One thing, to be sure, she didn't in the least understand—the very last thing he had said. "That's why it was so incredible when you came down the stairs instead." That had been to her, a complete non sequitur, an enigma. But she was content to leave it at that.
Such a man, of course, could never—belong to anybody. He was not collectable. There would always be about him, for everybody, some last enigma, some room to which no one would be given the key. But there was a virtue even in the fringe of him, the hem of his garment.
Was she getting sentimental? No, she was not. Indeed, precisely what his little visit had done for her was to effect her release from a tangle of taut-drawn sentimentalities. She hadn't felt as free as this, as comfortable with herself, since she came home with Rush from New York.
She had no assurance that he'd come to the house again of his own accord or that Paula would send for him. But she was in no mood to distress herself just now, even with that possibility.
She crossed the room and got herself a cigarette, and with it alight she returned to her contemplation of the piano keyboard. She didn't move nor speak when she heard Rush come in but she kept an eye on the drawing-room door and when presently he entered, she greeted him with a smile of good-humored mockery. He had something that looked like a battered school atlas in his hand.
"What do you suppose this is?" he asked. "It was lying on the bench in the hall."
She held out a hand for it and together they opened it on the lid of the piano and investigated.
"It's the manuscript of his opera," she said. "He brought it around to leave with Paula. To tell her he had done with it. He's been trying to spoil it for her but he can't."
"I suppose I made an infernal fool of myself," he remarked, after a little silence.
She blew, for answer, an impudent smoke ring up into his face.
He continued grumpily to cover his relief that she had not been more painfully explicit,—"I suppose I shall have to make up some sort of damned apology to him."
"I don't know," she said. "That's as you like. I don't believe he'd insist upon it. He understood well enough."
He looked at her intently. "Has there been any better news from father since I went out?" he asked.
She shook her head. "Except that there's been none. Every hour now that we aren't sent for counts. What made you think there might have been?"
He said he didn't know. She looked a little more cheerful somehow, less—tragic. Evidently her visit to the Corbetts had done her good.
His eye fell once more on the manuscript. "Did he go off and forget that?" he asked. "Or did he mean to leave it for Paula? And what shall we do with it,—hand it over to her or send it back?"
Thoughtfully Mary straightened the sheets and closed the cover. "I'll take care of it for him," she said.
Pneumonia, for all it is characterized by what is called a crisis, has no single stride to recovery, no critical moment when one who has been in peril passes to safety. Steinmetz and Darby were determined that Mary and all the household should understand this fully. She had waylaid them in the hall as they were leaving the house together—this was seventy-two hours or so after Anthony March's call—and demanded the good news she was sure they had for her. There was a look about them and a tone in their voices that were perfectly new.
They would not be persuaded to say that her father was out of danger.There was very little left of him. His heart had been over-strained andthis abnormal effect was now, in due course, transferred to the kidneys.All sorts of deadly sequellae were lying in ambush.
But the more discouraging they were, the more she beamed upon them. She walked along with them to the door, slipping her arm inside Doctor Darby's as she did so. "If you only knew," she said, "what a wonderful thing it is to have the doctors stop being encouraging and try to frighten you, instead. Because that means you really do think he's getting well."
"The balance of probability has swung to that side," Steinmetz admitted in his rather affected staccato. "At all events he's out of my beat." His beat was the respiratory tract and his treatment the last word in vaccines and serums.
She held Darby back a little. "Must we go on feeling," she asked, "that anything could happen any minute? Or—well, could Rush go back to the farm? Graham Stannard has gone to New York, I think, they're partners, you know, so he must be rather badly wanted. And this waiting is hard for him."
Rush could go, of course, Darby assured her. "For that matter," he went on with a quick glance at her, "why don't you go with him? Take your aunt along, too. For a few days, at least. You couldn't do better."
She demurred to this on the ground that it didn't seem fair to Paula. If there was a period of Arcadian retirement down on the books for anybody, it was Paula who was entitled to it.
But Paula, as Darby pointed out, wouldn't take it in the first place, and, surprisingly, didn't need it in the second. "She told me just now that she'd slept eighteen hours out of the last twenty-four and was ready for anything. She looked it, too."
He understood very well her irrepressible shrug of exasperation at that and interrupted her attempt to explain it. "It's another breed of animal altogether," he said. "And at that, I'd rather have had her job than yours. You're looking first rate, anyhow. But your aunt, if she isn't to break up badly, had better be carried off somewhere." He glanced around toward Steinmetz who had withdrawn out of ear-shot. "There are some toxins, you know," he added, "that are even beyond him and his microscopes."
Mary had meant to broach this project at dinner but changed her mind and waited until Aunt Lucile had withdrawn and she and Rush were left alone over their coffee cups for a smoke.
"Poor Aunt Lucile! She has aged years in the last three weeks. And it shows more, now the nightmare is over, than it did before."
"Is it over? Really?" he asked.
"Well, we don't need miracles any more for him. Just ordinary good care and good luck. Yes, I'd say the nightmare was over."
"Leaving us free," he commented, "to go back to our own."
"You can go back to the farm, anyhow," she said. "I asked Doctor Darby, especially, and he said so. He wants me to go along with you and take Aunt Lucile. Just for a week or so. Is there any sort of place with a roof over it where we could stay?"
He said, "I guess that could be managed." But his tone was so absent and somber that she looked at him in sharp concern.
"You didn't mean that the farm was your nightmare, did you?" she asked."Has something gone terribly wrong out there?"
"Things have gone just the way I suppose anybody but a fool would have known they would. Not worse than that, I guess."
He got up then and went over to the sideboard, coming back with a decanter of old brandy and a pair of big English glasses. She declined hers as unobtrusively as possible, just with a word and a faint shake of the head. But it was enough to make him look at her.
"You didn't drink anything at dinner, either, did you?" he asked.
She flushed as she said, "I don't think I'm drinking, at all, just now."
"Being an example to anybody?" he asked suspiciously.
She smiled at that and patted his hand. "Oh, no, my dear. I've enough to do to be an example to myself. I liked the way it was out at the Corbetts'. They've gone bone-dry. And,—oh, please don't think that I'm a prig—I am a little better without it—just now, anyway. Tell me what's gone wrong at the farm."
"This is wonderful stuff," he said, cupping the fragile glass in his two hands and inhaling the bouquet from the precious liquor in the bottom of it. "It's good for nightmares, at any rate." After a sip or two, he attempted to answer her question.
"Oh, I suppose we'll come out all right, eventually. Of course, we've got to. But I wish Martin Whitney had done one thing or the other; either shown a little real confidence and enthusiasm in the thing or else stepped on it and refused to lend father the money."
"Lend?" Mary asked. "Did he have to borrow it?"
