Dick was in favor of sticking it out. He thought Lewis madder, if anything, than Lewis thought him, which had the advantage of evening things up between them.... And then, halfway down the hill, Dick was struck by an idea. Was Lewis himself in love with Petra? Could anything be more probable? Petra was utterly beautiful. Propinquity too, and all that!... But why hadn’t Clare seen this possibility? Suppose she had seen it—. Was that the reason why she had been so insistent on Dick’s telling Lewis the whole situation? So that Lewis would be forewarned? But why would not Clare consider marriage between Petra and Doctor Pryne a very good marriage indeed? Clare wanted the very best for Petra, Dick never doubted that. Did Clare think, perhaps, that Petra could never be happy without a great deal of money? Well, Petra probably couldn’t, and Dick, not Lewis, had the money. Petra was mad about clothes, lovely clothes. She dressed more interestingly than any girl he knew. Pretty big of Clare, with her own indifference to luxury and clothes, to considerPetra’s different temperament, and have such long, wise thoughts for the girl’s future.
But Lewis was such a grand person! Quite aside from his fame, his personality was head and shoulders above any other man Dick knew,—even Lowell Farwell’s. Oughtn’t that personality to make up for Lewis’ comparative poverty, even to Petra’s rather shallow young view? Dick, in all humility, should think that it would and that in a choice between them any girl would choose Lewis, not himself.... But Clare understood Petra better, it seemed. It was clever of her not to have told him that Lewis might be his rival for Petra, but instead to send them off down here together, where Dick could find it out for himself. But put yourself in Lewis’ place. If you were in love with a girl, and a friend came to you and told you he wasnotin love with this same girl but wanted to marry her all the same,—how would you feel? Pretty furious! Just the way Lewis had acted! Dick wondered that Clare hadn’t had as much imagination for Lewis’ feelings, as she had had for Dick’s own, and Petra’s. Well, Clare loved him and Petra; and Lewis, after all, was only a respected acquaintance. That explained it. But it was tough on Lewis, all the same.
As they reached and crossed the wide trail toward Jordan Pond, Dick felt a new emotion coming to life and ascending in his heart—like a skyrocket. Elation! To win Petra from a fellow like Lewis! To imagine Petra desired—and by such a man—had had the effect of making her suddenly more desirable to himself. Hewould tell this phenomenon to Clare, when he got back, quite frankly. You could tell Clare anything. Her detachment was an exquisite, a consoling thing. If he told her that Petra, he felt, might in time come to take Clare’s own place with him, Clare would even then keep her dear, generous detachment. But of course, Dick could never have any such nonsense as that to tell Clare. No matter how fond he ever became of his beautiful wife, Clare would remain as long as he lived, his—his most beloved.
Abruptly, Lewis interrupted these forecastings. “See here, Dick, I’m sorry I got so hot. But let’s make a bargain. Don’t you mention Green Doors again or anybody in it as long as we are together on this holiday, and I’ll go back now and play golf with you instead of hiking. It’s what you want, I know, and you were merely being altruistic.... The idea of going on walking, anyway, doesn’t appeal to me.”
“Really?”
“Really! We can swing around to Asticou Inn and go back for our clubs, can’t we?”
They could and they did. But Dick did not know what Clare would think of the bargain he had struck with Lewis. She had expected the two to talk endlessly, to hash everything over.... Or what had she expected after all? Dick was no longer so certain. Well, he had only to get back to Clare, look in her candid, sweet eyes, to lose this sudden new sense of confusion about what her motives in getting him to confide in Lewis might be.She could and would explain to Dick’s complete enlightenment and satisfaction. She always did.
That evening Dick left Lewis reading Agatha Christie’s last detective novel by an open fire and walked into Northeast Harbor alone for their mail. If Clare had written him yesterday, as she had half promised to do, the letter would come to-night. All through the long hours on the misty golf course and ever since, this expectation of a letter coming to-night had been a steady undertow to all that went on in Dick’s mind. The entire day had been for him nothing in the world but a straight path to the letter window of Northeast Harbor’s little post office. The mail was sorted by eight-thirty, he knew, and sometimes a trifle earlier. But, taking hold on all the strength of character he possessed, Dick had determined not to arrive at that window of dreams one minute before the certain time of half-past eight. He knew how painful it would be to stand around waiting, watching the mail being sorted and not absolutely certain of his letter. Now, as he came down the village street through the drizzling fog, he saw that the cars parked near the post office were starting up their engines and that people with letters and papers in their hands were coming from the post-office door. And he walked faster. Whether the thick thugging tom-tom his heart had set up was delight or anguish, he did not consider.
The window gained, and Dick’s turn in the writingqueue at last arrived, he snatched the little bundle of letters from the smiling postmistress with a muttered, blind “good evening” and turned with it to the counter. His fingers, shuffling the letters through as he looked for Clare’s hand, were shaking. There were half a dozen letters for Doctor Pryne readdressed in Petra’s script. But there was nothing for himself. Nothing that counted. Petra had written him, it seemed. A letter in a fat envelope. But he was so dulled by disappointment that he hardly bothered to wonder why she had written or what.
