GAIL BREAKS A PROMISE
The _Whitecap_ would have been under way except for the delay of the gay
little Mrs. Babbitt and her admiring husband, who sent word that they
could not arrive until after dinner, so the yacht, long and low and
slender and glistening white, lay in the middle of the Hudson River,
while her guests, bundled warmly against the crisp breeze, gathered in
the forward shelter deck and watched the beginnings of the early sunset.
“I like Doctor Boyd in his yachting cap,” commented Lucile, as that
young man joined them, with a happy mother on his arm.
“It takes away that deadly clerical effect,” laughed Arly. “His long
coat makes him look like the captain, and he’s ever so much more
handsome.”
“I don’t mind being the topic of discussion so long as I’m present,”
commented the Reverend Smith Boyd, glancing around the group as if in
search of some one.
“It rather restricts the conversation,” Mrs. Helen Davies observed, at
the same time watching, with a smile, the tableau of her sister Grace
and Jim Sargent. Gail and herself had taken Grace out shopping, and had
forced on her sedate taste a neat and “fetching” yachting costume, from
flowing veiled cap to white shoes, which had dropped about twenty years
from her usual appearance, and had brought a renewed enthusiasm to the
eyes of her husband.
The cherub-cheeked Marion Kenneth glanced wistfully over at the rail
where Dick Rodley, vieing with the sunset in splendour, stood chatting
with easy Ted Teasdale and the stiff Gerald Fosland.
“Where’s Gail?” demanded the cherub-cheeked one.
“It’s time that young lady was up on deck,” decided Arly, and rose.
“She’s probably taking advantage of the opportunity to dress for
dinner,” surmised Mrs. Davies. “In fact, I think it’s a good idea for
all of us,” but the sunset was too potent to leave for a few moments,
and she sat still.
Where indeed was Gail? In her beautiful little curly maple stateroom,
sitting on the edge of a beautiful little curly maple bed, and digging
two small fists into the maple-brown coverlet. The pallor of the morning
had not yet left her face, and there were circles around the brown eyes
which gave them a wan pathos; there was a crease of pain and worry, too,
in the white brow.
Gail had come to the greatest crisis in her life. To begin with,
Allison. She would not permit herself to dwell on the most horrible part
of her experience with him. That she put out of her mind, as best she
could, with a shudder. She hoped, in the time to come, to be free of the
picture of him as he advanced slowly towards her in the music room, with
that frenzied glare in his eyes and that terrifying evil look upon his
face. She hoped, in the time to come, to be free of that awful fear
which seemed to have gripped her heart with a clutch that had left deep
imprints upon it, but, just now, she let the picture and the fear remain
before her eyes and in her heart, and centred upon her grave
responsibilities.
So far she had told no one of what had occurred that morning. When she
had rushed into the rector’s study he had sprung up, and, seeing the
fright in her face and that she was tottering and ready to fall, he had
caught her in his strong arms, and she had clung trustfully to him, half
faint, until wild sobs had come to her relief. Even in her incoherence,
however, even in her wild disorder of emotion, she realised that there
was danger, not only to her but to every one she loved, in the man from
whom she had run away; and she could not tell the young rector any more
than that she had been frightened. Had she so much as mentioned the name
of Allison, she instinctively knew that the Reverend Smith Boyd, in whom
there was some trace of impetuosity, might certainly have forgotten his
cloth and become mere man, and have strode straight across to the house
before Allison could have collected his dazed wits; and she did not dare
add that encounter to her list of woes. It was strange how instinctively
she had headed for the Reverend Smith Boyd’s study; strange then, but
not now. In that moment of flying straight to the protection of his
arms, she knew something about herself, and about the Reverend Smith
Boyd, too. She knew now why she had refused Howard Clemmens, and Willis
Cunningham, and Houston Van Ploon, and Dick Rodley; poor Dick! and
Allison, and all the others. She frankly and complacently admitted to
herself that she loved the Reverend Smith Boyd, but she put that
additional worry into the background. It could be fought out later. She
would have been very happy about it if she had had time, although she
could see no end to that situation but unhappiness.
