Laura, her face flushed from sleep and a cheerful awakening, her
burnished black hair in two great plaits that fell forward on her
shoulders far below the waist of her negligée, tiptoed early next
morning into the room, next to her own, where she had put Louise. But
her tiptoeing was a considerateness wasted. Louise was wide awake. She
had scarcely slept at all. The shock of her experience had been heavier
than her ensuing weariness, so that, for the greater part of the night,
she had lain wide-eyed, gazing into the darkness; dozing once, she had
been gripped by a hideous dream, in which she had stood paralyzed by
terror, awaiting the approach, from opposite directions, of two gigantic
reptiles, wearing the faces of Judd and Jesse. Laura noticed the dark
rings under the girl's feverishly bright eyes, and her heart glowed at
the thought that Louise, quite as a matter of course, had sought asylum
with her.
When the girl had arrived at her apartment on the previous night Laura,
far from questioning her, had pantomimed, finger at lip, that Louise was
not to tell her anything then; and Louise had been grateful for the fine
delicacy of the remission.
Finding Louise awake, Laura, smiling to match the sunlight that streamed
through the curtains, and exhibiting none of the curiosity or jarring
glumness of manner with which a woman of less tact might easily have
intensified the misery of such a situation, sat on the edge of Louise's
bed and began to chatter as gaily as if her listener's world had been
swimming in rose.
"My dear," she said, stretching her satin-smooth arms high above her
head in an abandonment of waking enjoyment, "I feel as chirpful this
morning as a sparrow in a wistaria vine. Let's talk until we get hungry.
Let's make plans and things. Plan number one: we are going abroad next
week, instead of early in May. I can't wait for May. I need things to
wear at once. I am positively in rags and tatters, the Cinderella of
Central Park West. How is that for one gorgeous plan?" It might easily
have been thought, listening to her and studying her enthusiasm, that
she was the girl and Louise the woman. But Louise, for all of her still
throbbing memory of the night before, was infected with the older
woman's unquenchable cheerfulness.
"You talk of going to Europe as if it were a run out to the Bronx in
your car, dear," she said, smiling. "And am I really to go with you? At
any rate, of course I must ask----" She had meant to say that she must
ask her mother's permission; but the thought rushed to her mind that in
all likelihood her mother would be only too willing to let her go. Laura
divined her thought and rushed to her aid.
"Oh, I shall do all the asking," she interposed. "That's another of my
glittering specialties--asking. I'm the most immoderately successful
asker, I think, in all North America; yes, and getter, too, I verily
believe. Really, I can't remember when I was refused anything that I
out-and-out asked for. So I'll arrange that. But with this stipulation:
you'll have to ask Mr. Blythe yourself."
"Mr. Blythe?" said Louise, wonderingly. The sound of his name somehow
gave her an immediate sense of uplift; but for the moment she failed to
catch Laura's meaning. "What is it that I must ask Mr. Blythe about,
dear?"
Laura gazed at her with skeptical eyes.
"What is it we were talking about, Louise?" she asked, mischievously.
"The Relation of the Cosmic Forces to--er--Mental Healing? The Real Nub
of the Suffragettes' Cause? Child, you don't really suppose that you
could gallumph off to the continent of Europe with a frivolous,
irresponsible, happy-go-lucky person like me without first asking the
consent of your guardian--or, at any rate, your guardian-to-be?"
Louise's flush shone through her amused smile.
"That is true, isn't it?" she said simply. "Of course I must ask him."
"I am in a frenzy of fear, though," went on Laura, affecting an
exaggerated solemnity, "that the ogre will flatly put his foot down and
refuse to let you go. I know that I should if I were he."
"Why, Laura?" asked Louise with such genuine wide-eyed innocence that
Laura laughed outright.
"Why?" she repeated in Louise's tone. "Well, I haven't the least doubt
that I should be a great deal more selfish about it than he will be.
Just because a man has to be such a horridly legal, dry-as-dust creature
as a guardian, is that any particular reason why he should become
incapable of experiencing the entirely human misery called
lonesomeness?"
Louise had no reply for that except a little gesture of deprecation that
quite failed to convince.
"How could we possibly get ready to go abroad in a week, Laura?" she
covered her confusion by asking.