He stuffed the whole bunch into his pocket and returned to the delivery window. “Are you sure there’s nothing else for Richard Wilder?” he asked. It was a childish act, he knew, but he could not seem to help himself. Obligingly, the, to Dick, faceless automaton at that fateful window turned back to the letter boxes. She even thrust a hand up into the Wilders’ now grimly empty pigeonhole, pretending to make certain of what was already a certainty. The look on the man’s face asking the unreasonable question made the gesture, empty as it was, a human necessity. She came back to her window. “Nothingnow.” The young woman spoke tentatively, averting kindly eyes. “In the morning’s mail perhaps.”
Out in the fog again Dick had to laugh at himself. Why did he need a letter so? They trusted each other, he and Clare. What did passionate friendship mean if not trust and peace, even in separation! Besides, it was scarcely sixty hours since they had parted. And he wouldsee her in thirty-six more. Lewis and he had decided to cut their holiday short and return to-morrow, after all. They gave the weather as their excuse to each other, but not to the Langleys. It was agreed that the doctor to-night was to receive an important letter which made their dashing off necessary. The fact was that ever since Dick had begun to suspect Lewis’ feeling for Petra, a constraint had settled between them which made their close companionship just now more of a strain than a relaxation. So day after to-morrow Dick would be out at Green Doors again. It was unworthy of Clare’s beautiful friendship that he should feel actual written words from her, which he could keep in his pocket and touch, a necessity to his sense of assurance of that friendship. It was unworthy and faithless in him. But letters were uncanny things!Wantingone so terribly was uncanny too....
Lewis glanced up at Dick welcomingly as he came in. The detective story had returned him to a healthy, intellectual mood. He was accustomed to find this type of reading as effective as a good game of contract or chess for keeping one sensible.
“This Christie is O.K., Dick,” he said. “You must read it yourself. It’s as good as anything she has done. I’ll be through in half an hour or so and you can have it.”
“Good! I picked up a new Dorothy Sayers as I came along, at Blaine’s drug store. You can have that to finish the night with. Here’s your mail.”
Dick had dropped the little pile of letters onto the armof Lewis’ chair, and pulling another chair up to the hearth, he sprawled himself into it, eyes moodily on the fire.
Petra’s fat letter to Dick was on the top of the pile. In his disappointment at not hearing from Clare, Dick had completely forgotten he had any letter at all. Lewis picked it up, turned it around in his fingers, looked at Dick. But Dick was bent forward, poking the fire. He jumped when Lewis spoke.
“This seems to be yours.”
“Oh, sure! I forgot it. Toss it across, will you. It’s a fat one. Funny!”
Putting down the tongs and leaning back in his chair, Dick tore the flap open with his thumb, and twisting around to get a better light on the sheets, began lazily reading Petra’s long letter. Lewis made no pretense of returning to his detective story or of looking over his own mail. Petra’s handwriting on the envelopes in his little pile that remained stared up at him ironically. This was as much as he had of her, or ever would have, he felt. Her hand readdressing somebody else’s letter to him. Petra’s handwriting was stirring—and Lewis believed it would be stirring to him even if he did not know and love and desire Petra as he did. The characters were consistently round, dear, black and perfectly spaced. The writer of such a script was scrupulous—exquisitely scrupulous—not to waste one instant of the recipient’s time or energy. It was like Petra’s own perfect manners, visible in black and white. But how arid to be sitting here,studying and appreciating the nuances of Petra’s agreeable manners, while Dick was reading her heart; for Dick had lost his indifferent, lounging attitude when he began to read Petra’s long letter, and his profile—all that Lewis could see of his face—was tense and excited.
Lewis got up hastily, leaving his letters where they were on the arm of the chair, and went out onto the piazza. The fog sucked up to him, enveloped him. He coughed, choked sharply. These Mount Desert fogs were like no others in the world, he thought, and for once, it occurred to him that he ought to possess himself of an automatic cigarette lighter: you couldn’t strike a match successfully out here in this insidious fog. But cigarette or not, he would not return to the warm fire-cheered room until Dick had done with that letter and put it away out of sight.
What would Dick do with the sheets when he had finished them, anyway? Lewis visualized him tossing them casually into the fire. Then he visualized himself putting his own bare hand into the fire and pulling them out! “Am I crazy?” he wondered. “What is there in her mere handwriting that stirs me more than the sight of Petra herself? It is the essence of her personality—as the voice is—only visible.” If Petra should ever write himself a letter—if such a day ever came—Lewis felt now that her handwriting on the envelope would produce as profound a feeling in him as would her first kiss. He coughed again. The fog hated him. Then Dick came to the door, shouting “Lewis! Oh, Lewis!”
“Oh! But I couldn’t see whether you were there or not, Lewis! This heathenish fog! But come along in, do. I’ve got to talk to you. Really!”
