Late in the afternoon of the day before Louise and Laura were to sail, John Blythe, having fled his office and a great mass of work at an unusually early hour and without any conscientious scruples whatever, strode up and down, back and forth, the entire length of his apartment—barring the kitchen—many dozens of times. He subjected his hair to an absurd hand-tousling as he paced; he kicked up corners of the rugs and then kicked them into place again on the next trip back; he stopped at tables to pick up books, glancing at their titles with unseeing eyes and then tossing them back on the tables with a bang; once he picked up an ordinary match-safe that he had owned for years, and caught himself holding it out in front of him and staring curiously at it—but really far, far beyond it—as if he had never before clapped an eye upon it, and, emerging for a moment from that trance, he replaced the match-safe on the table with a flickering smile.
Noticing all of which from the kitchen out of the corners of her solicitous and suspicious eyes, Sarah became worried. Sarah was the stout, grey-wooled colored woman who managed, not to say ruled, John Blythe's bachelor establishment, including John Blythe himself. She had been Blythe's boyhood nurse, and, never having been entirely out of touch with him through all of his early struggles, she had returned to him when he had won his way and set up his solitary Lares and Penates. She was highly privileged. There were times, indeed, when she exercised the actual veto power; as for example, when Blythe wanted to shift too early into lighter-weight linen, or sought to rush off to an appointment without his breakfast, and so on.
Now, polishing a glass to give her hands something to do, she appeared at the door of the kitchen, completely filling it, and waited for Blythe to stride back that way. So intense was his absorption that he did not see her until she coughed remindfully. Then he looked up and at her—still without seeing her, as she well knew.
"Yo' all ain't sick, is yo' Mistuh John?" inquired Sarah, gazing at him slantwise and showing a good deal of the whites of her eyes.
Blythe didn't hear her. He gazed right through her, and, thence on, through the rear wall of the kitchen. After quite a pause, however, it was borne in upon his consciousness that she had said something.
"How is that, Sarah?" he asked her, coming to a standstill.
"Ah said, Is yo' tuk sick, suh?" repeated Sarah. "Dis heah crazy, triflin', no-'count N'Yawk weathuh is 'nough tuh mek anybody tuhn ovuh an' die, an' Ah got de misuhy in mah haid mahse'f. Is yo' got any fevuh, suh? Yo' face looks raid on de tips o' de cheeks."
Blythe, only half-hearing, felt tentatively of the "raid" spots on his cheeks, which, as a matter of fact, were decidedly flushed. Then he thrust his hands into his pockets and resumed his up-and-down pacing, saying:
"Oh, I'm all right, Sarah. Not a bit under the weather. Just—er—fixing up a case, that's all."
Sarah, polishing away at the glass, gazed intently at his back as he walked away. Then she slowly turned and re-entered the kitchen, muttering to herself:
"Can't tellmeno sich conjingulatin' stuff—'fixin' up a case.' De case dat boy is fixin' up weahs petticoats an' puffs an' maybe one o' dese heah D'rectory dresses—Ah reckon Ah can tell de symptoms!"
Wherein, as to the main point of her suspicion, the sagacious Sarah was exactly right.
John Blythe was indubitably, whole-heartedly, whole-mindedly in love with Louise Treharne. He knew that. He had known it for some time. That, however, in accordance with a by no means uncommon rule in such cases, was, he considered, an exceedingly unimportant factor in the problem. The problem, briefly stated, was this: What did Louise Treharne think of him? He remembered now, with impatience, his words to Louise in the Park, when he had hoped that she might accept his "devotion as a man," and her reply. His "devotion as a man?" That, Blythe reflected, might mean anything, especially to a girl placed in a difficult position and, as a natural consequence, in need of all the devotion of any sort that might be offered her. Had Louise understood his words as he had meant them? Blythe, with the customary self-depreciating pessimism of the lover, was afraid she had not. He reproached himself for not having made his meaning more plain—another grisly pastime in which love-possessed males indulge for the purpose of making themselves even more acutely miserable. Immediately atop of this regret that he had not been more explicit, he flared at himself and decided that he would have been an inexcusable scoundrel had he done anything of the sort. It would have been taking a mean and an unworthy advantage of her in her distress.
Then he pondered the few words of hers that had so thrilled him. What, after all, had they amounted to? She had said that she was ready to accept his devotion. What of that? Devotion, how? Devotion, from whom? Why, her guardian-to-be, of course! How else could her words possibly be viewed by a sane man? What right had he to seek to torture her simple utterance into anything more meaningful, more solacing to his wretched self-esteem? At this point of his cogitations Blythe became quite indignant with himself.
Here he was (he reflected, figuratively hiding his head), a man of thirty-two who had been brushing elbows with the world's people nearly all his life, and wearing a few more than the average number of scars to show for it—here he was, actually thinking of pouncing upon a girl of nineteen, who had scarcely forgotten the discipline of school; actually contemplating the imbecility (why, worse than that—the crime!) of hurling himself and his love at her, before she had so much as had a chance to meet any other man or men, before, in fact, she had had even a chance to turn around—for hadn't he (accidentally or not) begun to vaguely form these idiotic notions on the very day she was leaving school? And what would be her natural implication? That he was seeking to take advantage of her inexperience and her helplessness, solely on the strength of his being her legal guardian!
He had been all wrong (he mentally maundered on) the other day at Laura's when he had attributed Louise's perfectly proper restraint with him to her keener realization of her mother's ostracized status in its bearing upon her own position. What had Louise's mother's status to do with Louise? And hadn't he been a complaisantly self-satisfied numbskull to suppose that this was the reason for Louise's obvious aloofness on that day! The truth was (still he drivelled on, never sparing himself) that she had come to a perfectly proper realization of how presumptuous he, Blythe, had been in his attitude toward her, and she had distinctly meant to indicate to him in an unmistakable manner that any aspirations of that kind on his part might as well be immediately suppressed, inasmuch as they were foredoomed to fail. True (taking again for the moment his own case as plaintiff), the love of any reasonably honest and fairly successful man for a woman ought to be at least worth considering, and Louise Treharne was the first woman he had wholly loved; other little affairs, scattered through the flown years, had been mere inconsequentialities, the mutual amusements (and so mutually understood) of an hour, a day, a week, perhaps, at most, a month. Three months before Blythe would have smiled, if he had not laughed outright, if any smirking imp had whispered to him that the time was quite close at hand when he would be shamefully neglecting his decidedly important practice because of his work-disqualifying absorption in thoughts, not to say dreams, of a woman. And yet here he was, supposedly a self-contained, level-headed man of the law, a man rigorously trained in the austere school of experience—here he was, sighing like a furnace, drawing meaningless pictures on blotting pads when he should have been preparing briefs, forgetting his meals, to Sarah's profound worriment and scandalization, and walking the world in a veritable schoolboy trance! Blythe, in lucid moments, caught himself smiling inwardly at the thought of it. Was he sorry that such a thing had come to be? He quickly beat down that trivial question, tentatively submitted by his subconsciousness. Schoolboy, furnace-sigher, sentimentalist, imbecile, what not—he was glad!
Ceaselessly pacing the apartment, then, and mulling the matter over, first condemning himself for his presumptuousness and then wondering in a blank sort of a way if Louise herself took this view of his attitude, Blythe found himself on the horns of his life's dilemma. It would not be so bad, he thought with a catch at the throat, if she were not going away; but the thought of the wide Atlantic rolling between them caused his heart to thump against his ribs and incited him to rumple his hair still more outrageously.