He dealt rather impatiently with that question. "You don't keep sixty or eighty thousand dollars lying around loose in a checking account," he said. "Of course, he had to borrow it. But he borrowed it of Whitney, worse luck—and Whitney being an old friend, pulls a long face over it whenever we find we need a little more than the original figures showed. That's enough to give any one cold feet right there.
"Graham's father is rich, of course, but he's tighter than the bark on a tree. He's gone his limit and he won't stand for anything more. He can't see that a farm like that is nothing but a factory and that you can't run it for any profit that's worth while without the very best possible equipment. He wanted us to pike along with scrub stock and the old tools and buildings that were on the place and pay for improvements out of our profits. Of course, the answer to that was that there wouldn't be any profits. A grade cow these days simply can't earn her keep with the price of feed and labor what it is. We didn't figure the cost of tools and modern buildings high enough—therewassuch a devil of a lot of necessary things that we didn't figure on at all—and the consequence was that we didn't put a big enough mortgage on the place. Nowhere near what it would stand. And now that we want to put a second one on, Mr. Stannard howls like a wolf."
The mere sound of the word mortgage made Mary's heart sink. She looked so woebegone that Rush went on hastily.
"Oh, that'll come out in the wash. It's nothing to worry about really, because even on the basis of a bigger investment than we had any idea of making when we went in, it figures a peach of a profit. There's no getting away from that. That's not the thing about it that's driving Graham and me to drink."
He stopped on that phrase, not liking the sound of it, and in doubt about asking her not to take it literally. She saw all that as plainly as if she had been looking through an open window into his mind. He took another deliberate sip of the brandy, instead, and then went on.
"Why, it's the way things don't happen; the way we can't get anything done."
He did not see the sympathetic hand she stretched out to him; went back to the big brandy glass instead, for another long luxurious inhalation and a small sip or two. "It's partly our own fault, of course," he went on, presently. "We've made some fool mistakes. But it isn't our mistakes that are going to beat us, it's the damned bull-headed incompetence of the so-called labor we've got to deal with."
He ruminated over that in silence for a minute or two. "They talk about the inefficiency of the army," he exclaimed, "but I've been four years in two armies and I'll say that if what we've found out at Hickory Hill is a fair sample of civilian efficiency, I'll take the army way every time. There are days when I feel as if I'd like to quit;—go out West and get a job roping steers for Bob Corbett, even if he is bone-dry."
She thought if he played any longer with that brandy glass she must cry out, but he drained it this time and pushed it away. With an effort of will she relaxed her tight muscles.
"I suppose I must have looked to you like a hopeless slacker," he said, "or you wouldn't have asked Darby to send me back to work. No,—I didn't mean to put it that way. I look like one to myself, that's all, when I stop to think. Only you don't know how it has felt, this last six weeks, to go on getting tighter and tighter in your head until you feel as if you were going to burst. I went out and got drunk, once,—just plain, deliberately boiled—in order to let off steam. It did me good, too, for the time being."
She didn't look shocked at that as he had expected her to—gave him only a rather wry smile and a comprehending nod. "We're all alike; that's the trouble with us," she said. "But you will take us out to Hickory Hill, won't you? Aunt Lucile and I. I'll promise we won't be in the way nor make you any more work."
She saw he was hesitating and added, "At that, perhaps, I may be some good. I could cook anyhow and I suppose I could be taught to milk a cow and run a Ford."
He laughed at that, then said a little uncomfortably that this wasn't what he had been thinking about. "I suppose you're counting on Graham's being in New York. He isn't. At least, he telegraphed me that he'd be back at Hickory Hill to-morrow morning. I knew you'd been rather keeping away from him and I thought perhaps…"
"No, that's all right." She said it casually enough, but it drew a keen look of inquiry from him, nevertheless. "Oh, nothing," she went on. "I mean I haven't made up with him. Of course, I never quarreled with him as far as that went. Only it's what I meant when I said just now that we were all alike, father and you and I. We all get so ridiculously—tight about things. Well, I've managed to let off steam myself."
He patted her hand approvingly. "That trip to Wyoming did you a lot of good," he observed.—"Or something did."
"They're wonderfully easy people to live with, Olive and Bob," she said. "They're immensely in love with each other I suppose, but without somehow being offensive about it. And they have such a lot of fun. Olive has a piebald cayuse, that she's taught all thehaute ecoletricks. He does the statuesque poses and all the high action things just as seriously as a thoroughbred and he's so short and homely and in such deadly earnest about it that you can hardly bear it. You laugh yourself into stitches but you want to cry too. And Bob says he's going to train a mule the same way. If he ever does that pair will be worth a million dollars to any circus.—Well, we'll be doing things like that out at Hickory Hill some day. Because there is such a thing as fun left in the world."
"We'll have some of it this week," he agreed, and in this rather light-headed spirit they arranged details.
The only building at Hickory Hill that had been designed for human habitation was the farm-house and it was at present fully occupied and rather more by a camp cook and his assistant, the farm manager and half a dozen hands. The partners themselves slept in a tent. There was also a cook tent near the house where three meals a day were prepared for everybody, including the carpenters, masons, concrete men and well diggers who were working on the new buildings. They drove out in Fords from two or three near-by towns in time for breakfast and didn't go home till after supper. The wagon shed of the old horse barn served as a mess hall.
There were some beds, though, two or three spare ones, Rush was sure, that had never been used. Given a day's start on his guests, he would promise some sort of building which, if they would refrain from inquiring too closely into its past, should serve to house them.
"A wood-shed," she suggested helpfully, "or a nicely swept-out hennery.Even a former cow stable, at a pinch. Only not a pig-pen."
"If our new hog-house were only finished, you could be absolutely palatial in it. But I think I can do better than any of those. You leave that to me.—Only, how about Aunt Lucile? She's—essential to the scheme, I suppose. Can you deliver her?"
"She'll come if it's put to her right,—as a sporting proposition. She really is a good sport you know, the dear old thing. You leave her to me."
"Lord, I feel a lot better than I did when I sat down to dinner," he told her when they parted for the night, and left her reflecting on the folly of making mountains out of mole-hills.
He broke his promise to be waiting for them Friday morning at the farm. It was Graham who caught sight of their car, as it stopped in front of the farm-house, and came plunging down the bank to greet them and explain how unavoidable it had been that Rush should go to Elgin.
He was somewhat flushed and a little out of breath but he seemed, after the first uncomfortable minute, collected enough. He mounted the running-board and directed the chauffeur to drive on across the bridge and fork to the right with the main road up to a small nondescript building on the far side of it.
It was a part of the farm, he explained, indicating the wilderness off to the left,—a part of what must once have been a big apple orchard. Indeed, exploring it yesterday for the first time, he had found a surprising number of old trees, which, choked as they were with undergrowth, looked as if they were still bearing fruit. The building, which they had never even entered until yesterday, had served as a sorting and packing house for the crop, though the old part of it—paradoxically the upper part—appeared to have been built as a dwelling by some pioneer settler. A second story had been added underneath by digging out the bank.
