For the first time since he had been in newspaper work, Howard came to the office the next day in a long coat and a top hat. He left early and went for a walk in the Avenue. But Miss Trevor was neither driving nor walking. He repeated this excursion the next afternoon with better success. At Fortieth Street he saw her and her cousin half a block ahead of him. He walked slowly and examined her. She was satisfactory from the aigrette in her hat to her heels—a long, narrow, graceful figure, dressed with the expensive simplicity characteristic of the most intelligent class of the women of New York and Paris. She walked as if she were accustomed to walking. Mrs. Carnarvon had that slight hesitation, almost stumble, which indicates the woman who usually drives and never walks if she can avoid it. As they paused at the crowded crossing of Forty-second Street he joined them. When Mrs. Carnarvon found that he was “just out for the air” she left them, to go home—in Forty-seventh Street, a few doors east of the Avenue.
“Come back to tea with her,” she said as she nodded to Howard.
“We have at least an hour.” Howard was looking at Miss Trevor with his happiness dancing in his eyes. “Why shouldn’t we go to the Park?”
“I believe it’s not customary,” objected Miss Trevor in a tone that made the walk in the Park a certainty.
“I’m glad to hear that. I don’t care to do customary things as a rule.”
“I see that you don’t.”
“Do you say so because I show what I am thinking so plainly that you can’t help seeing it—and don’t in the least mind?”
“Why shouldn’t you be glad to be alive and to be seeing me this fine winter day?”
“Why indeed!” Howard looked at her from head to foot and then into her eyes.
“We are not in the Park yet.” Miss Trevor accompanied her hint with a laugh and added: “I feel reckless to-day.”
“You mean you forget that there is any to-morrow.Ihave shut out to-morrow ever since I saw you.”
“And yesterday?” She noted that he coloured slightly, but continued to look at her, his eyes sad. “But there is a to-morrow,” she went on.
“Yes—my work, my career is my to-morrow and yours is——”
“Well?”
“Your engagement, of course.”
Miss Trevor flushed, but Howard was smiling and she did not long resist the contagion.
“My to-morrow,” he continued, “is far more menacing than yours. Yours is just an ordinary, every-day, cut-and-dried affair. Mine is full of doubts and uncertainties with the chances for failure and disappointment. If I can turn my back on my to-morrow, surely you can waive yours for the moment?”
“But why are you so certain that I wish to?”
“Instinct. I could not be so happy as I am with you if you were not content to have me here.”
They spoke little until they were well within the Park. There they turned down a by-path and took the walk skirting the lower lake. Miss Trevor looked at Howard with a puzzled expression.
“I never met any one like you,” she said. “I have always felt so sure of myself. You take me off my feet. I feel as if I did not know where I was going and—didn’t much care. And that’s the worst of it.”
“No, the best of it. You are a star going comfortably through your universe in a fixed orbit. You maintain your exact relations with your brother and sister stars. You keep all your engagements, you never wobble in your path—everything exact, mathematical. And up darts a wild-haired, impetuous comet, a hurrying, bustling, irregular wanderer coming from you don’t know where, going you don’t know whither. We pass very near each to the other. The social astronomers may or may not note a little variation in your movement—a very little, and soon over. They probably will not note the insignificant meteor that darted close up to you—close enough to get his poor face sadly scorched and his long hair cruelly singed—and then hurried sadly away. And——”
“And—what? Isn’t there any more to the story?” Marian’s eyes were shining with a light which she was conscious had never been there before.
“And—and——” Howard stopped and faced her. His hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his overcoat. He looked at her in a way that made the colour fly from her face and then leap back again. “And—I love you.”
“Oh”—Marian said, hiding her face in her white muff. “Oh.”
“I don’t wish to touch you,” he went on, “I just wish to look at you—so tall, so straight, so—so alive, and to love you and be happy.” Then he laughed and turned. “But you’ll catch cold. Let us walk on.”
“So you are trying to make a career?” she asked after a few minutes’ silence.
“Yes—trying—or, rather, I was. And shall again when you have gone your way and I mine.”
Marian was amazed at herself. Every tradition, every instinct of her life was being trampled by this unknown whom she had just met. And she was assisting in the trampling. In fact it was difficult for her to restrain herself from leading in the iconoclasm. She looked at him in wonder and delighted terror.
“Why do you look at me in that way?” he said, turning his head suddenly.
“Because you are stronger than I—and I am afraid—yet I—well—I like it.”
“It is not I that is stronger than you, nor you that are stronger than I. It is a third that is stronger than both of us. I need not mention the gentleman’s name?”
“It is not necessary. But I’d like to hear you pronounce it. At least I did a moment ago.”
“I’ll not risk repetition. I’ve been thinking of what might have been.”