At length, seized by an idea, he walked into his study, closed the door after him, sat down at his desk telephone, and called up Laura. Very promptly he heard her musically rising "Well?"
"Greetings, Laura," he said. "This is your insane friend, John Blythe."
"Greetings, Deserter Blythe," replied Laura. "You have not been to see us for an age. And how long have you been insane?"
"For several months, I believe. I am hardly a competent witness as to that."
"I am so distressed to hear it—when your career and—and everything looks so promising, too!"
"'Everything?' Define 'everything.'"
"I haven't the gift of being specific. You have. What, then, is the most convincing manifestation of your insanity?"
"I am thinking of taking a great chance; prematurely, and therefore insanely."
"You are talking rationally enough. Perhaps your madness is a sort of recurrent mania, with lucid intervals?"
"No, there are no lucid intervals. At this moment I am obsessed by a fear of the perils of the sea."
"That is odd, considering that you are not going to sea. Are you?"
"No; but you are—and she. Is she with you now?"
"No; she is in her room writing a letter to her father, the first she has ever written to him. A little sad, is it not? I am in my dressing room, quite comfortable, thank you, with my elbows on my writing desk; and so there is no danger of interruption. What is it you wish to tell me, John? Or ask me, perhaps?"
"It is something both to tell you and to ask you. In about an hour from now I want to ask Louise if she will marry me. That's the telling. The asking is this: Would that be a fair thing to do?"
"Such Druid-like deliberation! You speak, John, as if you were leading up to asking one for a cup of tea!"
"Do I? Well, I am mindful of this somewhat open medium of communication. Believe me, I feel anything but deliberate. But my question: Would it be fair?"
"How could it possibly be viewed as anything else but fair?"
"Because the circumstances are unusual. In the first place, I am almost the only man she knows—that she has had a chance to know. Then, I am her guardian. Would it not be rather presumptuous, not to say downright unfair, for me to take advantage of these things?"
"That, I think, is what might be called an obliquely conscientious view, John."
"Then the disparity in our ages."
"The difference between nineteen and thirty-two hardly constitutes a case of May and December. Another wholly trivial consideration of yours. Thirteen years' difference—and, by the way, haven't I heard you affirm that thirteen is your lucky number?"
"Finally, I haven't the least imaginable reason for supposing that she has ever thought of me in that respect."
"Haven't you? How perfectly unimportant! Isn't that quite the rule? How many men ever believed they were considered as possibilities until they endured the travail of finding out?"
"You are riotously optimistic this afternoon. I wish I were in the same humor. I think I shall be in need of a mood like that very soon."
"What a glorious opportunity for me to work in that antique bromidiom, 'Faint heart ne'er won,' and so forth. But I shan't. In an hour, you said?"
"About an hour."
"Don't expect to see me. I am horribly busy packing silver and things. Perhaps I may see you a moment before you leave. If not, then at the steamer in the morning."
"I wish I had words to tell you what a trump you are, Laura."
"I wish I had words to tell you how delighted I am, John."
"Not prematurely delighted, I hope, good friend. At this moment I find myself believing that the perils of the sea are nothing to certain perils of the land. Goodbye."
"Goodbye. Don't lose confidence in your lucky number—even if you do call it a 'disparity!'"
It would have been the obvious thing for Laura, after her telephone conversation with Blythe, to at least intimate to Louise that she was upon the verge of an event quite universally and correctly deemed of considerable importance in a young woman's life—her first proposal. Most women in Laura's place would have done so. But Laura's dislike for the obvious was almost a part of her religion. She had none of the benevolent marplot in her composition. She made it a point never to interfere with symmetrical sequences. Her own unhappy marital experience had by no means bereft her of sentiment; and she felt that a girl about to receive an offer of marriage should be entitled to enjoy the surprise—and in this case she knew it would be a surprise—inhering to so important an occasion. So Laura, although she visited Louise in her room after her telephone talk with Blythe, said nothing about it; but she craftily intimated, in order that Louise might look her best, that she would not be greatly surprised if Blythe were to drop in. The intimation was sufficient. Louise, a very human woman, promptly proceeded, as soon as Laura returned to her own quarters, to correct even her most trifling disarrays; so that when Blythe (astonishingly conforming to Laura's prophecy, Louise thought) arrived she looked very lovely in a one-piece dress of Quaker-grey rajah, with a band of grey velvet, which somehow suggested to Blythe the insignia of a princess, around her wonderful hair. She was at the piano, striving, soft pedal down, to extract musical sense from Strauss' "Salome" (impossible task!) when Blythe came in.
He noticed her grey dress at once.
"It is a comfort to have such a tractable, obedient ward," he said, studying the dress approvingly when she rose to greet him. "Here, a little less than a week after I threatened to insist upon your adopting the Quaker garb, I find that you've voluntarily assumed it—the color, at any rate. I know some guardians who would envy me."
Louise, quickly at ease—which had been Blythe's purpose in beginning with persiflage—smiled with a woman's usual deprecation of a complimented costume.
"Seeing that I have had this dress for more than a year," she said, "my obedience must have become an unconscious habit before I knew you."
Blythe, a trained hand at sparring, took advantage of the opening.
"Before you knew me, perhaps, Louise," he said. "But not before I knew you. Aren't you forgetting that I knew you when you still believed in Kris Kringle and Hans Andersen?" He sighed with rather too smiling an assumption of melancholy. "That reflection, I confess, makes me feel pretty aged."
"Does it?" asked Louise. "You forget that, if it makes you feel aged, it should make me feel at least middle aged, don't you? And I believe in Santa Claus and in fairy tales yet, I think." Then, resuming the first thread: "It seems singular that there should have been a time when you knew me and I didn't know you; that is, to remember you. For I didn't remember you at all on the train that day. Come to think of it, you didn't remember me, either, until you were reminded—that telegram, you know. An odd chance, was it not?"
"So odd," said Blythe, "that I catch myself wondering what my life had been before and what it would be now if—" He paused, already groping for words;—"if I had missed that train."
Louise, far from missing his meaning, grasped it so acutely that Blythe caught the tell-tale color mounting to her face.
"And now I am wondering," he went on, gazing for comfort at his nails, "since we are on the subject, whether my having known you for such a long, long time confers upon me the privilege of—well, of being entirely candid with you?"
"I should expect candor, in any case—from you," said Louise, trying desperately to concentrate her mind upon something quite matter-of-fact in order to keep her color down.
"Why, particularly, from me?" said Blythe, grasping at straws.
"Oh, I can hardly say—because you are the embodiment of candor, or candor itself," said Louise. "Aren't you?"
"I don't know," he answered as if really in doubt about it—as he was. "It seems to me that if I actually possessed that quality in such a high degree, I should have proved it to you, Louise, before this. Proved it, for example, in the Park the other afternoon."
Louise knew quite well what he meant. Moreover, it never occurred to her to pretend that she did not know.
"Are you sure that you did not?" she asked him, flushing, but with a direct enough gaze.
"I am afraid that I did not," said Blythe, nervously rising and facing her. "Perhaps it was as well, too. For the first time in my life I am in more than one mind as to whether a certain sort of candor is always desirable."
Having thus plunged into the domain of the purely ethical, Blythe could scarcely have expected an offhand reply. As a matter of fact, he got no reply at all.