It stood well back from the road, a grass grown lane with a turning circle leading to it. It had what had once been a loading platform, wagon high, instead of a veranda. The lower story, a single room which they peered into through a crack in a warped unhinged door, seemed unpromising enough, a dark cobwebby place, cumbered with wooden chutes from the floor above by which, Graham explained, they rolled the apples down into barrels after they had been sorted up-stairs. A carpenter had been busy most of the morning, he added, flooring over the traps from which these chutes led down.
Mary, though, fairly cried out with delight, and even Miss Wollaston beamed appreciation when, Graham, having led them up the bank and around to the back of the building, ushered them in, at the ground level up here, to the upper story of the building. There was a fireplace in the north end of it with twin brick erections on either side which they thought must have been used for drying apples. The opposite end, partitioned off, still housed a cider mill and press, but they had contrived, he said, a makeshift bedroom out of it.
Along the east side of the room were three pairs of casement windows which commanded a view of the greater part of the farm; across the road, across Hickory Creek, across the long reach of the lower pasture and the seemingly limitless stretches of new plowed fields. The clump of farm buildings, old and new, was in the middle of the picture. Over to the left not quite a mile away, behind what looked like nothing more than a fold in the earth (the creek again, Graham explained. It swung an arc of two hundred degrees or so, about the main body of their tillable land) rose the heavily wooded slopes of Hickory Hill.
"We were surprised at this place," he said, "when we opened it up yesterday. It's the best view on the farm. It will be a fine place to build a real country house, some day, if we ever make money enough to do that."
"It is a real country house already," Mary told him briskly. "You two, living in a tent with a lovely old place like this just waiting for you! Wait until Aunt Lucile and I have had a day at it and you'll see."
He looked as if he believed her. Indeed, he looked unutterable things, contemplating her, there in that mellow old room,—wrinkling her nose a little and declaring that she could still smell apples. But all he said was that he supposed the roof leaked, but it couldn't be very bad because everything seemed quite decently dry and not at all musty. He added that he must be getting back to work, but that an odd-job man, capable more or less of anything, was at her disposal for as long as she wanted him.
She went with him to the door when he made his rather precipitate departure and stood, after she had waved him a temporary farewell, gazing up at the soft sun-bathed slope with its aisles of gnarled trees. She smiled at the sight of a decrepit long-handled wooden pump. She took a long breath of the smell of the month of May. Then she turned, with Aunt Lucile, to such practical matters as bedding, brooms and tea-kettles.
There was more to do than a first look had led them to suppose, and their schemes grew ambitious, besides, as they advanced with them, so that, for all the Briarean prodigies of Bill, the odd-job man, they went to bed dog tired at nine o'clock that night with their labors not more than half complete. They slept—Mary did, anyhow, the deepest sleep she had known in years.
She waked at an unearthly—a heavenly hour. The thin ether-cool air was quivering with the dissonance of bird calls; the low sun had laid great slow-moving oblongs of reddish gilt upon the brown walls of the big room. (She had left her aunt in undivided possession of the extemporized bed-chamber.) She rose and opened the door and looked out into the orchard. But what her eye came to rest upon was the old wooden pump.
It was a triumph of faith over skepticism, that pump. Graham had contemned it utterly, hardly allowing, even, that it was picturesque, but Bill, the odd-job man had, with her encouragement, spent a patient hour over it and in the teeth of scientific probability, lo, it had given forth streams of water as clear as any that had ever miraculously been smitten out of a rock. The partners had forbidden her to drink any of it except boiled, until it had been analyzed.
She looked about. She had the world to herself. So she carried her rubber tub, her sponge and a bath-towel out to the warped wooden platform and batheden plein air, water and sun together. She came in, deliciously shuddering, lighted a fire, already laid, of shavings and sticks, put the kettle on to boil and dressed. She felt—new born that morning.
This sensation made the undercurrent of a long fully filled day. She almost never had time to look at it but she knew it was there. It enabled her to take with equanimity the unlooked-for arrival (so far as she and her aunt were concerned) of Graham's young torn-boy sister, Sylvia. It made it possible for her to say, "Why, yes, of course! I'd love to," when Graham, along in the afternoon asked her if she wouldn't go for a walk over the farm with him. They spent more than an hour at it, sitting, a part of the time, side by side atop the gate into the upper pasture, yet not even then had the comfortable sense of pleasant companionship with him taken fright. It was a security that resided, she knew, wholly in herself.
He was holding himself, obviously, on a very tight rein, and it was quite conceivable that before her visit ended, he would bolt. There was a moment, indeed—when he came with Rush to supper at the apple house and got his first look at the transformation she had wrought in it—when that possibility must have been in the minds of every one who saw his face.
She had dramatized the result of her two days' labor innocent of any intention to produce an effect like that. The partners when they came dropping in from time to time had, learned nothing of her plans, seen none of their accomplishments, so to-night the old-fashioned settle which Bill had knocked together from lumber in the packing room and she had stained, two of the sorting tables, fitted into the corners beside the fireplace to make a dais, the conversion of another into a capital dining table by the simple expedient of lengthening its legs, the rag rug, discovered in the village, during a flying trip with Sylvia this morning in her car and ravished from the church fair it had been intended for, the sacks of sheeting Aunt Lucile had been sewing industriously all day, covered with burlaps and stuffed with hay to serve as cushions, the cheese-cloth tacked up in gathers over the windows and hemmed with pins,—all this, revealed at once, had the surprise of a conjurer's trick, or, if one were predisposed that way, the entrancement of a miracle.
She was a little entranced, herself, partly with fatigue for she had put in, one after the other, two unusually laborious days, but partly no doubt with her own magic, with this almost convincing simulation of a home which she and her assistants had produced. It didn't matter that she had gone slack and silent, because Sylvia, who just before supper had shown a disposition to dreamy elegiac melancholy, rebounded, as soon as she was filled with food, to the other end of the scale altogether and swept Rush after her into a boisterous romp, which none of Aunt Lucile's remonstrant asides to her nephew was effectual to quell.
She was an amazing creature, this product of the latest generation to begin arriving at the fringes of maturity, a reedy young thing, as tall as Graham, inches taller than Rush. She had the profile of a young Greek goddess and the grin of a gamin. She was equally at home in a ballgown—though she was not yet out—or in a pair of khaki riding breeches and an olive drab shirt. She was capable of assuming a manner that was a genuine gratification to her great aunt or one that startled her father's stable men. She read French novels more or less at random, (unknown to her mother. She had a rather mischievous uncle who was responsible for this development) and she was still deadly accurate with a snowball. A bewildering compound of sophistications and innocence, a modern young sphinx with a riddle of her own.