“What?” Marian laughed a little, rather satirically. “A commonplace engagement and a commonplace wedding and a commonplace honeymoon leading into a land of commonplace disillusion and yawning—or worse?”
“Not unlikely. But since we’re only dreaming why not dream more to our taste? Now as I look at your strong, clear, ambitious profile, I can dream of a career made by two working as one, working cheerfully day in and day out, fair and foul weather, working with the certainty of success as the crown.”
“But failure might come.”
“It couldn’t. We wouldn’t work for fame or for riches or for any outside thing. We would work to make ourselves wiser and better and more worthy each of the other and both of our great love.”
Again they were walking in silence.
“I am so sad,” Marian said at last. “But I am so happy too. What has come over me? But—you will work on, won’t you? And you will accomplish everything. Yes, I am sure you will.”
“Oh, I’ll work—in my own way. And I’ll get a good deal of what I want. But not everything. You say you can’t understand yourself. No more can I understand myself. I thought my purpose fixed. I knew that I had nothing to do with marrying and giving in marriage, so I kept away from danger. And here, as miraculously as if a thunderbolt had dropped from this open winter sky, here is—you.”
They were in the Avenue again—“the awakening,” Howard said as the flood of carriages rolled about them.
“You will win,” she repeated, when they were almost at Forty-seventh Street. “You will be famous.”
“Probably not. The price for fame may be too big.”
“The price? But you are willing to work?”
“Work—yes. But not to lie, not to cheat, not to exchange self-respect for self-contempt—at least, I think, I hope not.”
“But why should that be necessary?”
“It may not be if I am free—free to meet every situation as it arises, with no responsibility for others resting upon me in the decision. If I had a wife, how could I be free? I might be forced to sell myself—not for fame but for a bare living. Suppose choice between freedom with poverty and comfort with self-contempt were put squarely at me, and I a married man. She would decide, wouldn’t she?”
“Yes, and if she were the right sort of a woman, decide instantly for self-respect.”
“Of course—if I asked her. But do you imagine that when a man loves a woman he lets her know?”
“It would be a crime not to let her know.”
“It would be a greater crime to put her to the test—if she were a woman brought up, say, as you have been.”
“How can you say that? How can you so overestimate the value of mere incidentals?”
“How can I? Because I have known poverty—have known what it was to look want in the face. Because I have seen women, brought up as you have been, crawling miserably about in the sloughs of poverty. Because I have seen the weaknesses of human nature and know that they exist in me—yes, and in you, for all your standing there so strong and arrogant and self-reliant. It is easy to talk of misery when one does not understand it. It is easy to be the martyr of an hour or a day. But to drag into a sordid and squalid martyrdom the woman one loves—well, the man does not live who would do it, if he knew what I know, had seen what I have seen. No, love is a luxury of the rich and the poor and the steady-going. It is not for my kind, not for me.”
They were pausing at Mrs. Carnarvon’s door.
“I shall not come in this afternoon,” he said. “But to-morrow—if I don’t come in to-day, don’t you think it will be all right for me to come then?”
“I shall expect you,” she said.
The talk of those who had come in for tea seemed artificial and flat. She soon went up-stairs, eager to be alone. Mechanically she went to her desk to write her customary daily letter to Danvers. She looked vacantly at the pen and paper, and then she remembered why she was sitting there.
“You are a traitor,” she said to her reflection in the mirror over the desk. “But you will pay for your treason. Has not one a right to that for which she is willing to pay?”
To be sure of a woman a man must be confident either of his own powers or of her absolute frankness and honesty. It was self-assurance that made Edward Danvers blindly confident of Marian.
His father, a man with none but selfish uses for his fellow men, had given him a pains-taking training as a vigilant guard for a great fortune. His favourite maxim was, “Always look for motives.” And he once summed up his own character and idea of life by saying: “I often wake at night and laugh as I think how many men are lying awake in their beds, scheming to get something out of me for nothing.”
There could be but one result of such an education by such an educator. Danvers was acutely suspicious, saved from cynicism and misanthropy by his vanity only. He was the familiar combination of credulity and incredulity, now trusting not at all and again trusting with an utter incapacity to judge. Had he been far more attractive personally, he might still have failed to find genuine affection. To be liked for one’s self alone or even chiefly is rarely the lot of any human being who has a possession that is all but universally coveted—wealth or position or power or beauty.
Danvers and Marian had known each the other from childhood. And she perhaps came nearer to liking him for himself than did any one else of his acquaintance. She was used to his conceit, his selfishness, his meanness and smallness in suspicion, his arrogance, his narrow-mindedness. She knew his good qualities—his kindness of heart, his shamed-face generosity, his honesty, the strong if limited sense of justice which made him a good employer and a good landlord. They had much in common—the same companions, the same idea of the agreeable and the proper, the same passion for out-door life, especially for hunting. He fell in love with her when she came back from two years in England and France, and she thought that she was in love with him. She undoubtedly was fond of him, proud of his handsome, athletic look and bearing, proud of his skill and daring in the hunting field.