These threats of Allison’s. How far could he go with them, how far could
he make them true? All the way. She had a sickening sense that there was
no idleness in his threats. He had both the will and the power to carry
them out. He would bankrupt her family; he would employ slander against
her, from which the innocent have less defence than the guilty; he would
set himself viciously to wreck her happiness at every turn. The long arm
of his vindictiveness would follow her to her home, and set a barrier of
scandalous report even between her and her friends.
But let her first take up the case of her Uncle Jim. She had not dared
go with her news to hot-tempered Jim Sargent. His first impulse would
have been one of violence, and she could not see that a murder on her
soul, and her Uncle Jim in jail as a murderer, and her name figuring
large, with her photograph in the pages of the free and entirely
uncurbed metropolitan press, would help any one in the present dilemma.
Yet even a warning, to her Uncle Jim, of impending financial danger
might bring about this very same result, for he had a trick of turning
suddenly from the kind and indulgent and tremendously admiring uncle,
into a stern parent, and firing one imperative question after another at
her, in the very image and likeness of her own father; and that was an
authoritative process which she knew she could not resist. Yet Uncle Jim
must be protected! How? It was easy enough to say that he must be, and
yet could he be? Could he even protect himself? She shook her head as
she gazed, with unseeing eyes, out of the daintily curtained port hole
upon the river, with its swarm of bustling small craft.
Where to turn for advice, or even to have a sharer in the burden which
she felt must surely crush her. There was no one. It was a burden she
must bear alone, unless she could devise some plan of effective action,
and the sense of how far she had been responsible for this condition of
affairs was one which oppressed her, and humbled her, and deepened the
circles about her woe-smitten eyes.
She had been guilty. In a rush of remorse and repentance, she
over-blamed herself. She did not allow, in her severe self-injustice,
for the natural instincts which had led her into a full and free
commingling with all this new circle; for, as Arly later put it for her
by way of comfort, how was she to know if she did not find out. Now,
however, she allowed herself no grain of comfort, or sympathy, or
relief, from the stern self-arraignment through which she put herself.
She had been wicked, she told herself. Had she delved deeply enough into
her own heart, and acknowledged what she saw there, and had she abided
by that knowledge, she could have spared her many suitors a part of the
pain and humiliation she had caused them by her refusal. She had not
been surprised by any of them. With the infliction of but very slight
pain, she could have stopped them long before they came to the point of
proposal, she saw that now. Why had she not done so? Pride! That was the
answer. The pleasure of being so eagerly sought, the actually spoken
evidence of her popularity, and the flattery of having aroused in all
these big men emotions so strong that they took the sincere form of the
offering of a lifetime of devotion. And she, who had prated to herself
so seriously of marriage, had held it as so sacred a thing, she had so
toyed with it, and had toyed, too, with that instinct in these good men!
In the light of her experience with Allison, she began to distrust her
own sincerity, and for some minutes she floundered in that Slough of
Despond.
But no, out of that misery she was able to emerge clear of soul. Her
worst fault had been folly. An instinctive groping for that other part
of her, which nature had set somewhere, unlabelled, to make of the twain
a complete and perfect human entity, had led her into all her
entanglements, even with Allison. And again the darkness deepened around
her troubled eyes.
After all, had she but known it, she had a greater fault than folly.
Inexperience. Her charm was another, her youth, her beauty, her
virility—and her sympathy! These were her true faults, and the ones for
which every attractive girl must suffer. There is no escape. It is the
great law of compensation. Nature bestows no gift of value for which she
does not exact a corresponding price.
Gail took her little fists from their pressure into the brown coverlet,
and held her temples between the fingertips of either hand; and the
brown hair, springing into wayward ringlets from the salt-breeze which
blew in at the half opened window, rippled down over her slender hands,
as if to soothe and comfort them. She had been wasting her time in
introspection and self-analysis when there was need for decisive action!
Fortunately she had a respite until Monday morning. In the past few days
of huge commercial movements which so vitally interested her, she had
become acquainted with business methods, to a certain extent, and she
knew that nothing could be done on Saturday afternoon or Sunday;
therefore her Uncle Jim was safe for two nights and a day. Then Allison
would deny the connection of her Uncle Jim’s road with the A.-P., and
the beginning of the destruction of the Sargent family would be
thoroughly accomplished! She had been given a thorough grasp of how
easily that could be done. What could she do in two nights and a day? It
was past her ingenuity to conceive. She must have help!
