Did he know that he had virtually lost when at the end of his brief vacation he went back to the city, leaving his rival alone in the field? During those tense days Vickers's admiration for the man grew. He was good tempered and considerate, even of Cairy. Lane had always been a pleasant host, and now instead of avoiding Cairy he seemed to seek his society, made an effort to talk to him about his work, and advised him shrewdly in a certain transaction with a theatrical manager.
"If she should go away with Cairy," Vickers said to himself, "he will look out for them always!"
Husband and wife, so Vickers judged, did not talk together during all this time. Perhaps they did not dare to meet the issue openly. At any rate when Isabelle proposed driving John to the station the last night, he said kindly, "It's raining, my dear,—I think you had better not." So he kissed her in the hall before the others, made some commonplace suggestion about the place, and with his bag in hand left, nodding to them all as he got into the carriage. Isabelle, who had appeared dazed these days, as if, her heart and mind occupied in desperate inner struggle, her body lived mechanically, left the two men to themselves and went to her room. And shortly afterwards Cairy, who had become subdued, thoughtful, pleaded work and went upstairs.
* * * * *
When Vickers rose early the next morning, the country was swathed in a thin white mist. The elevation on which the house stood just pierced the fog, and, here and there below, the head of a tall pine emerged. Vickers had slept badly with a suffocating sense of impending danger. When he stepped out of the drawing-room on the terrace, the coolness of the damp fog and the stillness of the June morning not yet broken by bird notes soothed his troubled mind. All this silent beauty, serenely ordered nature—and tumultuous man! Out of the earthy elements of which man was compounded, he had sucked passions which drove him hither and yon…. As he walked towards the west garden, the window above the terrace opened, and Isabelle, dressed in her morning clothes, looked down on her brother.
"I heard your step, Vick," she said in a whisper. Her face in the gray light was colorless, and her eyes were dull, veiled. "Wait for me, Bud!"
In a few moments she appeared, covered with a gray cloak, a soft saffron-colored veil drawn about her head. Slipping one hand under his arm,—her little fingers tightening on his flesh,—she led the way through the garden to the beech copse, which was filled with mist, then down to the stone bench, where she and Cairy had sat that other afternoon.
"How still it is!" she murmured, shivering slightly. She looked back to the copse, vague in the mist, and said: "Do you remember the tent we had here in the summers? We slept in it one night…. It was then I used to say that I was going to marry you, brother, and live with you for always because nobody else could be half so nice…. I wish I had! Oh, how I wish I had! We should have been happy, you and I. And it would have been better for both of us."
She smiled at him wanly. He understood the reference she made to his misadventure, but said nothing. Suddenly she leaned her head on his shoulder.
"Vick, dear, do you think that any one could care enough to forgive everything? Do you love me enough, so you would love me, no matter what I did? … That's real love, the only kind, that loves because it must and forgives because it loves! Could you, Vick? Could you?"
Vickers smoothed back her rumpled hair and drew the veil over it.
"You know that nothing would make any difference to me."
"Ah, you don't know! But perhaps you could—" Then raising her head she spoke with a harder voice. "But that's weak. One must expect to pay for what one does,—pay everything. Oh, my God!"
The fog had retreated slowly from their level. They stood on the edge looking into its depth. Suddenly Vickers exclaimed with energy:—
"You must end this, Isabelle! It will kill you."
"I wish it might!"
"End it!" and he added slowly, "Send him away—or let me take you away!"
"I—I—can't,—Vick!" she cried. "It has got beyond me…. It is not just for myself—just me. It's forhim, too. He needs me. I could do so much for him! And here I can do nothing."
"And John?"
"Oh, John! He doesn't care, really—"
"Don't say that!"
"If he did—"
"Isabelle, he saw you and Tom, here, the afternoon Tom came!"
She flushed and drew herself away from her brother's arms.
"I know it—it was the first time that—that anything happened! … If he cared, why didn't he say something then, do something, strike me—"
"That is not right, Belle; you know he is not that kind of animal."
"If a man cares for a woman, he hasn't such godlike control! … No, John wants to preserve appearances, to have things around him smooth,—he's too cold to care!"
"That's ungenerous."