And back in the room, over by the fire, the men stood facing each other across Petra’s letter. For Dick had not tossed it in the fire. That had been only a daydream of Lewis’ tired, driven mind. The letter lay on a little table, under Dick’s palms, as he stood leaning on the table, looking down at it.
“See here,” he was saying, “I promised to lay off our morning’s discussion—Clare—Green Doors—all that. But something has happened.... This letter ... Petra has written.... Amazing.... It’s quite moving ... Sweet.... And I want you to read it. It may open your eyes to something. It has mine. You may thank me. What I didn’t get around to tell you this morning was that I had already done it—proposed to Petra. She turned me down but I wasn’t sure she meant it. Clare was sure she didn’t mean it. Anyway, I meant to try again when I got back. But now I see Clare was wrong. Petra did mean it. Will you read this?” Dick’s face was glowing with the sheer generosity of the thing he was doing. “Will you read it?” he asked again, for Lewis was looking at him strangely—blankly.
“Would Petra mind?” Lewis asked.
“That can’t matter. She wouldn’t mind if she really knew you. And I owe it to you—after this morning. If we were two men in a novel, old boy, I wouldn’t give it to you, and you wouldn’t know right up to the last chapterthat your girl is yours for the asking. But this is life and we’ll let the suspense of the situation go by the boards. Read and see what a darned fool I’ve been.”
Lews took the letter. The sheets were steady in his strong, long fingers. Dick lounged back in the chair and watched his friend with growing uneasiness; for no light dawned in Lewis’ serious dark face as he read. That face seemed, indeed, under Dick’s very eyes, to grow thin and grim with controlled emotion of a sort totally other than Dick had expected.
It was the seventeenth of October. It was also Petra’s birthday; and Lewis had relaxed in his practice of turning down all Mrs. Lowell Farwell’s invitations and was now driving out to Green Doors to a dinner party given in honor of the birthday. Himself, Dick and the Allens were to be the only guests. Neil McCloud had been invited but was, Lewis understood, not coming. Lewis suspected that Neil’s refusal had been the cause of Petra’s manner to-day—not a birthday manner exactly. She had moved about at her work in a spirit of recollection, but a strained, anxious recollection which no doubt she thought went unnoticed by her employer. Lewis had first been struck by it when he asked her who was coming to her party to-night, and her answer had been that Neil was not. He had laughed and said, “But it was a list of acceptances I wanted—not refusals.” She had lifted her eyes to his, at that,—she was sitting at her desk and he had stopped by it as he passed through to his own office to say good morning—and they had been blank with a kind of subdued misery. But she hadanswered, “Clare tells me that you are coming, Doctor Pryne. The Allens. Dick. It is nice ofyouto have accepted.”
“Don’t say that. I am looking forward to it very much. My dear, will you accept this present? I’ve been days finding it, and if you don’t like it I shall be terribly disconcerted.”
It was the detail from the Fra Angelico picture: angels dancing, and saints embracing in a flower-studded meadow. A very good print, framed in silver. Lewis had brought the cumbersome thing under his arm, done up in brown paper, just as it had been sent to him from the store. Lewis did not hope, of course, that Petra would ever know why he had hit upon this particular present. It seemed inappropriate, perhaps, for a twenty-year-old girl’s birthday present. But to Lewis it meant something they had once experienced together—a meeting of souls where language and explanations are no longer necessary, where all is unselfconscious joy, camaraderie and fluent communication between the saints in Paradise. That first sight of the June meadow behind Clare’s guest house, which Lewis had likened to this picture—and thought of Petra and himself as saints, without their crowns to be sure, and their presence there in the paradisiacal meadow purest accident—had remained all summer a poignant memory. He hoped that Petra would keep this picture all her life, wherever she lived, and that even not understanding anything of what it meant to him in the giving, she would remember him now and then inlooking at it; and thus his memory would stay alive for her because of something which stood to him for their own one brief real meeting and recognition. Let that same quality of recognition never come again on this earth,—still it might yet come in heaven. Perhaps it only needed their crowns for the consummation of its promise.
An early frost had followed the unprecedentedly hot summer, and the trees all along the state highway to Meadowbrook had been stripped during the past few days of their flaming foliage. The fields and meadows stretched away brown and purple, barren too. But the clouds, like levitated mountain ranges, hung above the western horizon, blazing with autumn colors, red, gold, purple, buff. The day had had an Indian summer warmth over it and to-night the sky promised to be divinely clear with a full moon.
Lewis had sent Petra home from the office when she returned from her lunch. “Somehow you don’t look like a party to-day,” he had said. “Lie out in the sun on a blanket somewhere. It’s warm enough. Get rested. This has been a heavy week.” Miss Frazier was away on the vacation she had insisted on putting off until the book was actually in print and Petra really had been working up to the full capacity of her strength and ability.