"My dear," replied Laura, convincingly, "I could and would start for the
Straits of Sunda inside of twenty minutes if there were any possible
reason why I should want to go there--if, for example, there happened
to be a dressmaker or milliner there whose creations I particularly
fancied. The voyage to Europe is now a mere ferry trip. You speak as if
we were still living in the Victorian period. In those days folks 'made
preparations' to go abroad--the dear, fussy, old-fashioned creatures!
Now it is like riding to Staten Island, with the exception of the sleeps
and meals in between. One of the most delightful men I know goes to
Europe every year with no other impedimenta than a walking stick--he is
so used to a cane that he must have it for his constitutionals on
deck--and a toothbrush; he gets his changes of linen from the head
steward--I believe he knows every head steward afloat; and he is such a
cheerful steamer companion, because he is unhampered by luggage, that it
is a delight to be his fellow voyager. Once, when I was a young woman
("You are so aged and decrepit now, aren't you?" murmured Louise.) I
went on board a steamer to wish some friends _bon voyage_. It was rather
a cheerless day in New York, with overcast skies. I thought of sunny
Italy. And so I went along with them, in the clothes I was standing in,
and I had the most enjoyable voyage of my life."
Thus Laura chattered on, eager to take Louise's mind off the previous
night's experience which, even without having heard any of the details,
she well knew must have been a trying one. During the night Laura had
decided to start within the week on the trip to Europe which she made
every year. The climactic turn in Louise's affairs, which had by no
means been unexpected by Laura, had prodded her to this decision. She
had meant to take Louise abroad with her early in May at any rate; now,
however, that her young friend, whom she had come to regard with an
encompassing affection, was in obvious distressing straits, an almost
immediate withdrawal of her from painful scenes would, Laura felt, be at
least an attempt at a solution. A few months abroad would enable Louise
to shake off the bravely-borne but none the less wearing depression
which had taken possession of her when she found herself so unexpectedly
thrust into a horribly difficult situation--a situation which Laura now
blamed herself for not having actively sought to terminate before the
interposition of the incident, whatever had been its nature, which had
caused the girl to leave the house on the Drive in the middle of the
night. And Laura, meditating these things as she lay awake, declared in
her heart that Louise should never again be subjected to a renewal of
that ordeal.
Without any questioning, Louise, after a little actual planning with
Laura for the early trip abroad, told the older woman what had happened
at the house on the Drive on the previous night. She went over the
details calmly enough, grouping Judd's brutal utterances into a few
phrases which presented the picture almost as plainly to Laura's mental
vision as if she had been actually present at what she knew must have
been a scene sufficiently searing in its effect upon a girl yet under
twenty and fresh from school. It was only when she came to her mother's
flaccid, vacillating part in the affair that Louise's voice weakened a
little.
"She disappointed me, Laura," said Louise, feelingly. "I would not say
that to anybody else but you. But she did. I don't know just what to
think. I thought that, having returned in time to hear at least some of
the things that were said to me, she would come with me when she saw how
impossible it was for me to stay there. I can't even guess why she did
not. That was the worst part of it--her remaining there. And now I am
afraid that I did wrong in leaving her. Perhaps there was something to
prevent her leaving. It may be that if I had stayed on with her for a
while longer she might have----"
Laura interrupted her with a gesture.
"Don't say that, Louise," she put in, earnestly. "You must not do
yourself injustice. That wouldn't be fair. Your mother is one of my
oldest friends; we were girls together. But right is right. Your mother
should never have permitted you to so much as set foot in that house. I
am not disloyal to her in saying that. She herself knows in her heart
that it is true. But, having been allowed to go there, you did your
part; you played the game, as one says, without complaint; and you
stayed as long as you could. You have nothing to reproach yourself for.
Your mother herself, I think, will be fair enough to acknowledge that.
And you are never to go back there. That, of course, is settled. The
situation must work itself out in some other way. I feel perfectly
confident that your mother will see it all in the right light, and
before very long; probably while you are abroad with me. She will miss
you. And it is right that she should miss you. Missing you, she will
come to a realization of what she is sacrificing for--what? That, dear,
is my prediction as to the way it will all come out. But you must not
think of reproaching yourself for the step you have taken, nor even
dream of retracing that step."
During the forenoon Laura telephoned Blythe, giving him an outline of
what had happened.