"Haven't I lived with him years enough to know what is in his heart? He hates scandal. That's his nature,—he doesn't want unpleasant words, a fuss. There won't be any, either…. But I'm not the calculating kind, Vick. If I do it, I do it for the whole world to know and to see. I'm not Conny,—no sneaking compromises; I'll do it as you did it,—for the whole world to see and know."
"But you'll not do it!"
"You think I haven't the courage? You don't know me, Vick. I am not a girl any longer. I am thirty-two, and I know lifenow, my life at any rate…. It was all wrong between John and me from the beginning,—yes, from the beginning!"
"What makes you say that! You don't really believe it in your heart. You loved John when you married him. You were happy with him afterwards."
"I don't believe that any girl, no matter what experience she has had, can really love a man before she is married to him. I was sentimental, romantic, and I thought my liking for a man was love. I wanted to love,—all girls do. But I didn't know enough to love. It is all blind, blind! I might have had that feeling about other men, the feeling I had for John before…. Then comes marriage, and it's luck, all luck, whether love comes, whether it is right—the thing for you—the only one. Sometimes it is,—often enough for those who don't ask much, perhaps. But it waswrongfor John and me. I knew it from the first days,—those when we tried to think we were happiest. I have never confessed this to a human being,—never to John. But it was so, Vick! I didn't know then what was the matter—why it was wrong. But a woman suspects then…. Those first days I was wretched,—I wanted to cry out to him: 'Can't you see it is wrong? You and I must part; our way is not the same!' But he seemed content. And there was father and mother and everything to hold us to the mistake. And of course I felt that it might come in time, that somehow it was my fault. I even thought that love as I wanted it was impossible, could never exist for a woman…. So the child came, and I went through the motions. And the gap grew between us each year as I came to be a woman. I saw the gap, but I thought it was always so, almost always, between husbands and wives, and I went on going through the motions…. That was why I was ill,—yes, the real reason, because we were not fitted to be married. Because I tried to do something against nature,—tried to live married to a man who wasn't really my husband!"
Her voice sank exhausted. Never before even to herself had she said it all,—summed up that within her which must justify her revolt. Vickers felt the hot truth to her of her words; but granted the truth, was it enough?
Before he could speak she went on wearily, as if compelled:—
"But it might have gone on so until the end, until I died. Perhaps I could have got used to it, living like that, and fussed around like other women over amusements and charities and houses,—all the sawdust stuffing of life—and become a useless old woman, and not cared, not known."
She drew a deep breath.
"But you see—I knownow—what the other is! I have known since"—her voice sank to a whisper—"that afternoon when I kissed him for the first time." She shuddered. "I am not a stick, Vick! I—am a woman! … No, don't say it!" She clasped his arm tightly. "You don't like Tom. You can't understand. He may not be what I feel he is—he may be less of a man for men than John. But I think it makes little difference to a woman so long as she loves—what the man is to others. To her he isallmen!"
With this cry her voice softened, and now she spoke calmly. "And you see I can give him something! I can give HIM love and joy. And more—I could make it possible for him to do what he wants to do with his life. I would go with him to some beautiful spot, where he could be all that he has it in him to be, and I could watch and love. Oh, we should be enough, he and I!"
"Dear, that you can never tell! … It was not enough for us—for her. You can't tell when you are like this, ready to give all, whether it's what the other most needs or really wants."
In spite of Isabelle's doubting smile, Vickers hurried on,—willing now to show his scar.
"I have never told you how it was over there all these years. I could not speak of it…. I thoughtweshould be enough, as you say. We had our love and our music…. But we weren't enough, almost from the start. She was unhappy. She really wanted those things we had given up, which she might have had if it had been otherwise—I mean if she had been my wife. I was too much of a fool to see that at once. I didn't want divorce and marriage—there were difficulties in the way, too. We had thrown over the world, defied it. I didn't care to sneak back into the fold…. Our love turned bad. All the sentiment and lofty feeling somehow went out of it. We became two animals, tied together first by our passion, and afterwards by—the situation. I can't tell you all. It was killing…. It did kill the best in me."
"It washerfault. The woman makes the kind of love always."
"No, she might have been different, another way! But I tell you the facts. She became dissatisfied, restless. She was unfaithful to me. I knew it, and I shielded her—because in part I had made her what she was. But it was awful. And at the end she went away with that other man. He will leave her. Then she'll take another…. Love turns sour, I tell you—love taken that way. Life becomes just curdled milk. And it eats you like poison. Look at me,—the marrow of a man is all gone!"