"What I am striving to say, I suppose, Louise," he went on, taking himself a little better in hand, "is that, after you sail tomorrow, I am going to be more lonesome than I have ever been in my life before."
"Is that so hard to say?" Louise asked.
"Not when it is rewarded by so helpful an answer," said Blythe, conscious of a throbbing at his temples.
"I do not find it in the least hard to say that I shall miss you," said Louise, frankly enough; nevertheless, to give herself countenance, she picked up from the table a little carved ivory tiger and examined it with great apparent curiosity.
"Miss me for—for my guardianly wisdom and ghostly counsel?" said Blythe, his wide smile visibly nervous. Then, when there was a pause, he pressed the point: "Is that it, Louise?"
Her silence did not imply affirmation, and, the throbbing at his temples increasing, Blythe knew it. He bent over her chair, gently but firmly removed the ivory tiger from her hands, took one of them in his own, and said:
"Listen to me, Louise. I am fearful, if I do not plunge ahead, of becoming entangled in a weave of subtleties. I don't want to be incoherent, even if my excuse would be that I became so while taking a desperate chance. I haven't the least idea what you think of me—I don't mean as your guardian and interested friend, but as a man very susceptible to human impulses. But I am not debarred from finding out. And I should have no right to ask you such a question before telling you, as I tell you now, that I love you." She rose as he spoke, her hand still tightly grasped in his, and their eyes mingled. "You have set a new light to glow within me. I am conscious of a new propulsion that I never knew before—that I did not believe existed until I met you as a woman grown. It means everything to me—the world and all. I do not know that I am fair in saying this to you. I am incapable of judging. I do know that I want to be fair. After all, there is no unfairness in my simply telling you that I love you. It would be different, I think—but you are to judge of that—if I were to ask you to marry me—yet. But that, Louise, is what I came here to ask you."
There is no eloquence, however ornately phrased, to compare with that of a man or a woman who is altogether in earnest. Louise thrilled under the quiet, but, as she knew, deeply-felt words of this man whose clear-cut, rugged face, as he spoke, became positively handsome. She placed an impulsive hand on his arm.
"I told you that I should miss you," she said haltingly, but with a womanly sweetness that moved him like a harp-chord. "And I could not miss you if I did not care for you? I do care for you—as much as I esteem and honor you; and that is a great deal. I have not yet asked myself, I think, if I love you. It may be that I do. If to miss you dreadfully when I do not see you every day—and, until now, I had not seen you for nearly a week!—is—is that, then perhaps I—"
Blythe, fighting, as if in actual conflict with something tangible, the temptation to take her in his arms, grasped her other hand. His face was very close to hers, and her curved, girlish lips sent his blood swirling with their maddening proximity. But he held himself in a vise, knowing that the hour had not yet struck for their contact of lips.
"It is enough that you care for me, Louise," he said, hoarsely fervid; and he felt as weak as a man who has successfully come through a great peril. "I could ask no more; I ask no more. Your caring for me is, I know now, more than I ever hoped or dreamed. It is enough—for now. It is a start." He smiled vaguely at the homeliness of his phrase. "I scarcely know what I am saying, Louise. But it doesn't much matter what a man says, does it, when he is happier than he has ever before been in his life?"
She raised the hand which had been resting on his arm and took hold, with thumb and forefinger, of a button of his coat. The unconscious little intimacy set his pulses to throbbing again.
"I shall know when I come back," she said to him with a simplicity that was almost quaint, "whether—whether my caring for you is more than just that. I believe that it is, but—but there are reasons—you know what they are—that restrain me from owning it, even if I knew positively; which I do not, yet, John."
John!
A quiver ran through the man, which, as she still was unconsciously toying with the button of his coat, she could not help but feel.
"Louise," he said, bending so close to her that he felt her cool, fragrant breath upon his cheek, "I want you to call me that; but not again now. There must be an interval—tonight, say—for me to become used to it. I warn you of my irresponsibility if you call me that again before tomorrow. And I am not minding, my dear, about what you do not know positively. Neither am I presuming upon it. You have made me happy enough. Everything else can wait. You are not committed. I wouldn't dream of holding you committed. Your life is still all your unpromised own. I tell you that it is enough for me now—it will be enough for me hereafter, if nothing else is to be—to know that I am even cared for, have been cared for, by a woman like you. I am going now. My heart is raging with love and honor for you; I want to get out underneath the sky; feel the cold upon my face so that I shall know I am not dreaming. Goodbye, dear, until I send you away from me—send you away, not with wretchedness and despair in my heart, but with hope, and light, and happiness—tomorrow!" and he pressed her hands, gazed at her with wide, kindling eyes, and went reeling from the room, as one who seeks a secure footing after many days at sea.
Laura, by design, was standing in the doorway of her sitting room when he passed unsteadily out.
"Well?" she said to him. "Did the 'disparity' number win, John?"
He stopped, gazed at her for an instant unseeingly, then shook himself together and grasped her outstretched hands.
"I may be a John o' Dreams, dear friend," he said to her huskily. "In fact, I am sure that I am, right now. But it is worth a little delirium to find that, after all, I am not actually insane," and he strode out, Laura watching him with a dimpling face.
After a while Laura went in and found Louise standing musing before a window, seeming to watch the twilight settling upon the vaguely greening Park. Laura threw an arm around the girl's shoulder and kissed her.
"Did he tell you, dear?" Louise asked, turning.
"Not in words," replied Laura. "But one surmises. The air has been charged with it. I know, of course, that he has been worshipping you as did the shepherd of old a distant star. And you, heart of hearts?"
"I seem, somehow, to have been loving him all my life," said Louise.
"Did you tell him so?" asked Laura.
"I am afraid that he, too, surmises," said Louise, smiling shyly.
"American letters!" exclaimed Laura, turning the packet over eagerly. "Some rainy afternoon—which means, probably, this afternoon, even if the sunisshining smokily now—I am going to write a brief but enthusiastic essay, 'for private distribution,' on how good American stamps look on American letters addressed to Americans who are not in America—long may she wave!" and she sorted over the just-brought letters with fluttering fingers.
"What a lot of America in one sentence!" said Louise, her own eyes alight at the bulgy little packet of letters from overseas. "I wish," she added a little wistfully, "America were as near as your patriotism is genuine."
"Don'tI!" heartily agreed Laura. "Could anything be better calculated to inspire patriotism in the American bosom than an occasional inspection of Europe—and particularly an occasional residence in London? All Americans possessed of the steamship fare should be forced by law to visit Europe—particularly London—at least once. Then there would be no further trouble in getting soldiers for our army. All of the tourists by mandate would become so patriotic that they wouldenlistjust as soon as they got back to the United States!"
Then they fell upon their United-States-stamped mail as if the envelopes had contained anxiously awaited reprieves or dispensations, and for the next quarter of an hour the only sounds in the room were the crackling of paper and the absorbed, subdued ejaculations to which women give utterance in perusing letters.
The murk-modified morning sunshine of early June in London filtered wanly through the windows of their rooms at the Savoy. Very close to the consciousness of both women was the keen recollection of glorious Junes in the United States, with over-arching skies of sapphire, unstained for days at a stretch even by the fleeciest of golden clouds. Louise was confessedly lonesome. Laura, who had her London almost at her fingers' ends, was lonesome, too, but not confessedly so. It would be too much to ask a seasoned Londoner from New York to admit such a departure from the elemental rule of cosmopolitanism. Laura, in London or anywhere else in Europe, was lonesome in the abstract, so to speak. Her method of giving expression to her feeling was to comment—when no Europeans were of her audience, of course—upon the superior comforts and joys of life in the United States, which, to her, meant New York almost exclusively.