"It was inevitable, of course," was Blythe's brief comment over the
'phone. "Since it had to come, I am glad that it is over with--better
now than later. May I come up to see you?"
"To see _me_--hypocrite!" Laura answered, laughing--and she could hear
Blythe hastily and rather fumbling hanging up the receiver.
Blythe arrived at Laura's early in the afternoon and his arrival was a
signal for Laura to profess burdensome housekeeping cares in a distant
part of the apartment.
This time Louise's feeling in Blythe's presence was not a mere vague
shyness, but genuine embarrassment. She had thought of him a great deal
during the night, particularly of that which had passed between them
during the ride in the Park. Now she flushed at the thought that she had
even passively permitted such a thing, much less have seemed to invite
it. Her mother's position, and the stigma which, she could not but feel,
that position placed upon herself, now seemed, with the humiliating
incident of the night before fresh in her mind, to forbid the
continuation of any relationship between Blythe and herself other than
that of guardian and ward. It was purely from a sense of consideration
for Blythe, a man who had won his way in the world in the teeth of
almost insuperable obstacles, that Louise resolved that there must be an
abridgement of their gradually growing intimacy. She had sighed in
making that mental decision, for the relationship had been very
agreeable and--and something else which she could not quite analyze; but
she shrank from certain intuitive forecastings involving Blythe's
progress toward the goal he had set for himself, which she feared a
continuation of their closer relationship might develop.
Blythe was quick to notice her altered manner, expressed by a reserve
which, with the penetration of an alert mind, he could not but see was
studied. He was puzzled by it; but he attributed it, after a moment of
rapid pondering, to the effect of the shock from which he knew she must
still be suffering. Nevertheless he was conscious of a sudden depression
which for a while he found it difficult to throw off.
Louise spared him the difficulty of making the first adversion to that
which she knew was uppermost in his mind--her course, that is, now that
she had voluntarily, but under the press of circumstance, detached
herself from an impossible environment. More guardedly than she had
related the incident to Laura, Louise told him of the affair; but he was
more than able to fill in the grisly details.
"What I cannot understand," she said, not in any tone of reproach, but
earnestly enough, "is the fact that I was not told, particularly after I
left school, that I was so intolerably indebted to--to that man. My
impression always was so different. I never doubted that my father was
providing for me. I was given to understand that when I was a young
girl, and I never thought anything different. It would have been
difficult, of course I know, to tell me any such a thing while I was at
school; but I can't help but believe that I should have been told when I
went to live in that house. I doubt if I could have stayed there had I
known, even to be near my mother; I should have found some other way of
meeting her. It is unthinkable that I should be in that man's debt. I
shall not remain in his debt, at any rate, to the extent of the amount
my father sent me recently. I shall use that, at all events, to help rid
myself of such an intolerable obligation."
Blythe then explained it all to her: how her father had never ceased to
make provision for her, even after Blythe had informed him that his
remittances were being rejected; how, when he had seen her father in
Honolulu, he had been instructed to deposit the remittances as a fund
for Louise's future use, and he named the amount which he was holding
for her. Louise's eyes lighted up when she heard this.
"I shall send the entire amount to that man," she said, in precipitate
decision, "to reimburse him for what he has expended for me."
Blythe was forced to repress a smile.
"That decision does you credit, Louise," he said quietly. "But it is out
of the question. The man not only would not accept the reimbursement,
but, in offering it, you would simply give him another opportunity to
mortify you by returning it. That is what he would do. He is very rich,
and he has the porcine pride of riches. He would keenly enjoy the
flourish of thrusting back at you the offered reimbursement, just enjoy
as he enjoyed--I hate to say it, but I must to make matters
clear--thrusting back the quarterly remittances of your father."
"But why did you not tell me these things when my father asked you to
become my guardian?" Louise asked him. A natural curiosity, but no
reproof, marked her tone.
"Because I did not feel up to it," Blythe replied plainly enough. "That
would have involved telling you the whole miserable story. I could not
do that. Nor could Laura. We talked it over and we found that neither of
us was equal to so gruelling a task. It seemed better to let you
gradually grasp the facts yourself. Our telling you would not have
helped matters. Moreover, so far as I was concerned, I did not feel that
I had the right to touch upon matters so intimate. It is different
now--today. The proscription has been removed. I am now your guardian."
