ThatRichard in New York should miss his mother was inevitable. But he was not homesick. He was too busy for that. Austin's vogue was tremendous.
"Every successful man ought to be two men," he told Richard, as they talked together one Sunday night at Austin's place in Westchester, "'another and himself,' as Browning puts it. Then there would be one to labor and the other to enjoy. I want to retire, and I can't. There's a selfish instinct in all of us to grip and hold. That is why I am pinning my faith to you. You can slip in as I slip out. I have visions of riding to hounds and sailing the seas some day, to say nothing of putting up a good game of golf. But perhaps that's a dream. A man can't get away from his work, not when he loves it."
"That's why you're such a success, sir," Richard told him, honestly; "you go to every operation as if it were a banquet."
Austin laughed. "I'm not such a ghoul. But there's always the wonder of it with me. I sometimes wish I had been a churchgoing man, Brooks. There isn't much more for me to learn about bodies, but there's much about souls. I have a feeling that some day in some physical experiment I shall find tangible evidence of the spiritual. That's why I say my prayers to Something every night, and I rather think It's God."
"I know it's God," said Richard, simply, "on such a night as this."
They were silent in the face of the evening's beauty. The great trees on the old estate were black against a silver sky. White statues shone like pale ghosts among them. Back of Richard and his host, in a semicircle of dark cedars, a marble Pan piped to the stars.
"And in the cities babies are sleeping on fire escapes," Austin meditated. "If I had had a son I should have sent him to the slums to find his work. But the Fates have given me only Marie-Louise."
And now his laugh was forced. "Brooks, the Gods have checkmated me. Marie-Louise is the son of her father. I had planned that she should be the daughter of her mother. I sowed some rather wild oats in my youth, and waked in middle age to the knowledge that my materialism had led me astray. So I married an idealist. I wanted my children to have a spiritual background of character such as I have not possessed. And the result ofthat marriage is—Marie-Louise! If she has a soul it is yet to be discovered."
"She is young. Give her time."
"I have been giving her time for eighteen years. I have wanted to see her mother in her, to see some gleam of that exquisite fineness. There are things we men, the most material of us, want in our women, and I want it in Marie-Louise. But she gives back what I have given her—nothing more. And I don't know what to do with her."
"Her mother?" Richard hinted.
"Julie is worn out with trying to meet a nature so unlike her own. Our love for each other has made us understand. But neither of us understands Marie-Louise. I sent her away to school, but she wouldn't stay. She likes her home and she hates rules. She loves animals, and if she were a boy she would practice medicine. Being a woman and having no outlet for her energies, she is freakish. You saw the way she was dressed at dinner."
"I liked it," Richard said; "all that dead silver with her red hair."
"But it is too—sophisticated, for a young girl. Why, man, she ought to be in white frocks and pearls, and putting cushions behind her mother's back."
"You say that because her mother wore white and pearls, and put cushions behindhermother's back. There aren't many of the white-frocks-and-pearlskind left. It's a new generation. Perhaps dead silver with red hair is an expression of it. And it is we who don't understand."
"Perhaps. But it's a problem." Austin rose. "If you'll excuse me, Brooks, I'll go to my wife. We always read together on Sunday nights."
He sent Marie-Louise out to Richard. She came through the starlight, a shining figure in her silver dress, with a silver Persian kitten hugged up in her arms. She sat on the sun-dial and swung her jade bracelet for the kitten to play with.
"Dad and mother are reading the Bible. He doesn't believe in it, and she gets him to listen once a week. And then she reads the prayers for the day. When I was a little girl I had to listen—but never again!"
"Why not?"
"Why should I listen to things that I don't believe? To-night it is the ten virgins and their lamps. And Dad's pretending that he's interested. I am writing a play about it, but mother doesn't know. The Wise Virgins are Bernard Shaw women who know what they want in the way of husbands and go to it. The Foolish Virgins are the old maids, who think it unwomanly to get ready, and find themselves left in the end!"
The silver kitten clawed at the silver dress, and climbed on her mistress's shoulder.
"All of the parables make good modern plots.Mother would be shocked if she knew I was writing them that way. So I don't tell her. Mother is a dear, but she doesn't understand. I should like to tell things to Dad, but he won't listen. If I were a boy he would listen. But he thinks I ought to be like mother."
She slipped from the sun-dial and came and sat in the chair which her father had vacated. "If I were a boy I should have studied medicine. I wanted to be a trained nurse, but Dad wouldn't let me. He said I'd hate having to do the hard work, and perhaps I should. I like to wear pretty clothes, and a nurse never has a chance."
"Perhaps you'll marry."
"Oh, no. I shouldhateto be like mother."
"Why?"
"She just lives for Dad. Now I couldn't do that. I am not going to marry. I don't like men. They ask too much. I like books and cats and being by myself. I am never lonesome. Sometimes I talk to Pan over there, and pretend he is playing to me on his pipes, and then I write poetry. Real poetry. I'll read it to you some time. There's one called 'The Rose Garden.' I wrote it about a woman who was a patient of father's. When she knew she was going to die she wrote him a little note and asked him to see that her body was cremated, and that the ashes were strewn over the roses in his garden. He didn't seem to see anything in it butjust a sick woman's fancy. But I knew that she was in love with him. And my poem tells that her blessed dust gathered itself into a gentle wraith which lives and breathes near him."