If Lewis had not packed Petra off early, however, she would be beside him now in his rushing car, sharing the beauty of those levitated cloud-mountains along with him, and the bare tracery of tree branches against themellowed fields. He had had a selfish impulse to keep her late just to make this drive together inevitable. And he would have succumbed to his selfishness, had he not a better plan. Neil was not to be there to-night. Whether Dick was absolutely out of the running or not Lewis did not actually know. But Lewis had reached his limit of passive endurance. He had accepted the invitation because in the very act of reading Clare’s note a few days ago, tending it, he had made up his mind that he would go with Petra by moonlight to the edge of that meadow (October now, not June, but in the moonlight it would still be Paradise) and tell her how he wanted her. If she was in love with Neil—and he knew, of course, that she was—it did not matter. He wanted Petra at last even if she came to him with a broken heart. It had taken Lewis weeks to reach this depth of humility. But now it was reached. He had struck bottom in his longing and suffering. If Petra in youth’s scorn of compromises said that she had nothing she could give him, let it be so. At least, he would have reached for his star. But if he did not touch the sky to-night, did not draw it down to him, he must find Petra another job at once. It was impossible to have her in his office, feeling as he felt, longer.
At its very least, Lewis’ proposal would have the advantage of making Petra see the necessity for her not going on at his office. She would understand and not be wounded. And he would find her something even better. In spite of the “depression” and Petra’s lack of business experience, he promised himself—and he wouldpromise her—that she should not be the loser. In fact, all Lewis honestly hoped of this onrushing moonlight night was for an understanding between himself and Petra. A bitter understanding on his side—since she was going to tell him that she could not possibly marry him without loving him—but on hers illuminating. She would not go on, after to-night, so dangerously unconscious of the power of her young beauty and loveliness.
Remembering her letter to Dick two months ago down at Northeast—and when had Lewis forgotten it for a single hour!—he trusted Petra’s ability to face things squarely, once they were given her to face. She had a clear, honest mind. She had been clear and honest with Dick. Lewis would now, to-night, by moonlight, on the edge of the Paradise meadow, be equally clear and honest with her.
The car reached sixty-nine on the clear-ahead highway, and the lines of Petra’s brave letter streaked through Lewis’ mind with almost a like speed. He knew it by heart from the one reading—that brave, dear letter to another man:
Dear Dick:I am deeply sorry about the way I treated you last night. I have gotten up before dawn, Dick, to tell you how miserably sorry I am. Or I suppose it is really dawn, for all the east is red and purple. I am writing on Father’s desk in the library. Everybody is asleep. But I haven’t slept. I have been sitting up in bed all night, thinking of my cruelty to you. You see, this is the wayit was, Dick. When you kissed me like that, it was really just as if somebody passing me in the street had kissed me. I mean it was as unexpected as that. My only feeling was terror. That is why I struck out like that—just as you would in the dark, if something strange were striking at you. You’d strike back. Besides, no one has ever kissed me before. Not like that, I mean. No one has ever been in love with me before. And you see, anyway, I have thought right along—never thought anything else—that you came to Green Doors on Clare’s account. It was Clare you always talked to. I didn’t know you even looked at me. This may seem strange to you, Dick. Now I see that thinking that was pretty stupid. You have been shy with me—just as oneistoward somebody one really loves. Clare has explained it. She came out on the terrace right after you went. I was crying. She found out what was the matter. And she showed me how cruel and stupid I had been. I know now that it was a great honor you did me in asking me to marry you, Dick. To love somebody like that and tell them so and have them do what I did—strike out at you like a serpent—must have been too terrible. The blow on your face was nothing to the blow on your heart, I know. But now I am cool and all night I have been thinking. It isn’t just because Clare says so but now Ifeel myselfhow I owe you a deep apology. And I am going to tell you why, even if I hadn’t hated your kissing me the way you did, I would still havesaidthe same thing, that I couldn’t feel toward you as you do toward me. You asked me, you know, if there was anybody else. If I was engaged. I told you no. Well, that was true. Of course I am not engaged. But now I am going to tell you something to prove how sorry I am I treated you as I did last night and to show you how I trust you—andhow fond I am of you really, now that I see things about you and Clare in a truer light than I have been seeing them. It is this, Dick. I am not engaged, and I am not likely to be. But I love some one terribly. I love him the way you love me, I guess. But he doesn’t love me any more than I love you. So that makes things even between us, Dick, doesn’t it? Don’t tell Clare this, of course. Or any one. I have told you to even things up, and to make you see that if I have hurt your pride terribly, and been cruel to you, the same thing has been done to me. All I said to Clare last night was that I should write to you and apologize and beg you to go on being friends and not stop coming to Green Doors. Clare and Father will miss you, Dick, if you stay away, and believe it or not, I think I shall too. I don’t know how I ever behaved so brutally as I did last night, but I am always making mistakes and doing terrible things. Please burn this letter.Affectionately—truly—Petra.
