239CHAPTER XIV
Judge Tiffany turned from a consideration of the hillside to a closer consideration of Eleanor, who rode beside him in the Goodyear trap. She sat very straight, her hands folded in her lap, her grave, grey eyes staring not at hillsides nor spring skies, but into the far horizons.
Since he recovered from that purely human rage against this youth who had betrayed him to his dearest enemy, the Judge had been watching, with all his old interest, the surface indications of Eleanor’s moods. Last night, it had been a kind of gaiety; to-day the mood was quiet, but not at all despondent; there was life in it. Judge Tiffany held his own views on the relations between his niece and Bertram Chester, and on the right or convenience of interfering. Twice he had been on the point of telling her that his feeling toward Bertram Chester should not color hers; that his house was still open to the young240man. But the curiosity of philosophical age to see how things will turn out had prevented him.
It was just as well. They were on the eve of their summer flight to the ranch, where she would have other things to think about than young men. That was his half-expressed theme when he spoke:
“Well, girl, will you be glad to get back to work again? You missed last summer.”
Eleanor started as out of sleep.
“I think I am glad of everything!” she said cryptically. As though to turn the subject, she indicated a buckboard which was coming down an intersecting by-road at crazy speed.
“Why are they driving so fast?”
The Goodyear driver turned with the familiarity of a country henchman.
“That’s the doctor’s rig from Las Olivas,” he said, “and he’s sure going some!” Followed a monologue on the doctor and his habits.
About the next bend of the road, a little boy rushed from a wayside camp which looked strangely deserted for supper-time of Sunday afternoon. He waved both arms before his face.241
“Hey, mister, take me to the wreck!”
“What wreck, kid?”
“The five-ten is over the trestle, and they went off and left me!”
Judge Tiffany took the information calmly, even selfishly. “I wonder if we’d better turn back and give it up to-night, or go on?”
Eleanor spoke with a catch of the breath, a drawn-in tone.
“Go on! Oh, tell him to go on!”
The Judge peered at her. She was pale, but, as always in her crises, the curtain of inscrutability made her face a mask. “Oh, do go on!” she repeated. Then, as though it all needed explanation, she added:
“We might be able to help!”
“Drive on, then—fast!”
Absolutely passive, Eleanor swayed a little with the trap, but made no motion of her own. Indeed, there was little motion within. The train had gone over the trestle, that was all. Bertram Chester was on that train. She must not try to think it out—must only hold tight to herself until she found how God had decided for her. Once it did occur that she had fretted her heart away over shadowy ills, toy troubles, while Bertram walked the earth242free and healthy. How trivial those troubles seemed beside this real apprehension! Once again, she wondered how she had been cruel enough to hold him at arm’s length so long. Was this to be the punishment for her folly?
A buckboard, driven furiously, came over the hill-rise before them—the doctor’s rig.
“Ask him—ask him!” she called to her driver. As they drew up alongside, the doctor’s driver began talking without need for inquiries.
“Spread rail! The rear car just bucked over the trestle—”
“Anybody dead?”
“Two that I saw—and everybody in the rear car hurt. They’re loading ’em on the front car to take ’em to town. Good bye—I’ve got to bring back medicine before they start!”
The chances were even—the chances were even. If he had been in the front car—relief. If he had been in the rear car—
The thing opened before them like a panorama as they topped the hill. The engine puffing regularly, normally, the baggage car and one coach on the rails behind it; a little crowd buzzing and rushing up and down the243trestle; a black, distorted mass of iron and splinters at the edge of the water below. Three or four heads appeared above the trestle, and the people swarmed in that direction. The heads grew to four men, carrying between them a bundle covered by a red blanket.
Judge Tiffany spoke for the first time.
“You’d better not see it, Nell!”
His words seemed to draw the curtain away from her self-control.
“Oh, go on—for God’s sake, go on!”
As they drew up beside the undamaged coach, the bearers had just arrived with another body. Eleanor jumped down, rushed to the platform. The thing under the blanket was a woman. She turned into the coach, apprehension growing into certainty. She had not seen him in the crowd. If he were unhurt, he must be first and foremost among the workers.
The coach was a hospital—limp, bandaged people propped up on every seat; in a little space by the further door, a row of quiet figures which lay as though sleeping. Above them bent two men. Their business-like calm showed that they were physicians. The244half of her which stood aloof, observing all things, wondering at all things, the half whose influence kept her now so calm and sane, marvelled that she heard no moaning, tormented sounds. They were in the second stage of injury; the blessed anæsthesia of nature was upon them. For human speech, she heard only the low, quick voices of those who healed and nursed.
She saw a bare arm lifted from the press of huddled forms, saw that a physician had pressed a black bulb to it. The hand—the inevitable configuration of that arm which she had never seen bare—and she knew him.
Bertram lay on his side. His eyes were closed, his whole figure huddled; yet something more than the quiver of his body at the prick of the syringe told her that he was alive. His color had changed but little; hovering death showed mainly by a sharpening of all the lines of his face. Yet it did not seem to be Bertram, but rather some statue, some ghastly replica of him.
The physician stood up and stretched his back. She came close.
“Will he live?”245
He turned impatiently, but he caught her eyes.
“He has a chance. He’s young and strong—Is he—yours?”
“Yes—yes! What shall I do for him?”
“Are you sure you’re strong enough—you won’t faint nor carry on?”