Mary watched her tussling and tumbling about with Rush, pondering the riddle but making no great effort to find an answer to it. Was she child or woman? To herself what was she? And what did Rush think about her? They were evidently well established on some sort of terms. Rush, no doubt, would tell you—disgustedly if you sought explanation—that Sylvia was just a kid. That he was fond of her as one would be of any nice kid and that her rough young embraces, her challenges and her pursuits, meant precisely what those of an uproarious young—well, nephew, say,—would mean. Only his eagerness to go on playing the game cast a doubt upon that explanation.
They went out abruptly after a while, just as it was getting dark, to settle a bet as to which of them could walk the farthest along the top rail of a certain old fence. Miss Wollaston saw them go with unconcealed dismay, but it was hard to see how even a conscientious chaperon could have prevented it so long as the child's elder brother would do nothing to back her up. To Mary, half-way in her trance, it didn't seem much to matter what the relation was or what came of it. It was a fine spring night and they were a pair of beautifully untroubled young animals. Let them play as they would.
Their departure, did, however, arouse Graham to the assumption of his duties as host and he launched himself into a conversation with Miss Wollaston; a fine example, Mary thought, of what really good breeding means. Her aunt's questions about life in the navy were not the sort that were easy to answer pleasantly and at large. They drew from him things he must have been made to say a hundred times since his return and sometimes they were so wide of the mark that it must have been hard not to stare or laugh. He must have been wishing, too, with all his might down in the disregarded depths of his heart, that the old lady would yield to the boredom and fatigue that were slowly creeping over her. Soon! Before that pair of Indians came back. But by nothing, not even the faintest irrepressible inflection of voice was that wish made manifest.
It broke over Mary suddenly that this would never happen. Aunt Lucile might die at her post, but she'd never, in Graham's presence, retire through a door which was known to lead to her bedroom. She rose and going around to her aunt's chair, laid a light hand on her shoulder. But she spoke to Graham.
"Let's go out and bring in the wanderers," she said. "Aunt Lucile has had a pretty long day and I know she won't be able to go to sleep until Sylvia is tucked in for the night."
When the door had closed behind them and they stood where the path, already faintly indicated, led down to the road, he stopped with a jerk and mutely looked at her.
"Do you know where that fence of theirs is?" she asked.
"Yes, I guess so," he said. Then—it was almost a cry—"Must we go there?Right away?"
"I don't know that we need." (Why should he be tortured like that! What did it matter if the rigidity of some of her nightmare-born resolutions got relaxed a little?) "Where do you want to go with me?"
He didn't answer for a minute, but when he did speak his voice was steady enough. "There's a place up on the top of this hill where the trees open out to the east, a lovely place. I went up there last night after Rush had turned in. There'll be a moon along in a few minutes and you can see it come up, from there. Could we wait for it?—I suppose Miss Wollaston…"
"No, she'll be all right," Mary said. "Now that she thinks we're looking for them."
As she moved up the slope she added, "I've a sort of interest in the moon, myself, to-night."
"Perhaps if you'll take my hand—" he said stiffly. "It is dark here under the trees."
Her single-minded intention had been to make him a little happier. She liked him better to-night than ever, and that was saying a lot. But this elaborate covering up of what he really wanted under the pretended need of guiding her, tried her patience. The pretense was for himself, too, as much as for her. He was holding her off at arm's length behind him as if they were scaling an Alp!
In the spirit of mischief, half irritated, half amused, she crowded up to his side and turned her hand so that their palms lay together. And she said in a voice evenly matter-of-fact, "That's nicer, isn't it?"
He didn't succeed in producing anything audible in answer to that, but he began presently, and rather at random, to talk. As if—she reflected, mutinously,—some fact that must on no account be looked at would emerge, un-escapable, the moment he stopped.
But the bewitching loveliness of the place he led her to made amends, sponged away her irritation, brought back the Arcadian mood of the day. A recently fallen apple tree just on the crest of the hill, offered in its crotched arms a seat for both of them. With an ease which thrilled her he lifted her in his hands to her place and vaulted up beside her. His arm (excusably, again, for the hand was seeking a hold to steady him), crept around behind her.
Once more he began to talk,—of nature, of the farm, of how it was the real way to live, as we were meant to. One couldn't, of course, cut off the city altogether. There were concerts and things. And the companionship of old friends. Even at that it would be lonely. They had felt it already. That was why it was such a marvelous thing to have her here. She made a different world of it. Just as she had made what seemed like a home out of that old apple house. No one could do that but a woman, of course …
She was no longer irritated by this. She barely listened, beyond noting his circuitous but certain approach to the point of asking her, once more, to marry him.
Her body seemed drugged with the loveliness of the night, with fatigue, with him, with the immediacy of him,—but her mind was racing as it does in dreams.
Nature was not, of course, the gentle sentimentalist Graham was talking about, but one did get something out of close communion with her. A sense of fundamentals. She was a—simplifier of ideas. Plain and straightforward even in her enchantments. That moon they were waiting for…. Already she was looking down upon a pair of lovers, somewhere,—a thousand pairs!—with her bland unseeing face. And later to-night, long after she had risen on them, upon a thousand more.
Of lovers? Well perhaps not. Not if one insisted upon the poets' descriptions. But good enough for nature's simple purposes. Answering to a desire, faint or imperious, that would lead them to put on her harness. Take on her work.
Anthony March had never put on a harness. A rebel. And for the price of his rebellion never had heard his music, except in his head. Clear torment they could be, he had told her, those unheard melodies. Somehow she could understand that. There was an unheard music in her. An unfulfilled destiny, at all events, which was growing clamorous as the echo of the boy's passion-if it were but an echo-pulsed in her throat, drew her body down by insensible relaxations closer upon his.
The moon came up and they watched it, silent. The air grew heavy. The call of a screech-owl made all the sound there was. She shivered and he drew her, unresisting, tighter still. Then he bent down and kissed her.
He said, presently, in a strained voice, "You know what I have been asking. Does that mean yes?"
She did not speak. The moon was up above the trees, yellow now. She remembered a great broad voice, singing:
"Low hangs the moon. It rose late.It is lagging-O I think it is heavy with love, with love"
With a passion that had broken away at last, the boy's hands took possession of her. He kissed her mouth, hotly, and then again; drew back gasping and stared into her small pale face with burning eyes. Her head turned a little away from him.
"… Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give meMy mate back again if you only would,For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.O rising stars!…"
The languor was gone. She shivered and sat erect, he watching her in an agony of apprehension. She looked slowly round at him.
"You haven't answered!" His voice broke over that into a sob. "Will you marry me, Mary?"