Dear Dick:
I am deeply sorry about the way I treated you last night. I have gotten up before dawn, Dick, to tell you how miserably sorry I am. Or I suppose it is really dawn, for all the east is red and purple. I am writing on Father’s desk in the library. Everybody is asleep. But I haven’t slept. I have been sitting up in bed all night, thinking of my cruelty to you. You see, this is the wayit was, Dick. When you kissed me like that, it was really just as if somebody passing me in the street had kissed me. I mean it was as unexpected as that. My only feeling was terror. That is why I struck out like that—just as you would in the dark, if something strange were striking at you. You’d strike back. Besides, no one has ever kissed me before. Not like that, I mean. No one has ever been in love with me before. And you see, anyway, I have thought right along—never thought anything else—that you came to Green Doors on Clare’s account. It was Clare you always talked to. I didn’t know you even looked at me. This may seem strange to you, Dick. Now I see that thinking that was pretty stupid. You have been shy with me—just as oneistoward somebody one really loves. Clare has explained it. She came out on the terrace right after you went. I was crying. She found out what was the matter. And she showed me how cruel and stupid I had been. I know now that it was a great honor you did me in asking me to marry you, Dick. To love somebody like that and tell them so and have them do what I did—strike out at you like a serpent—must have been too terrible. The blow on your face was nothing to the blow on your heart, I know. But now I am cool and all night I have been thinking. It isn’t just because Clare says so but now Ifeel myselfhow I owe you a deep apology. And I am going to tell you why, even if I hadn’t hated your kissing me the way you did, I would still havesaidthe same thing, that I couldn’t feel toward you as you do toward me. You asked me, you know, if there was anybody else. If I was engaged. I told you no. Well, that was true. Of course I am not engaged. But now I am going to tell you something to prove how sorry I am I treated you as I did last night and to show you how I trust you—andhow fond I am of you really, now that I see things about you and Clare in a truer light than I have been seeing them. It is this, Dick. I am not engaged, and I am not likely to be. But I love some one terribly. I love him the way you love me, I guess. But he doesn’t love me any more than I love you. So that makes things even between us, Dick, doesn’t it? Don’t tell Clare this, of course. Or any one. I have told you to even things up, and to make you see that if I have hurt your pride terribly, and been cruel to you, the same thing has been done to me. All I said to Clare last night was that I should write to you and apologize and beg you to go on being friends and not stop coming to Green Doors. Clare and Father will miss you, Dick, if you stay away, and believe it or not, I think I shall too. I don’t know how I ever behaved so brutally as I did last night, but I am always making mistakes and doing terrible things. Please burn this letter.
Affectionately—truly—Petra.
When Lewis looked up from that letter, Dick had said quickly, “It isn’t McCloud, Lewis! Don’t think it for a minute. Anybody can see howhefeels about Petra. She could have him if she wanted him. It’s written all over him. It’s you she means, Lewis. You. Nobody else.”
Lewis had said, “Damn you, Dick!” and then no more. He had held Dick to their bargain from that minute, not to discuss Petra or anybody at Green Doors ever again. He had seen to it that Dick did burn the letter as Petra had asked. And as it charred and went up in a hot blaze between the logs, Lewis had not reached his hand to rescue it. He had clenched his hands instead,while his heart burned to a white heat and then withered into charred nothingness with the letter. In that minute Lewis had hated Dick almost as much as Clare. What had they tried to do, between them, to this poor baffled child! Of course it was Neil she meant. Poor Petra! And of course Neil did want her every bit as much as she wanted him. But there was the man’s living faith—the faith neither Clare nor Dick could comprehend as a reality—which stood between him and Petra, forbidding them to each other.
Only now, after weeks of thinking and watching, had Lewis come to think that it would be best for both Neil and Petra if Petra could bring herself to accept half a loaf from life, and marry himself, if she could care for him even a little. For she was created and designed for giving—for motherhood, wifehood. And Lewis loved her with such utter abandonment! Mightn’t the strength and truth of his love ultimately force a response almost in kind?
Lewis had little hope that this was even a possibility. But he had said his prayer—Neil’s prayer, rather—the only one Lewis had ever learned to pray. He was saying it now, as he drew more slowly into Meadowbrook’s environs. His nephews were expecting a romp with Lewis to-night before their supper. Then he would be changing into evening clothes at the Allens’, for Petra’s dinner, and would return there to sleep.
“Yes,” he assured himself, driving slowly and more slowly, “I shall lose her forever to-night—or gain thechance of beginning to win her.” He had decided to tell her that he had read her letter to Dick down at Northeast and how innocent Dick had been in letting him.
“Dick, you see,” Lewis would say to Petra, “simply thought he was fixing things up between you and me without making us wait for the last chapter! He thought in all honesty it was I, not Neil, you meant in that letter. Of course, I knew better.... But Petra, it isn’t broken hearts that make for ruin and unhappiness in lives. Not ultimately, anyway. It is broken faiths. Neil stayed away to-night—don’t you suppose—because of something dearer to him than mere happiness. Something more blessed than happiness.” That was part of what Lewis would say to her. And then, if they kissed—if she let him kiss her there to-night on the edge of the Paradise meadow—
Well! Lewis’ hope, though small, pierced his heart like a sword.