"And you aren't afraid to feel that her gentle wraith is here in the garden?"
"Why should I be? I don't believe in ghosts. I don't believe in fairies, either, or Santa Claus. But I like to read about them and write about them, and—and wish that it might be so."
There was something almost wistful in her voice. Richard, aware suddenly of what a child she was, bent forward.
"I think I half believe in fairies, and Christmas wouldn't be anything without Santa Claus, and as for the soul of your gentle lady, I have a feeling that it is finding Heaven in the rose garden."
She was stroking the silver kitten which had curled up in her lap. "I wish I weren't such a—heathen," she said, suddenly. "I know what you mean. But it is only the poetic sense in me that makes me know. I can'tbelieveanything. Not about souls—or prayers. Do you ever pray?"
"Every night. On my knees."
"On your knees? Oh, is it as bad as that?"
Richard, writing to his mother, said of Marie-Louise, "Her mind isn't in a healthy state. It hasn't anything to feed on. Her father is too busyand her mother too ill to realize that she needs companionship of a certain kind. I wish she might have been a pupil at the Crossroads school, with Anne Warfield for her teacher. But no hope of that."
He wrote, too, of his rushing days, and Nancy, answering, hid from him the utter hopelessness of her outlook. Her life began and ended with his letters and the week-ends which he was able to give her. But some of his week-ends had to be spent with Eve; a man cannot completely ignore the fact that he has a fiancée, and Richard would have been less than human if he had not responded to the appeal of youth and beauty. So he motored with Eve and danced with Eve, and did all of the delightful summer things which are possible in the big city near the sea. Aunt Maude went to the North Shore, but Eve stayed with Winifred, and wove about Richard her spells of flattery and of frivolity.
"I want to be near you, Dicky boy. If I'm not you'll work too hard."
"It is work that I like."
"I believe that you like it better than you do me, Dicky."
"Don't be silly, Eve."
"You are always saying that. Do you like your work better than you do me, Dicky?"
"Of course not." But he had no pretty things to say.
The life that he lived with her, however, and with Pip and Winifred and Tony was a heady wine which swept away regrets. He had no time to think. He worked by day and played by night, and often after their play there was work again. Now and then, as the Sunday night when he had first met Marie-Louise, he motored with Austin out to Westchester. Mrs. Austin spent her summers there. Long journeys tired her, and she would not leave her husband. Marie-Louise stayed at "Rose Acres" because she hated big hotels, and found cottage colonies stupid. The great gardens swept down to the river—the wide, blue river with the high bluffs on the sunset side.
The river at Bower's was not blue; it showed in the spring the red of the clay which was washed into it, and now and then a clear green when the rains held off, but it was rarely blue except on certain sapphire days in the fall, when a northwest wind swept all clouds from the sky.
And this was not a singing river. It was too near the sea, and too full of boats, and there was no reason why it should say, "Come and see—come and see—the world," when the world was at its feet!
And so the great Hudson had no song for Richard. Yet now and then, as he walked down to it in the warm darkness, his ears seemed to catch a faint echo of the harmonies which had filled his soul on the day that Anne Warfield had dried her hairon the bank of the old river at Bower's, and had walked with him in the wood.
Except at such moments, however, it must be confessed that he thought little of Anne Warfield. It hurt to think of her. And he was too much of a surgeon to want to turn the knife in the wound.
Marie-Louise, developing a keen interest in his affairs as they grew better acquainted, questioned him about Evelyn.
"Dad says you are going to marry her."
"Yes."
"Is she pretty?"
"Rather more than that."
"Why don't you bring her out?"
"Nobody asked me, sir, she said."
She flashed a smile at him.
"I like your nursery-rhyme way of talking. You are the humanest thing that we have ever had in this house. Mother is a harp of a thousand strings, and Dad is a dynamo. But you are flesh and blood."
"Thank you."
"I wish you'd ask your Evelyn out here, and her friends. For tea and tennis some Saturday afternoon. I want to see you together."
But after she had seen them together, she said, shrewdly, "You are not in love with her."
"I am going to marry her, child. Isn't that proof enough?"
"It isn't any proof at all. The big man is the one who really cares."
"The big man? Pip?"
"Is that what you call him? He looks at her like a dog waiting for a bone. And he brightens when she speaks to him. And her eyes are always on you and yours are never on her."
"Marie-Louise, you are an uncanny creature. Like your little silver cat. She watches mice and you watch me. I have a feeling that you are going to pounce on me."
"Some day I shall pounce," she poked her finger at him, "and shake you as my little cat shakes a mouse, and you'll wake up."
"Am I asleep, Marie-Louise?"
"Yes. You haven't heard Pan pipe." She was leaning on the sun-dial and looking up at the grinning god. "Men who live in cities have no ears to hear."
"Are you a thousand years old, Marie-Louise?"
"I am as old as the centuries," she told him gravely. "I played with Pan when the world was young."