Louise shared the almost inevitable feeling of genuine lonesomeness and unanalyzable oppression which overcomes, to the point of an afflictive nostalgia, most Americans of whatever degree who find themselves for the first time in European capitals. They had spent their first fortnight in London; and Louise had only been saved from complete dejection during that period by the gayety—somewhat studied and reserved, but still gayety—of Laura's troops of friends, English and American, in the city that, for the socially unacclimated American, is the dullest and most hopeless in all Europe. Paris, whence they had gone from London for a month's stay, had been made endurable to Louise by her close fellowship with Laura in the older woman's incessant battlings with the milliners and makers of dresses. Victory had never failed eventually to perch upon Laura's banners at the termination of these conflicts; but the intervening travail had given her young companion more than enough to think about and thus to ward off an ever-recurring depression. She did not call it "homesickness," even to herself; for by this time she had become, if not used, at least reconciled to the thought that she had no real home.
One of the least true maxims of all of those having perennial currency is that which declares that "All good Americans go to Paris when they die." Most Americans, if the truth could be tabulated, are poignantly disappointed with Paris. It is a city where American men of a certain type feel that they have almost a Heaven-bestowed license to "throw off responsibility." But "the morning after" knows neither latitude nor longitude, and it is just as dismal and conducive to remorse and good resolutions in Paris as it is in any other quarter of the irresponsible world. It takes an American man about a week to become thoroughly disillusioned as to Paris. The American woman, who, like women the world over, must preserve her sense of responsibility at all times, even in the French capital, discovers her disappointment with and her weariness of the over-lauded Paris in considerably less time than a week. Louise found it unutterably tiresome, artificial, insincere, absurdly over-praised. Now they had been back in London for three weeks, and she was beginning to wonder when Laura would give the "pack-up signal" for the return to New York. Whenever she circuitously led up to such a suggestion, however, Laura told her how ridiculous it would be to return to New York in June, at the height of the London season; besides, there were thousands upon thousands of people in London whom Laura wanted Louise to meet; and Louise (Laura would go on) must fight to overcome her Londonphobia, because, after all, London probably would be on the map as a sort of meeting place for peripatetic folk for quite a long time to come; whereupon, with fine feminine inconsistency, Laura would round upon London for its primitiveness in the supplying of ordinary comforts, for its incurable smudginess, for the mediæval complaisance of its populace, and for a hundred other matters that made it a mere "widely-spraddled" hamlet in comparison with her beloved New York.
Additionally, there had been an utter absence of the querulous note, and an unwonted tone of positive sadness, in her mother's letters that gravely disquieted Louise. Her mother's self-revelations on paper hitherto had been characterized by a sort of acidulous recklessness; her letters to Louise while the girl was at school had been long-drawn out epistolary complaints, the pages running over with the acridness of a woman at variance not only with her world but with herself. But the half dozen and odd letters which Louise had received from her mother since leaving New York had been of an entirely different character. Their tone denoted, not the indifference which proceeds from the callousness of surrender, but the long-deferred awakening of a maternal instinct and a maternal conscience. They were filled with reproaches, not for others, but for herself. In them, too, Louise perceived a vein of hopelessness, as of one who has been aroused all too late to the evils and dangers of a self-wrought environment, a self-created peril, which sorely disturbed her daughter.
Louise's parting with her mother had been tender enough on both sides. The girl had said, simply enough, that she was going away for a while in the hope that there would be an adjustment, a righting, of all things awry with her mother before her return. She felt her helplessness, she added, even to make herself a helpful instrument toward such an adjustment by remaining near her mother; but she hoped and believed that before she came back—And Louise had been able to progress no further. Nor was there any need. Her mother, troubled even beyond the relief of tears by her daughter's words, had taken Louise in her arms and cuddled her as if she had been again a child; and her last words had been, "Everything will be changed, dear—the slate will be cleansed, and we shall start hand in hand again—before you get back. Depend upon that. It is odd, I suppose, that I am beginning to remember my duty to you as a mother before I have made a start toward seeing my duty to myself as a woman. But the two awakenings go together, Louise, I find—as you shall see when you return." Louise had been quick to detect the implied promise in her mother's words; and her main reason for not being insistent with Laura upon an earlier return was that she wanted to give her mother plenty of time to redeem the tacit pledge bound up in her parting words.
Her letters from Blythe had been perfervid variations—the effort at restraint being almost humorously visible between the lines—upon the one theme, theleit motifof which was: "We are to be married: when?" The fact itself, it will be observed, was masterfully taken for granted; the time only remained to be mutually agreed upon, so it appeared to Blythe.
It was from such a letter as this that Louise now looked up and gazed pensively at the reddish rays of smothered London sunshine flickering, with the movement of the curtains, upon the rug. Laura herself, just having finished a far more informative letter from Blythe, caught the pensive expression and not unnaturally associated it with the still open letter on Louise's lap.
"Of course the man is impatient, dear," she said to Louise, weaving without effort into the subject matter of the girl's reflections. "But you must not mind that. Being impatient—at such an interesting juncture of their poor, benighted lives, I mean—is good for them. Really, it is the best thing that can possibly happen to them. It chastens them, teaches them the benignities, the joys of—er—abnegation and renunciation and things. By the way, Louise," veering about with diverting instability, "when do you really and privately mean to get rid of the man by marrying him?"
Louise, not without an effort, shook herself out of her reverie, folded her letter from Blythe with an odd sort of deliberation, and looked frankly enough at Laura.
"It is not certain, dear," she replied, with no irresolution of tone, "that I shall ever marry him."
Laura regarded the girl with a gaze of perfectly unaffected stupefaction.
"I wonder," she said, as if to herself, "if the acoustics of these London rooms can be so atrocious, or if I am really becoming so old that my hearing already is affected? Say that again, child. It isn't possible that I could have heard you correctly."
Louise was unable to repress a slight smile at the extraordinary bewilderment which was visible on Laura's face, but her tone was distinct enough when she repeated:
"It is far from a certainty that I shall marry him at all, Laura."
Laura rose from her deep chair, gathered her "getting-up gown" hastily about her, crossed over to where Louise was sitting, placed an arm about the girl's shoulder, and gazed wonderingly into her eyes.
"It is impossible," she said, "that you two are quarrelling across the wide Atlantic? I shall cable John Blythe this very hour! It is his fault! It must be his fault!" and she rushed to her escritoire and pretended to fumble for her cable blanks.
"Of course I know you haven't the least idea of doing any such a thing," said Louise, earnestness showing through her composure. "Won't you please stop your aimless ransacking and come over and talk with me?"
"But," said Laura, seating herself by Louise, "I am afraid I am too anxious to scold somebody—either you, here and now, or John Blythe, by a few stinging words sent under the sea, or—or anybody I can lay my tongue or pen to! Really, I am baffled by what you say, Louise. Of course the man has asked you time and again, since we've been over here, to marry him?"
"He scarcely writes about anything else," replied Louise, smothering a smile over Laura's intense but uninformed earnestness.