“No—no! I’m sure of that. What may I do?” Judge Tiffany was beside her now. He looked, understood, and said nothing.
“Thank God for you, then! With all the crowd we haven’t sane people enough to nurse one baby! Everything’s the matter with him—broken arm, broken collar-bone, shock, and maybe he’s injured internally. We can’t be sure about that yet. I’m trying to make him comfortable, but”—here the agitated man broke through the calm physician for a moment—“No braces, no slings, no anything! We’re going to town as soon as this company will let us. And he must be held. It’s the only way to keep him comfortable. Come!”
Judge Tiffany touched the doctor’s arm, but he spoke to Eleanor.246
“Nell—you’d better let a man do that.”
“No. You may help. How shall I hold him?”
All her will concentrated on obedience to direction, she followed the doctor while he drew Bertram’s bare arm over her shoulder, set a cushion at his back, showed her how she must support his neck with her right hand.
“Hold him as long as you can, then have your friend relieve you. But change no more often than you find necessary. He’ll get jostled enough before we reach town.”
The Judge seated himself calmly. She was alone with the care of her dying. The necessity for comforting and reassuring him came into her mind.
“It’s all right, Bertram; it’s all right!” she whispered. He returned no answer, even of a flickering eyelash. He lay still, inert, a great bulk that tugged at the muscles of her arms.
After a time, her frame adjusted itself to the position. Her perceptions, still keenly alive, told her that her doctor was working over a woman in the corner. Just as the train started, she saw him rise, wipe his hands on his handkerchief, and motion calmly to247two of the men. They lifted the woman. Eleanor realized all at once what the motion signified. They had taken her to join the dead in the baggage car.
Next to Bertram lay an old man, his head so wrapped in bandages that she could see only the tip of his grey beard. A middle-aged woman—Eleanor recognized her as a camper whom they had passed on the road but yesterday—knelt beside him, talking into his ear about his soul. “Do you lean on your Savior?” she whispered. A kind of passing impatience touched Eleanor. So much had her sympathetic spirit absorbed the feelings of these dying ones, that she resented this as an intrusion, an unwelcome distraction from the business of sloughing off the flesh.
A little sag of Bertram’s body, which alarmed her for a moment until she saw that the movement came from relaxation of her own arms, called her back to responsibility. The realization that ithadcalled her back brought with it the amazing, shameful realization that it had ever wandered away.
Why—
From the moment when she took him into her arms, she had never thought of him as248her dying lover—never as her lover at all!
A man in extremis, a thing so beaten and suffering that she called for it on her Christ—he was all that, in common with the other beaten and battered and senseless wrecks about them. But the feeling that he was her own, about to go from her, had never entered her heart. She was ashamed while she thought of it; but it persisted. Not hers? Why, she had suffered him to kiss her only yesterday! Must she think of such things with a life to save?
Now, her body was giving way with weariness; it seemed that she could hold him no longer. She nodded to Judge Tiffany, therefore; the old man rose and gently took her burden from her. She sank back on the empty seat. When the faintness of fatigue had passed, she fixed her eyes on the still face of him who had been her lover.
Why was it? The clear-cut profile, so refined and beautiful since suffering gave it the final touch, had thrilled her only yesterday and through a succession of yesterdays. It had no power to thrill her now. She tried to put back this unworthy thought, but it persisted. In spite of pity and all decency of249the heart, that outer self of hers kept saying it to her like an audible voice. Were he to die now, in her arms, she should work and weep and pray over his passing—but only as she would work and weep and pray over that alien old man who lay beside him, that woman whom they had just carried away.
The Judge was flagging. He glanced wearily over his shoulder, as though he hesitated to ask for relief. She rose; and without a word she took his place. And now, as she knelt with Bertram’s slight yet heavy breathing in her ear, her thoughts became uncontrollable nightmare—scattered visions and memories of old horrors, as when she saw her father drunk on the pavement; a multitude of those little shames which linger so long. One incident which was not quite a shame thrust itself forward most insistently of all. It was that episode under the bay tree, when she was only a little girl. Why did that memory start to the surface those tears which had been falling so long within? Her weeping seemed to lift her to a tremendous height of perception, as though that outer self had flowed in upon her.
That which had lured her and dragged her250to him in the end, was the life in him, the strong, vigorous body, the gestures, the smiles. That which had held her away from him was the soul within him—high and clean enough as souls go, but not one which she could ever know, and not one which could ever know hers. In this struggle of passing, he was all soul; the body was not in it.
She held the plan of her puzzle; it was necessary only to set the scattered blocks into place.
She found herself whispering to him; she checked herself until she remembered that he could not hear:
“O Bertram, you are not mine! O Bertram, you could never be mine!”
Now she could look straight at the possibility of his death or recovery. And she could weigh and choose, in case it was life, between telling him what she felt, or going on with him to the end—walking with a soul apart, yet choosing paths for it, too. That last might be the road of honor. That fine and heroic course, indeed, came to her with a high appeal. She had made her one resolve of duty. Perhaps it was her destiny to immolate herself for duty to the end.251
The train bowled on, stopping for no stations. The old man in the corner was unconscious or asleep; the woman who tended him had stopped her spiritual ministrations. A child, propped up in one of the rear seats, had awakened to cry, fallen asleep, awakened and wept again. She had in her voice a thick, mucous note, which became to Eleanor the motif in that symphony of misery. Otherwise, no one seemed to be making sound except the two physicians. Her own doctor came up once, pressed a syringe again into the bare arm, whispered that it was all going well.
