Late in the afternoon of the day before Louise and Laura were to sail,
John Blythe, having fled his office and a great mass of work at an
unusually early hour and without any conscientious scruples whatever,
strode up and down, back and forth, the entire length of his
apartment--barring the kitchen--many dozens of times. He subjected his
hair to an absurd hand-tousling as he paced; he kicked up corners of the
rugs and then kicked them into place again on the next trip back; he
stopped at tables to pick up books, glancing at their titles with
unseeing eyes and then tossing them back on the tables with a bang; once
he picked up an ordinary match-safe that he had owned for years, and
caught himself holding it out in front of him and staring curiously at
it--but really far, far beyond it--as if he had never before clapped an
eye upon it, and, emerging for a moment from that trance, he replaced
the match-safe on the table with a flickering smile.
Noticing all of which from the kitchen out of the corners of her
solicitous and suspicious eyes, Sarah became worried. Sarah was the
stout, grey-wooled colored woman who managed, not to say ruled, John
Blythe's bachelor establishment, including John Blythe himself. She had
been Blythe's boyhood nurse, and, never having been entirely out of
touch with him through all of his early struggles, she had returned to
him when he had won his way and set up his solitary Lares and Penates.
She was highly privileged. There were times, indeed, when she exercised
the actual veto power; as for example, when Blythe wanted to shift too
early into lighter-weight linen, or sought to rush off to an appointment
without his breakfast, and so on.
Now, polishing a glass to give her hands something to do, she appeared
at the door of the kitchen, completely filling it, and waited for Blythe
to stride back that way. So intense was his absorption that he did not
see her until she coughed remindfully. Then he looked up and at
her--still without seeing her, as she well knew.
"Yo' all ain't sick, is yo' Mistuh John?" inquired Sarah, gazing at him
slantwise and showing a good deal of the whites of her eyes.
Blythe didn't hear her. He gazed right through her, and, thence on,
through the rear wall of the kitchen. After quite a pause, however, it
was borne in upon his consciousness that she had said something.
"How is that, Sarah?" he asked her, coming to a standstill.
"Ah said, Is yo' tuk sick, suh?" repeated Sarah. "Dis heah crazy,
triflin', no-'count N'Yawk weathuh is 'nough tuh mek anybody tuhn ovuh
an' die, an' Ah got de misuhy in mah haid mahse'f. Is yo' got any fevuh,
suh? Yo' face looks raid on de tips o' de cheeks."
Blythe, only half-hearing, felt tentatively of the "raid" spots on his
cheeks, which, as a matter of fact, were decidedly flushed. Then he
thrust his hands into his pockets and resumed his up-and-down pacing,
saying:
"Oh, I'm all right, Sarah. Not a bit under the weather. Just--er--fixing
up a case, that's all."
Sarah, polishing away at the glass, gazed intently at his back as he
walked away. Then she slowly turned and re-entered the kitchen,
muttering to herself:
"Can't tell _me_ no sich conjingulatin' stuff--'fixin' up a case.' De
case dat boy is fixin' up weahs petticoats an' puffs an' maybe one o'
dese heah D'rectory dresses--Ah reckon Ah can tell de symptoms!"
Wherein, as to the main point of her suspicion, the sagacious Sarah was
exactly right.
John Blythe was indubitably, whole-heartedly, whole-mindedly in love
with Louise Treharne. He knew that. He had known it for some time. That,
however, in accordance with a by no means uncommon rule in such cases,
was, he considered, an exceedingly unimportant factor in the problem.
The problem, briefly stated, was this: What did Louise Treharne think of
him? He remembered now, with impatience, his words to Louise in the
Park, when he had hoped that she might accept his "devotion as a man,"
and her reply. His "devotion as a man?" That, Blythe reflected, might
mean anything, especially to a girl placed in a difficult position and,
as a natural consequence, in need of all the devotion of any sort that
might be offered her. Had Louise understood his words as he had meant
them? Blythe, with the customary self-depreciating pessimism of the
lover, was afraid she had not. He reproached himself for not having made
his meaning more plain--another grisly pastime in which love-possessed
males indulge for the purpose of making themselves even more acutely
miserable. Immediately atop of this regret that he had not been more
explicit, he flared at himself and decided that he would have been an
inexcusable scoundrel had he done anything of the sort. It would have
been taking a mean and an unworthy advantage of her in her distress.
