The night was warm, moist, astir with vernal growth. The trees whispered tender secrets to each other. Flowers were being born in the grasses. Clouds formed a light coverlet above an earth too fecund of dreams to sleep soundly.
Dee emerged from the side door of the James house and moved down the cedar path, soft as a wraith. The still mansion oppressed her. For two weeks she had hardly stirred beyond earshot of her husband's petulant, pathetic need of her. Her young blood craved air, the expanses, the sense of space and quiet.
Definite verdict had been pronounced that afternoon upon T. Jameson James by Dr. Osterhout, after a careful résumé of the case with the consulting surgeon.
"He'll last indefinitely. As long, one might say, as he has the will to live. Five years.... Ten. Twenty, if he can stand it. Much depends on you, Dee."
"Will he get better?"
Osterhout moved uneasily. "Better? Stronger, a little. Not really better. A wheel-chair existence at best."
"I can't conceive of it for Jim."
"He'll adjust himself to it after a fashion. People do. But he'll be difficult, dam' difficult. Have you thought any more of his offer to release you?"
"No. And I won't think of it."
"I wouldn't have supposed you would, being you. You're a good sort, Dee. And a good sport." He rubbed his forehead with a stubby forefinger. "As for your own status—you want me to be frank, don't you?"
"Yes, Bobs."
"It's a life of—well, practical widowhood for you. You understand."
Yes; she had understood, and with an influx of relief. Her loyalty would keep her beside her husband, helpless, whereas she would have left him had he been his normal self-centred, self-sufficient self. More; she would now gladly have forgiven him the breach of their private marriage agreement, have accepted the full regimen and responsibility of wifehood could she have borne him the child he wished, the child which might have brought an enduring and saving interest into his ruined life. But from that hateful duty she was absolved; the more reason for standing by him through his ordeal. At worst, she was now free to be faithful in thought and spirit to the man to whom, had he been husband or lover to her, she could have given her all in glorious surrender.
He stepped from the shadow of a cedar and stood before her.
"Dee!"
"Stanley!" Her hands flew to her breast. "How long have you been here?"
"Hours. Since dark."
"Why didn't you send word?"
"Would it have been safe to write?"
"Quite. Now."
"How, now?"
"Don't youknow? Haven't you seen Cary Scott?"
"Not since I left Baltimore. I came the first moment that I could after making arrangements. Our arrangements."
They had stood apart. But now he reached forward, took her hands, crushed them to his cheek. At his touch she flamed and trembled.
"When can you come with me, Dee?"
"With you? Where?"
"To England. The divorce can be arranged, and our marriage follow. You can trust me."
"Oh, yes; I can trust you," she answered dully.
"Then, when?"
"I can't go with you, Stanley."
"Can't?" he repeated incredulously. "When I can feel your pulse leap when I touch your hand, when——"
"I love you with every breath I take," she cried low and passionately. She snatched her hands from his grip, wreathed them back of his head, drew his lips down upon hers. "I've never dreamed what it could be to love as I love you."
"Come with me," he said.
The wife looked about her like a trapped creature. "I've got to make him understand," she muttered to herself in travail of spirit. "I've got to make him see and—and help me. Stanley," she pleaded, "be kind to me and don't stop me till I've finished telling what I've got to tell."
She related the accident and its sequel in few and simple words. For a time of pulse-beats Wollaston was silent, then:
"Poor devil!" he murmured. "Poor, poor devil!"
"So, you see, dear love——"
"I see nothing but that we belong to each other. You can't deny that kiss and what it means. You can't let me go back alone, Dee.... Shall I stay?"
"Oh, no! No! I couldn't bear it."
"Then you must come with me. Now. To-night."
"For God's sake, Stanley, don't! Don't kiss me." She was fighting for strength, for breath. "Don't make me——"
"Dee!Dee!Where are you?"
The petulant, flattened voice of helplessness came like a stab of pain through the night. A light, tenuous and sharp, flashed out from the wrecked man's window. Its ray touched the cedar overshadowing them.
Dee answered at once. "I'm coming, Jim. Just a moment. Good-bye, Stanley."
He gathered her into a slow, overmastering pressure of body to body, face to face.
"Dee, I love you. I want you."
"I know. God, how I know!"
"As you love and want me. What does anything else matter!"
"Oh, love; don't make it so bitter hard for me! I can't leave him. He needs me so. I can't! I can't!"
"Dee! The pain has come back. Where are you?"
"Coming, Jim, dear!" She turned away from Wollaston without another look; heard him thrashing through the bushy growth like a man blinded; felt her knees sag and give way.
She toppled slowly forward and lay, face down upon the earth that gives life, that gives courage, that gives endurance to bear the deadliest hurt, her fingers tearing in agony at the young grasses.
Presently she heaved herself up and went into the house. Her mouth was firm, her eyes tearless.
A good sort. A good sport.
For two weeks Pat and Scott lived in a paradise of constant dangers and passionate adventure. Fate played into their hands; James, as he recovered a little strength, developed a strong inclination for Scott's society, and insisted that he remain at their house as guest. The two men played chess and bezique. To Dee, in her time of ordeal and sacrifice, it was a relief without which she must have broken to have the invalid taken off her hands for a good part of every day.
Twice daily Pat came over from the Knoll, often staying to luncheon on her morning visit and returning directly after dinner to make a fourth hand at bridge whenever James was in fit condition to play. As a matter of course, Scott took her home and ostensibly left her while he went for a long walk alone, before returning to the James place. In reality those hours were spent with Pat in her conservatory.