A whistle came muffled through the fog; they were slowing down. It was a station; the lights, the clamor of human voices, proved it. Eleanor looked out of the window. A knot of young men had broken for the platform; and she could distinguish the black boxes of cameras. There arose a sharp parley at the rear door; her doctor muttered “reporters—damn!” and hurried back. Judge Tiffany rose and followed him. Over her shoulder Eleanor caught the white, intent face of Mark Heath. “He knows; they have told him,” she thought.252
Judge Tiffany, his mind on the practical necessities of the case, still had it in him to admire the control of that good soldier, the modern reporter. When he told simply what had happened, how the issue lay balanced between life and death, Mark only said:
“My God!—and me with the story to do!” Then his eye caught Eleanor.
“Did she—has she been nursing him?”
Judge Tiffany glanced at the other reporters, clustered about the conductor, at the photographers, holding animated wrangle with the physicians about flashlights.
“Keep her out of your story—you can do that. Say I found him on the train—put me in—that’s a good story enough. Keep my niece out. Keep the others off. Keep those flashlights muffled!”
Mark hurried forward. One look, a look which contorted his face, he bent on Bertram. Then he spoke puzzles to Eleanor.
“You’re Miss Brown, a camper at Santa Eliza, if anyone asks you—and when we leave this train you stay by me and do everything I tell you.”
“Very well.”
Mark touched Bertram’s face with a tenderness253almost feminine. “Poor old man!” he whispered; and he hurried back.
A shock-headed youth accosted him.
“What’s up there?” he asked.
“Good story,” answered Mark. “I’ve got it all—don’t you fellows bother. Bertram Chester, old California Varsity tackle, real estate manager for Northrup and Co., seriously injured, may not recover. Get his injuries from the doctor. His late employer, Judge Edward C. Tiffany, reached this train at Santa Eliza and has been taking care of him.”
A voice came from the group of reporters:
“Why, he’s your roommate!”
“I know it—damn it! Keep on. Judge Tiffany has been caring for him, holding him up so he could bear it, assisted by Miss Sadie Brown, a camper at Santa Eliza. She’s the one I was talking to.”
“Who is she? Any chance for a photograph?”
“I braced her for a picture. She wouldn’t stand for it.”
“Let me try! I’ll get it.”
“See here, you fellows, I’ll attend to that. I’ll let you all in if she gives up. I’ll play254you square. He’s my roommate—can’t you trust me to handle it? Keep on. Miss Sadie Brown, works at the Emporium, lives 2196 Valencia—” Mark was reading from a perfectly blank sheet of copy paper—“Judge Tiffany will take him home. He wired ahead for a private ambulance from Havens. That’s all of that. Now what have you fellows got? Help me out; it’s none too easy for me.”
As he took notes, asked questions, formed his “story” in his mind, Mark never took his eyes off that group in the corner.
Now they were racing down the last stage of the trip, with full freeway. Now they were drawing into the ferry station. Under the lights stood a buzzing crowd, its blacks shot with the white coats of hospital orderlies. A dozen ambulances, their doors open, stood backed to the platform. Eleanor sagged down on the floor with a sigh as two orderlies lifted Bertram’s arms from her shoulders, made shift to get him upon their stretcher.
But the doctor stopped them.
“Get this old man first,” he said, “and be careful. That young fellow ought to pull through.”
255CHAPTER XV
Toward morning, Eleanor managed to get a little sleep. When full daylight wakened her to the dull realization of her situation and burdens, she hurried into clothes, crept to the solid, old-fashioned best bedroom where they had put Bertram, and took counsel of the nurse. Everything was hopeful; she got that from the professional patter of temperatures and reactions. It seemed that there might be no internal hurt. He had roused from his shock in the night; had seemed to know where he was and what had happened. He lay now in a natural sleep, but he must be kept very quiet.
On the way downstairs, Eleanor met face to face with her aunt. Mrs. Tiffany had been awake since the ambulance brought responsibility; but her eyes showed more than want of sleep. The two women stopped, looked long at each other; then Mrs. Tiffany took Eleanor tenderly in her arms and kissed her.256
“Don’t you worry, dear,” she whispered, “he will get well, and everything will be all right with Edward and me.”
Eleanor did not answer at first. She drew a little away from her aunt’s embrace, before she found tongue to say:
“Please don’t speak of that, Aunt Mattie—oh, not of that now!”
As she made her way out to the piazza, in an instinctive search for air and room, she was crying.
In the limpness of reaction, she sank into a chair. Every joint and muscle, she realized now, ached and creaked. She could lift her arms only after taking long thought with herself; and the soul within was as burned paper.
The front gate clicked. The first, doubtless, of those inquiring visitors who would read a meaning into the adventures of last night. That, too, was to be faced this day! The pattering, hurrying footsteps sounded near to her before she looked up and recognized Kate Waddington.
If Kate had been crying, the only evidence was a hasty powdering which left streaks of white and pink before her ears. On first glance, Eleanor marvelled at her appearance257of control, at the lack of emotion in her face. But insight rather than conscious vision told Eleanor of the currents which were running under that mask. At the bottom Eleanor detected a fear which was not only apprehension of the news from Bertram Chester, but also a cowardly shrinking from the situation. She fancied that she could even trace Kate’s consideration of the proper shade of acting in the circumstances. All this in the moment before Kate sprang up the steps and asked:
“Oh, will he live?”