Louise gave a little start at his last words, and Blythe, trained in
observation, did not fail to notice the increased lustre of her wide
eyes, any more than he neglected to see that she was at some pains to
quell words which he felt assured would have been phrases of gladness
had she permitted herself to utter them. Why was she thus repressing her
impulses? Blythe immediately concentrated an acute mentality upon the
problem. The answer, and the right one, came to him in a flash, as if by
telepathic revelation: he understood the reason underlying her new
restraint, which he perceived, not without pleasure, she was having
difficulty in maintaining. It was from a keener realization of her
mother's position: Blythe felt so sure of it that he smiled inwardly and
was comforted. Her mother's position was nothing to him! But how to
convince Louise of that? He made poor progress of this factor of the
problem in trying to study it while talking with Louise. He told her
that he had only been notified that morning that the court had appointed
him her guardian.
"Are you prepared to be severely disciplined?" he asked her. He felt in
vastly better spirits since arriving at what he felt assured was the
correct solution as to Louise's manifestly changed manner toward him. "I
rather believe I shall insist upon your permitting me to pick out your
frocks and hats. I think I shall have you change at once to Quaker
garb."
Louise could not repress a smile at that. She caught herself longing to
be on her former plane with him. But her fancied ineligibility, her
somewhat morbid consciousness that she was hedged in by circumstances
which she had no right even to tacitly ask him to share with her, put a
damper upon her temptation to resume her former manner with him.
Blythe walked to the window and looked out over the Park for a silent
moment. Then he thrust his hand into his breast pocket, brought out a
photograph, and handed it to her.
"I came upon the picture this morning in rummaging through my safe," he
said to her.
Louise gazed puzzledly at the photograph. It was that of a tall,
distinguished-looking man with silvered hair and mustache, dressed in
white linen; he was shown standing on the porch of a squat, wide,
comfortable-looking bungalow, the open space in front of which was a
riot of tropical verdure.
Louise glanced up at Blythe, and her eyes filled.
"You must not think it odd that I did not give it to you before this,"
said Blythe, fighting a bit of a lump in his throat. "I've been spending
at least two hours every day searching for it ever since--well, ever
since I met you on the train," he admitted, his cheeks tingling with the
confession.
"When was it taken? And is he so--so glorious-looking as this?" asked
Louise, her enthusiasm over her father's photograph--the first she had
ever seen of him, for her mother had resentfully destroyed the earlier
ones--overcoming her hardly-maintained restraint.
Blythe sat down beside her and told her about the picture. He had gotten
it from her father upon the occasion of his visit to Honolulu nearly
three years before. Blythe had been summoned to California on some legal
business, and, a bit run down from over work, he had made the six-day
cruise down to Honolulu, partly for recuperation and partly to go over
some affairs with George Treharne. Treharne had come from his
plantations on the Island of Maui to meet him in Honolulu. Louise sat
rapt for more than half an hour while Blythe answered her eager
questions about her father. He had felt a delicacy about expanding on
that subject so long as the girl was domiciled with her mother; now,
however, that Louise had been literally forced to the severance of at
least her constant propinquity to her mother, and, now, too, that he was
her guardian in fact instead of in prospect, he felt at liberty to throw
off that reserve; and he keenly enjoyed the absorption with which she
listened to his account of her father, nearly every detail of which was
absolutely new to her.
"How I should love to see him!" Louise exclaimed, sighing, when at
length Blythe rose to leave.
"I am promising myself the intense satisfaction and pleasure of taking
you to see him, Louise--some day," Blythe said, tacking on the last two
words when he caught her scarlet flush. It was not until after he had
spoken that he reflected that what he had said might easily be open to
one very lucid and palpable interpretation; but that interpretation so
fitted in with what he meant to encompass, all conditions being fair and
equal, that he refused to stultify himself by modifying or withdrawing
his words. And Louise's beauty was heightened when she flushed in that
way, anyhow!
Laura, with the skillfully-assumed air of one who had been excessively
busy, came in at that moment.
"Well, Mr. Ogre-Guardian, are you going to be at the pier to wish us
_bon voyage_?" she asked Blythe.
Blythe stared at her. Laura stared back at him.