"When are you going to get tired of me?" she asked pertly, one gold-studded night of stars and soft winds as they sat together at the open window of the secluded room. She was perched on the arm of his chair, her hand overhanging the back to touch the short curls at his temple. He drew her palm downward and spoke with his lips lightly pressed upon it.
"When that planet yonder tumbles down out of the sky into your lap."
"But you ought to, you know. They always do."
"Still obsessed by the movies," he interpreted playfully. "This is the real world we're living in."
"Sometimes I wonder if it is. It doesn't seem too real."
"You're a phantasm yourself," said he jealously. "I never quite grasp and hold you."
"Yet I belong to you, don't I? Or is that just a—a silly form of words that hasn't any real meaning?"
"It's a phrase. You belong to yourself. You always will. There's that quality of the eternally unattainable, the eternally virginal, about you."
"Is there? I love to have you say that! Do youtrulythink it, Cary?"
"In the depths of my heart—where you live."
"But it wouldn't be so if we were married."
"It would always be so, my darling."
Ever keenly interested in her own character and its reflex upon others, she took this under thoughtful consideration.
"I've never felt that I could really belong to anybody. Not even to you. If I could think it, then perhaps I'd want to marry you. Does that mean that I don't love you, Cary? Or what?"
"Not as I love you," he replied with gloomy patience. "It means that I've got to wait."
"Here?" she flashed at him with her bewildering smile. "But you've been threatening to go away again."
"I ought to," he groaned. "I just haven't the will power. It would be like giving up hope to leave you now."
"Poor darling!" But there was a touch of mockery in her pity.
"If it weren't so terribly dangerous for you."
Her proud little head went up. "I told you long ago that I always did what I wanted. If I take a chance, I'm willing to pay for it. I'm not afraid."
"Because you've never suffered. You've never had to take punishment."
"Have you?"
"I'm taking it now, in the thought of our separation. Pat, for God's sake let me get free, if it is only to be ready, in case——"
"No; no; no!" she denied vehemently. "I won't be—captured, compelled. You can go if you want to, as soon as you want to."
"Pat!"
"Yes; I know." Her lips brushed his cheek in sweet contrition. "That was mean of me. But I just—don't—want—to—marry you." She spaced the words with rhythmic deliberation. "I don't want to marry anybody.... And have a lot of kids.... And look like Con does now. Shewaddles.... Cary, were you her lover?" she demanded abruptly.
"No!"
"I couldn'tbearit if you had been. But you'd say that anyway, wouldn't you? Even to me?"
"It's quite true. I never was."
"If anyone asked you that about me you'd swear by all your gods you weren't. Wouldn't you?"
"Yes."
"You'd lie about it? Ihateto think of your lying. I wonder whether I would if it was put up to me or whether I'd admit that we are lovers." She brooded darkly for a moment over the word. "I didn't mean to be, you know," she added naïvely.
"Whatever fault there was is mine," he claimed hoarsely. "If there is any just God——"
She slipped her fingers over his lips, cutting him short. "Don't, Cary. Don't say 'if.' Of course there is."
"Then He will hold me responsible; not you."
She rose, giving her shoulders the quaint, sliding wriggle with which she was wont to slough off, symbolically, problems too troublesome for solution. "Oh, if those things are going to happen, they happen," she muttered. "That's the fate part of it. But I do suppose we can't go on forever. We'll crash, some way."
"Does anyone suspect? Dee?"
"I don't think so. She's got troubles enough of her own these days. If it's anyone, it's Con. She's been asking some snoopy kind of questions."
"What questions?"
"Oh, I don't know. I told her to go to the devil; that I was over twelve, and she told me I'd better remember particularly that I was."
"I don't like that," said he.
"Oh, well; I don't like it much, myself. But what can she do?"
"Talk."
"Not outside the family. Con isn't that kind. She might tell Fred."
"That would be a pleasant complication," he observed grimly.
"There will be more and more complications all the time," she fretted. "If you only weren't married!"
"But I thought——" he began eagerly.
"Then there wouldn't be any kick. We could be supposed to be engaged. I suppose wewouldbe engaged!" she added brightly, as if a new thought had struck her.
"Being engaged implies being married eventually," he pointed out.
"Not these days," she retorted. "It doesn't hold you up for anything and we could snap out of it when we got good and ready. Only—this isn't the kind of thing you can snap out of, is it?" A cloud darkened the vivacity ofher face. "We're terrible boobs, Cary.... Let's stop it."
"That's wholly in your hands, dear love."
"Yes," she said discontentedly; "you've always put everything up to me; let me go my own way—that's why I've gone so far. I wonder if you knew that was the way to get me. You're so dam' clever.... Like what's-his-name—Mephistoph—no, Macchiavelli, wasn't it?" She dropped to the floor in front of him, clasped her hands over his knee, turned upward a shadowy and bewitching face, speaking in a lowered voice. "Listen, dear. Next week I'm going back to Philadelphia, to finish out my visit with Cissie. But—I won't go to Cissie's, not till the next day. We'll have that time together; that'll be our good-bye. And then you must go away."
"If you wish it so," he assented steadily.
"Idon'twish it so. But it's got to come some time. You say so yourself."
"Yes; it's got to come some time. Unless——"
"I know the unless. I don't say I'll never send for you to come back. I might."
"I'll never come back except with my freedom. And if you send for me it must be for good and all."
"I wish I could, Cary. I wish I were sure," she said wistfully. She jumped to her feet. "Tell me good-night," she commanded, holding out her arms. "And you're to come early to-morrow and take me for a long walk."
Overnight, luck, which had so befriended the lovers, turned against them. They returned from their morning's tramp, weary but elate with the vigour of strong sunshine and woodland air. Pat, her glorious eyes welling light, paused by the open library window.