They smiled at each other, and then he said, "My mother wants me to live in the country. Do you think if I were there I should hear Pan pipe?"
"Not if you were there because your mother wished it. It is only when you love it yourself that the river calls and you hear the fluting of the wind in the rushes."
It was an August Saturday, hot and humid. Marie-Louise was in thin white, but it was a white with a difference from the demure summer frocks of a former generation. The modern note was in the white fur which came high up about Marie-Louise's throat. Yet she did not look warm. Her skin was as pale as the pearls in her ears. Her red hair flamed, but without warmth; it rippled back from her forehead to a cool and classic coil.
"If you marry your Eve," she told Richard, "and stay with father, you'll grow rich and fat, and forget the state of your soul."
"I thought you didn't believe in souls."
She flushed faintly. "I believe in yours. But your Eve doesn't. She likes you because you don't care, and everybody else does. And that isn't love."
"What is love?"
She pondered. "I don't know. I've never felt it. And I don't want to feel it. If I loved too much I should die—and if I didn't love enough I should be ashamed."
"You are a queer child, Marie-Louise."
"I am not a child. Dad thinks I am, and mother. But they don't know."
There were day lilies growing about the sun-dial. She gathered a handful of white blooms and laid them at the feet of the piping Pan. "I shall write a poem about it," she said, "of a girl who loved a marble god, and who found it—enough. Every dayshe laid a flower at his feet. And a human came to woo her, and she told him, 'If I loved you, you would ask more of me than my marble lover. He asks only that I lay flowers at his feet.'"
He could never be sure whether she was in jest or earnest. And now she narrowed her eyes in a quizzical smile and was gone.
He spoke of Marie-Louise to Eve. "She hasn't enough to do. She ought to be busy with her fancy work and her household matters."
"No woman is busy with household matters in this age, Dicky. Nor with fancy work. Is that what you expect of a wife?"
He didn't know what he expected, and he told her so. But he knew he was expecting more than she was prepared to give. Eve had an off-with-the-old-and-on-with-the-new theory of living which left him breathless. She expressed it one night when she said that she shouldn't have "obey" in her marriage service. "I never expect to mind you, Dicky, so what's the use?"
There was no use, of course. Yet he had a feeling that he was being robbed of something sweet and sacred. The quaint old service asked things of men as well as of women. Good and loving and fine things. He was old-fashioned enough to want to promise all that it asked, and to have his wife promise.
Eve laughed, too, at Richard's grace before meat. "You mustn't embarrass me at formal dinners,Dicky. Somehow it won't seem quite in keeping with the cocktails, will it?"
Thus the spirit of Eve, contending with all that made him the son of his mother, meeting his spiritual revolts with material arguments, banking the fires of his flaming aspirations!
Yet he rarely let himself dwell upon this aspect of it. He had set his feet in a certain path, and he was prepared to follow it.
On this path, at every turning, he met Philip. The big man had not been driven from the field by the fact of Eve's engagement. He still asked her to go with him, he still planned pleasures for her. His money made things easy, and while he included Richard in most of his plans, he looked upon him as a necessary evil. Eve refused to go without her young doctor.
Now and then, however, he had her alone. "Dicky's called to an appendicitis case," she informed him ruefully, one night over the telephone, "and I am dead lonesome. Come and cheer me up."
He went to her, and during the evening proposed a week-end yachting trip which should take them to the North Shore and Aunt Maude.
"Is Dicky invited?"
"Of course. But I'm not sure that I want him."
"He wouldn't come if he knew that you felt like that."
"It isn't anything personal. And you know my manner is perfect when I'm with him."
"Yes. Poor Dicky. Pip, we are a pair of deceivers. I sometimes think I ought to tell him."
"There's nothing to tell."
"Nothing tangible,—but he's so straightforward. And he'd hate the idea that I'm letting you—make love to me."
"I don't make love. I have never touched the tip of your finger."
"Pip!Of course not. But your eyes make love, and your manner—and deep down in my heart I am afraid."
"Afraid of what?"
"That Fate isn't going to give me what I want. I don't want you, Pip. I want Dicky. And if you loved me—you'd let me alone."
"Tell me to go,—and I won't come back."
"Not ever?"
"Never."
She weakened. "But I don't want you to go away. You see, you are my good friend, Pip."
She should not have let him stay. She knew that. She found it necessary to apologize to Richard. "You see, Pip cares an awful lot."
Richard had little sympathy. "He might as well take his medicine and not hang around you, Eve."
"If you would hang around a little more perhaps he wouldn't."
"I am very busy. You know that."
His voice was stern. "If I am a busy husband, will you make that an excuse for having Pip at your heels?"
"Richard."
"I beg your pardon. I shouldn't have said that. But marriage to me means more than good times. Life means more than good times. When I am here in New York it seems to me sometimes that I am drugged by work and pleasure. That there isn't a moment in which to live in a leisurely thoughtful sense."
"You should have stayed at Crossroads."
"I can't go back. I have burned my bridges. Austin expects things of me, and I must live up to his expectations. And, besides, I like it."
"Really, Dicky?"
"Really. There's a stimulus about the rush of it and the big things we are doing. Austin is a giant. My association with him is the biggest thing that has ever come into my life."