"Do you mean to tell me," exclaimed Laura, laughing, "that, after you've
been here more than a solid hour, Louise has not told you? In heaven's
name, what else could you two have been talking about?"
"Don't keep me oscillating on this--this
ten-thousand-revolutions-to-the-minute fly-wheel, please, Laura," said
Blythe, blankly. "What are you talking about?"
"Then it is true that Louise hasn't told you we are going abroad next
week?"
"Next week?" Blythe's jaw fell.
"Why, I thought surely she would have finished asking your guardianly
permission--and everything by this time," said Laura, shaking a finger
at Louise. "But I can see how it is going to be: she means to wheedle me
into asking her guardian all the terribly difficult things."
"But are you really going so--so scandalously soon?" inquired Blythe,
for a moment genuinely glum. "Why, New York will seem like some
miserable tank town plunged in Stygian darkness without you and----"
"Oh, finish it!" dared Laura when he came to a sudden halt. But Blythe
did not, for already his mind was grasping the fact that the plan was a
good one, as Laura's plans generally were. He did not try to convince
himself that he would not miss them both sorely; Laura for her cordial,
unexacting friendship and _camaraderie_ and Louise because----He knew
equally well why he should miss Louise, but there was a shyness about
this man even in his self-communings, and so he did not go to the bottom
of that in his summary reflection on the project. Laura's keen eye
detected that there was something distrait in Louise's manner with
Blythe, and, wondering, she made another escape in order to permit
Blythe to make his devoirs to one instead of to two. Blythe took
Louise's hands in his and gradually, by mere silent compulsion, drew her
averted eyes into a direct line with his own, which were smiling and
alight with an utter frankness.
"Louise," he said, going straight to the point, "I know what is in your
mind and why you are holding me at a little more than arm's length. I am
glad to say, although I am a little sorry that you do not already know
it, that you are absolutely wrong; not hopelessly wrong, because you
are going to see the matter differently when you are less troubled in
mind than you now are. I wish such an idea had not entered your mind. I
believe it would not have entered your mind had you known me better."
Louise, startled that he should have read her so clearly as his words
denoted, replied, with no great conviction that what she said was
exactly true:
"Does not the very fact that you seem to understand so clearly furnish
the best evidence?" But that sounded rather inconsequential to her, and
she went on flurriedly: "I don't mean just that. Perhaps I do not know
precisely what I do mean," averting her head again in her confusion,
"now that you----" and she came to a futile end.
"Now that I read you aright, you were about to say," said Blythe,
smiling gravely. "Well, I am not going to be ungenerous enough to
triumph over you because you have virtually admitted that you were
wrong--for you have so admitted, haven't you?"
Louise remained silent, her head still averted; but her hands still
rested in Blythe's.
"Haven't you?" said Blythe; and she was conscious that his grasp upon
her hands was tightening.
Blythe peered around to catch a view of her face, and he saw that she
was faintly smiling. He did not let go of her hands, nor did she appear
at all eager to have him do so.
"I have an appointment for which I am already late, and I am keen to
have a look at my watch," went on Blythe, quite cheerfully, without in
the least relaxing his possession of her hands. "But of course I can't
look at it--I can't do anything but remain here for a week, say--until
you tell me that you are wrong."
Louise turned her natural face upon him and nodded brightly--conquered,
and willing to be; there was, she noticed, an inviting little hollow in
his coat, between his left shoulder and the rise of his chest, which she
vaguely imagined would be a very inviting spot upon which to rest, if
even for a transitory moment, a tired head; Blythe was conscious of a
decided response when he pressed her hands just before releasing them;
and when he went out she felt that the room, somehow, had become a
little darker than it had been. She knew that he had understood, and she
appraised his fineness in telling her that she had been wrong at its
true value; but she was not entirely convinced, and she recoiled from
the thought of permitting him to make any sacrifice for her sake. But
she was glad that he had divined what had been in her mind, and her
heart gave a little leap when she thought that, if ever there was to be
any computation of or allusion to a sacrifice, it would be on her side,
and not on his; she knew now that he was above even the thought of
entertaining, much less measuring, such a consideration.
Her mother came to Laura's late in the afternoon, very downcast, very
plaintive on the subject of how terribly she already had missed Louise.