A baser nerve in Eleanor quivered with the desire to be cruel. She had to put it down before she could tell the simple truth. One little corner of Kate’s mouth quivered and jerked for a second under her teeth before she caught herself and resumed the impersonation of a solicitous friend.
“Tell me all about it,” she said.
“Ah, I am too tired!” Nevertheless, Eleanor did manage a plain tale, ending with the nurse’s report and with her own conviction that he would live.
“Oh, of course he will live!” And then—“Who is nursing him?”258
She looked up on this question, which was also an appeal, a begging.
“We have a nurse,” answered Eleanor shortly. It gratified her a little, in her low state of consciousness, to be thus abrupt. The better part of her realized this; saw how she was wreaking the revenge of an old emotion. A reaction of generosity prompted her next words; but she spoke with an effort.
“You may help if you want to. Uncle Edward must go to the ranch this week—unless—don’t you want to come here and stay in my spare room?” It seemed to Eleanor that she had never made a harder sacrifice than the one which she sealed with that invitation.
This, too, brought Kate out of her impersonation. Her whole figure straightened for a second, and—
“Oh, might I?” she said.
“I should be very glad. Will you come up to see him—one may look in at the door. He is in Uncle Edward’s spare chamber.”
As they threaded the involved halls of that rambling dwelling, Kate hurried on ahead. Eleanor, from the rear, threw out a word or two by way of direction. At the door, opened to get air of a dull and heavy morning,259they peered into the grim order of the sick room. The nurse had already stripped it to hospital equipment. His face, refined almost into beauty by pain and low-running blood, lay tilted to one side as he slept. The nurse touched her lips. Eleanor nodded. The nurse turned back toward her patient. Eleanor dared look at Kate.
Her color had changed from pale, back to the pink of life; now it was turning pale again. She noticed neither Eleanor nor the nurse; she stood as one in a universe unpeopled save by herself and another. Once, her two arms quivered with an involuntary outward motion, and once she swayed against the lintel.
And Eleanor, watching her through this wordless passage, gathered all the currents that had been running through her will into an indeterminate determination. In that moment she realized the full bitterness of a renunciation that does not mean renouncing a wholly dear and desired thing, but does mean renouncing the beloved thing which one is better without.
Kate turned at length. Eleanor, as their eyes met, could read in her face and body the260change as the actress took command once more. Kate flew at once to her hollow conventional phrases.
“The poor, poor boy!” she said. “Oh, we must all help!”
Eleanor turned away with the feeling that this made it harder for her to perform her renunciation—if real renunciation it were.
The day brought too much work, activity, purely material anxiety, for a great deal of thought. They had cut off the telephone in the main wing of the Tiffany house and switched the current to the instrument in Eleanor’s living-room. Most of the day she spent answering that telephone. People of whom she had never even heard, made anxious inquiries about the condition of Mr. Chester. Before night the newspapers became a plague. For in the afternoon, winged reporters, shot out in volleys for a “second day story,” had called at 2196 Valencia and found there no Sadie Brown. Hurrying down the back trail to the Emporium, they did discover an indignant little shop-girl of that name. Those reporters who had been with the wreck the night before found no resemblance in her to261the mysterious lady. Then came a bombardment, in person and by telephone, of the Tiffany house. The Judge, meeting all callers at the front door, lied tactfully. The city editors gave up sending reporters and took to bullying over the telephone; so that the burden of an unaccustomed lying fell upon Eleanor. At eleven o’clock, and after one voice had declared that theJournalhad the whole account and would make it pretty peppery if the Tiffanys did not confirm it, Eleanor took the telephone off the hook and went to bed.
The morning papers did pretty well with what they had. “Mysterious Woman Nurses Prominent Varsity Athlete”—“Who Is The Pretty Girl that Nursed Society Man in Las Olivas Horror?”—“Modest Heroine of Las Olivas Holocaust.” But the secret, thanks to Mark Heath, was safe.
She slept that night. Far along in the morning she awoke to the delicious sense of physical renewal. The situation crept into her mind stage by stage, as such things do arrive in the awakening consciousness. She was calm now, what with her rest of body, her262decision of soul. She could think it out; her course of action and how she might accomplish it.
A knock at her door roused her from half-sleep and meditation to full wakening. Kate Waddington had entered—Kate, transformed into a picturesque imitation of a nurse. She was all in grass linen, the collar rolled away to show her round, golden throat. Her flowing tie was blue, and a blue bow completed the knot of her hair. She looked cool, efficient, domestically business-like.
“He’s better!” Kate burst out with the news as Eleanor turned her head. “There’s really no danger now. The nurse says that he roused this morning and showed a positively vicious temper because they would not let him see anyone.”
“That’s pleasant news. I was sure that he would recover.” Eleanor caught an unconsidered expression, no more than a glint and a drooping, in Kate’s eyes. This answer, so calm, so entirely unemotional, had touched curiosity if nothing more. But Kate chirped on:
“I’m playing Mama’s little household fairy—how do you like the way I dress the part?263I sent for these clothes last night. Now you’re to lie abed and let me bring you your breakfast. Are you rested, dear? It was enough to kill two women!”
“Quite rested, I think.”