The dinner was over—a medley of flowers and fruit, shining candles, extravagantly imaginative food (Clare was no gourmand but her cook was a prize), much banter and some conversation. The cake had crowned it all. It was a perfectly recognizable model, two feet high or so, of the building where Lewis had his offices, and Petra herself, done in violet-colored gumdrops, was represented on the roof, sitting on a typewriter and surrounded by twenty minute candelabras each holding five candles. It was obvious that Dick had conspired with the cook. Every one was enchanted, but Petra most of all. “What a child she is!” Lewis had thought, with a variety of pang he had never before experienced concerning this girl. “A baby, really!” A thousand candelabra of birthday candles might have gone to the shining of her eyes, and her cheeks were rosy. She clapped her hands like a child in a fairy tale ... at least, that is something children outside of fairy tales seem not to do, clap their hands when they are suddenly delighted.
But now they had left the dining room and come through the great hall to a small drawing-room at one side of the street door. Lewis and his hostess, at any rate, were there, sitting together on a sofa with ends curved like a lyre, facing the wide arched doorway into the hall, their backs to open French doors flooded with moonlight. Moonlight, dim lamplight, a fire burning on a white-tiled hearth, roses in silver vases—that was Clare’s little drawing-room to-night. Cynthia and Farwell had drifted through the room with their cigarettes and out the French door to the moonlit road. Farwell called back as they went, “This is delicious, Clare! Your road is like a silver river to-night. You and Doctor Pryne must come.”
But Clare by a glance had held Lewis where he was. She said to him in a low voice, “I’d rather watch Petra! Isn’t she too delightful to-night! This is the way I have dreamed her. If only all days were birthdays!”
Harry Allen had gravitated to the piano up on the dais at the side of the great hall, and now he was drumming out jazz to make your heart jump, while Petra and Dick danced. They did not confine themselves to one small space on the floor in the usual way, but circled the whole hall freely. At dinner Lewis had noticed how the relationship of these two had changed since he had first seen them together, that fateful Saturday in June. Then Dick had only been aware of Petra, it seemed, as an excrescence on Clare’s life. Now they were comrades. You saw it in the way they looked at each other, laughedat each other, teased each other. In fact, they counted with each other every minute. This was a development for which Lewis was totally unprepared; for Dick had kept his promise, and since the fiasco of his and Lewis’ holiday at Northeast Harbor had never so much as mentioned Petra the few times they had met. So Lewis had rather taken it for granted that Petra’s naïve and illusioned letter had destroyed any possibility of an honest relation between them. From what ground had the present happy intimacy evolved? Lewis could not guess. When the cake had been brought in and set on the cleared table in front of Petra and she had clapped her hands, Dick who was beside her had kissed her cheek. It was a brotherly caress, hearty and genuine. But Lewis’ heart had stood still. Was this to be the answer? Why not! How unconscionably unimaginative and stupid he had been!
Lewis and Clare were in a position to see the dancers during much of their way around the great hall. But Dick and Petra seemed not aware of the little drawing-room and their audience there. They might have been dancing out under the moon alone, so unconscious they appeared of anybody’s eyes or attention. Dick held Petra as if she were a delightful glass doll that might break. And Petra gave the impression of glass. Brittle. Lovely. Her birthday gown made Lewis think of spun glass, it was so stiff and fragile. Even her fantastically high-heeled slippers seemed glassy. And her forehead, leaning against Dick’s bowed-down forehead in the latestabsurd mode of the dance, added the last aspect of brittle fragility to what they were doing.
“Petra and Dick are great friends now,” Clare said suddenly. “You can imagine, Doctor Pryne, how that gratifies me.”
“Yes?” he said. “Yes. It’s very nice.” Lewis did not mind the idiotic sound of his own words. Clare simply did not count enough for him to listen to her. She was less than nothing to his consciousness, with Petra out there in Dick Wilder’s arms, turning on fantastic spun-glass heels to Harry’s intrepid, persistent, absolutely compelling jazz.
Clare was all too aware of Lewis’ indifference. Nothing to-night had gone quite as she had planned it. If she were honest with herself, she would have known that the imperfection of the way the birthday party was going really consisted in its perfection. The object of the party, Petra, had somehow, strangely, unbelievably, taken the center of the stage and held it. Even for her father she had held it. Several times, when Clare had said something directly to Lowell down the table, he had been slow to turn his eyes from his daughter. And once he had not turned them at all—merely answered his wife absently, while he continued to smile at some silly byplay between Dick and Petra. As for Doctor Lewis Pryne—who sat at her right during dinner—his manners were impeccable but his attention, she had known perfectly well, was for Petra. Even when he was not looking at the girl—and to be fair, he scarcelylooked at her at all—he heard every silly, childish thing she said, every laugh,—heard them through the things Clare was saying to him. This had never happened to Clare before. To sit at her own table and have all the attention sweep over her and away from her toward another. This was something she had never imagined or planned! It filled her with a sort of wild unbelief in its reality. It was dreamlike. Almost nightmarish.