"Bigger than your love for me?"
Thus she brought him back to it. Making always demands upon him which he could not meet. He found himself harassed by her continued harping on the personal point of view, yet there were moments when she swung him into step with her. And one of the moments came when she spoke of the yachting trip. It was very hot, and Richard loved the sea.
"Dicky, I'll keep Pip in the background if you I promise to come."
"How can you keep him in the background when he is our host?"
"He is going to invite Marie-Louise. And he'll have to be nice to her. And you and I——! Dicky, we'll feel the slap of the breeze in our faces, and forget that there's a big city back of us with sick people in it, and slums and hot nights. Dicky—I love you—and I am going to be your wife. Won't you come—because I want you—Dicky?"
There were tears on her cheeks as she made her plea, and he was always moved by her tears. It was his protective sense that had first tied him to her; it was still through his chivalry that she made her most potent appeal.
Marie-Louise was glad to go. "It will be like watching a play."
She and Richard were waiting for Pip's "Mermaid" to make a landing at the pier at Rose Acres. A man-servant with their bags stood near, and Marie-Louise's maid was coated and hatted to accompany her mistress. "It will be like watching a play," Marie-Louise repeated. "The eternal trio. Two men and a girl."
She waved to the quartette on the forward deck. "Your big man looks fine in his yachting things. And your Eve is nice in white."
Marie-Louise was not in white. In spite of theheat she was wrapped to the ears in a great coat of pale buff. On her head was a Chinese hat of yellow straw, with a peacock's feather. Yet in spite of the blueness and yellowness, and the redness of her head, she preserved that air of amazing coolness, as if her blood were mixed with snow and ran slowly.
Arriving on deck, she gave Pip her hand. "I am glad it is clear. I hate storms. I am going to ask Dr. Brooks to pray that it won't be rough. He is a good man, and the gods should listen."
The"Mermaid," having swept like a bird out of the harbor, stopped at Coney Island. Marie-Louise wanted her fortune told. Eve wanted peanuts and pop-corn. "It will make me seem a little girl again."
Marie-Louise, cool in her buff coat, shrugged her shoulders. "I was never allowed to be that kind of a little girl," she said, "but I think I'd like to try it for a day."
Eve and Marie-Louise got on very well together. They spoke the same language. And if Marie-Louise was more artificial in some ways, she was more open than Eve.
"You'd better tell Dr. Brooks," she told the older girl, as the two of them walked ahead of Richard and Pip on the pier. Tony and Winifred had elected to stay on board.
"Tell him what?"
"That you are keeping the big man in reserve."
Eve flushed. "Marie-Louise, you're horrid."
"I am honest," was the calm response.
Pip bought them unlimited peanuts and pop-corn, and Marie-Louise piloted them to the tent of a fat Armenian who told fortunes.
In spite of his fatness, however, he was immaculate in European clothing; he charged exorbitantly and achieved extraordinary results.
"He said the last time that I should marry a poet," Marie-Louise informed them, "which isn't true. I am not going to be married at all. But it amuses me to hear him."
The black eyes of the fat Armenian twinkled. "There will be a time when you will not be amused. You will be married."
He pulled out a chair for her. "Will your friends stay while I tell you the rest?"
"No, they are children; they want to buy peanuts and pop-corn—they want to play."
The others laughed. But the fat Armenian did not laugh. "Your soul is old!"
"You see," she asked the others, "what I mean? He says things like that to me. He told me once that in a former incarnation I had walked beside the Nile and had loved a king."
"A king-poet," the man corrected.
"Will you tell mine?" Eve asked suddenly.
"Certainly, madam."
"I am mademoiselle. You go first, Marie-Louise."
But Marie-Louise insisted on yielding to her. "We will come back for you."
Coming back, they found Eve in an irritable temper. "He told me—nothing."
"I told you what you did not want to hear. But I told you the truth."
"I don't believe in such things." Eve was lofty. Her cold eyes challenged the Oriental. "I don't believe you know anything about it."
"If Mademoiselle will write it down——" He was fat and puffy, but he had a sort of large dignity which ignored her rudeness. "If Mademoiselle will write it down, she will not say—next year—'I do not believe.'"
She shivered. "I wish I hadn't come. Dicky boy, let's go and play. Pip and Marie-Louise can stay if they like it. I don't."
When Marie-Louise had had her imagination once more fed on poets, kings, and previous incarnations, she and Pip went forth to seek the others.
"I wonder what he told Eve?" Pip speculated.
Marie-Louise spoke with shrewdness. "He probably told her that she would marry you—only he wouldn't put it that way. He would say that in reaching for a star she would stumble on a diamond."
"And is Brooks the star?"
She nodded, grinning. "And you are the diamond. It is what she wants—diamonds."
"She wants more than that"—tenderness crept into his voice—"she wants love—and I can give it."
"She wants Dr. Brooks. 'Most any woman would," said Marie-Louise cruelly. "We all know he is different. You know it, and I know it, and Eve knows it. He is bigger in some ways, and better!"