Kate opened the window, bustled about putting the room to rights.
“Shall I bring your coffee now?” she asked at last.
“Yes, thank you.”
Kate was back in ten minutes with table and tray. Whatever she did had an individuality, a touch. That tray, for example—nothing could have been better conceived to tempt the appetite. She set out the breakfast and remained to pour coffee and to talk.
“And isn’t it good—mustn’t you be thankful—that it won’t leave him lame or disfigured or anything like that! His shoulder may be weak, but what does a man need of shoulders after he’s quit football?”
Eleanor just glanced over her coffee-cup, but she made no answer. Kate turned her course.
“Won’t you let me open your egg for you?”
“No, thank you.” Then, “You’re very kind, Kate.”264
“I am the original ray of light. Do let me fix those pillows. You’re going to lie in bed all the morning, you know. Shall I bring you the papers? You should see them! They’ve got you a heroine.”
“Me!” Now Eleanor showed animation.
“Oh, not you. We’ve all kept the secret well. You’re a mystery, a pretty shop-girl to the rescue. I hope the weeklies don’t find the real story.”
“I hope so.”
Kate rose, made another pretense at setting things right in the room, and moved toward the door. A relief, a lowering of tension, came over Eleanor. But at the threshold, Kate turned.
“Oh, I nearly forgot! They sent up from Mr. Northrup’s office this morning for some documents or deeds or something which they thought Mr. Chester might have in his pockets. The nurse brought out his clothes so that Mrs. Tiffany and I might go through them—I felt like a pickpocket. And we came across a package of proofs—photographs of him. We opened it to see if the old deeds might be in there. And they’re265such stunning likenesses—Muller, you know—that I thought it would do you good to see them.”
“Thank you, I should like to.”
Kate drew the photographs from her bosom and handed them over. As Eleanor took them and began mechanically to inspect them, she caught an unconsidered trifle. Kate was not leaving the room. She had stepped over to the cheval-mirror, which faced the bed, and was adjusting the ribbon in her hair. Looking across the photographs through her lashes, Eleanor saw that the counterfeit eyes of Kate in the mirror were trained dead upon her.
She examined them, therefore, with indifference; she stopped in the middle of her inspection to ask if Judge Tiffany were up yet.
“They’re excellent likenesses,” she went on indifferently. “That’s a good composition. I don’t care so much for this one. That’s a poor pose.” She had come now to the bottom of the pile. This last print was one of those spirited profiles by which Muller, master-photographer, so illuminates character.
“Oh, that’s a wonder,” cried Eleanor. “Such a profile!” Then, at the thought how266Kate might misinterpret this purely artistic enthusiasm, she dropped her voice to indifference again.
“Won’t you please tell Aunt Mattie that I will get up if I can be of any use?” And she held out the package.
Kate packed up the tray and withdrew. Eleanor heard the muffled tap of her heels in the hall. The sound stopped abruptly. It was fully a minute before they went on again.
Kate, in fact, had rested the tray on a hall table, drawn out the photographs, and run over them, looking at them with all her eyes. The profile was at the bottom of the package. When she reached that, she hesitated a moment; then, with a quivering motion that ran from her fingers over her whole body, she tore it in two. Short as this explosion was, her recovery was quicker. She glanced with apprehension over her shoulder at the door of Eleanor’s room, tucked the photographs back in her bosom, and took up the tray again.
Eleanor, when the sound of the tapping heels had quite died away, turned her face toward the wall and gave herself to thought. She had gathered up the last strand of the267tangled web. Nothing was left but the unweaving.
First, his soul was not hers, as her soul was not his. That impression, received in a crisis which, she felt, was to be the crisis of her life, had grown to be an axiom. His youth, his vigor, the pull of a stalwart vitality which made his coarseness almost beauty—that had been the attraction. His spirit, so blazing but so full of flaws—that had been the repulsion.
Did not her own spirit have its flaws? Doubtless. Who was she, then, to judge him? Ah, but they did not fit into her flaws!
Kate Waddington now—Eleanor turned her thoughts in that direction with difficulty—her flaws were akin to his. Kate could tolerate and admire the whole of him. His lapses in finer standards, such as that desertion to Northrup—did they not fit like the segments of a broken coin with Kate’s diplomacies of that very day, her subtle reaching to discover if Eleanor were really a rival? Kate would weigh his compromises with honor as lightly as he would weigh those pretty treacheries. He would be successful;268everyone had felt that in him from his very first flash on the horizon. Kate would help him to the kind of success he wanted. Her tact, her diplomacies, herflairfor engrafting herself, would be the very best support to his direct methods of assault. They belonged to each other; and since now Kate’s desires in the matter had become manifest, only one thing remained.
All this allowed, what should her own line of conduct be? How should she bear herself in the days and weeks when pure human kindness must inhibit her from delivering a shock? Would it be necessary to commit the inner treason of posing to him as a secret fiancée? Well, that must be lived out, step by step. She could at least take all possible means, within the bounds of kindness, of withdrawing herself gradually from him, of paving the way for the ultimate confession. Kate Waddington would help in that. There, her own game and Kate’s ran parallel.
This discovery of Kate at the end of the tangled strings brought a tug at her heart, a black cloud to her spirit. She hated Kate Waddington. It made her grip the pillows to think how much she hated. Her mood descending269into a bitter, morbid jealousy which had no reason for being, but which momentarily swept all her resolutions away, sent her mind and body whirling back toward Bertram Chester.