"Is there anything in the world that we haven't talked to a finish to-day, Cary?" she demanded, laughing.
"Nothing, dearest."
"Yet to-morrow we'll have just as much to talk about as if we'd never spoken a word to each other. It's rather wonderful, isn't it? What makes us that way?"
"Companionship. The rarest thing in life or love."
She swung herself in by the window. "Come on, companion," she invited. As he followed, she detached a few sprays from the huge cluster of wild purple violets at her belt, and set them in his coat. "Decoration of companionship," she said. "And"—she stretched up and kissed his lips—"reward for a happy morning."
There was a stifled exclamation. Constance rose from the depths of the big arm chair facing away from them and confronted the pair. Pat burst into harsh laughter.
"Trapped!" she exclaimed.
Constance's face with its strained, expectant, apprehensive expression of imminent motherhood, was white. "Pat, I think you'd better leave me with Mr. Scott," she said.
"I don't," snapped Pat. "If you've got anything to say, say it." Her eyes burned sombrely, angrily. She was furious with her sister for having surprised her.
A puzzled, helpless look came over Constance's face. "I wouldn't have believed——" she began lamentably. "How long has this been going on?"
"None of your business," returned Pat coolly.
"It will be father's business. I shall phone him now."
"Wait, Connie," put in Scott with quiet authoritativeness. "Wouldn't it be as well to consider consequences before making more trouble than can perhaps be undone?"
"You're afraid, are you? Well, you can run."
"I shall stay here, if you phone, until Mr. Fentriss comes."
Constance swayed, irresolute, uncertain on her feet. "How far has this gone?" she muttered.
Scott rallied his defences. "You're not to think that this is just a casual, cheap flirtation," he said. "If I could make you understand how deeply and honestly I love Pat——"
"Honestly!" echoed Constance with scorn.
"I won't split words with you. And for myself I've no excuses to make. I ought to have held myself better in hand. But as for this sort of thing—my kissing Pat—it's the first time and it will be——"
"Oh, piffle!" Pat's reckless voice broke in. "Tell her the truth, Cary."
Constance looked from one to the other. Her lips quivered, curled down at the corners like a grieved baby's. She began to sob in short, quick, strangled catches of the breath. Suddenly a dreadful look convulsed her face. She pressed her hands down upon her abdomen.
"Oh!" she cried. "Ah-h-h-h. The pain! Pat! I'm——"
Scott jumped to catch her, barely in time to break the fall. He eased her into the chair. Pat was beside him instantly.
"Phone for Bobs. Quick! Tell him to get Dr. Courcey. No. You go for Courcey, it'll save time. Second house around the corner. Tell him to bring everything. All his instruments and a nurse. Don't come back. I'll write you."
As he hurried to the door he heard a shriek, then Pat's strong, soothing voice:
"All right, Con, old girl. The doctor'll be here in five minutes."
Such was their parting, one of life's sardonic emendations to the plots and plans of lovers.
"Some kind of internal explosion has taken place in our little family, dear one (wrote Robert Osterhout to his dead love); and is still taking place, which is rather a deliberate method for an explosion. They are keeping me out of it; even Pat will not confide in me. Therefore I infer that it is not so much her trouble as the others'. Con's baby is now six months old; she had a bad time of it but the son is a lusty creature. About the time of his birth there was a quarrel between Con and Pat not wholly made up yet. But while Con was so ill, Pat stood by, a tower of strength. From the way in which she gave up everything to look after Con and her household, I was almost ready to suspect a touch of remorse. But what about? There was the contemporaneous phenomenon of Cary Scott going away so abruptly, quite without explanation. I ask myself whether it is possible that the old fire flamed up between Con and him and Pat was in some way involved. A tangled skein!
"Dee troubles me, too. She has grown so subdued and inert. Her devotion to James would explain it, to a casual observer. It isn't enough for me. There is something else. She withdraws from me, too; but she has always given me less of her confidence than the others. It is a sort of shyness, and at times it hurts. I so long to help her. But you can't help another person who lives in a fourth dimension by herself.
"Pat is back in the rush and whirl of things, going faster than ever, but she does not seem to be getting as much fun out of it as of old. She is as little comprehensible as ever."
To Pat herself, her mental processes were difficult of comprehension. It was now six months since she and Cary Scott had so strangely and inconsequentially parted and he had gone back to Europe. On the whole, she did very well without him; but that there was a gap she could not deny to herself. Being uncompromisingly what she was, she filled it with other masculine interests. Rather to her surprise she did not find herself specially tempted to venture upon forbidden ground with any other man. The barriers once down, she had supposed that self-control would be more difficult. But curiosity is an important component part of sex-attraction to the untried, and her curiosity was appeased. Perhaps, too, Scott had been right in imputing to her an instinctive quality of virginity, constantly at war against but not incompatible with her passionate temperament.
Certainly the substitute interests seemed dull and insufficient as compared with her association with Scott. At times she missed intolerably that unique understanding and companionship which he had given her, and these times became more instead of less frequent as the weeks lengthened out, which was both unexpected and perturbing. She was seriously annoyed with him, too, because he had respected religiously her injunction against writing, and when, three months after his departure, she herself had written lifting the embargo, he had returned, after a long silence, a single sentence:
"When you send for me I will come; but you must be ready to accept all and give all."
Choosing to interpret this as an attempt to bully her she was properly wrathful. By way of logical reprisal (though how it was to affect him she would have found it difficult to say) she "stepped on the gas," as she wouldhave put it, and speeded up an already sufficient pace. Local eruptions followed.
"All the old cats are squalling their heads off at me," she complained to Osterhout.
"What would you expect?" said the philosophical doctor.
"Of courseyou'dtake that side," retorted the aggrieved Pat. "Why should they?"