"Dear Vick, it was allherfault. Any decent woman would have made you happy,—you would have worked, written great music,—lived a large life."
His story did not touch her except with pity for him. To her thinking each case was distinct, and her lips curved unconsciously into a smile, as if she were picturing how different it would be withthem….
The fog had broken, and was rising from the meadows below, revealing the trees and the sun. The birds had begun to sing in the beeches. It was fresh and cool and moist before the warmth of the coming day. Isabelle drew deep breaths and loosened her scarf.
Vickers sat silent, miserable. As he had said to Alice, the wreck of his life, where he had got knowledge so dearly, availed nothing when most he would have it count for another.
"No, Vick! Whatever happens it will be our own fate, nobody's else—and I want it!"
There was cool deliberation in her tone as if the resolve had been made already.
"Not John's fate, too?"
"He's not the kind to let a thing like this upset him long. While the railroad runs and the housekeeper stays—"
"And Molly's fate?"
"Of course I have thought about Marian. There are ways. It is often done.She would be with me until she went to school, which won't be long, now."
"But just think what it would mean to her if her mother left her father."
"Oh, not so much, perhaps! I have been a good mother…. And why should I kill the twenty, thirty, maybe forty years left of my life for a child's sentiment for her mother? Very likely by the time she grows up, people will think differently about marriage."
She talked rapidly, as if eager to round all the corners.
"She may even decide to do the same thing some day."
"And you would want her to?"
"Yes! Rather than have the kind of marriage I have had."
"Isabelle!"
"You are an old sentimental dreamer, Vick. You don't understand modern life. And you don't know women—they're lots more like men, too, than you think. They write such fool things about women. There are so many silly ideas about them that they don't dare to be themselves half the time, except a few like Margaret. She is honest with herself. Of course she loves Rob Falkner. He's in Panama now, but when he gets back I have no doubt Margaret will go and live with him. And she's got three children!"
"Isabelle, you aren't Margaret Pole or Cornelia Woodyard or any other woman but yourself. There are some thingsyoucan't do. I know you. There's the same twist in us both. You simply can't do this! You think you can, and you talk like this to me to make yourself think that you can…. But when it comes to the point, when you pack your bag, you know you will just unpack it again—and darn the stockings!"
"No, no!" Isabelle laughed in spite of herself; "I can't—I won't…. Why do I sniffle so like this? It's your fault, Vick; you always stir the pathetic note in me, you old fraud!"
She was crying now in long sobs, the tears falling to his hand.
"I know you because we are built the same foolish, idiotic way. There are many women who can play that game, who can live one way for ten or a dozen years, and then leave all that they have been—without ever looking back. But you are not one of them. I am afraid you and I are sentimentalists. It's a bad thing to be, Belle, but we can't help ourselves. We want the freedom of our feelings, but we want to keep a halo about them. You talked of cutting down these beeches. But you would never let one be touched, not one."
"I'll have 'em all cut down to-morrow," Isabelle murmured through her tears.
"Then you'll cry over them! No, Belle, it's no use going dead against your nature—the way you were made to run. You may like to soar, but you were meant to walk."
"You think there is nothing to me,—that I haven't a soul!"
"I know the soul."
Isabella flung her arms about her brother and clung there, breathing hard. The long night had worn her out with its incessant alternation of doubt and resolve, endlessly weaving through her brain.
"Better to suffer on in this cloudy world than to make others suffer," he murmured.
"Don't talk! I am so tired—so tired."….
From the hillside below came a whistled note, then the bar of a song, like a bird call. Some workman on the place going to his work, Vickers thought. It was repeated, and suddenly Isabelle took her arms from his neck,—her eyes clear and a look of determination on her lips.
"No, Vick; you don't convince me…. You did the other thing when it came to you. Perhaps wearealike. Well, then, I shall do it! I shall dare to live!"….
And with that last defiance,-the curt expression of the floating beliefs which she had acquired,—she turned towards the house.
"Come, it is breakfast time."
She waited for him to rise and join her. For several silent moments they lingered to look at Dog Mountain across the river, as if they were looking at it for the last time, at something they had both so much loved.
"You are dear, brother," she murmured, taking his hand. "But don't lecture me. You see I am a woman now!"