One day—it was in the autumn a year before Howard met her—they were “in at the death” together after a run across a stiff country that included several dangerous jumps. “You’re the only one that can keep up with me,” he said, admiring her glowing face and star-like eyes, her graceful, assured seat on a hunter that no one else either cared or dared to ride.
“You mean you are the only one who can keep up withme,” she laughed, preparing for what his face warned her was coming.
“No I don’t, Marian dear. I mean that we ought to go right on keeping up with each other. You won’t say no, will you?”
Marian was liking him that day—he was looking his best. She particularly liked his expression as he proposed to her. She had intended to pretend to refuse him; instead her colour rose and she said: “No—which means yes. Everybody expects it of us, Teddy. So I suppose we mustn’t disappoint them.”
The fact that “everybody” did expect it, the fact that he was the great “catch” in their set, with his two hundred and fifty thousand a year, his good looks and his good character—these were her real reasons, with the first dominant. But she did not admit it to herself then. At twenty-four even the mercenary instinct tricks itself out in a most deceptive romantic disguise if there is the ghost of an opportunity. Besides, there was no reason, and no sign of an approaching reason, for the shadow of a suspicion that life with Teddy Danvers would not be full of all that she and her friends regarded as happiness.
But she would not marry immediately. She was tenacious of her freedom. She was restless, dissatisfied with herself and not elated by her prospects. She had an excellent mind, reasonable, appreciative, ambitious. Until she “came out” she had spent much time among books; but as she had had no capable director of her reading, she got from it only a vague sense, that there was somewhere something in the way of achievement which she might possibly like to attain if she knew what it was or where to look for it. As she became settled in her place in the routine of social life, as her horizon narrowed to the conventional ideas of her set, this sense of possible and attractive achievement became vaguer. But her restlessness did not diminish.
“I never saw such an ungrateful girl,” was Mrs. Carnarvon’s comment upon one of Marian’s outbursts of almost peevish fretting. “What do you want?”
“That’s just it,” exclaimed Marian, half-laughing. “WhatdoI want? I look all about me and I can’t see it. Yet I know that there must be something. I think I ought to have been a man. Sometimes I feel like running away—away off somewhere. I feel as if I were getting second-bests, paste substitutes for the real jewels. I feel as I did when I was a child and demanded the moon. They gave me a little gilt crescent and said: ‘Here is a nice little moon for baby;’ and it made me furious.”
Mrs. Carnarvon looked irritated. “I don’t understand it. You are getting the best of everything. Of course you can’t expect to be happy. I don’t suppose that any one is happy. But all the solid things of life are yours, and you can and should be comfortable and contented.”
“That’s just it,” answered Marian indignantly. “I have always been swaddled in cotton wool. I have never been allowed really to feel. I think it is the spirit of revolt in me. Yes, I ought to have been a man. I’m sure that then I could have made life a little less tiresome.”
It was this dissatisfaction that postponed the announcement of the engagement from month to month until a year had slipped away.
Instead of coming to New York, Danvers went off to Montana for a mountain-lion hunt with two Englishmen who had been staying with him in “The Valley.” He would join Marian for the trip South, the engagement would be announced, and the wedding would be in May—such was the arrangement which Marian succeeded in making. It settled everything and at the same time it gave her a month of freedom in New York. She hinted enough of this programme to Howard to enable him to grasp its essential points.
“A month’s holiday,” was his comment. They were alone on the second seat of George Browning’s coach, driving through the Park. “If we were like those people”—he was looking at a young man and young woman, side by side upon a Park bench, blue with cold but absorbed in themselves and obviously ecstatic. Marian glanced at them with slightly supercilious amusement and became so interested that she turned her head to follow them with her eyes after the coach had passed.
“Is he kissing her?” asked Howard.
“No—not yet. But I’m sure he will as soon as we have turned the corner.” She said nothing for a moment or two, her glance straight ahead and upon vacancy, he admiring the curve of her cheek at the edge of its effective framing of fur.
“But we are not——” She spoke in a low tone, regretful, pensive, almost sad. “We are not like them.”
“Oh, yes we are. But—we fancy we are not. We’ve sold our birthright, our freedom, our independence for—for——”
“Well—what?”
“Baubles—childish toys—vanities—shadows. Doesn’t it show what ridiculous little creatures we human beings are that we regard the most valueless things as of the highest value, and think least of the true valuables. For, tell me, Lady-Whom-I-Love, what is most valuable in the few minutes of this little journey among the stars on the good ship Mother Earth?”
“But you would not care always as you care now? It would not, could not, last. If we—if we were like those people on the bench back there, we’d go on and—and spoil it all.”