"For one item, the broken Vandegrift-Mercer engagement."
"I didn't do it!" disclaimed Pat. But she dimpled a little.
"You're popularly credited with having had a hand in it, not to say a face."
"Don't be coarse, Bobs. What right had Bess Vandegrift to be stickingherblotchy face between the curtains——"
"What right had you to be kissing Bess's best young feller?"
"Liar yourself, Bobs! I didn't kiss him. He kissed me."
"It's a fine distinction. Maybe a shade too fine for Bess."
"I haven't kissed a man," declared Pat virtuously, "that is to say really kissed, since—well, never mind that," with hasty but belated discretion. "I didn't want Harry to kiss me. Troo-woo-wooly, Bobs. Though I did suspect that he might get interesting and try.... She's a sob, anyway."
"Then, there's Stanley Johnston——"
"All off. Tackles too hard!" said Pat.
"And Mark Denby. You keep him rushing back and forth between here and Baltimore like a demented drummer."
"Oh, Mark's like the Pig that forgot he was Educated. He doesn't count."
"Who does count at the present moment?"
"Nobody. That's the big trouble," said Pat fretfully. "They none of 'em givemeany thrill. I'm bored, Bobs."
"Pose of youth," opined Bobs.
Herein he was wrong. Pat really was bored, though she would not admit to herself the reason, deep and effective in the background of her willful soul. Life was flat, stale, tasteless. Men were either unenterprising guinea-pigs or bellowing rhinoceroses. Women were cats. She loathed the tame and monotonous world. It was boredom, combined with a provocative accidental discovery, that led her to the reckless adventure of the Washington Heights flat and Edna Carroll.
In an earlier age the Fentriss family would have referred to Edna Carroll with hushed voices, if at all, as "that woman." In this enlightened and tolerant time she was humorously characterised by the three girls as "Ralph's flossie." Little was known of her. She lived somewhere outside the social pale and Fentriss's liaison with her had endured for many years. Constance was sure that she was of the flamboyant, roystering, chorus-girl type. Dee inclined to the soft and babyish siren. Pat speculated rangingly, and had more than once endeavoured to pump Osterhout, with notable lack of success. From some unlocatable purlieu of gossip had issued the rumour that Ralph Fentriss was going to marry her, perhaps had already done so secretly. Constance was outraged. Dee was cynically amused, but skeptical. Pat was hotly excited.
Entering the city by one of the upper ferries one day in search of a dressmaker's assistant, recreant in the matter of a dinner gown, the youngest daughter wasstartled to see her father's car drawn up opposite a pleasant looking apartment house on a quiet side street. At three-thirty in the afternoon! The truth leapt to her mind. Profusely blooming flowers made beautiful the third floor window ledge; there, Pat decided, was the nest of the bird. Fearing that her father might emerge and find her, she hastened away.
On the following morning, full of delightful tremors and keen anticipations—for this would be something, indeed, to tell the girls—she returned and pressed the third button in the entry. The light click of the release almost sent her scuttling out, but she gathered her resolution, composed a demure face for herself, and mounted the stairs. In the top hallway stood a slim, tailor-made woman with glasses pushed up on her forehead. Pat at once made up her mind that she was attractive in an alert, bird-like way.
"Whom are you looking for?"' asked the woman pleasantly.
Pat liked her voice. "Does Mrs. Fentriss live here?"
"Who?" said the woman in a tone which made Pat regret that she had chosen that particular form of opening.
Pat faltered out the enquiry again, not knowing what else to do. The other's brown and dancing eyes grew formidably cold.
"Why do you ask for Mrs. Fentriss?"
"I thought this was where she lived."
"There is no Mrs. Fentriss here."
"Perhaps I've got the wrong apartment."
"No. I think you have the right one. Who are you?"
Entire frankness appeared to the intruder the method of sense and safety. "I'm Pat. Patricia Fentriss."
"I thought so. By what right do you come here?"Two tiny spots of reddish flame shone in the wine-dark eyes. Pat decided that she wasveryattractive.
"Please don't be angry with me."
"You're hardly here as an emissary of the family, I suppose."
"No. I—I just came."
"In that case hadn't you better just go again?"
"If you tell me to," said Pat, downcast and humble.
The other hesitated. "I can't conceive what you mean by this visit," she said with severity, into which, however, had crept a mitigating quality. "Was it just vulgar curiosity?"
Pat nodded so vigorously that her hair flicked forward about her face like wind-whipped silk ribbons.
"You're frank, at any rate. I like that." Abruptly she stepped back. "As you're here, come in."
Pat obeyed. "You're awfully good to let me."
"Am I? That remains to be seen." She led the way to an airy, daintily furnished front room, a conspicuous feature of which was a big arm chair with a drawing board across the arms.
"What's that?" asked Pat with lively curiosity.
"My work."
"Oh! Are you an artist?"
"Of a sort. I make fashion drawings."
"How diverting!" Pat was recovering herself. "Can't you go on working while we talk?"
"Are we going to talk?" The corners of the firm mouth crinkled up, a dimple affirmed its existence, the brown eyes twinkled, and Pat incontinently and most improperly fell in love with her hostess.
"I think you'retoodelightful!"
"I can be quite otherwise, on occasion—to impertinent people."
"Don't scare me again," begged Pat. "I won't be impertinent. Though I want to be, terribly."
"As that is what you came for, perhaps you'd better be. Why did you ask for Mrs. Fentriss?"
"Isn't that what—what you're called?"
"Certainly not."
An inspiration struck Pat. "We heard that you'd married Dad."
The hostess replaced her glasses, seated herself, and began to ink in a sketch. "Did you?"