Then he pondered the few words of hers that had so thrilled him. What,
after all, had they amounted to? She had said that she was ready to
accept his devotion. What of that? Devotion, how? Devotion, from whom?
Why, her guardian-to-be, of course! How else could her words possibly be
viewed by a sane man? What right had he to seek to torture her simple
utterance into anything more meaningful, more solacing to his wretched
self-esteem? At this point of his cogitations Blythe became quite
indignant with himself.
Here he was (he reflected, figuratively hiding his head), a man of
thirty-two who had been brushing elbows with the world's people nearly
all his life, and wearing a few more than the average number of scars to
show for it--here he was, actually thinking of pouncing upon a girl of
nineteen, who had scarcely forgotten the discipline of school; actually
contemplating the imbecility (why, worse than that--the crime!) of
hurling himself and his love at her, before she had so much as had a
chance to meet any other man or men, before, in fact, she had had even a
chance to turn around--for hadn't he (accidentally or not) begun to
vaguely form these idiotic notions on the very day she was leaving
school? And what would be her natural implication? That he was seeking
to take advantage of her inexperience and her helplessness, solely on
the strength of his being her legal guardian!
He had been all wrong (he mentally maundered on) the other day at
Laura's when he had attributed Louise's perfectly proper restraint with
him to her keener realization of her mother's ostracized status in its
bearing upon her own position. What had Louise's mother's status to do
with Louise? And hadn't he been a complaisantly self-satisfied numbskull
to suppose that this was the reason for Louise's obvious aloofness on
that day! The truth was (still he drivelled on, never sparing himself)
that she had come to a perfectly proper realization of how presumptuous
he, Blythe, had been in his attitude toward her, and she had distinctly
meant to indicate to him in an unmistakable manner that any aspirations
of that kind on his part might as well be immediately suppressed,
inasmuch as they were foredoomed to fail. True (taking again for the
moment his own case as plaintiff), the love of any reasonably honest and
fairly successful man for a woman ought to be at least worth
considering, and Louise Treharne was the first woman he had wholly
loved; other little affairs, scattered through the flown years, had been
mere inconsequentialities, the mutual amusements (and so mutually
understood) of an hour, a day, a week, perhaps, at most, a month. Three
months before Blythe would have smiled, if he had not laughed outright,
if any smirking imp had whispered to him that the time was quite close
at hand when he would be shamefully neglecting his decidedly important
practice because of his work-disqualifying absorption in thoughts, not
to say dreams, of a woman. And yet here he was, supposedly a
self-contained, level-headed man of the law, a man rigorously trained
in the austere school of experience--here he was, sighing like a
furnace, drawing meaningless pictures on blotting pads when he should
have been preparing briefs, forgetting his meals, to Sarah's profound
worriment and scandalization, and walking the world in a veritable
schoolboy trance! Blythe, in lucid moments, caught himself smiling
inwardly at the thought of it. Was he sorry that such a thing had come
to be? He quickly beat down that trivial question, tentatively submitted
by his subconsciousness. Schoolboy, furnace-sigher, sentimentalist,
imbecile, what not--he was glad!
Ceaselessly pacing the apartment, then, and mulling the matter over,
first condemning himself for his presumptuousness and then wondering in
a blank sort of a way if Louise herself took this view of his attitude,
Blythe found himself on the horns of his life's dilemma. It would not be
so bad, he thought with a catch at the throat, if she were not going
away; but the thought of the wide Atlantic rolling between them caused
his heart to thump against his ribs and incited him to rumple his hair
still more outrageously.
At length, seized by an idea, he walked into his study, closed the door
after him, sat down at his desk telephone, and called up Laura. Very
promptly he heard her musically rising "Well?"
"Greetings, Laura," he said. "This is your insane friend, John Blythe."
"Greetings, Deserter Blythe," replied Laura. "You have not been to see
us for an age. And how long have you been insane?"
"For several months, I believe. I am hardly a competent witness as to
that."
"I am so distressed to hear it--when your career and--and everything
looks so promising, too!"
"'Everything?' Define 'everything.'"
"I haven't the gift of being specific. You have. What, then, is the most
convincing manifestation of your insanity?"
"I am thinking of taking a great chance; prematurely, and therefore
insanely."