They found Eve and Richard in a pavilion dancing in strange company, to raucous music. Later the four of them rode on a merry-go-round, with Marie-Louise on a dolphin and Eve on a swan, with the two men mounted on twin dragons. They ate chowder and broiled lobster in a restaurant high in a fantastic tower. They swept up painted Alpine slopes in reckless cars, they drifted through dark tunnels in gorgeous gondolas. Eve took her pleasures with a sort of feverish enthusiasm, Marie-Louise with the air of a skeptic trying out a new thing.
"Mother would faint and fade away if she knew I was here," Marie-Louise told Richard as she sat next to him in a movie show, "and so would Dad. He would object to the germs and she would object to the crowd. Mother is like a flower in a sunlighted garden. She can't imagine that a lily could grow with its feet in the mud. But they do. And Dad knows it. But he likes to have mother stay in the sunlighted garden. He would never have fallen in love with her if her roots had been in the mud."
She was murmuring this into Richard's ear. Eve was on the other side of him, with Pip beyond.
"I've never had a day like this," Marie-Louisefurther confided, "and I am not sure that I like it. It seems so far away from—Pan—and the trees—and the river."
Her voice dropped into silence, and Richard sat there beside her like a stone, seeing nothing of the pictures thrown on the screen. He saw a road which led between spired cedars, he saw an old house with a wide porch. He saw a golden-lighted table, and his mother's face across the candles. He saw a girl in a brown coat scattering food for the birds with a kind little hand—he heard the sound of a bell!
When they reached the yacht, Winifred was dressed for dinner, and Eve and Marie-Louise scurried below to change. They dined on the upper deck by moonlight, and sat late enjoying the still warmth of the night. There was no wind and they seemed to sail through silver waters.
Marie-Louise sang for them. Strange little songs for which she had composed both words and music. They had haunting cadences, and Pip told her "For Heaven's sake, kiddie, cheer up. You are making us cry."
She laughed, and gave them a group of old nursery rhymes. Most of them had to do with things to eat. There was the Dame who baked her pies "on Christmas day in the morning," and the Queen who made the tarts, and Jenny Wren and her currant wine.
"They are what I call appetizing," she saidquaintly. "When I was a tiny tot Dad kept me on a diet. I was never allowed to eat pies or tarts or puddings. So I used to feast vicariously on my nursery rhymes."
They laughed, as she had meant they should, and Pip said, "Give us another," so she chanted with increasing dramatic effect the story of King Arthur.
"A bag pudding the king did make,And stuffed it well with plums,And in it put great hunks of fat,As big as my two thumbs——"
"A bag pudding the king did make,And stuffed it well with plums,And in it put great hunks of fat,As big as my two thumbs——"
"Think of the effect of those hunks of fat," she explained amid their roars of laughter, "on my dieted mind."
"I hate to think of things to eat," Eve said. "And I can't imagine myself cooking—in a kitchen."
"Where else would you cook?" Marie-Louise demanded practically. "I'd like it. I went once with my nurse to her mother's house, and she was cooking ham and frying eggs and we sat down to a table with a red cloth and had the ham and eggs with great slices of bread and strong tea. My nurse let me eat all I wanted, because her mother said it wouldn't hurt me, and it didn't. But my mother never knew. And always after that I liked to think of Lucy's mother and that warm nice kitchen, and the plump, pleasant woman and the ham and eggs and tea."
She was very serious, but they roared again. She was so far away from anything that was homely and housewifely, with her red hair peaked up to a high knot, her thick white coat with its black animal skin enveloping her shoulders, the gleam of silver slippers.
"Dicky," Eve said, "I hope you are not expecting me to cook in Arcadia."
"I don't expect anything."
"Every man expects something," Winifred interposed; "subconsciously he wants a hearth-woman. That's the primitive."
"I don't want a hearth-woman," Pip announced.
Dutton Ames chuckled. "You're a stone-age man, Meade. You'd like to woo with a club, and carry the day's kill to the woman in your tent."
A quick fire lighted Pip's eyes. "Jove, it wouldn't be bad, would it? What do you think, Eve?"
"I like your yacht better, and your chef and your alligator pears, and caviar."
An hour later Eve and Richard were alone on deck. The others had gone down. The lovers had preferred the moonlight.
"Eve, old lady," Richard said, "you know that even with Austin's help I'm not going to be a Cr[oe]sus. There won't be yachts—and chefs—and alligator pears."
"Jealous, Dicky?"
"No. But you've always had these things, Eve."
"I shall still have them. Aunt Maude won't let us suffer. She's a good old soul."
"Do you think I shall care to partake of Aunt Maude's bounty?"
"Perhaps not. But I am not so stiff-necked. Oh, Ducky Dick, do you think that I am going to let you keep on being poor and priggish and steady-minded?"
"Am I that, Eve?"
"You know you are."
Her laughing eyes challenged him. He would have been less than a man if he had not responded to the appeal of her youth and beauty. "Dicky," she said, "when we are married I am going to give you the time of your young life. All work and no play will make you a dull boy, Dicky."
In the night the clouds came up over the moon, and when the late and lazy party appeared on deck for luncheon, Marie-Louise complained. "I hate it this way. There's going to be a storm."
There was a storm before night. It blew up tearingly from the south and there was menace in it and madness.