"And don't Iknow," pursued Laura, with a mystified rapidity of utterance, "that he made his incoherent, almost unintelligible declaration to you on the very day before we sailed—didn't Iseehim as he left, treading on air, andhearhim emit the entranced gibberish that customarily mounts to a man's lips at such a time? And you received his declaration as if you had been timing its arrival, and you told me two minutes after he had gone that you loved him. Then what in the wide world is the—" Laura threw up her hands with a baffled gesture that was almost comic. "I confess myself completely daunted, dear. Won't you tell me what it is all about?"
Louise regarded Laura with steady, reflective eyes.
"You know how I appreciate your fine, generous impulsiveness, dear," she said to the older woman. "But you must have thought, haven't you, that it would not be fair for me to marry John Blythe?"
Another film of mystification appeared on Laura's widened eyes.
"Fair?" she almost whispered in her amazement. "How do you mean—'fair'? Fair to whom—to yourself or to John?"
"To him," said Louise. "Of course it would not be fair to him. I cannot see how there could be two views as to that."
Laura, arms folded, rose and lithely crossed the room several times, knitting her brow. Then she sat down again beside Louise.
"I think I know what you mean, child," she said. "But of course you are wrong. Utterly, hopelessly, pitiably wrong. He isn't that sort of a man. You should know that, dear."
"I don't underestimate him—far from that," said Louise. "It is just because he isn't that sort of a man, as you say, that I shrink from the thought of being unfair with him—of permitting him to do himself an injustice."
"But," said Laura, "he is not a cubbish, haphazard lad. He is a man—a real man. He knows and gauges the world. More and better than that, he knows himself. I should have difficulty in recalling the name of any man who knows his mind better than John Blythe does his."
"I know that, Laura," said Louise. "But his unselfishness is too fine a thing to be taken advantage of. He has made his way unaided. He has had a long fight. He will never cease to mount. Why should I hamper him?"
"Hamper him!" exclaimed Laura. "Child, how can the woman a man loves hamper him?"
"Your partiality causes you to generalize, dear," said Louise. "My case—our case, if you will—is entirely different." She took a turn up and down the room and then confronted Laura calmly. "Don't youknowwhat the world—hisworld—would say if he married me?"
Laura shrugged impatiently.
"The 'They Sayers'!" she exclaimed. "The 'They Sayers' say this, they say that, they say the other thing. And what does their 'They-Saying' amount to?"
"It would amount to nothing at all in his estimation—I am only too sure of that," replied Louise. "But a man who is making his way in the world must even take heed of the 'They-Sayers,' as you call them. He cannot ignore them. His unselfish impulse would be, not only to ignore them, but to flaunt them; and all on my account. It would, I think, be simply contemptible for me to permit him to do that."
Laura studied for a moment, then shook her head despairingly.
"My dear," she said, "you are the first girl I ever knew deliberately to erect barriers between herself and the happiness that rightfully belongs to her. What, in Heaven's name, has your mother's departure from—from rule to do with you? How has it, how could it, ever involve you, or come between you and the man—the big-minded man—who loves you and whom you love? Tell me that."
"It could not come betweenus," replied Louise. "But the world—the very 'They-Sayers' you mention—could and would use it as a thong to punish him. And that is the one thing I could not have. I am the daughter of my mother. I am not very experienced, but I know how the world views these things. The world does not draw lines of demarcation where women are concerned. Its ostracism is a very long and heavy whip. Its condemnation does not take the least heed of mitigations. I can speak plainly to you, dear—you are of course the only living person to whom I would say these things. But, if I were to permit John Blythe to marry me, can you not hear the gruelling comment—comment that, while it might not actually reach my husband's ears, he could not fail to be conscious of? They would say that he had married a girl whose mother had been openly maintained by a man—a man in the public eye—whose wife was living. They would go farther and say—which of course is the simple truth—that I had lived for a time under the roof maintained by that man. And, with such things to go upon, how could the world possibly reach any other conclusion—granting, as you must, the knack the world has for leaping at conclusions—than that John Blythe, a growing man, a man destined for distinction, had made a tremendous mistake in his marriage? Of course you understand. I have been wanting to say these things to you for a long time, but I could not summon the courage. I wanted to say them to John on the day before we sailed; but Icouldnot."
Her voice broke, and she gazed out of the window to hide the tears that stood in her eyes. Laura, so strongly moved that she deliberately forced herself to think of inconsequentialities to keep back her tears, wrapped her arms about the girl.
"My dear," she said, "I am not, I fear, as religious, as reverent a woman as I should be. But I do not believe that God will keep a woman like you and a man like John Blythe apart. That would be a deviation from His all-discerning rule in which I simply could not believe. I don't admit that you are right. I don't say now that you are wholly wrong. But, through the very nobility of the view you take, a way shall be found. Never doubt that, child. I know that in some ways—many ways—the world is awry enough. But I know, too, that there is not enough injustice in all the world to keep you from the arms of the man who loves you and is beloved by you."
There were two topics in John Blythe's letter to Laura that gave her more than a day's material for reflection. One of them concerned Louise's mother.
"Mrs. Treharne summoned me a few days ago, and in the evening I went to the house on the Drive," Blythe wrote. "There seemed to be nothing in particular as to which she wished to see me—except that she was good enough to intimate that she had noticed my 'interest' in Louise. (Interest!'—when that very evening I'd been cursing the slow progress of the art of aviation, which made it impossible for me to fly to London out of hand—out of wing, I mean.) Really, Laura, I think the depressed little woman merely wanted to have a talk with somebody about Louise, which was why she sent for me. She looks in shocking health. If I read aright, I think she is at least at the beginning of some sort of a decline. Better not tell Louise this—just yet. There are reasons why I think it would be better for Louise to remain abroad with you for a while longer. One of the reasons is this: I gather that Mrs. Treharne is pretty nigh through with Judd. She as much as told me so. I was touched by her lack of reserve in speaking to me of this matter. Louise was right. Her mother, as Louise prophesied to you, is undergoing the miseries of an awakening—a singularly bitter awakening in her case, I fear. I felt and feel intensely sorry for her—she was never wrong at heart, but was caught in the eddy of circumstance.
"She hinted, not vaguely, but quite directly, that she was upon the verge of a complete change in her environment—and the intertwined remarks denoted that her keenly-felt humiliation in the eyes of her daughter was at the bottom of the contemplated change, whatever it is to be. I am very confident that it is to be a withdrawal from the protection, if one could call it that, of Judd. It is too bad, isn't it, that this did not come just a few months earlier? But (here's a bromidiom for you!) better late than never! Think what distress such a withdrawal would have spared Louise if it had happened before the child quit school!
"But enough of if-it-had-beens. The point is that Louise, I feel very sure, has accomplished a wonderful regeneration—the regeneration of her own mother! Could there be anything more unheard-of, more marvelous, than that? But it is merely of a piece with the influence which Louise has upon everybody. You know that badly-batted-around modern word, 'uplift'? It applies actually, I think, to but one human being in the world: Louise. I mean that everybody who comes even slightly under her influence experiences that sense of 'uplift.' I know thatIdo! And even you, my dear Laura, even you ..."
("Of course the dear headlong creature is right," thought Laura when she read this, "but isn't it hard to picture the self-contained, occasionally even austere John Blytheravingso! But they're all alike. I suppose that even Alexander, Cæsar, and Charlemagne privately raved the same way over their sweethearts!")