She said now to Lewis, “Aren’t they precious. Sweet! And everything before them! Petra seems to have had enough of young Neil, or he of her. Anyway, he seldom comes here now. But it was none of my doing. I was ready to stand back of him, in spite of my cherished hope that Dick might find his happiness in Petra. Dick told you of that hope, at Northeast. So you know how I have planned and dreamed for both those children, Petra and Dick. We—you and I, Doctor, between us,—seem to have succeeded in giving Petra her chance at life. Your job, anyway, has given her self-respect, self-confidence. And I—well, Doctor Pryne, you know because you are wise—pray Dick never knows—it has not been too easy for me to give her Dick. For one thing, honestly, I am not sure she is big enough for him. I tremble at my daring in taking her ultimate development so for granted.—Tell me—I need you to tell me, Doctor—say that in your judgment I have not been wrong. If I thought what I have done wasn’t to mean Dick’s happiness,—well, I should blame myself eternally. If in trying to mend his life I have complicated it—that is aterrible thought. For you know—he told you—how he feels about me. Through no fault of mine. I saw it happening and I warned him. But I thought if only he could begin to care for Petra a little, in the end—in the end—well—he might come to care for me less. He did tell you?”
Lewis sighed. Little he cared whether she heard the sigh. And she did hear it. He said, “If you were actually giving Dick to Petra so that he might get over his young, romantic infatuation for you, it would, of course, be calamitous, Mrs. Farwell. Calamitous for them both. Ghastly. But that won’t be the way of it. If they do marry, it will be because they have fallen healthily in love. You—and I—we are out of it. Clean out of it. Nothing to worry us.”
“You think Dick no longer cares for me, Doctor Pryne?” Her voice was sharper than she meant it to be.
Lewis did not reply. His hostess or not, she was abominable. He watched the dancers.
Clare said, after a minute, “I see what you think! If only you were right! How happy that would make me, Doctor! But life isn’t like that. Life makes us suffer. What I am so tortured by now is the fear that in my blundering I may not only have failed to help Dick, but I may have involved Petra in something amounting almost to tragedy for her. If she cares for him, as she seems to lately—if she has given up Neil for Dick, and Dick fails her—all our hearts may break in the end. But mine the most. For I am the cause of the muddle.I have wanted only the best for them both. For us all. And what have I really done! I begin to fear that Dick—no matter how hard he tries—will never be satisfied with Petra. Knowing Dick, I ought to have known that.—But I wanted his happiness so.”
She was crying. Unashamedly. But they were angry, baffled tears and Lewis knew it. The unkind part was that Clare knew he knew it. But she would show him. She would give him a demonstration of how he was wrong, how absolutely wrong he was. She would show him that Petra had no possible chance of being her, Clare Farwell’s, rival! After long weeks of fearing it, to-night Clare was faced with the fact that this Doctor Lewis Pryne was not to increase her roll of wonderful friendships. But one slight gratification she would yet wrest from the humiliating situation: the man might himself distrust, even dislike her; but he should see that Dick Wilder was still her slave.
She got up and went to the door: stood by it, one bare, rather thin arm reached up along the jamb, watching the dancers. Lewis stayed where he was and smoked his interminable cigarettes. He was glad his hostess had left him, but concerned for the direction her steps had taken.
This time, as Petra and Dick neared the arch of the drawing-room doorway, they could not fail to know that they were the object of some one’s attention. Dick wavered, let Petra go from his arms, seemed to wake from a fragile dream.
“Want to dance, Clare?” he said.
She shook her head.
“No. But Doctor Pryne is tired of talking to just me. Come on in and play with us.”
Lewis got up and stood by the fire. Petra came and stood irresolutely near him, at a loss and waiting for Clare to lead the “play,” whatever it was to be. But Clare wandered toward the French doors and stood, her back half turned, looking out onto the moonlight road. No one said anything. Lewis had no intention of “playing.” He was swearing angry. Clare turned her head after a minute’s silence, during which the three of them—Lewis, Petra, Dick—had stayed watching her, turned her head and looked at Dick over her shoulder. Then she stepped out into the moonlight.
Harry, oblivious that his dancers no longer existed, that the frail dream had broken, went on pouring out jazz. Dick had followed Clare, of course. He went as naturally and with as little fuss as if he were her shadow. Lewis and Petra were left, silent, by the fire.
Neither of them had a thing to say. The clock ticked,—an elegant little glass clock with glass flowers for dials, on the mantel near them. Then they heard Cynthia’s voice out in the moonlight. “You’ll need a scarf, Clare dear. There’s an autumn tang.”
“Oh, no. The moonlight’s warm! We’ll be right back. Get out the cards, Lowell, and since your heart is set on it, we’ll have some poker.”