That passed. The last trace of her wild animal hatred for Kate Waddington was borne away on a prayer of the old faith which held her instincts. She rose from her bed in a state of fixed determination that never faltered again.
When Eleanor was dressed, she turned not to the front of the house where the business of drawing back a life was afoot, but to the fresh silences of her garden. She walked to the lattice whose view commanded the bay and the distant Gate. It was a quiet, dull-gold morning on the Roads. A tug fussed about the quarantine wharf; the lateen fisher-boats were slipping out towards the Sacramento. And white and stately, between the pillars of the Gate, a full-rigged ship was making out to sea on a favoring breeze.
Eleanor watched the sea-birds bending toward it, the mists creeping down to cover it. The soul within her leaped toward it and seized it as a symbol.270
“O ship,” she whispered, “take this too away with you! I give it to the pure seas. Take this little love away with you!”
That rite, with its poetry and its self-pity, brought exaltation into her resolution. The sacrifice was complete.
271CHAPTER XVI
Life and spirit came back to Bertram Chester with a sudden bound. By the fourth day, he was so much alive, so insistent for company, that it became a medical necessity to break the conventional regulations for invalids, and let him see people. As it happened, his father was the first visitor. Judge Tiffany, who thought of everything, had telegraphed on the night of the accident, and had followed this dispatch, as Bertram improved, with reassuring messages. Bert Chester the elder, it appeared, was off on a long drive into Modoc; two days elapsed before his vaqueros, left on the ranch, could reach him.
He arrived with his valise on the morning of that fourth day when Bertram roared for company. He was a tall, calm man, with a sea-lion mustache, a weather-beaten complexion and the Chester smile in grave duplicate. He was obviously uncomfortable in his town clothes; and, even at the moment when they272were leading him solemnly to the sick room, he stepped in awe through the Tiffany splendors. When Mrs. Tiffany told him that Bert was doing well, would doubtless recover and without disability, he said “That’s good!” and never changed expression. Mrs. Tiffany, lingering at the door, saw and heard their greeting.
“How are you, Bert?” said Chester senior.
“Pretty well, Dad,” said Bertram. Then awkwardly, with embarrassed self-consciousness of the rite which he was performing, Mr. Chester shook his son’s hand.
After their short interview, Mr. Chester, a cat—or a bear rather—in a strange garret, roamed the Tiffany home and entertained her who would listen. He warmed to Kate especially, and that household fairy, in her flights between errands of mercy, played him with all the prettiness of her coquetry. At luncheon he quite lost his embarrassment and responded to the advances of three friendly humans. Yes ma-am, he had been glad to learn that Bertram was doing well in the city. He had five sons, all doing well. He’d risked letting Bert try college, and it had turned out all right. There wasn’t much273more left in the cattle business; but he was an old dog to learn new tricks. If he had it to do over again, he’d try fruit in the Santa Clara Valley, just like they had done.
As the afternoon wore away bringing its callers, its telephone messages and its consultations of doctors, his mood shifted to uneasiness. He spent an hour walking back and forth in the garden. Just before dinner-time he approached Mrs. Tiffany and Kate, who were sewing in the living-room, and said simply:
“Well, I guess I’ve got to be going.”
“Why, we’re just getting acquainted!” cried Kate.
Mrs. Tiffany merely flickered an eyelash at the assumption of privilege which this implied. But she answered, after a moment, “We should like to have you stay. Even at that, don’t consider us when it is a case of being near your son.”
“Well,” answered the older Chester, ponderously, “you see it ain’t like I had only this one son and hadn’t been through trouble. There’s Bob now. I worried quite a lot more than was necessary when the Artiguez outfit shot him up, but he pulled through. And274after Pete got scrambled by a riata, and a few more things of that kind happened, I stopped worrying any more than was necessary. He’ll get well, and you’re handling him fine. You’ve been blame good to the boy,” he said; and the touch of sentimental softness in his voice showed how genuine was his hardly expressed gratitude. He began talking rapidly, as though ashamed of it. He hoped they all could come to see him on the ranch some time, though there wasn’t much there to attract a lady. Still, the boys had pretty good times now and then. If the Tiffanys liked fresh venison, the boys always got some deer in the season.
“It’s lovely down there, I know. Bertram—your son—has told me so much about it!” broke in Kate.
“We’d like to see you, too,” said Mr. Chester. Then, catching the implication, embarrassed by it, he retreated to his room and came back in an incredibly short time with his valise. He had turned toward the door when Mrs. Tiffany said:
“I think Bertram is well enough so that you might see him again.”
“Oh, sure,” replied Mr. Chester, as recalling275a neglected trifle. He dropped his valise and strode back to the sick-room for a short stay.
All that day, Eleanor harbored a dread, which turned toward night to a relief—dread of the first interview, relief that Bertram had not sent for her. Kate, waiting her chance, slipped secretly into the room after Mr. Chester had gone. Bertram was awake. He smiled in a measured imitation of his old smile when she entered, and extended his uninjured hand. She did not take it; instead, she patted it with her cool, long fingers, made to soothe. And considering that the nurse was watching, she looked a long time into his eyes.
“They sure smashed me up some,” he said. “But I’m a-knitting. How did it happen that they swore you in?”
“I wanted to help!”