"You are talking rationally enough. Perhaps your madness is a sort of
recurrent mania, with lucid intervals?"
"No, there are no lucid intervals. At this moment I am obsessed by a
fear of the perils of the sea."
"That is odd, considering that you are not going to sea. Are you?"
"No; but you are--and she. Is she with you now?"
"No; she is in her room writing a letter to her father, the first she
has ever written to him. A little sad, is it not? I am in my dressing
room, quite comfortable, thank you, with my elbows on my writing desk;
and so there is no danger of interruption. What is it you wish to tell
me, John? Or ask me, perhaps?"
"It is something both to tell you and to ask you. In about an hour from
now I want to ask Louise if she will marry me. That's the telling. The
asking is this: Would that be a fair thing to do?"
"Such Druid-like deliberation! You speak, John, as if you were leading
up to asking one for a cup of tea!"
"Do I? Well, I am mindful of this somewhat open medium of communication.
Believe me, I feel anything but deliberate. But my question: Would it be
fair?"
"How could it possibly be viewed as anything else but fair?"
"Because the circumstances are unusual. In the first place, I am almost
the only man she knows--that she has had a chance to know. Then, I am
her guardian. Would it not be rather presumptuous, not to say downright
unfair, for me to take advantage of these things?"
"That, I think, is what might be called an obliquely conscientious view,
John."
"Then the disparity in our ages."
"The difference between nineteen and thirty-two hardly constitutes a
case of May and December. Another wholly trivial consideration of
yours. Thirteen years' difference--and, by the way, haven't I heard you
affirm that thirteen is your lucky number?"
"Finally, I haven't the least imaginable reason for supposing that she
has ever thought of me in that respect."
"Haven't you? How perfectly unimportant! Isn't that quite the rule? How
many men ever believed they were considered as possibilities until they
endured the travail of finding out?"
"You are riotously optimistic this afternoon. I wish I were in the same
humor. I think I shall be in need of a mood like that very soon."
"What a glorious opportunity for me to work in that antique bromidiom,
'Faint heart ne'er won,' and so forth. But I shan't. In an hour, you
said?"
"About an hour."
"Don't expect to see me. I am horribly busy packing silver and things.
Perhaps I may see you a moment before you leave. If not, then at the
steamer in the morning."
"I wish I had words to tell you what a trump you are, Laura."
"I wish I had words to tell you how delighted I am, John."
"Not prematurely delighted, I hope, good friend. At this moment I find
myself believing that the perils of the sea are nothing to certain
perils of the land. Goodbye."
"Goodbye. Don't lose confidence in your lucky number--even if you do
call it a 'disparity!'"
* * * * *
It would have been the obvious thing for Laura, after her telephone
conversation with Blythe, to at least intimate to Louise that she was
upon the verge of an event quite universally and correctly deemed of
considerable importance in a young woman's life--her first proposal.
Most women in Laura's place would have done so. But Laura's dislike for
the obvious was almost a part of her religion. She had none of the
benevolent marplot in her composition. She made it a point never to
interfere with symmetrical sequences. Her own unhappy marital experience
had by no means bereft her of sentiment; and she felt that a girl about
to receive an offer of marriage should be entitled to enjoy the
surprise--and in this case she knew it would be a surprise--inhering to
so important an occasion. So Laura, although she visited Louise in her
room after her telephone talk with Blythe, said nothing about it; but
she craftily intimated, in order that Louise might look her best, that
she would not be greatly surprised if Blythe were to drop in. The
intimation was sufficient. Louise, a very human woman, promptly
proceeded, as soon as Laura returned to her own quarters, to correct
even her most trifling disarrays; so that when Blythe (astonishingly
conforming to Laura's prophecy, Louise thought) arrived she looked very
lovely in a one-piece dress of Quaker-grey rajah, with a band of grey
velvet, which somehow suggested to Blythe the insignia of a princess,
around her wonderful hair. She was at the piano, striving, soft pedal
down, to extract musical sense from Strauss' "Salome" (impossible task!)
when Blythe came in.
He noticed her grey dress at once.
"It is a comfort to have such a tractable, obedient ward," he said,
studying the dress approvingly when she rose to greet him. "Here, a
little less than a week after I threatened to insist upon your adopting
the Quaker garb, I find that you've voluntarily assumed it--the color,
at any rate. I know some guardians who would envy me."