Judd, with his customary morning penitence, had seen her at noon and
made his usual abject apology; and he had endured the lash of her
scornful tongue with a shaky consciousness that his conduct had been
pretty outrageous even for him. He did not acknowledge how set back he
was, however, when Mrs. Treharne, a tirade over, let fall the fact that
Louise had gone to Laura's, and the additional fact that Louise, having
been placed under John Blythe's guardianship at her father's direction,
would be very well looked after and provided for. But Judd wondered,
nevertheless, just how these facts would dovetail with Langdon Jesse's
sweet scheme to have Louise relegated, under Judd's provision, to the
depressing and chastening surroundings of a "five-by-eight flat."
Louise's heart went out to her mother when Mrs. Treharne, in an effusion
of tears, told her how hideously lonesome the house on the Drive was and
would continue to be without her; but the girl had difficulty in
matching this with the undeniable fact that, when she told her mother
that she would be sailing for Europe within a week, Mrs. Treharne,
drying her tears, offhandedly pronounced that the plan was a very wise
one and would be the best imaginable thing for Louise.
Louise, as often before, was stunned by the palpable contradiction
afforded by her mother's tears over what she called her lonesomeness
and, in the next moment, her dry-eyed approval of a trip that would
place an ocean between them. She wanted to go with Laura and she meant
to go; but she was conscious of a sinking of the heart when she found
that, far from seeking to deter her, her mother appeared not only
willing but anxious to have her go. Mrs. Treharne's one thought, of
course, was that the trip would give her a breathing spell, "give her a
chance to think," as she futilely expressed it to herself; for her life
had become one continuous procrastination. Louise, she considered, would
be "broadened by travel" and sheared of some of her "old-fashioned
notions." And, while Louise was gone, she herself could "think things
over" and block out a course. A misty, intangible idea of abandoning
Judd already had crept into her mind, in her self-searching,
self-contemning moments; perhaps, while Louise was across the sea, she
might be able to evolve some plan whereby----And here her musings halted
when she came plumb upon the thought of the surrender of luxuries that
her abandonment of Judd would involve, the scrimping and saving of a
"narrow, smug existence with smug, narrow people." Anyhow, Louise's
absence from the scene would "give her time to think." That was the
main point.
But Louise, who had been lonesome for her mother, now found herself
lonesome in her mother's presence.
* * * * *
Judd met Langdon Jesse at the club a few nights later.
"Judd," Jesse sneered, "you are, all in all, about the most accomplished
damned blunderer in the Western Hemisphere, aren't you?"
"That will be about all of that from you," growled Judd in reply. He had
got out of the cotton market with, as he put it, an "unpunctured pelt,"
so that he had no present fear of the vindictive machinations of the
younger man. "A civil tongue between your teeth henceforth in your
dealings with me, or we don't deal. Do you get that?"
"Oh!" said Jesse, eloquently. He surrendered the whip hand with his
customary deftness. "But you'll remember, I suppose," going on suavely,
"that you told me that Miss Treharne was a virtual dependent of yours?"
"Well," snarled Judd, "supposing I really thought so? How about that?"
"Oh, if you really thought so, why of course that's different," said
Jesse, graciously. "But you were pretty wrong, weren't you? You
separated her from her mother on that presumption by bawling at her as
if she had been a chambermaid; and all the time she was virtually, as
she is now in fact, under the guardianship of that toploftical Blythe
fellow; she is living with Mrs. Stedham, with whom she starts for Europe
in a few days, and she is more than amply provided for by her father. In
all candor, and between man and man, could you possibly have botched
things worse than you did upon your mistaken premise?"
"You mean botched the thing so far as you are concerned, eh?" growled
Judd. "Well, things were botched for you in that direction before you
ever started. You've been kicking around long enough to know when you're
left at the post; but you don't know it, all the same. Anyhow, count me
out of your confounded woman-hunting schemes in future, understand? I've
got enough to do to attend to my own game. Play your own hand. But
you're butting your head against a stone wall in this one instance, let
me tell you that."
"Is that so?" inquired Jesse, with no sign of perturbation or
discouragement. "Well, to adopt your somewhat crude metaphor, I'll play
the hand out, and I'll show you the cards after I've finished. Will you
want to see them?"
"Oh, go to the devil," virtuously replied Judd.