And looking into her grave, tear-stained face, Vickers saw that he had lost. She had made her resolution; she would "dare to live," and that life would be with Cairy! His heart was sad. Though he had tried to free himself of his old dislike of Cairy and see him through Isabelle's eyes, it was useless. He read Tom Cairy's excitable, inflammable, lightly poised nature, with the artist glamour in him that attracted women. He would be all flame—for a time,—then dead until his flame was lighted before another shrine. And Isabelle, proud, exacting, who had always been served,—no, it was hopeless! Inevitable tragedy, to be waited for like the expected motions of nature!
And beneath this misery for Isabelle was the bitterest of human feelings,—personal defeat, personal inadequacy. 'If I had been another!' "Don't lecture me!" she had said almost coldly. The spiritual power of guidance had gone from him, because of what he had done. Inwardly he felt that it had gone. That was part of the "marrow of the man" that had been burned out. The soul of him was impotent; he was a shell, something dead, that could not kindle another to life.
'I could have saved her,' he thought. 'Once I could have saved her. She has found me lackingnow, when she needs me most!'
The whistle sounded nearer.
"Will you do one thing for me, Isabelle?"
"All—but one thing!"
"Let me know first."
"You will know."
Cairy was coming down the terrace, cigarette in hand. His auburn hair shone in the sunlight. After his sleep, his bath, his cup of early coffee, he was bright with physical content, and he felt the beauty of the misty morning in every sense. Seeing the brother and sister coming from the beeches together, he scrutinized them quickly; like the perfect egotist, he was swiftly measuring what this particular conjunction of personalities might mean to him. Then he limped towards them, his face in smiles, and bowing in mock veneration, he lay at Isabelle's feet a rose still dewy with mist.
Vickers turned on his heel, his face twitching. But Isabelle with parted lips and gleaming eyes looked at the man, her whole soul glad, as a woman looks who is blind to all but one thought,—'I love him.'
"The breath of the morn," Cairy said, lifting the rose. "The morn of morns,—this is to be a great day, my lady! I read it in your eyes."
It was still sultry at four o'clock in the afternoon, and the two men walked slowly in the direction of the river. Cairy, who had been summoned by telegram to the city, would have preferred to be driven to the junction by Isabelle, but when Vickers had suggested that he knew a short cut by a shady path along the river, he had felt obliged to accept the implied invitation. He was debating why Price had suddenly evinced this desire to be with him, for he felt sure that Vickers disliked him. But Isabelle had shown plainly that she would like him to accept her brother's offer,—she was too tired to go out again, she said, and the only horse that could be used was a burden to drive. So he set forth on the two-mile walk this oppressive afternoon, not in the best mood, determined to let Vickers do the talking.
They plodded across the meadow in silence, Cairy thinking of the interview in the city, his spirits rising as they always soared at the slightest hint of an "opening." "I'll make her take the play," he said to himself; "she isn't much good as an actress, but I must get the thing on. I'll need the money." He hoped to finish his business with this minor star, who had expressed a desire to see him, and return to Grafton by the morning express. Isabelle would be disappointed if he should not be back for luncheon.
Vickers's head was bent to the path. He had seized this chance of being alone with Cairy, and now that they were beyond the danger of interruption his blood beat uncomfortably in his head and he could not speak—for fear of uttering the wrong word…. When they reached the river, the two men paused involuntarily in the shade and looked back up the slope to the Farm, lying in the warm haze on the brow of the hill. As they stood there, the shutter of an upper chamber was drawn in, and Cairy smiled to himself.
"The house looks well from here," he remarked. "It's a pleasant spot."
"It is a dear old place!" Vickers answered, forgetting for the moment the changes that Isabelle had wrought at the Farm. "It's grown into our lives,—Isabelle's and mine. We used to come here as boy and girl in vacations…. It was a day something like this when my sister was married. I remember seeing her as she came out of the house and crossed the meadow on my father's arm. We watched her from the green in front of the chapel…. She was very beautiful—and happy!"
"I can well imagine it," Cairy replied dryly, surprised at Vickers's sudden loquacity on family matters. "But I suppose we ought to be moving on, hadn't we, to get that express? You see I am a poor walker at the best."