But before Farwell and Cynthia came in through the French doors, Lewis had said quickly to Petra, “Mydarling, you mustn’t mind. Dick’s such a fool he’s not worth your little finger.”
That brought Petra’s face around to Lewis’. She took hold of the high carved back of a chair between them. Took hold hard. Eyes, lips,—suddenly they had become the attentive eyes of her childhood, looking outward onto a wonder-filled world. The unsullen lips of her childhood sweetly parted with expectant breath. For just that instant it might have been Petra back in the Cambridge apartment three years ago.
But unfortunately Lewis was totally unaware that “my darling” had come from his lips at all. He had no cue to the transformation. And then Cynthia and Farwell joined them and Farwell was getting out the cards. He sent Petra for a table. But as she started to obey, she was intercepted by Elise in the doorway. Petra was wanted on the telephone.
“Who is it?” Farwell called after his daughter. “It can’t be important. Why do you bother?”
The maid answered, not Petra. “He didn’t give his name, sir. But he said itwasvery important.”
“Well, Elise, don’t interrupt us again to-night with telephone messages or anything else,” Farwell commanded. And then to Cynthia and Lewis, “Telephones are the devil! Damned intrusions on decent privacy! Clare agrees with me. We’re thinking of having ’em taken out. As it is, it’s a private number, of course, but Petra has given it to several of her friends. Only natural, I suppose. But I detest it.”
Petra was back almost before her father was done grumbling. She came only to the door, however, and said, “I’m terribly sorry, Father, but I’ve got a headache. Elise is bringing the table. I couldn’t possibly play. Tell Clare when they come in, will you? I am going to bed.”
It would have been absurdly impossible to accept illness as an explanation of Petra’s leaving her own birthday party so suddenly, if her story were not so borne out by her look. She had lost all the unusual high color of the earlier part of the evening and become extraordinarily white and peaked. Cynthia saw it as plainly as her doctor brother. She cried, “Petra, dear child! You must let me come with you. You do look really ill. And at your own party! It’s a shame!”
“No, don’t come, please. I’ll be perfectly all right. I just want to be alone. Will you tell Clare, please, not to come in, afterwards, to-night? I may be asleep and I’d rather she didn’t. Good night, Doctor Pryne. Good night, Mrs. Allen, and Father. I’m so sorry....”
When Clare and Dick drifted in a few minutes later, it was Cynthia who did Petra’s explaining. But by then Harry had waked to the fact that nobody was taking advantage of his jazz and had come to the drawing-room.
“That’s funny!” he said, breaking into his wife’s account of Petra’s sudden desertion. “Petra didn’t go to bed, you know. She went out of the door. I saw her. That’s why I stopped playing. I thought you and Petrawere dancing, Dick. Then I looked up and saw Petra going alone out the front door in a tearing hurry.”
“Did she have a wrap on?” Cynthia asked, concerned.
“No. Just her pretty party frock.”
“She’s back now then,” Clare said, “and in her bed. It’s really cold.” But she looked at Lewis, her eyes distraught. Had the woman any compunction for what she had done? If not, it was superb acting. She was a Duse, Lewis thought, but with her genius devoted to personal, secret dramas.
“Anyway, I’d better go up and see how she is,” Clare murmured. “She doesn’t have headaches like this, you know. Not suddenly. She must have been—disturbed about something. Put out. I’ll go up. I think she’ll come back.”
“No, don’t.” That was Lewis. He did not care how sharply he spoke. “The child really looked ill.And she particularly asked that you shouldn’t go to her.”
Clare’s eyes grew wide,—darkened. She was superb! “Really? Well—” And then to her husband she said, with a shrug. “And I wanted her party to be a success!”
“Well, it was, my dear. It still is. And Petra’ll be all right in the morning. She doesn’t care much for poker, anyway. Let’s start playing. It’s going on eleven.”
But Lewis was destined to blame himself, before many hours had passed, for dissuading Clare from going up to see about Petra. Afterwards, he never understood why he had sat there playing poker until midnight, after what Harry had said of Petra’s going out of the door andnot up to bed. He had been stupid to the point of imbecility. But the reason was that Petra’s transformation when he told her Dick wasn’t worth her little finger, while she stood holding the back of that chair, had filled his mind so full of a simply blinding hope that there was no room for shadows—hardly for thought itself! He had accepted her story quite simply, when she returned from the telephone: she had a headache. He knew, too, of course, that she was furious with Clare. Any girl would be, under the circumstances. But for Lewis himself she had had that look.
It was hard for Lewis to have to wait until morning to see Petra again. That was all her going to bed in the middle of the party had meant to him—that he must wait now until morning. He was not to tell her his love by moonlight in the Paradise meadow, but to-morrow, in daylight, driving her in to Boston. He had got ahead of Dick in this, and it had been agreed he should come to Green Doors from the Allens’ a little before eight.
He won steadily at the game they were playing, but smiled now and then his lighted smile that had nothing to do with material, mundane winnings.