Louise, quickly at ease--which had been Blythe's purpose in beginning
with persiflage--smiled with a woman's usual deprecation of a
complimented costume.
"Seeing that I have had this dress for more than a year," she said, "my
obedience must have become an unconscious habit before I knew you."
Blythe, a trained hand at sparring, took advantage of the opening.
"Before you knew me, perhaps, Louise," he said. "But not before I knew
you. Aren't you forgetting that I knew you when you still believed in
Kris Kringle and Hans Andersen?" He sighed with rather too smiling an
assumption of melancholy. "That reflection, I confess, makes me feel
pretty aged."
"Does it?" asked Louise. "You forget that, if it makes you feel aged, it
should make me feel at least middle aged, don't you? And I believe in
Santa Claus and in fairy tales yet, I think." Then, resuming the first
thread: "It seems singular that there should have been a time when you
knew me and I didn't know you; that is, to remember you. For I didn't
remember you at all on the train that day. Come to think of it, you
didn't remember me, either, until you were reminded--that telegram, you
know. An odd chance, was it not?"
"So odd," said Blythe, "that I catch myself wondering what my life had
been before and what it would be now if--" He paused, already groping
for words;--"if I had missed that train."
Louise, far from missing his meaning, grasped it so acutely that Blythe
caught the tell-tale color mounting to her face.
"And now I am wondering," he went on, gazing for comfort at his nails,
"since we are on the subject, whether my having known you for such a
long, long time confers upon me the privilege of--well, of being
entirely candid with you?"
"I should expect candor, in any case--from you," said Louise, trying
desperately to concentrate her mind upon something quite matter-of-fact
in order to keep her color down.
"Why, particularly, from me?" said Blythe, grasping at straws.
"Oh, I can hardly say--because you are the embodiment of candor, or
candor itself," said Louise. "Aren't you?"
"I don't know," he answered as if really in doubt about it--as he was.
"It seems to me that if I actually possessed that quality in such a high
degree, I should have proved it to you, Louise, before this. Proved it,
for example, in the Park the other afternoon."
Louise knew quite well what he meant. Moreover, it never occurred to her
to pretend that she did not know.
"Are you sure that you did not?" she asked him, flushing, but with a
direct enough gaze.
"I am afraid that I did not," said Blythe, nervously rising and facing
her. "Perhaps it was as well, too. For the first time in my life I am in
more than one mind as to whether a certain sort of candor is always
desirable."
Having thus plunged into the domain of the purely ethical, Blythe could
scarcely have expected an offhand reply. As a matter of fact, he got no
reply at all.
"What I am striving to say, I suppose, Louise," he went on, taking
himself a little better in hand, "is that, after you sail tomorrow, I am
going to be more lonesome than I have ever been in my life before."
"Is that so hard to say?" Louise asked.
"Not when it is rewarded by so helpful an answer," said Blythe,
conscious of a throbbing at his temples.
"I do not find it in the least hard to say that I shall miss you," said
Louise, frankly enough; nevertheless, to give herself countenance, she
picked up from the table a little carved ivory tiger and examined it
with great apparent curiosity.
"Miss me for--for my guardianly wisdom and ghostly counsel?" said
Blythe, his wide smile visibly nervous. Then, when there was a pause, he
pressed the point: "Is that it, Louise?"
Her silence did not imply affirmation, and, the throbbing at his temples
increasing, Blythe knew it. He bent over her chair, gently but firmly
removed the ivory tiger from her hands, took one of them in his own, and
said:
"Listen to me, Louise. I am fearful, if I do not plunge ahead, of
becoming entangled in a weave of subtleties. I don't want to be
incoherent, even if my excuse would be that I became so while taking a
desperate chance. I haven't the least idea what you think of me--I don't
mean as your guardian and interested friend, but as a man very
susceptible to human impulses. But I am not debarred from finding out.
And I should have no right to ask you such a question before telling
you, as I tell you now, that I love you." She rose as he spoke, her hand
still tightly grasped in his, and their eyes mingled. "You have set a
new light to glow within me. I am conscious of a new propulsion that I
never knew before--that I did not believe existed until I met you as a
woman grown. It means everything to me--the world and all. I do not know
that I am fair in saying this to you. I am incapable of judging. I do
know that I want to be fair. After all, there is no unfairness in my
simply telling you that I love you. It would be different, I think--but
you are to judge of that--if I were to ask you to marry me--yet. But
that, Louise, is what I came here to ask you."