"So you will see," Blythe went on in his letter, "why it is better that Louise should remain on the other side with you until matters work themselves out here—until, in essence, her mother completely clears her skirts of the wretched Judd entanglement; and that, I think, is something very imminent. It will be a joy for Louise to be freely and unrestrainedly alone with her mother when she comes back. You understand, of course. So stay over there for another month at least, won't you, Petrarch's Laura and the Laura of all of us?...
"A few forenoons ago I came perilously close to getting a bit of needed exercise by throwing a man bodily out of my office—and this will seem the more startling to you when you remember my almost lamb-like non-aggressiveness. I think, though, I should have gone the length of throwing him out of the window had I not mentally visualized, in an unaccustomed access of caution, the large, rampageous red headlines in the afternoon newspapers: 'Struggling Young (?) Lawyer Hurls Famous Financier From Fifth Story Window,' etc., etc.
"The man was Langdon Jesse, whom of course you know. (Sometimes I wish you did not know so many sinister persons, but perhaps you can't help it.) Probably you are aware that I don't like the Jesse individual. I don't believe I am a victim of a prejudice as to him, either. He is a waxy, doughy person who makes the pursuit of women a hobby as decenter men make hobbies of golf, billiards, cigars and so on. I do not lean to the condemnatory tone where men are concerned, but this man's record is too besmudged and his personality too repulsive even for my amiable, non-Pharisaical (I hope) taste. I have known him in a general sort of a way for a number of years, but have always been at some pains to make it clear to him that I preferred the sight of his back.
"He lounged in upon me the other forenoon, very oily and desirous of exhibiting to me his somewhat rhino-like brand ofsavoir-faire, and he told me that, inasmuch as he was leaving for Europe directly, he thought he would ask me if I, as the guardian of Miss Treharne, would be willing that he should extend the tourist's usual civilities and courtesies to that young lady. Can you imagine a more imbecile question? Naturally, I was astonished to find that he had even met Louise, and you may hold yourself in readiness to be very severely spoken to when you return because you did not inform me of it. Seriously, I am inordinately sorry that Louise ever did meet him. Of course I gave the fellow what the reporters call 'very short shrift.' I can't remember ever having been more annoyed. The impudence of this loathly Eden Musée Lothario, knowing (as he certainly must have known) that I was perfectly familiar with his record and character, coming to me on such a mission! He was upon the pin-point of hinting that a note of recommendation from me, submitting him to the fair opinion of you and Louise, might enable him to offer the two of you certain somewhat prized civilities not easily obtainable—when I, without the least attempt at hinting, indicated the general direction of my door and gave him a view of my back.
"I haven't the least notion as to what the fellow's actual purpose was, but if, as he claims, he really has met Louise, I am perturbed to think that presently he will be in the same hemisphere with her. (I would include you in my perturbation, only I know how thoroughly well able you are to crunch such objects with a mere word, if not, indeed, a simple lifting of the eyebrows.) Of course he will not now have the temerity to call upon you in London. But if he does exhibit such hardihood, and in any way attempts to annoy you or Louise with his 'prized civilities,' you will let me know at once, of course—by cable, if you think it necessary. I don't know why I have permitted and am permitting myself to be disturbed by this individual's inexplicable little machinations (his whole life, in business and in private, is one huge machination), but I have been and I am. Write me just how he contrived to meet Louise, won't you?"
Laura, in reading this, felt considerable compunction over the fact that she had not told Blythe of Louise's unavoidable meetings with Langdon Jesse and of the attentions which he had attempted to force upon her. She had not done so because she had frankly feared the possible consequences of Blythe's quick-blazing anger. While she would have been willing enough to commit Jesse to the corporeal handling of a physically adept man like John Blythe, she had no means of knowing in advance whether the story of such a chastisement, if it took place, would become public; and as Louise had come under her own protection very soon after her final encounter with Jesse, Laura had felt that, as the Jesse incubus probably had been disposed of for good and all, it would be better not to disquiet Blythe by telling him anything about it. She knew that Louise had not mentioned Jesse to Blythe out of a feeling of plain shame that she had been put in the way of meeting a man of his stamp. But Laura, after re-reading that part of Blythe's letter referring to Jesse, found herself vaguely uneasy at the thought that even then he was on his way to London. She determined not to say anything about it to Louise. She also determined that London was going to remain large enough for Louise and herself and ten thousand Langdon Jesses; which, interpreted, means that she had not the remotest idea of bolting for it because of Jesse's impending arrival. Laura also concluded to obey Blythe's injunction to say nothing to Louise as to her mother's changing affairs. She longed to tell the girl of Blythe's forecasting of the approaching dissolution of the relationship between her mother and Judd; but she had learned the time-biding lesson, and she disliked to arouse hopes within Louise's mind that might not, after all, have fruition. Moreover, she had frequently had occasion to test Blythe's judgment, and she had always found it sound.
"But I wish John Blythe would take a vacation of a fortnight or so and run over here," she caught herself meditating. "He would fit into the situation beautifully at the present moment and in some moments that I seem to feel approaching. But there never was a man yet who could recognize the psychological moment even when it paraded before his eyes—much less grasp it by intuition."
Not alone from John Blythe had Langdon Jesse suffered a rebuff in his attempt to gather ammunition, in the form of intimate and more or less mandatory credentials, for his European campaign, in which Louise Treharne figured as the alluring citadel of his sinister ambition. First he had tried Louise's mother with that purpose in view; and in that quarter he had been treated to one of the surprises of his by no means uneventful life.
Jesse's method of reasoning, in approaching Mrs. Treharne on such a mission, was in no wise subtle; it was, on the contrary, as plain and pointed as a fence-paling. It all started from the outright premise that Jesse "wanted" Louise Treharne and thoroughly meant to "have" her—for Jesse had the merit (negative enough in his case) of never attempting to deceive himself as to his eventual purposes where women were concerned. Louise, of course, had plainly given him to understand that she despised him. That, however, was, in Jesse's view, a negligible detail. It would make his final conquest all the more satisfying. Many women who had begun by disliking him and frankly questioning his motives had ended by yielding to him; whereupon, after basking in the joys of triumph, he had taken a revengeful pleasure in casting them into what, in his self-communings, he brutally termed his "discard."
It would be the same, Jesse thoroughly believed, in Louise's case. She now represented to him a difficulty to be surmounted, a transaction to be successfully carried through. The weakness in the armor of men of the Jesse type is that they have little or no imagination. They foresee merely results; and their handling of the means to an end often is singularly clumsy and unadept. In regarding all women, of whatever class, as mere palterers with virtue and self-respect, Jesse considered that he was justified by his experience with women; but he made the egregious mistake of supposing that his own experience with women established a criterion, a formula, from which there could be no departure.
A week or so before he contemplated going abroad, mainly for the purpose of continuing his besiegement of Louise, Jesse dropped in at the house on the Drive one evening. He was glad to find Mrs. Treharne alone. He was not unmindful of his boast to Judd that he would victoriously overcome what, in his B[oe]otian imagining, he really deemed Louise's "prejudice" against him; and he preferred to lay his course without any Judd finger on his chart.
Mrs. Treharne, now thin and frail-looking, no longer from banting, but from the conflict with conscience that been consuming her ever since her daughter's departure, received him coldly enough. Not the least of her self-scornings since Louise had gone away had centered upon her complaisance in tacitly permitting her daughter to be pursued by a man of the Langdon Jesse type.
"I am leaving for England," Jesse found early occasion to announce.