Winifred and Eve were good sailors. But Marie-Louise went to pieces. She was frantic with fear, and as the night wore on, Richard found himself much concerned for her.
She insisted on staying on deck. "I feel like a rat in a trap when I am inside. I want to face it."
The wind was roaring about them. The sea was black and the sky was black, a thick velvety black that turned to copper when the lightning came.
"Aren't you afraid?" Marie-Louise demanded; "aren't you?"
"No."
"Why shouldn't you be? Why shouldn't anybody be?"
"My nerves are strong, Marie-Louise."
"It isn't nerves. It's faith. You believe that the boat won't go down, and you believe that if it did go down your soul wouldn't die."
Her white face was close to him. "I wish I could believe like that," she said in a high, sharp voice. Then she screamed as the little ship seemed caught up into the air and flung down again.
"Hush," Richard told her; "hush, Marie-Louise."
She was shaking and shivering. "I hate it," she sobbed.
Pip, like a yellow specter in oilskins, came up to them. "Eve wants you, Brooks," he shouted above the clamor of wind and wave.
"Shall we go in, Marie-Louise?"
"No, no." She cowered against his arm.
Over her head Richard said to Pip, "I shall come as soon as I can."
So Pip went down, and the two were left alone in the tumult and blackness of the night.
As Marie-Louise lay for a moment quiet againsthis arm, Richard bent down to her. "Are you still afraid?"
"Yes, oh, yes. I keep thinking—if I should die. And I am afraid to die."
"You are not going to die. And if you were there would be nothing to fear. Death is just—falling asleep. Rarely any terror. We doctors know, who see people die. I know it, and your father knows it."
By the light of a blinding flash he saw her white face with its wet red hair.
"Dad doesn't know it as you know," she said, chokingly. "He couldn't say it as you—say it."
"Why not?"
"He's like I am.Dad's afraid."
The storm swept on, leaving the waves rough behind it, and Richard at last put Marie-Louise to bed with a sleeping powder. Then he went to hunt up Eve. He was very tired and it was very late. The night had passed, and the dawn would soon be coming up over the horizon. He found Pip in the smoking room. Eve had gone to bed. Everybody had gone to bed. It had been a terrible storm.
Richard agreed that it had been terrible. He was glad that Eve could sleep. He couldn't understand why Austin had allowed Marie-Louise to take such a trip. Her fear of storms was evidently quite uncontrollable. And she was at all times hysterical and high-strung.
Pip was not interested in Marie-Louise. "Eve lost her nerve at the last."
Richard was solicitous. "I'm sorry. I wanted to come down, but I couldn't leave Marie-Louise. Eve's normal, and she'll be all right as soon as the storm stops. But Marie-Louise may suffer for days. The sooner she gets on shore the better."
He went on deck, and looked out upon a gray wind-swept world.
Then the sun came up, and there was a great light upon the waters.
All the next day Marie-Louise lay in a long chair. "Dad told me not to come," she confessed to Richard. "I've been this way before. But I wouldn't listen."
"If I had been your father," Richard said, "you would have listened, and you would have stayed at home."
She grinned. "You can't be sure. Nobody can be sure. I don't like to take orders."
"Until you learn to take orders you aren't going to amount to much, Marie-Louise."
"I amount to a great deal. And your ideas are—old-fashioned; that's what your Eve says, Dr. Dicky."
She looked at him through her long eyelashes. "What's the matter with your Eve?"
"What do you mean?"
"She is punishing you, but you don't know it.She is down-stairs playing bridge with Pip and Tony and Win, and leaving you alone to meditate on your sins. And you aren't meditating. You are talking to me. I am going to write a poem about a Laggard Lover. I'll make you a shepherd boy who sits on the hills and watches his sheep. And when the girl who loves him calls to him, he refuses to go—he still watches—his sheep."
He looked puzzled. "I don't know in the least what you are talking about."
"You are the shepherd. Your work is the sheep—Eve is the girl. Your work will always be more to you than the woman. Dad's work isn't. He never forgets mother for a minute."
"And you think that I'll forget Eve?"
"Yes. And she'll hate that."
There was a spark in his eye.
"I think that we won't discuss Eve, Marie-Louise."
"Then I'll discuss her in a poem. Lend me a pencil, please."
He gave her the pencil and a prescription pad, and she set to work. She read snatches to him as she progressed. It was remarkably clever, with a constantly recurring refrain.
"Let me watch my sheep," said the lover, "my sheep on the hills."
The verses went on to relate that the girl, finding her shepherd dilatory, turned her attention to another swain, and at last she flouts the shepherd.
"Go watch your sheep, laggard lover, your sheep on the hills."
She laid the verses aside as Tony and Win joined them.
"Three rubbers, and Pip and Eve are ahead."
"Isn't Eve coming?"
"She said she was coming up soon."
But she did not come, and Pip did not come. Marie-Louise, with a great rug spread over her, slept in her chair. Dutton Ames read aloud to his wife. Richard rose and went to look for Eve.
There was a little room which Pip called "The Skipper's own." It was furnished in a man's way as a den, with green leather and carved oak and plenty of books. Its windows gave a forward view of sky and water.