Vickers struck off by the river path, leading the way. Suddenly he stopped, and with flushed face said:—
"Tom, I wish you wouldn't come back to-morrow!"
"And why the devil—"
"I know it isn'tmyhouse, it isn'tmywife, it isn'tmyaffair. But, Tom, my sister and I have been closer than most,—even husband and wife. I love her,—well, that's neither here nor there!"
"What are you driving at, may I ask?" Cairy demanded coldly.
"What I am going to say isn't usual—it isn't conventional. But I don't know any conventional manner of doing what I want to do. I think we have to drop all that sometimes, and speak out like plain human beings. That's the way I am going to speak to you,—as man to man…. I don't want to beat about the bush, Tom. I think it would be better if you did not come back to-morrow,—never came back to the Farm!"
He had not said it as he meant to phrase it. He was aware that he had lost ground by blurting it out like this. Cairy waited until he had lighted a cigarette before he replied, with a laugh:—
"It is a little—brusque, your idea. May I ask why I am not to come back?"
"You know well enough! … I had hoped we could keep—other names out of this."
"We can't."
"My sister is very unhappy—"
"You think I make your sister unhappy?"
"Yes."
"I prefer to let her be the judge of that," Cairy retorted, walking ahead stiffly and exaggerating his limp.
"You know she cannot be a judge of what is best—just now."
"I think she can judge of herself better than any—outsider!"
Vickers flushed, controlled himself, and said almost humbly:—
"I know you care for her, Tom. We both do. So I thought we might discuss it amicably."
"This doesn't seem to me a discussable matter."
"But anything that concerns one I love as I do Isabellemustbe discussable in some way."
"Your sister told me about her talk with you this morning…. You did your best then, it seems. If you couldn't succeed in changinghermind,—what do you expect from me?"
"That you will be generous! … There are some things that Isabelle can't see straight just now. She doesn't know herself, altogether."
"I should think that her husband—"
"Can't you feel his position? His lips are closed by his pride, by his love!"
"I should say, Vickers," Cairy remarked with a sneer, "that you had better follow Lane's sensible course. This is a matter for the two most concerned and for them alone to discuss…. With your experience you must understand that ours is the situation which a mature man and a mature woman must settle for themselves. Nothing that an outsider says can count."
And turning around to face Vickers, he added slowly, "Isabelle and I will do what seems best to us, just as under similar circumstances you did what you thought was best for you without consulting anybody, as I remember."
Vickers quivered as his eye met Cairy's glance, but he accepted the sneer quietly.
"The circumstances were not the same. And I may have learned that it is a serious matter to do what you wish to do,—to take another man's wife, no matter what the circumstances are."
"Oh, that's a mere phrase. There's usually not much taking! When a woman is unhappy in her marriage, when she can be happy with another man, when no one can be really hurt—"
"Somebody always is hurt."
"The only thing I am greatly interested in is Isabelle's happiness, her life. She has been stifled all these years of marriage, intellectually, emotionally stifled. She has begun to live lately—we have both begun to live. Do you think we shall give that up? Do you think any of your little preachments can alter the life currents of two strong people who love and find their fulfilment in each other? You know men and women very little if you think so! We are living to-day at the threshold of a new social epoch,—an honester one than the world has seen yet, thank God! Men and women are daring to throw off the bonds of convention, to think for themselves, and determine what is best for them, for their highest good, undisturbed by the bogies so long held up. I will take my life, I will live, I will not be suffocated by a false respect for my neighbor's opinion."
Cairy paused in the full career of his phrases. He was gesticulating with his hands, almost forgetful of Vickers, launched as it were on a dramatic monologue. He was accustomed thus to dramatize an emotional state, as those of his temperament are wont to do, living in a world of their own feelings imaginatively projected. While Vickers listened to Cairy's torrent of words, he had but one thought: 'It's no use. He can't be reached that way—any way!'
A stone wall stopped their progress. As Cairy slowly dragged himself over the wall, Vickers saw the outline of the pistol in the revolver pocket, and remembered the afternoon when Cairy had shown them the weapon and displayed his excellent marksmanship. And now, as then, the feeling of contempt that the peaceable Anglo-Saxon has for the man who always goes armed in a peaceable land came over him.
Cairy resumed his monologue on the other side of the wall.