There is no eloquence, however ornately phrased, to compare with that of
a man or a woman who is altogether in earnest. Louise thrilled under the
quiet, but, as she knew, deeply-felt words of this man whose clear-cut,
rugged face, as he spoke, became positively handsome. She placed an
impulsive hand on his arm.
"I told you that I should miss you," she said haltingly, but with a
womanly sweetness that moved him like a harp-chord. "And I could not
miss you if I did not care for you? I do care for you--as much as I
esteem and honor you; and that is a great deal. I have not yet asked
myself, I think, if I love you. It may be that I do. If to miss you
dreadfully when I do not see you every day--and, until now, I had not
seen you for nearly a week!--is--is that, then perhaps I--"
Blythe, fighting, as if in actual conflict with something tangible, the
temptation to take her in his arms, grasped her other hand. His face was
very close to hers, and her curved, girlish lips sent his blood swirling
with their maddening proximity. But he held himself in a vise, knowing
that the hour had not yet struck for their contact of lips.
"It is enough that you care for me, Louise," he said, hoarsely fervid;
and he felt as weak as a man who has successfully come through a great
peril. "I could ask no more; I ask no more. Your caring for me is, I
know now, more than I ever hoped or dreamed. It is enough--for now. It
is a start." He smiled vaguely at the homeliness of his phrase. "I
scarcely know what I am saying, Louise. But it doesn't much matter what
a man says, does it, when he is happier than he has ever before been in
his life?"
She raised the hand which had been resting on his arm and took hold,
with thumb and forefinger, of a button of his coat. The unconscious
little intimacy set his pulses to throbbing again.
"I shall know when I come back," she said to him with a simplicity that
was almost quaint, "whether--whether my caring for you is more than just
that. I believe that it is, but--but there are reasons--you know what
they are--that restrain me from owning it, even if I knew positively;
which I do not, yet, John."
John!
A quiver ran through the man, which, as she still was unconsciously
toying with the button of his coat, she could not help but feel.
"Louise," he said, bending so close to her that he felt her cool,
fragrant breath upon his cheek, "I want you to call me that; but not
again now. There must be an interval--tonight, say--for me to become
used to it. I warn you of my irresponsibility if you call me that again
before tomorrow. And I am not minding, my dear, about what you do not
know positively. Neither am I presuming upon it. You have made me happy
enough. Everything else can wait. You are not committed. I wouldn't
dream of holding you committed. Your life is still all your unpromised
own. I tell you that it is enough for me now--it will be enough for me
hereafter, if nothing else is to be--to know that I am even cared for,
have been cared for, by a woman like you. I am going now. My heart is
raging with love and honor for you; I want to get out underneath the
sky; feel the cold upon my face so that I shall know I am not dreaming.
Goodbye, dear, until I send you away from me--send you away, not with
wretchedness and despair in my heart, but with hope, and light, and
happiness--tomorrow!" and he pressed her hands, gazed at her with wide,
kindling eyes, and went reeling from the room, as one who seeks a secure
footing after many days at sea.
Laura, by design, was standing in the doorway of her sitting room when
he passed unsteadily out.
"Well?" she said to him. "Did the 'disparity' number win, John?"
He stopped, gazed at her for an instant unseeingly, then shook himself
together and grasped her outstretched hands.
"I may be a John o' Dreams, dear friend," he said to her huskily. "In
fact, I am sure that I am, right now. But it is worth a little delirium
to find that, after all, I am not actually insane," and he strode out,
Laura watching him with a dimpling face.
After a while Laura went in and found Louise standing musing before a
window, seeming to watch the twilight settling upon the vaguely greening
Park. Laura threw an arm around the girl's shoulder and kissed her.
"Did he tell you, dear?" Louise asked, turning.
"Not in words," replied Laura. "But one surmises. The air has been
charged with it. I know, of course, that he has been worshipping you as
did the shepherd of old a distant star. And you, heart of hearts?"
"I seem, somehow, to have been loving him all my life," said Louise.
"Did you tell him so?" asked Laura.
"I am afraid that he, too, surmises," said Louise, smiling shyly.