“Perhaps—who can say? But in some circumstances couldn’t I make you just as happy as—as some one else could?”
“Not if you had made me infinitely happier at one time than even you could hope to make me all the time. At least I think not. It would always be—be racing against a record; we both would be, wouldn’t we?”
Howard looked at her with an expression which transfigured his face and sent the colour flaming to her cheeks. “That being the case,” he said, “let us—let us make the record one that will not be forgotten—soon.”
During the month he saw her almost every day. She was most ingenious in arranging these meetings. They were together afternoons and evenings. They were often alone. Yet she was careful not to violate any convention, always to keep, or seem to be keeping, one foot “on the line.” Howard threw himself into his infatuation with all his power of concentration He practically took a month’s holiday from the office. He thought about her incessantly. He used all his skill with words in making love to her. And she abandoned herself to an equal infatuation with equal absorption. Neither of them spoke of the past or the future. They lived in the present, talked of the present.
One day she spoke of herself as an orphan.
“I did not know that,” he said. “But then what do I know about you in relation to the rest of the world? To me you are an isolated act of creation.”
“You must tell me about yourself.” She was looking at him, surprised. “Why, I know nothing at all about you.”
“Oh, yes, you do. You know all that there is to know—all that is important.”
“What?” She was asking for the pleasure of hearing him say it.
“That I love you—you—all of you—all of you, with all of me.”
Her eyes answered for her lips, which only said smilingly: “No, we haven’t time to get acquainted—at least not to-day.”
She was to start for Florida at ten the next morning. Mrs. Carnarvon was going away to the opera, giving them the last evening alone. Marian had asked this of her point-blank.
“You are an extraordinarily sensible as well as strong-willed girl, Marian,” Mrs. Carnarvon replied.
“I can’t find it in my heart to blame you for what you’re doing. The fact that I haven’t even hinted a protest, but have lent myself to your little plots, shows that that young man has hypnotized me also.”
“You needn’t disturb yourself, as you know,” Marian said gaily. “I’m not hypnotized. I shall not see Mr. Howard again until—after it’s all over. Perhaps not then.”
He came to dinner and they were not alone until almost nine. She sat near the open fire among the cushions heaped high upon the little sofa. She had never been more beautiful, and apparently never in a happier mood. They both laughed and talked as if it were the first instead of the last day of their month. Neither spoke of the parting; each avoided all subjects that pointed in direction of the one subject of which both thought whenever their minds left the immediate present. As the little clock on the mantle began to intimate in a faint, polite voice the quarter before eleven, he said abruptly, almost brusquely:
“I feel like a coward, giving you up in this way. Yes—giving you up; for you have a traitor in your fortress who has offered me the keys, who offers them to me now. But I do not trust you; and I can’t trust myself. The curse of luxury is on you, the curse of ambition on me. If we had found each the other younger; if I had lived less alone, more in the ordinary habit of dependence upon others; if you had been brought up to live instead of to have all the machinery of living provided and conducted for you—well, it might have been different.”
“You are wrong as to me, right as to yourself. But yours is not the curse of ambition. It is the passion for freedom. It would be madness for you, thinking as you do, even if you could—and you can’t.”
He stood up and held out his hand. She did not rise or look at him.
“Good night,” she said at last, putting her hand in his. “Of course I am thinking I shall see you tomorrow. One does not come out of such a dream,”—she looked up at him smiling—“all in a moment.”
“Good night,” he smiled back at her. “I shall not open ‘the fiddler’s bill’ until—until I have to.” At the door he turned. She had risen and was kneeling on the sofa, her elbow on its low arm, her chin upon her hand, her eyes staring into the fire. He came toward her.
“May I kiss you?” he said.
“Yes.” Her voice was expressionless.
He bent over and just touched his lips to the back of her neck at the edge of her hair. He thought that she trembled slightly, but her face was set and she did not look toward him. He turned and left her. Half an hour later she heard the bell ring—it was Mrs. Carnarvon. She wished to see no one, so she fled through the rear door of the reception room and up the great stairway to lock herself in her boudoir. She sank slowly upon the lounge in front of the fire and closed her eyes. The fire died out and the room grew cold. A warning chilliness made her rise to get ready for bed.
“No,” she said aloud. “It isn’t ambition and it isn’t lack of love. It’s a queer sort of cowardice; but it’s cowardice for all that. He’s a coward or he wouldn’t have given up. But—I wonder—how am I going to live without him? I need him—more than he needs me, I’m afraid.”
She was standing before her dressing table. On it was a picture of Danvers—handsome, self-satisfied, healthy, unintellectual. She looked at it, gave a little shiver, and with the end of her comb toppled it over upon its face.
On that journey south Marian for the first time studied Danvers as a husband in prospect.