“That was being pretty good to little Bertie!” He withdrew his hand to drop it above hers, and he looked long into her face. “Pretty good to little Bertie,” he repeated, “and now I want you to be better, and not ask any questions about it. Is Miss Gray—Eleanor—about the house?”276
“Yes.”
“I thought she might have gone to the ranch. Well, just about to-morrow, will you get her in here—alone?”
“Are you ready—to be agitated?”
“Now you don’t know what I want—or you wouldn’t be asking questions. Will you?”
“Yes, Bertram.”
“You mustn’t talk any more,” spoke the nurse from the corner. And Kate withdrew.
When, next morning, the two girls met in the hall before breakfast, Kate repeated the message simply, carelessly. Eleanor found herself struggling to keep face and color. In spite of her long inner preparation, the emergency came to her with a sense of surprise. How should she carry off this interview? Though her respite had been long, though she had thought much, she had no prepared plan of campaign. Must she lie for the sake of his bodily health, assume the part which she had been playing when he went out of life? Even the question how to get rid of the nurse was a tiny embarrassment.
She mustered her voice to say:277
“I think I’ll look in now. Invalids are likely to be awake at this hour of the day.”
“Yes, you must be eager!” dabbed Kate.
The nurse was no obstacle. She looked up toward the figure in the door, said: “A young lady to see you, Mr. Chester,” and withdrew. Eleanor stood alone by the foot of the bed, looking into the eyes of her problem.
He made no motion. He did not even put out his hand. He regarded her with the frown which usually broke into a smile. Now, it continued a frown.
“Well, things happened, didn’t they?” he said. His voice burst out of him with almost its normal force.
“Yes, Bertram. A great deal.”
“And I thank you. It was bully work. I don’t see how you stood it, holding me up the way you did—it ought to have killed off a man, let alone a girl. Didn’t hurt you anywhere, did it?”
“No—who told you?” Her voice was hard and constrained.
Now Bertram smiled. It was different, this smile, from the old illumination of his features. She could not tell, in the moment she had to think, whether it was his illness278that changed it so, or whether it really held a bitterness which, superficially, she read into it.
“That’s the answer,” he said enigmatically. “You didn’t know I was onto everything, did you? I never went out but once—just after the crash when the car turned over. I began to know things while they were carrying me up the bank. From that time, I was just like a man with his wind knocked out. It didn’t hurt much, but I couldn’t move a finger or a toe. I didn’t want to move if I could. I was too busy just keeping alive. I couldn’t open my eyes, but I heard everything. You just bet I heard everything!”
This descent of the conversation into reminiscence and apparent commonplace gave Eleanor an opening into which she leaped. It was wonderful; she had read of such cases. Had he heard that child crying in the corner, and had it bothered him? Had he been conscious that it was Mark Heath and none other who was asking so many questions? Mark Heath had done so much for them—she would tell him about it some other time. But Bertram still lay there with his frown of a279petulant boy on his face, and her voice ran down into nothing for lack of sympathy in her listener.
“Do you remember all you said?” he asked when she was quite silent.
“I think so—why?” The question had brought a little, warm jump of her nerves.
“Everything? Something you said to me?”
“I think so, Bertram.”
“Did I dream it, then?”
She made no answer to this, but her knees failed under her so that she sat down on the bed. Had she—had she said it aloud?
“Something like this: ‘Bertram, we don’t belong to each other’?” He laughed a little on this; even a certain blitheness came into his laugh, as though he should say, “the joke is on you.”
A sense of the shock she might give him moved her to temporize.
“Let us not talk of it now, Bertram. Let it be as it was until you’re better.”
“I’ll be a blame sight better after I get this off my system. You see—well I couldn’t think just then, but now, when my think tank280has resumed business, I savvey a heap of things. One is that you weren’t telling me any news.”
“What makes you say that?” Eleanor bent her grave grey eyes on him.
“I had the signal already. I mightn’t have seen it fully if this smash hadn’t come, but just the same I caught it away ahead of you. That afternoon up on the Las Olivas trail when we came together. When I kissed you.”
Had she ever let him kiss her?
He made an incurved gesture of his free hand, as though joining two wires.
“It didn’t connect. That’s all. I was acting on a hunch when I told you to keep it dark. Told anyone?”
Not until afterward did she think to be offended by this question. At the time, she answered with a simple negative.
“That’s good. It is just between us now. I suppose the matter with me was that I wanted to fly high, and you were about the highest thing in sight—”
“Don’t, Bertram. I’m not high. Am I hurting you? Oh, am I unkind when you are ill?”281
“Oh, if you think it’s hurting me, you’re off. This is a swell way to talk, isn’t it, considering that I’m here—” his eyes swept the aristocratic comforts of the Tiffany spare room.
“We mustn’t think of that. It’s too big to think of that!”
“I guess you’re right. Now that is finished, going to forgive me because I walked over to Northrup?”
“I’ve nothing of any kind to forgive. It’s you, I think, that must forgive.”
“Oh, it’s all square, everything’s all square. I want to be good friends with you if you’ll let me. I hope,” his voice was almost tender, “you connect with the right man. He won’t have any too much blood in his neck, but he’ll have a lot of general culture in his system.”
Here she realized that she had something to forgive. She repeated, mentally, her act of renunciation as she said:
“You’re a great, strong, generous man. I can’t tell you how much I thank you for the course you’ve taken to-day. You’re going to succeed and—some woman—is going to be proud of you.” She had avoided by a thread282naming the woman. “I shall be glad I knew you, and I shall be your friend as long as you’ll let me.”