It was here that the four of them had been playing auction. Eve was now shuffling the cards for Solitaire.
Pip, watching her, caught suddenly at her left hand. "Why didn't Brooks give you a better ring?"
"I like my ring. Let go of my hand, Pip."
"I won't. What's the matter with the man that he should dare dream of tying you down to what he can give you? It seems to me that he lacks pride."
"He doesn't lack anything. Let go of my hand, Pip."
But he still held it. "How he could have thecourage to ask—until he had made a name for himself."
She blazed. "He didn't ask. I asked him, Pip. I cared enough for that."
He dropped her hand as if it had stung him. "You cared—as much as that?"
She faced him bravely. "As much as that—it pleased me to say what it was my right to say."
"Oh! It was the queen, then, and the—beggar man.Eve, come back."
She was at the door, but she turned. "I'll come back if you will beg my pardon. Richard is not a beggar, and I am not the queen. How hateful you are, Pip."
"I won't beg your pardon. And let's have this out right now, Eve."
"Have what out?"
"Sit down, and I'll tell you."
Once more they were seated with the table between them. Pip's back was to the window, but Eve faced the broad expanse of sky and sea. A faint pink flush was on the waters: a silver star hung at the edge of a crescent moon. There was no sound but the purr of machinery and the mewing of gulls in the distance.
Eve was in pink—a straight linen frock with a low white collar. It gave her an air of simplicity quite unlike her usual elegance. Pip feasted his eyes on her.
"You've got to face it. Brooks doesn't care."
"He does care."
"He didn't care enough to come down last night when you were afraid—and wanted him. And you turned to me, just for one little minute, Eve. Do you think I shall ever forget the thrill of the thought that you turned to me?"
She was staring straight out at the little moon. "Marie-Louise was his patient—he had to stay with her."
"You are saying that to me, but in your heart you know you are resenting the fact that he didn't come when you called. Aren't you, Eve? Aren't you resenting it?"
She told him the truth. "Yes. But I know that when I am his wife, I shall have to let him think about his patients. I ought to be big enough for that."
"You are big enough for anything. But you are not always going to be content with crumbs from the king's table. And that's what you are getting from Brooks. And I have a feast ready. Eve, can't you see that I would give, give, give, and he will take, take, take? Eve, can't you see?"
She did see, and for the moment she was swayed by the force of his passionate eloquence.
She leaned toward him a little. "Pip, dear, I wish—sometimes—that it might have been—you."
It needed only this. He swept the card tableaside with his strong arms. He was on his knees begging for love, for life. Her hair swept his cheek.
The little moon shone clear in the quiet sky. There was not much light, but there was enough for a man standing in the door to see two dark figures outlined against the silver space beyond.
And Richard was standing in the door!
Eve saw him first. "Go away, Pip," she said, and stood up. "I—I think I can make him understand."
When they were alone she said to Richard in a strained voice, "It was my fault, Dicky."
"Do you mean that you—let him, Eve?"
"No. But I let him talk about his love for me—and—and—he cares very much."
"He knows that you are engaged to me."
"Yes. But last night when you stayed on deck when I needed you and asked for you, Pip knew that you wouldn't come—and he was sorry for me."
"And he was sorry again this afternoon?"
"Yes."
"And he showed it by making love to you?"
"He thinks I won't be happy with you. He thinks that you don't care. He thinks——"
"I don't care what Meade thinks. I want to know what you think, Eve."
Their voices had come out of the darkness. She pulled the little chain of a wall bracket, and the room was enveloped in a warm wave of light. "I don'tknow what I think. But I hated to have you with Marie-Louise."
"She was very ill. You knew that. Eve, if we can't trust each other, what possible happiness can there be ahead?"
She had no answer ready.
"Of course I can't stay on Meade's boat after this," he went on; "I'll get them to run in here somewhere and drop me."
She sank back in the chair from which she had risen when Philip left them. His troubled eyes resting upon her saw a blur of pink and gold out of which emerged her white face.
"But I want you to stay."
"You shouldn't want me to stay, Eve. I can't accept his hospitality, after this, and call myself—a man."
"Oh, Dicky—I detest heroics."
She was startled by the tone in which he said, "If that is the way you feel about it, we might as well end it here."
"Dicky——"
"I mean it, Eve. The whole thing is based on the fact that I stayed with a patient when you wanted me. Well, I shall always be staying with patients after we are married, and if you are unable to see why I must do the thing I did last night, then you will never be able to see it. And a doctor's wife must see it."
She came up to him, and in the darkness laid her cheek against his arm. "Dicky, don't joke about a thing like that. I can't stand it. And I'm sorry about—Pip. Dicky, I shall die if you don't forgive me."
He forgave her. He even made himself believe that Pip might be forgiven. He exerted himself to seem at his ease at dinner. He said nothing more about leaving at the next landing.
But late that night he sat alone on deck in the darkness. He was a plain man, and he saw things straight. And this thing was crooked. The hot honor of his youth revolted against the situation in which he saw himself. He felt hurt and ashamed. It was as if the dreams of his boyhood had been dragged in the dust.