The morning after they left New York, their private car arrived at Savannah. At dark the night before they were rushing through a snow storm raging in a wintry landscape. Now they were looking out upon spring from the open windows. As soon as the train stopped, all except Marian and Danvers left the car to walk up and down the platform. Danvers, standing behind Marian, looked around to make sure that none of the servants was about, then rubbed his hand caressingly and familiarly upon her cheek.
“Did you miss me?” he asked.
Marian could not prevent her head from shrinking from his touch.
“There’s nobody about,” Danvers said, reassuringly. But he acted upon the hint and, taking his hand away, came around and sat beside her.
“Did you miss me?” he repeated, looking at her with an expression in his frank, manly blue eyes that made her flush at the thought of “treason” past and to come.
“Didyoumissme?” she evaded.
“I would have returned long ago if I had not been ashamed,” he answered, smiling. “I never thought that I should come not to care for as good shooting as that. You almost cost me my life.”
“Yes?” Marian spoke absently. She was absorbed in her mental comparison of the two men.
“I got away from the others and was looking at your picture. They started up a lion and he came straight at me from behind. If he hadn’t made a misstep in his hurry and loosened a stone, I guess he would have got me. As it was, I got him.”
“You mean your gun got him.”
“Of course. You don’t suppose I tackled him bare-handed.”
“It might have been fairer. I don’t see how you can boast of having killed a creature that never bothered you, that you had to go thousands of miles out of your way to find, and that you attacked with a gun, giving him no chance to escape.”
“What nonsense!” laughed Danvers. “I never expected to hear you say anything like that. Who’s been putting such stuff into your head?”
Marian coloured. She did not like his tone. She resented the suggestion of the truth that her speech was borrowed. It made her uncomfortable to find herself thus unexpectedly on the dangerous ground.
“I suppose it must have been that newspaper fellow Mrs. Carnarvon has taken up. She talked about him for an hour after you left us to go to bed last night.”
“Yes, it was—was Mr. Howard.” Marian had recovered herself. “I want you to meet him some time. You’ll like him, I’m sure.”
“I doubt it. Mrs. Carnarvon seemed not to know much about him. I suppose he’s more or less of an adventurer.”
Marian wondered if this obvious dislike was the result of one of those strange instincts that sometimes enable men to scent danger before any sign of it appears.
“Perhaps he is an adventurer,” she replied. “I’m sure I don’t know. Why should one bother to find out about a passing acquaintance? It is enough to know that he is amusing.”
“I’m not so sure of that. He might make off with the jewels when you had your back turned.”
As soon as she had made her jesting denial of her real lover Marian was ashamed of herself. And Danvers’ remark, though a jest, cut her. “What I said about a passing acquaintance was not just or true,” she said impulsively and too warmly. “Mr. Howard is not an adventurer. I admire and like him very much indeed. I’m proud of his friendship.”
Danvers shrugged his shoulders and looked at her suspiciously.
“You saw a good deal of this—this friend of yours?” he demanded, his mouth straightening into a dictatorial line.
At this Marian grew haughty and her eyes flashed: “Why do you ask?” she inquired, her tone dangerously calm.
“Because I have the right to know.” He pointed to the diamond on her third finger.
“Oh—that is soon settled.” Marian drew off the ring and held it out to him. “Really, Teddy, I think you ought to have waited a little longer before insisting so fiercely on your rights.”
“Don’t be absurd, Marian.” Danvers did not take the ring but fixed his eyes upon her face and changed his tone to friendly remonstrance. “You know the ring doesn’t mean anything. It’s your promise that counts. And honestly don’t you think your promise does give me the right to ask you about your new friends when you speak of them, of one of them, in—in such a way?”
“I don’t intend to deceive you,” she said, turning the ring around slowly on her finger. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I suppose the only way to speak is just to speak.”
“Do you think you are in love with this man, Marian?”
She nodded, then after a long pause, said, “Yes, Teddy, I love him.”
“But I thought——”
“And so did I, Teddy. But he came, and I—well I couldn’t help it.”
As he did not speak, she looked at him. His face was haggard and white and in his eyes which met hers frankly there was suffering.
“It wasn’t my fault, Teddy,” Marian laid her hand on his arm, “at least, not altogether. I might have kept away and I didn’t.”
“Oh, I don’t blame you. I blame him.”
“But it wasn’t his fault. I—I—encouraged him.”
“Did he know that we were engaged?”
“Yes,” reluctantly.
“The scoundrel! I suspected that he was rotten somewhere.”
“You are unjust to him. I have not told you properly.”
“Did he tell you that he cared for you?”
“Yes—but he didn’t try to get me to break my engagement.”
“So much the more a scoundrel, he. Tell me, Marian—come to your senses and tell me—what in the devil did he hang about you for and make love to you, if he didn’t want to marry you? Would an honest man, a decent man, do that?”