Mrs. Treharne, very languid and tired-looking, did not find the announcement sufficiently important to call for comment.
"Louise, I believe, is in London?" pursued Jesse, sensing, without perturbation, the chill Mrs. Treharne was purposely diffusing.
Mrs. Treharne gave him a level, penetrating glance.
"Miss Treharne, I think, would not be interested in knowing that you possessed information as to her movements," she replied, with studied indifference.
Jesse smiled and stooped to stroke a dozing spaniel.
"What have I done, Tony?" he asked after a pause, looking up with a dental smile.
"You have presumed to employ Miss Treharne's first name, after having met her, I believe, not more than three times. Don't do it again," replied Mrs. Treharne in a tone that, while quiet enough, had a ring in it that was utterly new to Jesse. Jesse, seeming by his manner to take the rebuke in a chastened spirit, occupied himself again with the spaniel's silky coat.
"I seem," he said, finally breaking the oppressive silence, "to have found you in a somewhat Arctic humor. Still, that should not be allowed to congeal an old friendship. It cannot be that you, too, are beginning to misunderstand me, as Miss Treharne has from the beginning?"
"Miss Treharne should not have been allowed to meet you at all," returned Mrs. Treharne. "I leave you to imagine how bitterly I condemn myself now for not having at least screened her from that."
"You say 'now,'" said Jesse. "Why, particularly 'now?'"
"That," replied Mrs. Treharne, "is my affair."
The time, of course, had arrived for Jesse to make the best of a poor departure. The man, however, was of a surprising obtuseness as to such details.
"And yet I came this evening," he said, adopting a tonal tremolo which was intended to convey the idea that he was sorely put upon, "to offer, through you, any poor courtesies that I might have at my command to make Miss Treharne's stay in England agreeable."
Mrs. Treharne shrugged impatiently.
"Spare yourself these posturings, if you please," she said. "Miss Treharne has made it plain enough that she detests you. Are you waiting to have me tell you that I applaud her judgment?"
An ugly sneer flickered across Jesse's features. At length the barbs were hitting home. But he effaced the sneer and twisted it into a forced smile.
"What I can't understand is why you received me at all this evening, if this is your feeling—your newly-formed feeling—toward me," he said, quelling the hoarseness that proceeded from his repressed anger.
"I confess to having entertained a certain curiosity, perhaps a certain uneasiness, as to your purpose in calling at all," promptly replied Mrs. Treharne. "It is the first time you have been here since my daughter's departure. I have been sorting over certain of my mistakes since she went away. I have been considering them, too, from a different angle than any you could possibly understand. Not the least of these mistakes, as I have told you, was in permitting my daughter to exchange as much as two words with you. Happily, it is not too late to rectify that mistake, at least. She is well protected. I need not tell you that if you should have the temerity to attempt to call upon her in London she would instruct the flunkeys to cease carrying her your card. I think there is no more to be said?" Mrs. Treharne rose and assumed the attitude of dismissal.
This time Jesse, also rising, did not essay to erase the sneer from his wrath-flushed features.
"What is all this—a scene from some damned imbecile play?" he demanded, completely throwing off the mask. "Are you trying to regale me with a rehearsal of the flighty mother turned virtuous? Don't do that. That isn't the sort of thing you could reasonably expect me to stand for from Fred Judd's kept wo——"
"Say that if you dare!" exclaimed Mrs. Treharne, stepping close to him and transfixing him with blazing eyes.
Jesse, out of sheer timidity, broke off at the exact point where she had interrupted him. As she stepped to the wall to ring, he put on his hat with studied deliberation and patted it to make it more secure on his head. Thus, with his hat on, he spoke to her.
"I suppose your solicitude for the—er—the what-you-may-call-it of your auburn-haired daughter is natural enough, probably being based upon something that you, and you alone, know," he said, sidling, however, toward the door as he spoke. "But it is wasted solicitude, let me tell you that. She has lived here with you, hasn't she? Well, that fact will about settle her, you know. There's no downing that. And after awhile she'll give up. She won't be able to stand the stigma. None of them can stand it. It would take a superwoman to endure, without herself surrendering, the ignominy of having lived under this roof. Don't forget that."
Then the butler, answering the ring, appeared at the door. Mrs. Treharne raised a limp arm and pointed to Jesse.
"This man," she said to the butler, "is not to be admitted to the house again as long as I am in it."
The butler inclined his head with butler-like gravity, detoured to get behind Jesse, and Jesse, patting the top of his hat again to emphasize, in the menial's presence, the insult of wearing it, stalked down the hall.
The broken, faded woman tottered to her sleeping room and fell upon a couch in an agony of tears.
It was on the day following this scene that Jesse, inconceivably persistent in the pursuit of such a purpose as he had in mind, and now roused by obstacles to the point where he swore to himself that he would "win out," made the call at Blythe's office which the latter purposely glossed over in describing it in his letter to Laura.
Jesse's purpose in seeking out Blythe was two-fold. In the first place, he wanted to measure the man who, he knew, had been appointed Louise's guardian. He only recalled Blythe in a general sort of a way, and he wanted to "size him up" from this new angle. He was aware that Blythe was not only the guardian but an admirer of Louise, and he wanted to ascertain, from the contact of an interview, whether Blythe's admiration was of a piece with his own; the manifestation of a mere predatory design, that is to say; for men of the Jesse type are ever prone to drag the motives of other men to a level with their own. Secondly, if he found, as he hoped to find, that Blythe was a mere supple and sycophantic young lawyer, eager to succeed, and therefore capable of being impressed by a call from a man looming large in the financial world, Jesse prefigured that probably Blythe, by means of credentials that would have the weight of a guardian's advice, might very easily aid him in his "little affair" (so he thought of it) with Louise when he reached London. Jesse was not in the least fearful of the consequences, so far as his standing with Louise was concerned, of his unmasking in the presence of her mother. He was under the impression that Louise had left the house on the Drive at odds with her mother and that no correspondence existed between them. So that he felt sure that Louise would not hear from her mother of his brutality toward her.
It took Jesse something less than thirty seconds, when he called upon Blythe, to discover that that young lawyer was neither sycophantic nor supple, and that, so far from being impressed by a visit from Jesse in his capacity of financial magnate, Blythe was coldly but distinctly hostile toward him. The interview had terminated with startling abruptness. After having mentioned Louise's name once, and been forbidden to repeat the offense, Jesse had involuntarily let slip her name again. Blythe, seated in his desk-chair with his hands on his knees, viewed Jesse calmly, but with eyes that showed cold glints of steel.
"Are you going to get out now, or are you waiting for me to throw you out?" Blythe inquired of him in much the same tone that he would have employed in asking for a match.
Jesse, it appeared, was not waiting to be thrown out. He went at once. But when he reached the street level and got into his waiting car, he was in almost as pretty a state of passion as any sepulchral-voiced stage villain. And he was quite as resolved to win the baffling battle, even under the lash of unintermittent scorn, as he had been from the hour of his first meeting with Louise Treharne.
An hour after Jesse had gone, leaving the stunned, shattered woman weltering in his litter of cowardly words, Judd walked into Antoinette Treharne's apartments. He found her dishevelled and still weeping convulsively. He sat down and regarded her with the bewildered helplessness of the male when the woman's tears are streaming. She scarcely saw him, but lay, huddled and shaking, a mere wraith of the woman whom he had beckoned to this present disaster and despair but a few years before.