"Is it true?"
"No. We are not married."
No good, that line. A chilling thought followed. "He isn't likely to be coming here, is he?"
"Why? Are you afraid of being caught?"
"I can't think of anything more poisonous."
"Don't be alarmed. He couldn't get in if he did come."
Pat searched her mind for movie evidence. "Hasn't he got a key?"
"No. Why not be honest and ask directly what's in your mind?"
"I—I don't know how," confessed the visitor.
"For a singularly forward young person you don't get on very fast. How old are you?"
"Nineteen. But I know everything about—about everything."
"If you don't it isn't for lack of enterprise," was the grim reply. "And what you don't know, you suspect. In this case your suspicions are quite correct. But it doesn't follow that Ralph—that your father comes and goes at will here, inmyplace." There was the slightest emphasis on the possessive.
"Oh! I thought they—they always had—had a key, and—and——"
"And paid the rent, and filled the place with luxury and orchids, cigarettes and champagne. You've been reading cheap novels. The rotten-minded little fiction writers don't know everything. They don't know anything about women."
Pat leaned forward. "Are you going to marry Dad?"
The artist's face hardened. "You were sent here to find that out. Well, then, I am."
"I'm glad," said Pat simply and sincerely.
The older woman took off her glasses, rose, walked across to the lounge where Pat was seated and set her delicate hands on the girl's shoulders, staring into her face with an inscrutable expression. "Why do you say that?"
"Because it's true. I'm crazy about you—already."
The other sat down limply. "What kind of a personareyou?"
"An honest one."
"Then I'll be, too. I'm not going to marry Ralph. I can't. I've got a husband. He's no good. I haven't lived with him for years. I had a devil of a life. I was going to kill myself when I met Ralph."
"Were you so poor?" asked Pat sympathetically.
"Poor? Do you think it was a question of money with me that took me to Ralph?" retorted the other with slow anger.
"No. I don't know why I said that. But you're so young."
"So is he," was the defiant reply. "He's eternally young. That's what I love in him. I loved him the first time I ever saw him and I've never stopped. But if you've come here looking for a common kept-woman——"
"I haven't. Oh, I haven't!" broke in Pat, squirming.
"Anyway, you know all about me now. All except myname, Edna Carroll. What are you going to tell your family?"
"Not a word."
"Aren't you? You're a strange little witch."
"Do you like me a little?" asked Pat, slant-eyed and demure.
"Yes; I do. You're very like Ralph in some ways."
"Then may I come again?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I should have thought you might understand without my drawing you a diagram."
"Conventional stuff!" scoffed the girl. "How do you get that way? I'm coming anyway—Edna."
Edna Carroll laughed uncertainly. "I'm insane to let you. But I'd love to have you. What would your father think?"
"He's not going to think at all. We won't give him the chance. Will you ask me to your parties?"
"How do you know I give parties?"
"You're the kind that always draws people around them. Besides," added the shrewd Pat, "there's a violin and a clarinet on the piano. I don't suppose you play themall. And I'm mad about music."
"Inheritance," murmured Edna softly. She let her darkling glance rest on the piano bench where Ralph Fentriss had so often sat to make his music. "Very well. I'll ask you sometime."
She was as good as her word. It was there that Pat met Leo Stenak.
The episode between Leo Stenak and Patricia Fentriss was headlong as a torrent. She heard him before she saw him; heard, rather, his violin, expression and interpretation of his innermost self. The raucous sweetness of his tone, which he overemphasises and sentimentalises, and which is the cardinal defect of his striking and uneven style, floated out to her as she stood, astonished, in the exterior hallway of Edna Carroll's flat.
When it died into silence, she supposed that the number was over and entered just as he was resuming. Her first impression was of a plump, sallow, carelessly dressed youth with hair almost as shaggy as her own, and the most wildly luminous eyes she had ever looked into, who turned upon her an infuriated regard and at once pointedly dropped his bow. His savage regard followed her while she crossed the room to speak to her hostess.
This was no way to treat high-spirited Pat. Quite deliberately she took off gloves and wrap, handed them to the nearest young man and remarked to the violinist:
"It's very nice of you to wait. I'm quite fixed now, thank you."
A vicious snort was the only response. The accompanist who had trailed along a bar or two before appreciating the interruption, took up his part, and the melody again filled the air. In spite of her exacerbated feelings, Pat recognised the power and distinction of the performance. Nevertheless, she refrained from joining in the applause which followed the final note.
At once the musician crossed to her, which was exactly what she had intended.
"You don't like music," he accused, glowering.
"I love it," retorted Pat.
"Then you don't like my music."
"Better than your manners."
"I care nothing for manners. I am not a society puppet."
"If you were, perhaps you would have waited to be presented."
"I am Leo Stenak," said he impressively.
If not unduly impressed, Pat was at least interested. She remembered the name from having heard Cary Scott speak of a youthful violinist named Stenak who had appeared at a Red Cross concert the year before and for whom he had predicted a real career, "if he can get over his cubbish egotism and self-satisfaction."
"I've heard of you," she remarked.
"The whole world will hear of me presently," he replied positively. "Where did you hear?"
"From a friend of mine, Cary Scott."
Stenak searched his memory. "I never heard of him. An amateur?"
"Yes."
"Amateurs don't count," was his superb pronouncement.
"Any friend of mine counts," said Pat coldly, and turned her back upon him. He flounced away exactly like a disgruntled schoolgirl.
"Don't mind Leo, Pat," said her hostess, coming over to her with a smile of amusement. "He's a spoiled child; almost as much spoiled as you are."
"I don't mind him," returned the girl equably, but inside she was tingling with the sense of combat and of theman's intense and salient personality. She was sure that he would come back to her.
