by his deductions. There was no mistaking the
nature of the change which was so apparent in the Reverend Smith Boyd;
but Allison, after careful thought on the matter, was able to take a
comparatively early departure.
“I’ll see you to-morrow, Gail,” he observed finally. Rising, he crossed
to where she sat, and, reaching into her lap, he took both her hands. He
let her arms swing from his clasp, and, looking down into her eyes with
smiling regard, he gave her hands an extra pressure, which sent, for the
hundredth time that night, a surge of colour over her face.
The Reverend Smith Boyd, blazing down at that scene, suddenly felt
something crushing under his hand. It was the light runner board of the
music rack, and three hairs, which had lain in placid place at the crown
of his head, suddenly popped erect. Ten thousand years before had these
three been so grouped, Allison would have felt a stone axe on the back
of his neck, but as it was he passed out unmolested, nodding carelessly
to the young rector, and bestowing on Gail a parting look which was the
perfection of easy assurance.
The Reverend Smith Boyd wasted not a minute in purposeless hesitation or
idle preliminary conversation.
“Gail!” he said, in a voice which chimed of all the love songs ever
written, which vibrated with all the love passion ever breathed, which
pleaded with the love appeal of all the dominant forces since creation.
Gail had resumed her seat on the end of the piano bench, and now he
reached down and took her hand, and held it, unresisting. She was weak
and limp, and she averted her eyes from the burning gaze which beamed
down on her. Her breath was fluttering, and the hand which lay in her
lap was cold and trembling. “Gail, I love you!” He bent his head and
kissed her hand. The touch was fire, and she felt her blood leap to it.
“Gail dear,” and his voice was like the suppressed crescendo of a
tremendous organ flute; “I come to you with the love of a man. I come to
you with the love of one inspired to do great deeds, not just to lay
them at your feet, but because you are in the world!” He bent lower, and
tried to gaze into the brown eyes under those fluttering lashes. He held
her hand more tightly to him, clasped it to his breast, oppressed her
with the tremendous desire of his whole being to draw her to him, and
hold her close, as one and a part of him for all time to come, mingling
and merging them into one ecstatic harmony. “Gail! Oh, Gail, Gail!”
There was a cry in that repetition of her name, almost an anguish. She
stole an upward glance at him, her face pale, her beautiful lips half
parted, and in her depthless brown eyes, alive now with a new light
which had been born within her, there was no forbiddance, though she
dropped them hastily, and bent her head still lower. She had made
herself an eternal part of him just then, had he but seized upon that
unspoken assent, and taken her in his arms, and breathed to her of the
love of man for woman, the love that never dies nor wavers nor falters,
so long as the human race shall endure.
He bent still closer to her, so that he all but enfolded her. His warm
breath was upon her cheek. The sympathy which was between them bridged
the narrow chasm of air, and enveloped them in an ethereal flame which
coursed them from head to foot, and had already nigh welded them into
one.
“I need you, Gail!” he told her. “I need you to be my wife, my
sweetheart, my companion. I need you to go with me through life, to walk
hand in hand with me about the greatest work in the world, the
redemption of the fallen and helpless, into whose lives we may shed some
of the beauty which blossoms in our own.”
There was a low cry from Gail, a cry which was half a sob, which came
with a sharp intake of the breath, and carried with it pain and sorrow
and protest. She had been so happy, in what she fancied to be the near
fulfilment of the promptings which had grown so strong within her. No
surge of emotion like this had ever swept over her; no such wave of
yearning had ever carried her impetuously up and out of herself as this
had done. It had been the ecstatic answer to all her dreams, the ripe
and rich and perfect completion of every longing within her; yet, in the
very midst of it had come a word which broke the magic thrall; a thought
which had torn the fairy web like a rude storm from out the icy north; a
devouring genii which, dark and frightening, advanced to destroy all the
happiness which might follow this first inrushing commingling of these
two perfectly correlated elements!
“I can’t!” she breathed, but she did not withdraw her hand from his
clasp. She could not! It was as if those two palms had welded together,
and had become parts of one and the same organism.
There was an instant of silence, in which she slowly gathered her
swirling senses, and in which he sat, shocked, stunned, disbelieving his
own ears. Why, he had known, as positively, and more positively, than if
she had told him, that there was a perfect response in her to the great
desire which throbbed within him. It had come to him from her like the
wavering of soft music, music which had blended with his own pulsing
diapason in a melody so subtle that it drowned the senses to languorous
swooning; it had come to him with the delicate far-off pervasiveness of
the birth of a new star in the heavens; it had come to him as a
fragrance, as a radiance, as the beautiful tints of spring blossoms, as
something infinitely stronger, and deeper, and sweeter, than the sleep
of death. That tremendous and perfect fitness and accord with him he
felt in her hand even now.
“I can’t, Tod,” she said again, and neither one noticed that she had
unconsciously used the name she had heard from his mother, and which she
had unconsciously linked with her thoughts of him. “There could never be
a unity of purpose in us,” and now, for the first time, she gently
withdrew her hand. “I could never be in sympathy with your work, nor you
with my views. Have you noticed that we have never held a serious
dispute over any topic but one?”
He drew a chair before her, and took her hand again, but this time he
patted it between his own as if it were a child’s.
“Gail, dear, that is an obstacle which will melt away. There was a time
when I felt as you do. The time will come when you, too, will change.”
“You don’t understand,” she gently told him. “I believe in God the
Creator; the Maker of my conscience; my Friend and my Father. I am in no
doubt, no quandary, no struggle between faith and disbelief. I see my
way clearly, and there are no thorns to cut for me. I shall never
change.”
He looked at her searchingly for a moment, and then his face grew grave;
but there was no coldness in it, nor any alteration in the blueness of
his eyes.
“I shall pray for you,” he said, with simple faith.