Judd, a gross, fleshly man not without human traits, felt sorry for her as he sat watching her. Also, he felt sorry for himself. It was not agreeable that a woman—this woman—should be weeping and moaning and shaking her shoulders in her grief in such a manner. It was disturbing. It destroyed the poise of things. It created a sort of sympathy which was bad for the digestion of the sympathizer. But Judd felt sorry for her. He really did. He had been watching, with a sort of mystified concern, how her health had been going to pieces lately. He wondered why that was. Surely, she had everything that she wanted? Well, then. Anyhow, Judd was sorry. He was extremely fond of Tony. She had touched a certain responsive chord in him, and he knew that his chords were pretty well insulated; and here she was weeping and staining her face with tears, her hair all mussed, and all that—Judd was decidedly disturbed, and sorry as well.
"I say, Tony, what is it?" he asked her, after keeping vigil for fifteen minutes without emitting a word.
There was no reply. She did not even look up at him. Gradually, though, her weeping ceased. Judd walked up and down the room, smoking an enormously long, black cigar, occasionally stopping in his heavy stride to look at her. Presently she sat up, blinking in the light, her face still swollen with her tears. A certain prettiness still remained to her; but it was the pathetic prettiness of the exotic the petals of which are dropping, dropping.
"Is it anything that I can help, Tony?" asked Judd in a tone that was not lacking in kindliness, as he stopped and stood before her. She shook her head wearily.
"No," she answered him in a quiet, tear-hoarsened tone. "It is nothing that you can help. It is all my own fault."
Judd flicked the long ash of his cigar to the rug and studied her with a puckered but not scowling brow.
"I don't want to stir up or start anything anew," he said, not unkindly, "but may I ask what it is that is your fault?"
She crushed her wet handkerchief between her palms and looked up at him with vague eyes.
"Oh, everything," she replied, with a shrug of utter weariness. "Few women could be found in all the world tonight, I believe, who have made such an utter mess of their lives as I have of mine. But I am not so unfair, thank God, as to blame it upon anybody but myself. It is a compensation, at any rate, to be able to see things in their true light."
"You are ill, aren't you?" Judd asked her, with a solicitude that was obviously genuine.
"I don't know—I think so," she replied. "I am very tired—I know that. Tired of myself, of everything."
"You need a change," suggested Judd. "You ought to go away somewhere. But I don't want you to go alone. I am pretty busy, but I'll chuck everything to go with you if you want me to, Tony."
She looked at him with a sort of weary curiosity.
"It is just as I have said," she murmured after having made this inspection of him. "It has never been your fault. You have, in your way, been kind to me. You still are. You care for me in your way. But it is a bad way, Fred. I know that now. It is too late, of course. Nevertheless, I am going to make what amendment I can. I must try to preserve at least a shred of womanhood. I am sure you are not going to take it angrily or bitterly. But we have reached the parting of the ways, my friend. You have been fair enough, from your point of view, through the whole wretched business. It has been my fault, my weakness, from the beginning."
Judd plumped into a deep chair near her and, pondering, blew great smoke-rings at the portieres.
"The thing is," he said, presently, "that you've lost your nerve. And, having lost it, why, you've gone into the camp of the folks you call the Smugs. Am I right?"
"You are utterly wrong," she replied, spiritlessly. "I have little toleration for—well, death-bed repentances. That is too old and too unconvincing a story. A woman does as she likes, flouts the world, snaps her finger at usage, until she becomes middle aged or near it; then she begins to fumble her beads, takes on the face of austerity, and condemns, right and left, the lapses of the younger generation of defiant women. I haven't the least use for that sort of thing. It is simply that I have arrived at the knowledge that a woman is an idiot not to conform and to stay conformed. It is mere madness for a woman to suppose that she can fight so unequal a battle against the world's opinion as I have foolishly tried to fight. It makes no difference as to a man. He can do as he pleases. I suppose it was the inequality of that law that goaded me into it all in the first place. But I've lost. I see now that there never was the possibility of any other outcome."
"You get a bit beyond me, you know," said Judd, not argumentatively, but as one seeking enlightenment. "I am willing to grant that men have the best of it, and all that sort of thing. But women know the rules of the game. Then why can't they play the game without moaning and kicking to the umpire?"
"There isn't any umpire except conscience," she answered him. "There isn't any arbitration for a woman. She is what the steel-sheathed law of the ages says she is to be, or she is not. I have not been, and I have lost. That is all. I am not so futile as to complain of the game. I despise myself for having been so opaque as to suppose that I could defy the rules, win, and not be disqualified—as I have been, of course, ever since I tried it."
"It's queer," said Judd, reflectively, after a pause, "how these man-made laws sooner or later anchor all you women, after you've made your flights. The whole thing, you know, is an idiotic system. They try to regulate us by rote and rule, by bell, book and candle. But, after all, they only think they're regulating us that way, don't they? I wonder how many of us really follow their rules? Mighty few that I know of. Openly, we subscribe to all of the iron-bound tenets, privately we laugh at them and do the best we know to rip them apart. It's all a matter of being found out; of being caught with the goods. A woman, of course, has to watch out for more danger signals than a man. But they're pretty clever little watchers, believe me."
"Well, you can't blame them for that," said Mrs. Treharne. "Most of them, at any rate, have the common sense not to attempt to brazen matters out, as I have."
"I see what you mean," said Judd, cogitatively. "Your idea is that it is a woman's business to get all that she can out of life, and that the only way for her to get the most out of life is to pretend to agree to the rules as they've been made for her, and then, if she feels disposed to kick over the traces, why, to keep under cover about it. You're right in that view, of course. But, after all, what difference does it make? Sooner or later, no matter how we play the string, they toss us into a box and plant us. When it comes to that, I can't see why you should permit what you call your conscience to make a wreck of you in this way. What have you done? Why, you've been my companion. Will you be good enough to tell me how that companionship could possibly have been made any better than it has been if, at its outset, a man in a surplice or a mouthing justice had mumbled a few so-called binding words over us? Faugh! You can't believe such crass humbug. The so-called 'consecration of matrimony' is a good enough phrase and a good enough scheme to keep groundlings up to the mark. Don't you suppose we'd have fought and barked at each other just the same if we'd been married according to the frazzled old rule? At that, I'd have married you years ago, just to straighten you out, if there had been the least chance of my prevailing upon my wife, who made life a hell for me with her whinings, to get a divorce from me. But, now that the thing has ambled along to this stage, what's the use of talking about quitting?"
She listened to him composedly. But his words fell thumpingly enough upon her ears. He had never gone to the pains before of giving her so complete an elucidation of his doctrine.
"There is as little use in our debating the world's social and ethical system," she said. "I am not thinking of myself. There is no reason why I shouldn't acknowledge to you that I don't much care how our relationship affects myself. But——"
"Yes, I know what it's all about," put in Judd. "It's your daughter. Well, I'll have to grant that you've got a big end of the argument there. I've got daughters of my own, and I know how I'd snort around if I thought there was a chance on earth for any of my daughters to inherit my doctrine, my view of the world, the flesh and the devil. That's the finest little inconsistency I possess. I might as well stick in the observation here, while we're all confessing our sins, that I've felt a good deal more like a blackguard than has been comfortable to my self-esteem ever since the night I rounded on your daughter. That, I think, was about the meanest and commonest act of my life. A pretty fine sort of a girl, your daughter."