But from whom could she receive it? Tod Boyd? The same reason which made
her think of him first made her swiftly place him last. Her Uncle Jim?
Too hotheaded. Her Aunt Grace? Too inexperienced. Her Aunt Helen? Too
conventional. Lucile, Ted, Dick? She laughed. Arly?
There was a knock on her door, and Arly herself appeared.
“Selfish,” chided Arly. “We’re all wanting you.”
“That’s comforting,” smiled Gail. “I have just been being all alone in
the world, on the most absolutely deserted island of which you can
conceive. Arly, sit down. I want to tell you something.”
The black hair and the brown hair cuddled close together, while Gail,
her tongue once loosened, poured out in a torrent all the pent-up misery
which had been accumulating within her for the past tempestuous weeks;
and Arly, her eyes glistening with the excitement of it all, kept her
exclamations of surprise and fright and indignation and horror, and
everything else, strictly to such low monosyllables as would not impede
the gasping narration.
“I’d like to kill him!” said Arly, in a low voice of startling
intensity, and jumping to her feet she paced up and down the confines of
the little stateroom. Among all the other surprises of recent events,
there was none more striking than this vast change in the usually cool
and sarcastic Arly, who had not, until her return from Gail’s home,
permitted herself an emotion in two years. She came back to the bed with
a sudden swift knowledge that Gail had been dry-eyed all through this
recital, though her lips were quivering. She should have cried. Instead
she was sitting straight up, staring at Arly with patient inquiry. She
had told all her dilemma, and all her grief, and all her fear; and now
she was waiting.
“The only way in which that person can be prevented from attacking your
Uncle Jim, which would be his first step, is to attack him before he can
do anything,” said Arly, pacing up and down, her fingers clasped behind
her slender back, her black brows knotted, her graceful head bent toward
the floor.
“He is too powerful,” protested Gail.
“That makes him weak,” returned Arly quickly. “In every great power
there is one point of great weakness. Tell me again about this
tremendously big world monopoly.”
Patiently, and searching her memory for details, Gail recited over again
all which Allison had told her about his wonderful plan of empire; and
even now, angry and humiliated and terror stricken as she was, Gail
could not repress a feeling of admiration for the bigness of it. It was
that which had impressed her in the beginning.
“It’s wonderful,” commented Arly, catching a trace of that spirit of the
exultation which hangs upon the unfolding of fairyland; and she began to
pace the floor again. “Why, Gail, it is the most colossal piece of
thievery the world has ever known!” And she walked in silence for a
time. “That is the thing upon which we can attack him. We are going to
stop it.”
Gail rose, too.
“How?” she asked. “Arly, we couldn’t, just we two girls!”
“Why not?” demanded Arly, stopping in front of her. “Any plan like that
must be so full of criminal crookedness that exposure alone is enough to
put an end to it.”
“Exposure,” faltered Gail, and struggled automatically with a lifelong
principle. “It was told to me in confidence.”
Arly looked at her in astonishment.
“I could shake you,” she declared, and instead put her arm around Gail.
“Did that person betray no confidence when he came to your uncle’s house
this morning! Moreover, he told you this merely to over-awe you with the
glitter of what he had done. He made that take the place of love!
Confidence! I’ll never do anything with so much pleasure in my life as
to betray yours right now! If you don’t expose that person, I will! If
there’s any way we can damage him, I intend to see that it is done; and
if there’s any way after that to damage him again and again, I want to
do it!”
For the first time in that miserable day, Gail felt a thrill of hope,
and Arly, at that moment, had, to her, the aspect of a colossal figure,
an angel of brightness in the night of her despair! She felt that she
could afford to sob now, and she did it.
“Do you suppose that would save Uncle Jim?” she asked, when they had
both finished a highly comforting time together.
“It will save everybody,” declared Arly.
“I hope so,” pondered Gail. “But we can’t do it ourselves, Arly. Whom
shall we get to help us?”
The smile on Arly’s face was a positive illumination for a moment, and
then she laughed.
“Gerald,” she replied. “You don’t know what a dear he is!” and she rang
for a cabin boy.