Late in the evening he did, with a manifest effect of its being against his judgment and intention, which delighted her mischievous soul. Most of the others had left.
"They tell me you sing, Miss Fentriss," he began abruptly.
"A little," replied Pat, who had been devoting what she regarded as hard and grinding work to her music for a six-month.
"Rag-time, I suppose." Contemptuously.
"Andothers!"
"Know theChanson de Florian?"
"Of course."
"Well, it's light sort of trash, but it has a melody. I've written my own obbligato to it. If you like I'll play it with you."
"I don't like, at all, thank you."
"You owe me something for spoiling my andante when you came in. I played wretchedly after that. You did something to me; I was too conscious of you to get back into the music. Won't you sing for me?" His manner was quite amenable now; his splendid eyes held and made appeal to her.
"But I'm an amateur," she answered, still obdurate. "And amateurs don't count."
"It isn't every amateur I'd ask. Come on!" He caught up his violin. "Ready, Carlos?" he said to the accompanist.
Pat gave her little, reckless laugh. "Oh,verywell!"
She sang. It seemed to her that she was in exceptionally good voice, inspired and upheld by the golden streamof counter-melody which surged from the violin. At the close he looked at her intently and in silence.
"Well?" queried Pat, thrilling with expectancy of merited praise.
"You sing rottenly," he replied with entire seriousness.
"Thank you!" Pat's sombre eyes smarted with tears of mortification.
"But you have a voice. Some of the notes—pure music. Your method—horrible. You should practice."
"I've been practicing. A terrible lot."
"Pffooh! Fiddle-faddling. You amateurs don't know what work is!"
"Do you think my voice is worth working with?"
"Perhaps. It has beauty. You are beautiful, yourself. Where do you live?"
Pat laughed. "What's the big idea, Mr. Stenak?"
"I will take you home when you go. I wish to talk to you."
"I'm not going home. I'm staying with friends downtown."
"Then I will take you there. May I?"
"Yes; if you'll play once more for me first."
Though it was quite a distance to her destination, Stenak did not offer to get a taxi. He observed that as the night was pleasant, it would be nice to walk part way, to which Pat, somewhat surprised, assented. Immediately, and with no more self-consciousness than an animal, he became intimately autobiographical. He told her that he was a Russian, a philosophic anarchist, with no belief in or use for society's instituted formulas: marriage, laws, government—nothing but the eternal right of the individual to express himself to the utmost in his chosen medium of life. All his assertiveness had left him; he talked honestly and interestingly. Pat caught glimpsesof a personality as simple and, in some ways, as innocent as a child's; credulous, eager, resolute, confident, trusting, and illumined with a lambent inner fire.
"I was rude to you at first," he confessed. "I am sorry. But I could not help it. I am like that."
"You shouldn't be," she chided.
"Tell me what I should be and I will be it," he declared. "You could make me anything. When you came into the room, even though I was angry, there was a flash of understanding between us. You felt it, too?"
"I felt something," admitted she. "But I was angry, myself. How silly of you to give yourself the airs of genius!"
"I have genius," he averred quietly.
Such profound conviction was in his tone that Pat was ready to believe him. As they turned to the elevated stairs he asked:
"Will you come to my studio soon for music?"
"Who else will be there?"
"Nobody. Just you and I."
"No. I couldn't do that. Ask Mrs. Carroll and I'll come."
"Why should you not come alone? Are you afraid of me? That would be strange."
"Of course I'm not afraid of you. But——"
"I will not make love to you. I will only make music to you."
Pat reflected that it might well prove to be much the same thing. When she left him it was with a half promise.
Before the week was out she had gone to his studio. Within the fortnight she had been there half a dozen times. She was drawn back to him by the lure of his marvellous music—"I play for no one as I play for you," he said—and by the fascination of his strange and single-mindedpersonality. Not only did he play for her, but he made her sing, experimenting with her voice, pointing out her errors, instructing her, laughing to shame her impatiences and little mutinies, himself patient with the endurance and insight of the true artist. Ever responsive to genuine quality of whatever kind, Pat let herself become more and more involved in imagination and vagrant possibilities.
In the matter of love-making he was faithful to his word. While she was his guest he never so much as offered to kiss her, rather to her resentful disappointment, to tell the truth. But when, one November afternoon, he was walking with her to where her car was waiting, he said without preface:
"Colleen, I love you." He had taken to calling her Colleen after hearing her sing an Irish ballad of that title. Pat liked it.
She gave her veiled and sombre glance. "Do youreallylove me?"
"You know it. And you?"
"I don't know."
"I think you do."
"I think it would be very stupid of me to fall in love with you."
"Why?"
"We're not the same kind at all. Some day I shall marry and settle down and be good and happy and correct, ever after. You don't believe in marriage."
"I believe in love. And in faith to be kept between two who love. Don't you?"
"When you play to me I do. You could make me believe anything then."
"Then come back, Colleen, and let me play to you."
"No," said Pat, in self-protective panic. She could not make herself look at him.
"When are you coming again?"
"I don't know," she answered, and popped into her car as if it were sanctuary. Wayward thoughts of his flame-deep eyes, his persuasive speech, the subtle passion of his music made restless many nights for her thereafter. Edna Carroll, suspecting the progress of the affair, questioned her.
"What are you up to with Leo?"
"Just playing around."
"With fire?"
"He's got it all right, the fire. I wonder if it's the divine fire?"
"How seriously are you thinking of him, Pat?" Edna's piquant face was anxious. "You wouldn't marry him?"
"Are you afraid for me?"
"No. For him."
"You're too flattering!"