"I don't know," she said dully, like one struggling out of a dream. "I will if I can. I meant to for a while, I think. But …"
He leaped to the ground and stood facing her with clenched hands. "I ought to be shot," he said. "I'm not fit to touch you—a white thing like you. I didn't mean to. Not like that. I meant …"
She stared for an instant, totally at a loss for the meaning—the mere direction of what he was trying to say. Then, slipping down from the branch, she took him by the arms. "Don't!" she cried rather wildly. "Don't talk like that! That's the last impossibility. Listen. I'm going to tell you why."
But he was not listening for what it might be. He was still morosely preoccupied with his own crime. He had been a beast! He had bruised, once more, the white petals of a flower!
It was not that her courage failed. She saw he wouldn't believe. That he couldn't be made to believe. It was no use. If he looked at her any longer like that, she would laugh.
She buried her face in her arms and sobbed.
He rose to this crisis handsomely, waited without a word until she was quiet and then suggested that they go and find Rush and Sylvia. And until they were upon the point of joining the other pair nothing more was said that had any bearing on what had happened in the apple tree. But in that last moment he made a mute appeal for a chance to say another word.
He reminded her that she had said she would marry him if she could. This was enough for him. More than he deserved. He was going back to the beginning to try to build anew what his loss of self-control had wrecked. She need say nothing now. If she'd wait, she'd see.
It was still May and the North Carolina mountain-side that John Wollaston looked out upon was at the height of its annual debauch of azalea blooms, a symphonic romance in the key of rose-color with modulations down to strawberry and up to a clear singing white. For him though, the invalid, cushioned and pillowed in an easy chair, a rug over his knees, these splendors and the perfume of the soft bright air that bathed them had an ironic significance.
He had arrived with Paula at this paradise early in the week, pretty well exhausted with the ordinary fatigues of less than a day's journey in the train. They were feeding him bouillon, egg-nogs and cream. On Paula's arm he had managed this afternoon, his first walk, a matter of two or three hundred yards about the hotel gardens, and at the end of it had been glad to subside, half reclining into this easy chair, placed so that through the open door and the veranda it gave upon, he could enjoy the view of the color-drenched mountain-side.
He had dismissed Paula peremptorily for a real walk of her own. He had told her, in simple truth, that he would enjoy being left to himself for a while. She had taken this assurance for an altruistic mendacity, but she had yielded at last to his insistence and gone, under an exacted promise not to come back for at least an hour.
It offered some curious compensations though, this state of helplessness—a limpidity of vision, clairvoyant almost. For a fortnight he had been like a spectator sitting in the stalls of a darkened theatre watching the performances upon a brilliantly lighted stage, himself—himselves among the characters, for there was a past and a future self for him to look at and ponder upon. The present self hardly counted. All the old ambitions, desires, urgencies, which had been his impulsive forces were gone—quiescent anyhow. He was as sexless, as cool, as an image carved in jade.
And he was here in this lover's paradise—this was what drew the tribute of a smile to the humor of the high gods—with Paula. And Paula was more ardently in love with him than she had ever been before.
The quality of that smile must have carried over to the one he gave her when she came back, well within her promised hour, from her walk. One couldn't imagine anything lovelier or more inviting than the picture she made framed in that doorway, coolly shaded against the bright blaze that came in around her. She looked at him from there, for a moment, thoughtfully.
"I don't believe you have missed me such a lot after all," she said."What have you been doing all the while?"
"Crystal-gazing," he told her.
She came over to him and took his hands, a caress patently enough through the nurse's pretext that she was satisfying herself that he had not got cold sitting there. She relinquished them suddenly, readjusted his rug and pillows, then kissed him and told him she was going to the office to see if there were any letters and went out again. She was gone but a moment or two; returning, she dropped the little handful which were addressed to him into his lap and carried one of her own to a chair near the window.
He dealt idly with the congratulatory and well-wishing messages which made up his mail. There was but one of them that drew even a gleam of clearly focused intelligence from him. He gave most of his attention to Paula. She was a wonderful person to watch,—the expressiveness of her, that every nerve and muscle of her body seemed to have a part in. She had opened that letter of hers with nothing but clear curiosity. The envelope evidently had told her nothing. She had frowned, puzzled, over the signature and then somehow, darkened, sprung to arms as she made it out. She didn't read it in an orderly way even then; seemed to be trying to worry the meaning out of it, like one stripping off husks to get down to some sort of kernel inside. Satisfied that she had got it at last, she dropped the letter carelessly on the floor, subsided a little deeper into her chair and turned a brooding face toward the outdoor light and away from him.
"Are you crystal-gazing, too?" he asked. Unusually, she didn't turn at his voice and her own was monotonous with strongly repressed emotion.
"I don't need to. I spent more than a week staring into mine."
That lead was plain enough, but he avoided, deliberately though rather idly, following it up. The rustle of paper told her that he had turned back to his letters.
"Anything in your mail?" she asked.
"I think not. You can look them over and see if I've missed anything. To a man in my disarticulate situation people don't write except to express the kindness of their hearts. Here's a letter from Mary designed to prevent me from worrying about her. Full of pleasant little anecdotes about farm life. It's thoroughly Arcadian, she says. A spot designed by Heaven for me to rusticate in this summer when—when we go back to town. Somehow, I never did inhabit Arcady. There's a letter from Martin Whitney, too, that's almost alarmingly encouraging in its insistence that I mustn't worry. If only they knew how little I did—these days!"
"Well, that's all right then," she said. "Because those were DoctorDarby's orders. You weren't to be excited or worried about anything. But,John, is it really true that you don't? Not about anything?"
The fact that her face was still turned away as she asked that question gave it a significance which could not be overlooked.
"It's perfectly true," he asserted. "I don't believe I could if I tried. But there's something evidently troubling you. Let's have it. Oh, don't be afraid. You've no idea what an—Olympian position one finds himself in when he has got half-way across the Styx and come back. Tell me about it."
"You know all about it already. I told you the first day you could talk—that I was going to give up singing altogether except just for you,—when you wanted me to. I knew I'd been torturing you about it. I thought perhaps you'd get well quicker,—want to get well more—if you knew that the torture wasn't to go on. It was true and it is true. Perhaps you thought it was just one of those lies that people tell invalids—one of those don't-worry things. Well, is wasn't.
"But you made me promise I wouldn't do anything—wouldn't break my Ravinia contract—until we could talk it all out together. Your temperature went up a little that afternoon and when Doctor Darby asked me why, I told him. He said I mustn't, on any account, speak again to you about it until you brought the subject up yourself. I don't know whether he'd call this bringing it up or not, but anyway that's it. I've kept my promise to you though," she concluded. "I haven't written. They still think I am going to sing this summer."
"I am very glad of that," he said quietly. "I thought the thing was settled by our first talk. I didn't realize that you had taken it merely as an—adjournment."
She was still turned rigidly away from him, but the grip of one of her hands upon the arm of a chair betrayed the excitement she was laboring under, while it showed the effort she was making to hold it down.