Inthe winter which followed Richard often wondered if he were the same man who had ridden his old Ben up over the hills, and had said his solemn grace at his own candle-lighted table.
It had been decided that he and Eve should wait until another year for their wedding. Richard wanted to get a good start. Eve was impatient, but acquiesced.
It was not Richard's engagement, however, which gave to his life the effect of strangeness. It was, rather, his work, which swept him into a maelstrom of new activities. Austin needed rest and he knew it. Richard was young and strong. The older man, using his assistant as a buffer between himself and a demanding public, felt no compunction. His own apprenticeship had been hard.
So Richard in Austin's imposing limousine was whirled through fashionable neighborhoods and up to exclusive doorways. He presided at operations where the fees were a year's income for a poor man. A certain percentage of these fees came to him. He found that he need have no fears for his financial future.
His letters from his mother were his only link with the old life. She wrote that she was well. That Anne Warfield was with her, and Cousin Sulie, and that the three of them and Cousin David played whist. That Anne was such a dear—that she didn't know what she would do without her.
Richard went as often as he could on Sundays to Crossroads. But at such times he saw little of Anne. She felt that no one should intrude on the reunions of mother and son. So she visited at Beulah's or Bower's and came back on Mondays.
Nancy persisted in her refusal to go back to New York. "I know I am silly," she told her son, "but I have a feeling that I shouldn't be able to breathe, and should die of suffocation."
Richard spoke to Dr. Austin of his mother's state of mind. "Queer thing, isn't it?"
"A natural thing, I should say. Your father's death was an awful blow. I often wonder how she lived out the years while she waited for you to finish school."
"But she did live them, so that I might be prepared to practice at Crossroads. As I think of it, it seems monstrous that I should disappoint her."
"Fledglings always leave the nest. Mothers have that to expect. The selfishness of the young makes for progress. It would have been equally monstrous if you had stayed in that dull place wasting your talents."
"Would it have been wasted, sir? There's no one taking my place in the old country. And there are many who could fill it here. There's a chance at Crossroads for big work for the right man. Community water supply—better housing, the health conditions of the ignorant foreign folk who work the small farms. A country doctor ought to have the missionary spirit."
"There are plenty of little men for such places."
"It takes big men. I could make our old countryside bloom like a rose if I could put into it half the effort that I am putting into my work with you. But it would be lean living—and I have chosen the flesh-pots."
"Don't despise yourself because you couldn't go on being poor in a big way. You are going to be rich in a big way, and that is better."
As the days went on, however, Richard wondered if it were really better to be rich in a big way. Sometimes the very bigness and richness oppressed him. He found himself burdened by the splendor of the mansions at which he made his morning calls. He hated the sleekness of the men in livery who preceded him up the stairs, the trimness of the maids waiting on the threshold of hushed boudoirs. Disease and death in these sumptuous palaces seemed divorced from reality as if the palaces were stage structures, and the people in them were actors who would presently walk out into the wings.
It was therefore with some of the feelings which had often assailed him when he had stepped from a dim theater out into the open air that Richard made his way one morning to a small apartment on a down-town side street to call on a little girl who had recently left the charity ward at Austin's hospital. Richard had operated for appendicitis, and had found himself much interested in the child. He had dismissed the limousine farther up. It had seemed out of place in the shabby street.
He stopped at the florist's for a pot of pink posies and at another shop for fruit. Laden with parcels he climbed the high stairs to the top floor of the tenement.
The little girl and her grandmother lived together. The grandmother had a small pension, and sewed by the day for several old customers. They thus managed to pay expenses, but poverty pinched. Richard had from the first, however, been impressed by their hopefulness. Neither the grandmother nor the child seemed to look upon their lot as hard. The grandmother made savory stews on a snug little stove and baked her own sweet loaves. Now and then she baked a cake. Things were spotlessly clean, and there were sunshine and fresh air. To have pitied those two would have been superfluous.
After he had walked briskly out into Fifth Avenue, he was thinking of another grandmother on whom he had called a few days before. She was a haughtyold dame, but she was browbeaten by her maid. Her grandchildren were brought in now and then to kiss her hand. They were glad to get away. They had no real need of her. They had no hopes or fears to confide. So in spite of her magnificence and her millions, she was a lonely soul.
Snow had fallen the night before, and was now melting in the streets, but the sky was very blue above the tall buildings. Christmas was not far away, and as Richard went up-town the crowd surged with him, meeting the crowd that was coming down.
He had a fancy to lunch at a little place on Thirty-third Street, where they served a soup with noodles that was in itself a hearty meal. In the days when money had been scarce the little German café had furnished many a feast. Now and then he and his mother had come together, and had talked of how, when their ship came in, they would dine at the big hotel around the corner.
And now that his ship was in, and he could afford the big hotel, it had no charms. He hated the women dawdling in its alleys, the men smoking in its corridors, the whole idle crowd, lunching in acres of table-crowded space.
So he set as his goal the clean little restaurant, and swung along toward it with something of his old boyish sense of elation.
And then a strange thing happened. For the first time in months he found his heart marking time tothe tune of the song which old Ben's hoofs had beaten out of the roads as they made their way up into the hills—