He smiled his old smile and his uninjured hand went out.
“Shake!” he said.
Yet it was a relief that the nurse came back and said quietly, “You’ve talked enough.” As she walked to the door, Eleanor found that her will was focused on the operation of her feet, commanding them to move with decent slowness. Had she obeyed her impulse, she should have run. She forced herself to turn at the door and smile back, forced herself to bridle her emotions and go quietly to breakfast and to her ordeal with the lightning thrusts of Kate Waddington.
Two days later, Eleanor followed Judge Tiffany to the ranch. A perplexing fruit season brought her fair excuse. The year before, the Japanese, adventurers in minor labors, had begun to flood the Santa Lucia tract. They drove out the Chinese; when that spring brought picking contracts, no Oriental was to be had save a Japanese. In the first rush of that season, the Japanese283pickers on the Tiffany ranch, in concert with all the other Japanese of Santa Lucia, had thrown down their baskets, repudiated their agreements, and struck. It needed more than Judge Tiffany’s failing strength, more than Olsen’s methodical plodding, to conquer this situation.
She must be a post now, not a rail, Eleanor told Mrs. Tiffany. And Kate would help until Mr. Chester could be moved. At further acceptance of Kate, Mrs. Tiffany rebelled. Kate had foisted herself on them. Goodness knew, Mrs. Tiffany couldn’t tell why they had ever accepted that situation. It didn’t seem to her even decent.
“You’ll perplex me greatly, dear Aunt Mattie, if you don’t let her remain now!” said Eleanor, looking up from her packing.
This remark, cryptic though it was, came as a fresh shower to Mrs. Tiffany’s curiosity. Never before had Eleanor so nearly committed herself on the subject which lay like lead on her aunt’s responsibilities. It prompted Mrs. Tiffany to try for a wider opening.
“Would you like it, dear, if we brought Mr. Chester down to the ranch to recuperate284when he is better? I’m sure Edward wouldn’t object. After all, he’s ready to forgive the Northrup affair.”
Eleanor looked up significantly.
“If you’re consulting my wishes, certainly not!” she said.
The sigh which Mrs. Tiffany drew expressed deep relief. Thereafter, they proceeded straight ahead with the arrangement. Eleanor went on to the ranch. Kate, remaining, made herself so useful in a hundred ways that Mrs. Tiffany’s irritation wore itself away.
The old combination of Eleanor and an attractive though undesirable young man had moved her to a perilous sympathy. Now that it was over, now that she had no more responsibility in the matter, she transferred some of that vivid and friendly interest to the new arrangement. She caught herself resisting a temptation to spy on their conversations; she watched Kate’s face for tell-tale expression whenever Bertram’s name came up in their luncheon-time chats.
Kate usurped all the finer prerogatives of the nurse. Hers it was to arrange the sick-room, to put finishing touches on bed and285table, to feed him at his meals. Her tawny hair made sunshine in the chamber, her cool hands, in their ministration, had the caress of breezes. He was getting to be an impatient invalid; he bore the confinement harder than he did the ache of knitting bones. Kate’s part it was to laugh away these irritations, so that she always left him smiling.
He went on mending until they could get him out of bed; until, on an afternoon when the sun was bright and the wind was low, they could take him into the garden for a breath of air and view. He made the journey out-of-doors with Kate supporting him unnecessarily by the armpit. She set out a Morris chair for him by the lattice, so that he could overlook the Bay, she tucked the robes about him, she parted the vines that he might have better view.
For a moment he swept the bay with his eyes and opened his lungs to the out-door room and air. Then his gaze returned to Kate’s strong, vigorous yet feminine back, as she stood, arms outstretched, hooking vines on the trellis. The misty sunshine was making jewels in her hair.
“Say!” He spoke so suddenly and with286such meaning in the monosyllable that Kate blushed as she turned. “Say! is that fellow still writing to you—the one with the Eastern education and the money?”
Kate dropped her eyes.
“No,” she said softly. “I told him—I have broken it off—lately.”
Bertram laughed—his old, fresh laugh of a boy.
“You saved me trouble then. I was just about to serve notice on him that henceforth no one but little Bertie was going to be allowed on this ranch.”
Kate did not speak. She continued to look down at the gravel walk.
“Now don’t you go pretending you don’t know what I mean,” Bertram went on. “Just for that, I won’t tell you what I mean. But you know.”
“What about Eleanor?” murmured Kate.
“You little devil!” answered Bertram. “Come over here.”
Kate sank down on the edge of his chair, and dropped one arm about his neck.
Mrs. Tiffany, viewing the morning from the window of her room, saw them so. At first, she smiled; then a heavier expression287drew down all the lines of her face. She crossed to her dresser, where a long frame of many divisions held the photographs of all whom she had loved. The first in order was of a woman who had a face like Eleanor’s; a more beautiful Eleanor, perhaps, but with no such grave light of the spirit in her eyes. This she touched with her finger tips. But her look was bent upon the second, the portrait of a young man whose attitude, defying the conventional pose of old-fashioned photography, showed how blithe and merry and full of life he must have been.
“Ah, Billy Gray!” she whispered, “Billy Gray, you know,you, how sincerely Eleanor and I ought to thank God!”
THE END