"I didn't think, though," he went on, "that that resolution of yours to give up your whole career,—make ducks and drakes of it, in obedience to my whim—was nothing more than one of those pious lies that invalids are fed upon. I knew you meant it, my dear. I knew you'd have done it—then—without a falter or a regret."
"Then or now," she said. "It's all the same. No, it isn't! Now more than then. With less regret. Without a shadow of a regret, John,—if it would bring you back to me."
The last words were muffled, for she had buried her face in her hands.
He had heard the ring of undisguised passion in her voice without an answering pulse-beat, sat looking at her thoughtfully, tenderly. The reflection that occupied his mind was with what extravagant joy he would have received such an assurance only a few weeks ago. On any one of those last days before his illness fastened upon him;—the Sunday he had gone to Hickory Hill alone because Paula had found she must work with March that day; the evening when he had made his last struggle against the approaching delirium of fever in order to telephone for an ambulance to get him out of that hated house. What a curious compound of nerve ends and gland activities a man's dreams—that he lived by, or died for—were!
She pulled him out of his reverie by a deliberate movement of resolution, taking her hands away from her face, half rising and turning her chair so that she faced him squarely.
"I want to know in so many words," she said, "why you're glad that I'm still bound to that Ravinia thing. You seem to want me to sing there this summer, as much as you hated the idea of my doing it before. Well, why? Or is it something you can't tell me? And if I sing and make a success, shall you want me to go on with it, following up whatever opening it offers; just as if—just as if you didn't count any more in my life at all?"
Before he could answer she added rather dryly, "Doctor Darby would kill me for talking to you like this. You needn't answer if it's going to hurt you."
"No," he said, "it isn't hurting me a bit. But I'll answer one question at a time, I think. The first thing that occurred to me when you spoke of the Ravinia matter was that I didn't want you to break your word. You had told them that they could count on you and I didn't want you, on my account, to be put in a position where any one could accuse you of having failed him. My own word was involved, for that matter. I told LaChaise I wouldn't put any obstacles, in your way. Of course, I didn't contract lobar pneumonia on purpose," he added with a smile.
The intensity of her gaze did not relax at this, however. She was waiting breathlessly.
"The other question isn't quite so easy to answer," he went on, "but I think I would wish you to—follow the path of your career wherever it leads. I shall always count for as much as I can in your life, but not—if I can help it—as an obstacle."
"Why?" she asked. "What has made the perfectly enormous difference?"
It was not at all an unanswerable question; nor one, indeed, that he shrank from. But it wanted a little preliminary reflection. She interrupted before he was ready to speak.
"Of course, I really know. Have known all along. You haven't forgiven me."
He echoed that word with a note of helplessness.
"No," she conceded. "That isn't it, exactly. I can't talk the way you and Mary can. I suppose you have forgiven me, as far as that goes. That's the worst of it. If you hadn't there'd be more to hope for. Or beg for. I'd do that if it were any good. But this is something you can't help. You're kind and sweet to me, but you've just stopped caring. For me. What used to be there has just—gone snap. It's not your fault. I did it myself."
"No," he said quickly. "That's where you're altogether wrong. You didn't do it. You had nothing to do with the doing of it."
She winced, visibly, at the implication that, whoever was responsible, the thing was done.
"Paula, dearest!" he cried, in acute concern. "Wait! There are things that can't be dealt with in a breath. That's why I was trying to think a little before I answered."
Even now he had to marshal his thoughts for a moment before he could go on. It was too ridiculous, that look of tragic desperation she wore while she waited! He averted his eyes and began rather deliberately.
"You are dearer to me now—at this moment, as we sit here—than ever you've been before. I think that's the simple literal truth. This matter of forgiveness—of your having done something to forfeit or to destroy my—love for you… Oh, it's too wildly off the facts to be dealt with rationally! I owe you my life. That's not a sentimental exaggeration. Even Steinmetz says so. And you saved it for me at the end of a period of weeks—months I guess—when I had been devoting most of my spare energies to torturing you. Myself, incidentally, but there was nothing meritorious about that. In an attempt to assert a—proprietary right in you that you had never even pretended to give me. That I'd once promised you I never would assert. The weight of obligation I'm under to you would be absolutely crushing—if it weren't for one thing that relieves me of it altogether. The knowledge that you love me. That you did it all for the love of me."
She moved no nearer him. These were words. There was no reassurance for her in them. One irrepressible movement of his hands toward her, the mere speaking of her name in a voice warmed by the old passion, would have brought her, rapturous, to his knees.
"There's no such thing as a successful pretense between us, I know," he said. "So I'll talk plainly. I'm glad to. I know what it is you miss in me. It's gone. Temporarily I suppose, but gone as if it had never been. That's a—physiological fact, Paula."
She flushed hotly at that and looked away from him.
"I don't know exactly what a soul is," he went on. "But I do know that a body—the whole of the body—is the temple of it. It impenetrates everything; is made up of everything. Well, this illness of mine has, for these weeks, made an old man of me. And I'm grateful to it for giving me a chance to look ahead, before it's too late. I want to make the most of it. Because you see, my dear, in ten years—or thereabouts—the course of nature will have made of me what this pneumonia has given me a foretaste of. Ten years. You will be—forty, then."
She was gazing at him now, fascinated, in unwilling comprehension. "I hate you to talk like that," she said. "I wish you wouldn't."
"It's important," he told her crisply. "You'll see that in a minute, if you will wait. Before very long—in a month or so, perhaps—I shall be, I suppose, pretty much the same man I was—three months ago. Busy at my profession again. In love with you again. All my old self-assurance back; the more arrogant if it isn't quite the real thing. So now's the time, when the fogs one moves about in have lifted and the horizon is sharp, to take some new bearings. And set a new course by them. For both of us.
"There is one fact sitting up like a lighthouse on a rock. I'm twenty-four years older than you. Every five years that we live together from now on will make that difference more important. When you're forty-five—and you'll be just at the top of your powers by then—I shall be one year short of seventy. At the end, you see, even of my professional career. And that's only fifteen years away. Even with good average luck, that's all I can count on. It's strange how one can live along, oblivious to a simple sum in arithmetic like that."
She had been on her feet moving distractedly about the room. Now she came around behind his chair and gripped his body in her strong arms.
"You shan't talk like that!" she said. "You shan't think like that! I won't endure it. It's morbid. It's horrible."
"Oh, no, it's not," he said easily. "The morbidity is in being afraid to look at it. It was morbid to struggle frantically, the way I did all the spring, trying to resist the irresistible thing that was drawing you along your true path. It was a cancerous egotism of mine that was trying to eat you up, live you up into myself. That, thank God, has been cut out of me! I think it has. Don't misunderstand me, though. I'm not going to relinquish anything of you that I can keep;—that I ever had a chance to keep."
He took her hands and gently—coolly—kissed them.