Marian’s face confessed assent.
“I should think you would have seen what sort of a fellow he is. I should think you would despise him.”
“Sometimes it seems to me that I ought to. But I always end by despising myself—and—and—it makes no difference in the way I feel toward him.”
“I think I would do well to look him up and give him a horse-whipping. But you’ll get over him, Marian. I am astonished at your cousin. How could she let this go on? But then, she’s crazy about him too.”
Marian smiled miserably. “I’ve owned up and you ought to congratulate yourself on so luckily getting rid of such an untrustworthy person as I.”
“Getting rid of you?” Danvers looked at her defiantly. “Do you think I’m going to let you go on and ruin yourself on an impulse? Not much! I hold you to your promise. You’ll come round all right after you’ve been away from this fellow for a few days. You’ll be amazed at yourself a week from now.”
“You don’t understand, Teddy.” Marian wished him to see once for all that, whatever might be the future for her and Howard, there was no future for her and him. “Don’t make it so hard for me to tell you.”
“I don’t want to hear any more about it now, Marian. I can’t stand it—I hardly know what I’m saying—wait a few days—let’s go on as we have been—here they come.”
The others of the party came bustling into the car and the train started. For the rest of the journey Danvers avoided her, keeping to the smoking room and the game of poker there. Marian could neither read nor watch the landscape. She did not know whether to be glad or sorry that she had told him. She hated to think that she had inflicted pain and she could not believe, in spite of what she had seen in his eyes, that his feeling in the matter was more than jealousy and wounded vanity.
“He doesn’t really care for me,” she thought. “It’s his pride that is hurt. He will flare out at me and break it off. I do hope he’ll get angry. It will make it so much easier for me.”
Late in the afternoon she took Mrs. Carnarvon into her confidence. “I’ve told Teddy,” she said.
“I might have known!” exclaimed her cousin. “What on earth made you do that?”
“I don’t know—perhaps shame.”
“Shame—trash! Your life is going to be a fine turmoil if you run to Teddy with an account of every little mild flirtation you happen to have. Of all the imbeciles, the most imbecile is the woman who confesses.”
“But how could I marry him when——”
“When you don’t love him?”
“No—I might have done that. I like him. But, when I love another man.”
“It does make a difference. But you ought to be able to foresee that you’ll get over Howard in a few weeks——”
“Precisely what Teddy said.”
“Did he? I’m surprised at his having so much sense. For, if you’ll forgive me, I don’t think Teddy will ever set New York on fire—at least, he’s—well, he has the makings of an ideal husband. And has he broken it off?”
“No. He wouldn’t have it.”
“Really? Well heisin love. Most men in his position—able to get any girl he wants—would have thrown up the whole business. Yes, he must be awfully in love.”
“Do you think that?” Marian’s voice spoke distress but she felt only satisfaction. “Oh, I hope not—that is, I’d like to think he cared a great deal and at the same time I don’t want to hurt him.”
“Don’t fret yourself about these two men. Just go on thinking as you please. You’ll be surprised how soon Howard will fade.” Mrs. Carnarvon smiled satirically at some thought—perhaps a memory. “You’re a good deal of a goose, my dear, but you are a great deal more of a woman. That’s why I feel sure that Teddy will win.”
With such an opportunity—with the field clear and the woman half-remorseful over her treachery, half-indignant at the man who had shown himself so weak and spiritless—a cleverer or a less vain man than Danvers would have triumphed easily. And for the first week he did make progress. He acted upon the theory that Marian had been hypnotized and that the proper treatment was to ignore her delusion and to treat her with assiduous but not annoying consideration. He did not pose as an injured or jealous lover. He was the friend, always at her service, always thinking out plans for her amusement. He made no reference to their engagement or to Howard.
Several people of their set were at the hotel and Marian was soon drifting back into her accustomed modes of thought. The wider horizon which she fancied Howard had shown her was growing dim and hazy. The horizon which he had made her think narrow was beginning again to seem the only one. This meant Danvers; but he was not acute enough to understand her and to follow up his advantage.
One morning as he was walking up and down under the palms, waiting for Mrs. Carnarvon and Marian, Mrs. Fortescue called him. She was a cold, rather handsome woman. In her eyes was the expression that always betrays the wife or the mistress who loathes the man she lives with, enduring him only because he gives her that which she most wants—money. She had one fixed idea—to marry her daughter “well,” that is, to money.
“Can you join us to-day, Teddy?” she asked. “We need one more man.”
“I’m waiting for Mrs. Carnarvon and Marian,” he explained.
“Oh, of course.” Mrs. Fortescue smiled. “What a nice girl she is—so clever, so—so independent. I admired her immensely for deciding to marry that poor, obscure young fellow. I like to see the young people romantic.”