"I'm in earnest. You'd ruin him. You're too selfish and too capricious to be the mate of a genius. And he's going to be a great genius, Pat, if he keeps himself straight and undivided. You'd divide him. He's quite mad over you; told me so himself."
"How do you know I'm not mad over him?"
"God forbid! It would never last with you. Because he isn't your kind, you'd grow away from him and he'd be wretched and that would react on his music."
"And you think more of his music than of me," pouted Pat.
The artist in Edna Carroll, humble and slight in degree though it were, spoke out the true creed of all artistry which is one. "Not of him. Of his genius. Where youfind genius you have to think of it and cherish it above everything."
"Above love?" said Pat. She understood enough of this pure passion to be a little daunted.
"Above everything," reaffirmed the other.
"You needn't be afraid. He doesn't want to marry me."
"Whether he does or not, it's a dangerous fascination for both of you."
Vacillating days followed for Pat. There was a week in which she did not trust herself to see Leo. He telephoned and wrote frantically. She did not answer his letters. But one day she met him fortuitously on the street, and went to the studio with him. There he broke all bounds, poured out the fire of his heart upon her: he loved her, wanted her, needed her; she was part of his genius, without her he could never reach his full artistic stature. She loved him, too; he felt it; he knew it; he defied her to deny it, and she found that, under the compulsion of his presence, she could not. He was going to Boston on the following day, for a week. Would she come and join him, if only for a day? She could make up some tale for her family; pretend to be staying with a friend. And he would take her to a great singing-master, the greatest, a friend of his whom he wanted to hear and try her voice. Wouldn't she trust herself to him and come?
Pat denied him vehemently. But she was stirred and troubled to her own passionate depths by his stormy yet controlled passion. He had not so much as touched her hand.
In the hallway, as they went out, she turned to him and yielded herself into his arms.
"Oh,well!" she murmured, her voice fluttering in herthroat. "I don't care. I'll come. Only—don't rush me. Give me time."
They parted with the one kiss of that embrace. Instantly she had agreed, the spirit of adventure rose within her. She was recklessly jubilant.
Three days of alternating morbid self-examination and flushed excitement followed. She looked forward to the meeting not so much with conscious physical anticipation as with the sense of something vivid and bold and new coming, as relief, into the too monotonous pattern of life.
The rendezvous was arranged by letter. She was to take a late afternoon train, and he was to be at the Back Bay to meet her.
Looking from the window as the train pulled in she saw him restlessly pacing the platform on the wrong side. He had on a new overcoat which did not fit him and was incongruously glossy as compared with his untidy hair and rumpled soft hat. As his coat slumped open, she was conscious of an unpressed suit underneath. Probably greasy! At the moment he dropped one of the brand new gloves in his hand—she could not recall ever having seen him wear gloves—and bent awkwardly to recover it. His head protruded; his collar, truant from its retaining rear button, hunched mussily up, and she looked down with a dismal revulsion of the flesh, upon an expanse of sallow, shaven neck.
Unbidden, vividly intrusive, there rose to the eyes of her quickening imagination the image of Cary Scott, always impeccable of dress and carriage, hard-knit of frame, exhaling the atmosphere of smooth skin and hard muscle. In fancy she breathed the very aroma of him, clean, tingling, masculine, and felt again the imperative claim of his arms.
From the groping figure below her, glamour fell like a decaying garment. She forgot the genius, the inner fire; beheld only the outer shell, uncouth, pulpy, nauseous to her senses.
With cheeks afire and chin high, she walked up the aisle, turned into the ladies' room and found safe refuge there, until the train moved on. At the South Station she took the next train back to New York. The image of Cary Scott bore her unsolicited company. She went straight to Edna Carroll with the story. Edna was alarmed, relieved, puzzled.
"But, after going so far, why—why—why?" she demanded.
In response Pat delivered one of those final and damning sentences upon man which women express only to women:
"When I saw him that way I knew that his socks would be dirty."
"I'm off of men," confidently wrote Pat in her diary. "There's nothing to it for me. From now on I'm going to be so nice and careful and mind-your-steppy that the place won't know me. All the old cats in Dorrisdale will purr when I come around. I think I shall take up slumming. Anyway, no more flutters for little Pat. I've reformed."
In proof of which she comported herself with great circumspection for a space of several months, to the surprise of all and the discomfiture of sundry amatory youths of her circle. The word went about that Pat Fentriss was slowing up. While as much fun as ever in a crowd, she was less approachable in a corner. Pat, her peculiar radiance deepening and ripening, was content with the crowd. Her quickening intelligence was impatient of the callowness and shallowness of her contemporaries among the youth of the suburb.
To fill her time a new and purely unselfish interest had come into her life; not so showy as the slumming which she had considered, but of far more practical beneficence. At the time of T. Jameson James's accident she had devoted herself with centred enthusiasm to the sufferer and his household. Later as the tragedy became a commonplace to her mind, she drifted wide of it. It was natural to the shallow fervours and shifting interests of her youth that she should unconsciously drop out of mind that silent and shadowed personality in the big house across the town. When she did think of it, temporary self-reproach would send her there two or three times ina week. But there seemed to be "nothing that she could do"; and she would drop away again.
It was an episode of one of these visits that changed her attitude. On her arrival Dee had told her that Jim was probably asleep; she could creep up softly and see; the attendant who pushed the wheeled-chair was out. Tiptoeing to the open door Pat peered in at the crack. T. Jameson James lay very stiff and still on the window divan, apparently sleeping. Pat was just about to turn away with a sense of relief when she noticed the hand nearest her. It was so tightly clenched that the flesh around the nails was white. His head turned quite gradually, bringing the contour of the face into view. She saw that the eyes were closed, but in the corners two drops of water gathered and grew, slowly, slowly, as if wrung from the very core of a soul's repressed agony. The drops broke, darted, trickled down like rain along a windowpane. A slight shudder lifted his breast. Then he was immobile again.