"Then don't relinquish anything," she said. "It's all yours. Can't you believe that, John?"
He released her hands and sank back slackly in his chair. "Victory!" he said, a note of inextinguishable irony in his voice. "A victory I'd have given five years of my life for last March. Yet I could go on winning them—a whole succession of them—and they could lead me to nothing but disaster."
She left him abruptly and the next moment he heard her fling herself down upon his bed. When he rose and disengaged himself from his rug, she said, over an irrepressible sob or two, that he wasn't to mind nor come to her. She wasn't going to cry-not more than a minute.
He came, nevertheless, settled himself on the edge of the bed and took possession of her hands again.
"I wouldn't have told you all this," he said—"for you don't need any lessons in arithmetic, child—if I dared trust myself to remember, after the other thing had come back. Now I'm committed—don't you see?—not to play the fool, tragically or ludicrously, as the case might be, trying to dispute the inevitable. And I shall contrive to keep a lot, my dear. More than you think."
Later, the evening of that same day, he asked her what was in the letter that had provoked their talk. Did they want her back in Chicago for rehearsals or consultations? Because if they did there was no reason in the world why she should not go. At the rate at which he was gaining strength there would not be the slightest reason—he gave her his professional word of honor—why she should not go back in a day or two.
"I should have to go back," she said, "if I were going to sing March's opera. There is such a lot of work about a new production that there would be no time to spare."
"But," he asked, "isn't March's opera precisely what you are going to sing?"
"No," she said rebelliously. "It's not. There wasn't anything in the contract about that. I'll carry out the contract this summer. I'll keep my word and yours, since that is what you want me to do. But I won't sing 'Dolores' for anybody."
He did not press her for the reason.
After a little silence, she said, "Lucile thought I'd fallen in love with him. So did Rush, I guess,—and poor old Nat. Did you, John?"
"I tried to, hard enough," he confessed.
She stared. "Tried to!"
"That would have been the easier thing to fight," he said. "There's nothing inevitable about a man,—any man. I'd have stood a chance at least, of beating him, even though he had a twenty-year handicap or so. But the other thing,—well, that was like the first bar of the Fifth Symphony, you know; Fate knocking at the door. Clear terror that is until one can get the courage to open the door and invite Fate in."
About a week later—just at the beginning of June, this was—Paula did go back to Chicago, leaving her husband to go on gaining the benefit, for another ten days or so, of that wine-like mountain air. It was an unwelcome conviction that he really wanted her to go, rather than any crying need for her at Ravinia that decided her to leave him. The need would not be urgent for at least another fortnight since it had been decided between her and LaChaise that she should make her debut inTosca, an opera she had sung uncounted times.
Since their momentous conversation in which John had attempted to revise the fundamentals of their life together, they had not reverted to the main theme of it; had clarified, merely, one or two of its more immediate conclusions. Paula was to carry out in spirit as well as in letter the terms of her Ravinia contract exactly as if it were still to be regarded as the first step of her reopened career. What she should do about the second step in case it offered itself to her was a bridge not to be crossed until they came to it.
John had professed himself content to let it remain at that, but she divined that there was something hollow in his profession. It was possible, of course, that his restlessness represented nothing more than a new stage in his convalescence. It didn't seem possible that after the candors of that talk he could still be keeping something back from her. Yet that was an impression she very clearly got. Anyhow, her presence was doing him no good, and on that unwelcome assurance, she bade him a forlorn farewell and went home.
It was a true intuition. John heaved a sigh of relief when she was gone. In his present enfeebled state she was too much for him. The electrical vitality of her overpowered him. Even before his illness he had had moments—I think I have recorded one of them—when her ardent strength paralyzed him with a sort of terror and these moments were more frequent now.
There was, too, a real effort involved in presenting ideas to her (intellectual ideas, if they may be so distinguished from emotional ones). He didn't know, now, whether she had fully understood what he had been driving at that day; whether anything had really got through to her beyond a melancholy realization that his love had cooled. He had always been aware of this effort, but in the days of his strength he hadn't minded making it.
Now he was conscious of wishing for some one like Mary,—indeed, for Mary herself. They talked the same language, absolutely. Their minds had the same index of refraction, so that thoughts flashed back and forth between them effortlessly and without distortion. He thought of her so often and wished for her so much during the first two days of his solitude that it seemed almost a case for the psychical research people when he got a telegram from her.
It read: "Aunt Lucile worried you left alone especially traveling. Shall you mind or will Paula if I come down and bring you back, Mary."
There was a situation made clear, at all events. He grinned over it as he despatched his wire to her. "Perfectly unnecessary but come straight along so that we can play together for a week or two before starting home."
Play together is just what they did. Enough of his strength soon came back to make real walks possible and during the second week, with a two-horse team and a side-bar buggy, they managed, without any ill effect upon him, an excursion across the valley and up the opposite mountainside to a log cabin road-house where they had lunch.
Mary, a born horsewoman, did the driving herself, thus relieving them of the impediment to real companionship which a hired driver would have been. In an inconsecutive, light-hearted way difficult to report intelligibly, they managed to tell each other a lot. She let him see, with none of the rhetorical solemnities which a direct statement would have involved, her new awareness of his professional eminence. A dozen innuendoes, as light as dandelion feathers, conveyed it to him; swift brush-strokes of gesture and inflection sketched the picture in; an affectionate burlesque of awe completed it, so that he could laugh at her for it as she had meant he should.
She told him during their drive what the source of her illumination was; described Anthony March's visit on that most desperate day of all, the vividness of his concern over the outcome of the fight and his utter unconcern about the effect of it upon his own fortunes. She had been reading Kipling aloud, out at the farm, to the boys and Aunt Lucile and a memory of it led her to make a comparison—heedless of its absurdity—between the composer and Kirn's lama. "He isn't, anyhow, tied to the 'wheel of things' any more than that old man was."
"I'd like to have come down that day and heard him talk," John said. "Because it's the real thing, with him. Not words. He wouldn't be a bad person to go to," he added musingly, "if one had got himself into a realimpasse—or what looked like one. Paula has chucked his opera, you know."
She nodded, evidently not in the least surprised and, no more, perturbed by this intelligence. "He won't mind that," she explained. "The only thing he really needs, in the world, is to hear his music, but this, you see, wasn't his any more. He had been trying to make it Paula's. He had been working over it rather hopelessly, because he had promised, but it was like letting him out of school when he found that she had forgotten all about him;—didn't care if she never saw him again."
She caught, without an explanatory word, the meaning of the glance her father turned upon her, and went straight on. "Oh, it seems a lot, I know, to have found out about him in one short talk, but there's nothing—personal in that. He doesn't, I mean—save himself up for special people. He's there for anybody. Like a public drinking fountain, you know. That's why he would be such a wonderful person—to go to, as you said. No one could possibly monopolize him."