Danvers flushed angrily and pulled at his mustache. He tried to smile. “We’ve teased her about it a good deal,” he said, “but she denies it.”
“I suppose they aren’t ready to announce the engagement yet,” Mrs. Fortescue suggested. “I suppose they are waiting until he betters his position a little. It’s never a good idea to have too long a time between the announcement and the marriage.”
“Perhaps that is it.” Danvers tried to look indifferent but his eyes were sullen with jealousy.
“I always rather thought that you and Marian were going to make a match of it,” continued Mrs. Fortescue. Just then her daughter came down the walk. She was fashionably dressed in white and blue that brought out all the loveliness of her golden hair and violet eyes and faintly-coloured, smooth fair skin. Danvers had not seen her since she “came out,” and was dazzled by her radiance.
They say that every man must be a little in love with every pretty woman he sees. And Danvers at once gave Ellen Fortescue her due. She sat silent beside her mother, looking the personification of innocence, purity and poetry. Her mother continued subtly to poison Danvers against Marian, to make him feel that she had not appreciated him, that she had trifled with him, that she had not treated him as his dignity and importance merited. When she and Mrs. Carnarvon appeared, he joined them tardily, after having made an arrangement with the Fortescues for the next day.
That evening he danced several times with Ellen Fortescue and adopted the familiar lover’s tactics—he set about making Marian jealous. He scored the customary success. When she went to bed she lay for several hours looking out into the moonlight, raging against the Fortescues and against Danvers. The mere fact that a man whom she regarded as hers was permitting himself to show marked attention to another woman would have been sufficient. But in addition, Marian was perfectly aware of the material advantages of this particular man. She did not want to marry him; at least she was of that mind at the moment. But she might change her mind. Certainly, if there was to be any breaking off, she wished it to be of her doing. She did not fancy the idea of him departing joyfully.
She was far too wise to show that she saw what was going on. She praised Miss Fortescue to Danvers with apparent frankness and insisted on him devoting more time to her. Danvers persisted in his scheme boldly for a week and then, just as Marian was despairing and was casting about for another plan of campaign, he gave in. They were sitting apart in the shadow near one of the windows of the ball-room. He had been sullen all the evening, almost rude.
“How much longer are you going to keep me in suspense?” he burst out angrily.
“In suspense?”
“You know what I mean. I think I’ve been very patient.”
“You mean our engagement?” Marian was looking at him, repelled by his expression, his manner, the tone of his voice, his whole mood.
“Yes—I want your decision.”
“I have not changed.”
“You still love that—that newspaper fellow?”
“No, I don’t mean that.” Marian felt her irritation against Danvers suddenly vanish and in its place a Sense of relief and of calmness. “I mean toward you. It won’t do, Teddy. We shall get on well as friends. But I can’t think of you in—in that way.”
Mrs. Fortescue had so swollen his vanity that he was astounded at Marian’s decision. He rapidly went over in his mind all the advantages he offered as a husband, and then looked at her as if he thought her beside herself.
“Look here, Marian,” he protested. “You can’t mean it. Why, it’s all settled that we are to marry. It would be madness for you to break it off. I can give you everything—everything. And he can’t give you anything.” Then with fatal tactlessness: “He won’t even give you the little that he can, according to your own story.”
“Yes, it’s madness, isn’t it, Teddy, to refuse you—fascinating you, who can give everything. But that’s just it. You have too much. You overwhelm me. I should feel like a cheat, taking so much and giving so little.”
“Don’t,” he begged, his self-complacence and superiority all gone. “Don’t mind my blundering, please, dear. I want you. I can’t say it. I haven’t any gift of words. But you’ve known me all my life and you know that I love you. I’ve set my heart on it, Mary Ann,”—it was the name he used to tease her with when they were children playing together—“You won’t go back on me now, will you?”
“I wish I could do as you wish, Teddy.” Marian was forgetful of everything but the unhappiness she was causing this friend of so many, many years and of so many, many memories. “But I can’t—I can’t.”
“Marry me, dear, anyhow. You will care afterward.” Marian was silent and Danvers hoped. “You know all about me. I’ll not give you any surprises. I shan’t bother you. And I’ll make you happy.”
“No,” she said firmly. “You mustn’t ask it. I’ll tell you why. I have thought of marrying you regardless of this. Only last night I thought of it—finally, went over the whole thing. Listen, Teddy—if I were married to you—and if he should come—and he would come sooner or later—if he should come and say ‘Come with me,’—I’d go—yes, I’m sure I’d go. I can’t explain why. But I know that nothing would stand in the way—nothing.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Marian shrank from him. She was horrified by the malignant fury that sparkled in his eyes and raged in his voice. “That damned scoundrel is worthy of you and you of him. But I’ll get you yet. I never was crossed in anything in my life and I’ll not be beaten here.”