Pat crept away until she reached the refuge of the lower floor. She ran into the garden, kept on running to the far extent of the grounds, flung herself down and so lay. She did not collapse; she did not cry. But presently—unpoetic and anti-climactic though it be to record plain facts—the stress of sudden emotion on top of a hearty luncheon had its logical effect. Pat was violently sick.
As soon as she recovered breath and poise, she returned to the house with a plan in mind, stamped noisily upstairs and entered the sick room.
"Hello, Jimmie-jams!"
"Hello, Pat." His face lighted up a little; she was miserably conscious that he had always welcomed her with a smile.
"How are you feeling?"
"All right." This was his invariable formula.
"Don't lie to me!" She closed the door, lowered the window, and turned upon him. "Jimmie!"
"Well?"
"Swear!"
"All right. I swear. What's the secret?"
"Not that kind of swear. Cuss. Rip it out. Blast the ceiling off the roof. Let yourself go."
He peered into her face. It was solemn, intent. "I don't know what——" he began. Then he broke off and let himself go. Such virulent, vitriolic, blazing, throbbing profanity Pat had never dreamt of. It comprehended the known universe and covered the history of the cosmos, past, present, and future. When he had finished and lay back exhausted, she enquired:
"Feel better, don't you?"
"Yes. How did you know?"
"I saw you a few minutes ago when your eyes were holding in. But you couldn't help—there was——" She touched her own eyelids.
"You're a —— liar, Pat!" exploded the correct and punctilious T. Jameson James.
"That's right. Go to it if you haven't got it all out," approved Pat.
"No; I'm through. Lord, that did me good!"
"Cussing to yourself is no good. You've got to have somebody to listen. Ever let anyone hear you really loosen up before?"
"No. I've always been too—too"—he grinned—"hellish dignified."
"Well, you send for me when you need an audience."
From that time a bond of special sympathy and fellowship was established between the life so disastrouslywrecked and the life so triumphantly burgeoning. Every morning after breakfast Pat called him on the phone and every noon she came over for an hour's chat, until Dee, grateful beyond her self-contained power to express, threatened to sue her sister for alienation of her husband's affections.
Nothing, of however much appeal to Pat, was permitted to interfere with this regimen. Through this it was that she had her quarrel with Monty Standish.
After three years of hard-working athletic obscurity, Standish had suddenly blossomed out into flaming football prominence. His picture appeared in the sporting pages of the metropolitan dailies; his condition was the subject of commentary in the papers, as serious as that accorded to an ailing king. He was of a gallant and alluring type, a bonny lad, handsome, spirited, good-humoured, well-mannered, sluggish of mind as he was alert of body, but with a magnetism almost as imperative as Pat's own. He had quite withheld his homage from her, ostentatiously refusing to compete in the circle of her adorers, so she was the more surprised and gratified when he asked her to join his sister's party for the big game. It cost her a real pang to decline, but when he hotly resented her refusal and demanded an explanation—he was rather spoiled by all the local adulation and newspaper notoriety which were the guerdon of his prowess—Pat declined to be catechised. There was a scene, angry on his part, scornful on hers, and he departed, darkly indicating that if Princeton lost the game on his side of the line the true responsibility for the catastrophe would rest upon her contemptuous shoulders.
How T. Jameson James got wind of the controversy she never knew, but on the day of the game he called her to account.
"Why didn't you go down to Princeton?"
"Didn't want to," she said airily.
"Monty Standish asked you, didn't he?"
"He said something about it."
"They say he's the greatest end we've had for ten years." James was a Princeton alumnus. "He's a good-looking youngster, Pat."
The girl flushed and her eyes shone. "He's a winner to look at," she agreed.
"They tell me you've added him to your collection."
"That's all guff," replied the inelegant Pat.
"Is it? The point is that you wouldn't go because you felt you had to come here. Isn't that so?"
"I didn't want to go, anyway," lied Pat gallantly. "I'm worn with football twice a week."
"Well, you've got to stop spoiling me by coming here every day. It's bad for me; the doctor says so. I won't have it."
"Are you going to close the house to me?" retorted Pat saucily. "You'll have to hire a guard. Go on, swear, Jimmie."
"Oh, you go to the devil!" said the invalid, laughing. "If Princeton loses to-day——"
But Princeton won and Pat was saved from the undying remorse which should (but probably would not) have consumed her spirit had Standish "fallen down" and involved his team in defeat.
He came back the following week-end, a hero of the first calibre, and undertook to ignore Pat at the Saturday dance at which he was unofficial guest of honour. It would have been a more successful attempt if his eyes had not constantly strayed from whatever partner he was with, to follow Pat's pliant and swaying form in the arms of some happier man. On the morrow his stern resolution,already weakened, was totally melted by a talk which he had with T. Jameson James, who had sent for him ostensibly to ask about the game.
For a front-page newspaper hero he was amazingly humble when he called up Pat to ask if he might come and see her. Pat, her heart swelling with pride and not without a flutter of other emotions, said that he might if he would apologise properly. Mr. Standish did apologise properly and handsomely, and, by the time the apology was concluded, Pat was mildly astonished at finding herself in his arms being fervently kissed and returning the kisses with no less fervour. She was further surprised to find, when he bade her good-night, that she was engaged to him.
But the really astounding feature of the whole matter came when she awoke the next morning to a sense of the prevailing luminosity of the world and the conviction that she was thrillingly in love. She had thought that she was through with all that. For a long time, anyway.