She added, after a silence, "It seems a shame, when he wants so little that he can't have that. Can't hear, for example, that opera of his the way he really wrote it."
"We owe him something," her father said thoughtfully. "He got rather rough justice from Paula, anyhow. I suppose a thing like that could, perhaps, be managed—if one put his back into it."
She understood instantly, as before, and quite without exegesis, the twinge of pain that went across his face. "Youwillhave a back to put into things again, one of these days. It wants only courage to wait for it, quite patiently until it comes. You've plenty of that. That's one of he things Mr. March told me about you," she added with the playful purpose of surprising him again. "Only I happened to know that for myself."
"It's more than I can be sure of," he said. "I've been full of bravado with Paula, telling her how soon I was going to be back in harness again; cock-sure and domineering as ever, so that she'd better make hay while the sun shone. But it was I, nevertheless, who made her go home so that she could start to work—when the whistle blew. Some one was going to have to support the family, I told her, and it didn't look as if it were going to be me."
This speech, though it ended in jest, had begun, she knew, in earnest. He meant her to understand that, and left her to judge for herself where the dividing line fell. She answered in a tone as light as his, "Paula could do it easily enough." But she was not satisfied with the way he took it. The mere quality of the silence must have told her something. She turned upon him with sudden intensity and said, "Don't tell me you're worrying—about three great healthy people like us. You have been, though. Whatever put it into your mind to spend half a thought on that?"
"Why, it was a letter from Martin Whitney," he said. "Oh, the best meant thing in the world. Nothing but encouragement in it from beginning to end, only it was so infernally encouraging, it set me off. No, let me talk. You're quite the easiest person in the world to tell things to. I've been remiss, there's no getting away from that. I've never taken money-making very seriously, it came so easily. I've spent my earnings the way my friends have spent their incomes. Well, if I'd died the other day, there wouldn't have been much left. There would have been my life insurance for Paula, and enough to pay my debts, including my engagements for Rush, but beyond that, oh, a pittance merely. Of course with ten years' health, back at my practise, even with five, I could improve the situation a lot."
She urged as emphatically as she dared—she wanted to avoid the mistake of sounding encouraging—that the situation needed no improvement. The income of fifty thousand dollars would take care of Paula, and beyond that,—well, if there were ever two healthy young animals in the world concerning whom cares and worries were superfluous, they were herself and Rush.
He told her thoughtfully that this was where she was; wrong. "Rush, to begin with, isn't a healthy young animal. That's what I couldn't make Martin Whitney understand. He's one of the war's sacrifices precisely as much as if he had had his leg shot off. He needs support; will go on needing it for two or three years, financial as well as moral. He mustn't be allowed to fail. That's the essence of it. He's—spent, you see; depleted. One speaks of it in figurative terms, but it's a physiological thing—if we could get at it—that's behind the lassitude of these boys. It all comes back to that. That they're restless, irresolute. That they need the stimulus of excitement and can't endure the drag of routine. They need a generous allowance, my dear,—even for an occasional failure in self-command, those two boys out at Hickory Hill."
She had nothing to say to that, though his pause gave her opportunity. A sudden surmise as to the drift of that last sentence, silenced her. And it was a surmise that leaped, in the next instant, to full conviction. He was pleading Graham's cause with her! Why? Was it something that had been as near his heart as that, all along? Or had some one—Rush—or even Graham himself—engaged his advocacy?
She said at last, rather breathlessly (it was necessary to say something or he would perceive that his stratagem had betrayed itself): "Well, at the gloomy worst, Rush is taken care of. And as for me, I'm not a war sacrifice, anyhow. That's not a possible conception—even for a worried convalescent. Did you everseeanything as gorgeous as that tree, even in an Urban stage setting?"
"No," he said, "the war wasn't what you were sacrificed to."
She held her breath until she saw he wasn't going on with that. But he seemed willing to follow her lead to lighter matters, and for the rest of their excursion they carried out the pretense that there was nothing like a cloud in their sky.
That evening, though, after she had bidden him good night, she changed her mind and came back into his room. There had been something wistful about his kiss that, determined her.
"Which of them wrote to you about me?" she asked.
"Both," he told her. "Of course I should have known you'd guess. Forgive me for having tried to—manage you. I'll show you both their letters if you like. It's a breach of confidence, of course, but I don't know that I could do better."
"I'll read Rush's," she said. "Not the other."
She carried it over to the lamp, and for a while after she had taken in its easily grasped intent she went on turning its pages back and forth while she sought for an end of the tangled skein of her thoughts to hold on by.
Finally, "Do you want me to marry him, dad?" she asked. Then, before he could answer she hurried on. "I mean, would it relieve you from some nightmare worry about me if I did?—This has to be plain talk, doesn't it, if it is to get us anywhere?"
"That's a fair question of yours," he said. But he wasn't ready at once with an answer. "Itwouldbe such a relief, provided you really wanted to marry him. That goes to the bottom of it, I think. My responsibility is to make it possible for you to—follow your heart. To marry or not as you wish. To marry a poor man if you wish. But if Graham is your choice and all that holds you back from him is some remediable misunderstanding—or failure to understand …"
"I don't know whether it's remediable or not," she said; and added, "I told him I would marry him if I could. Did he tell you that?"
It was a mistake to have quoted that expression to her father. He took it just as Graham had. Of course! What else could he think? She sat with clenched hands and a dry throat, listening while he tried to enlighten what he took to be her innocent misunderstanding.
They had never spoken, she realized, about matters of sex. For anything he really knew to the contrary she might have been as ignorant as a child. He was actually talking as one talks to a child;—kindly, tolerantly, tenderly, but with an unconscious touch of patronage, like one trying to explain away—misgivings about Santa Claus! There were elements, inevitably, in a man's love for a woman, that a young girl could not understand. Nothing but experience could bring that understanding home to her. This was what in one way after another, he was trying to convey.
But the intuition which, in good times or bad, always betrayed theiremotions to each other, showed him that he was, somehow missing the mark.Her silence through his tentative little pauses disconcerted him heavily.He ran down at last like an unwound clock.
It was only after a long intolerably oppressive silence that she found her voice. "The misunderstanding isn't what you think," she said. "Nor what Graham thinks. It's his misunderstanding, not mine. He thinks that I am—a sort of innocent angel that he's not good enough for. And the fact is that I'm not—not innocent enough for him. Not an angel at all. Not even quite—good."
But she got no further. The plea for comprehension, for an ear that would not turn away from her plain story, never was made. In a smother of words he halted her. Affectionately, with a gentleness that achieved absolute finality. She was overwrought. She carried paradox too far. In her innocence she used a form of speech that she didn't know the meaning of, and should be careful to avoid. Her troubles, with patience, would work themselves out in the end. Meanwhile let her as far as possible stop thinking about them.