“And I thought you were my friend!” Marian was looking at him, pale, her eyes wide with amazement. “Is it really you?”
He laughed insolently. “Yes—you’ll see. And he’ll see. I’ll crush him as if he were an egg shell. And as for you—you perjurer—you liar!”
He looked at her with coarse contempt, rose and stalked away. Marian sat rigid. She was conscious of the insult. But even that humiliation was not so strong in her mind as the astounding revelation of Danvers. She remembered that even as his eyes blazed hatred at her, he looked at her, at her neck, her bare arms, with the baffled desire of brute passion. She did not fully understand the look, but she felt that it was a degradation far greater than his insulting words.
She slipped, almost skulked to her room, her eyes down, her face in a burning flush, her scarf drawn tightly about her neck. As her door closed behind her, she fell upon her bed and began to sob hysterically. She started up with a scream to find her cousin standing beside her.
“I’m so sorry. Forgive me.” Mrs. Carnarvon’s voice had lost its wonted levity. “I saw that you were in trouble and followed. I knocked and I thought I heard you answer. What is it, Marie? May I ask? Can I do anything?”
Marian drew her down to the bed and buried her face in her lap. “Oh, I feel so unclean,” she said. “It was—Teddy. Would you believe it, Jessie, Teddy! I looked on him as a brother. And he showed me that he was not my friend—that he didn’t even love me—that he—oh, I shall never forget the look in his eyes. He made me feel like a—like athing.”
Mrs. Carnarvon smothered a smile. “Of course Teddy’s a brute,” she said. “I thought you knew. He’s a domesticated brute, like most of the men and some of the women. You’ll have to get used to that.”
By refusing to fall in with her mood, Mrs. Carnarvon had gone far toward curing it. Marian stopped sobbing and presently said:
“Oh, I know all that. But I didn’t expect it from Teddy—and toward me. And—” she shuddered—“I was thinking, actually thinking of marrying him. I wish never to see him again. And he pretended to be my friend!”
“And he was, no doubt, until he got you on the brain in another way, in the way he calls love. There isn’t any love that has friendship in it.”
“We must go away at once.”
“Unless Teddy saves us the trouble by going first, as I suspect he will.”
“Jessie, he hates me and—and—Mr. Howard.”
“So you talked to him about Howard again, did you?” Mrs. Carnarvon was indignant. “You are old enough to know better, Marian. You carry frankness entirely too far. There is such a thing as truth running amuck.”
“He said he would crush Howard. And I believe he really meant it.”
“Teddy is a man who believes in revenges—or thinks he does. His father taught him to keep accounts in grievances, and no doubt he has opened an account with Howard. But don’t be disturbed about it. His father would have insisted on balancing the account. Teddy will just keep on hating, but won’t do anything. He’s not underhanded.”
“He’s everything that is vile and low.”
“You’re quite mistaken, my dear. He’s what they call a manly fellow—a little too masculine perhaps, but——”
A knock interrupted and Mrs. Carnarvon, answering it, took from the bell-boy a note for Marian who read it, then handed it to her. Mrs. Carnarvon read: “I apologise for the way I said what I did this evening, not for what I said. Because you had forgotten yourself, had played the traitor and the cheat was, perhaps, no excuse for my rudeness. You have fallen under an evil influence. I hope no harm will come to you, for I can’t get over my feeling for you. But I have done my best and have not been able to save you. I am going away early in the morning.
“Melodramatic, isn’t it?” laughed Mrs. Carnarvon. “So he’s off. How furious Martha Fortescue and Ellen will be. But they’ll go in pursuit, and they’ll get him. A man is never so susceptible as when he’s broken-hearted. Well, I must go. Good-night, dear. Don’t mope and whine. Take your punishment sensibly. You’ve learned something—if it’s only not to tell one man how much you love another.”
“I think I’ll go abroad with Aunt Retta next month.”
“A good idea—you’ll forget both these men. Good-night.”
“Good-night,” answered Marian dolefully, expecting to resume her thoughts of Danvers. But, instead, he straightway disappeared from her mind and she could think only of Howard. She was free now. The one barrier between him and her of which she had been really conscious was gone. And her heart began to ache with longing for him. Why had he not written? What was he doing? Did he really love her or was his passion for her only a flash of a strong and swift imagination?
No, he loved her—she could not doubt that. But she could not understand his conduct. She felt that she ought to be very unhappy, yet she was not. The longer she thought of him and the more she weighed his words and looks, the stronger became her trust in him. “He loves me,” she said. “He will come when he can. It may be even harder for him than for me.”
And so, explanation failing—for she rejected every explanation that reflected upon him—she hid and excused him behind that familiar refuge of the doubting, mystery.