"It is the silliest piece of barbaric tradition for a civilized man to think that because a woman has once seen fit to give herself to him, she is his possession for all time. Because she has gone through some form, some ceremony, repeated a horrible oath that she doesn't understand, to say that she belongs to that man, ishis, like his horse or his house,—phew! That's mere animalism. Human souls belong to themselves! Most of all the soul of a delicately sensitive woman like Isabelle! She gives, and she can take away. It's her duty to take herself back when she realizes that it no longer means anything to her, that her life is degraded by—"
"Rot!" Vickers exclaimed impatiently. He had scarcely heard what Cairy had been saying. His sickening sense of failure, of impotency, when he wished most for strength, had been succeeded by rage against the man, not because of his fluent argument, but because of himself; not against his theory of license, but against him. He saw Isabelle's life broken on the point of this glib egotism. "We needn't discuss your theories. The one fact is that my sister's life shall not be ruined by you!"
Cairy, dropping back at once to his tone of worldly convention, replied calmly:—
"That I think we shall have to let the lady decide for herself,—whether I shall ruin her life or not. And I beg to point out that this topic is of your own choosing. I regard it as an impertinence. Let us drop it. And if you will point out the direction, I think I will hurry on by myself and get my train."
"My God, no! We won't drop it—not yet. Not until you have heard a little more what I have in mind…. I think I know you, Cairy, better than my sister knows you. Would you make love to apoorwoman, who had a lot of children, and takeher? Would you take her and her children, like a man, and work for them? … In this case you will be given what you want—"
"I did not look for vulgarity from you! But with thebourgeoisie, I suppose, it all comes down to dollars and cents. I have not considered Mrs. Lane's circumstances."
"It's not mere dollars and cents! Though that is a test,—what a man will do for a woman, not what a woman will do for a man she loves and—pities."
As Cairy shot an ugly glance at him, Vickers saw that he was fast angering the man past all hope of influence. But he was careless now, having utterly failed to avert evil from the one he loved most in the world, and he poured out recklessly his bitter feeling:—
"The only success you have to offer a woman is success with other women! That little nurse in the hospital, you remember? The one who took care of you—"
"If you merely wish to insult me—" the Southerner stammered.
They were in the midst of a thicket of alders near the river, and the sinking sun, falling through the young green leaves, mottled the path with light and shade. The river, flushed with spring water, gurgled pleasantly over pebbly shallows. It was very still and drowsy; the birds had not begun their evening song.
The two men faced each other, their hands clenched in their coat pockets, and each read the hate in the other's face.
"Insult you!" Vickers muttered. "Cairy, you are scum to me—scum!"
Through the darkness of his rage a purpose was struggling—a blind purpose—that urged him on.
… "I don't know how many other women after the nurse have served to fatten your ego. But you will never feed on my sister's blood while I live!"
He stepped closer unconsciously, and as he advanced Cairy retreated, taking his clenched hand from his pocket.
"Why don't you strike?" Vickers cried.
Suddenly he knew that purpose; it had emerged with still clearness in his hot brain. His heart whispered, 'She will never do it over my body!' And the thought calmed him at once. He saw Cairy's trembling arm and angry face. 'He'll shoot,' he said to himself coldly. 'It's in his blood, and he's a coward. He'll shoot!' Standing very still, his hands in his pockets, he looked quietly at the enraged man. He was master now!
"Why don't you strike?" he repeated.
And as the Southerner still hesitated, he added slowly:—
"Do you want to hear more?"
The memory of old gossip came back to him. 'He is not the real Virginia Cairy,' some one had said once; 'he has the taint,—that mountain branch of the family,—the mother, you know, they say!' Very slowly Vickers spoke:—
"No decent man would want his sister living with a fellow whose mother—"
As the words fell he could see it coming,—the sudden snatch backwards of the arm, the little pistol not even raised elbow high. And in the drowsy June day, with the flash of the shot, the thought leapt upwards in his clear mind, 'At last I am not impotent—I have saved her!'….
And when he sank back into the meadow grass without a groan, seeing Cairy's face mistily through the smoke, and behind him the blur of the sky, he thought happily, 'She will never go to him, now—never!'—and then his eyes closed.
* * * * *
It was after sunset when some men fishing along the river heard a groan and hunting through the alders and swamp grass found Vickers, lying face down in the thicket. One of the men knew who he was, and as they lifted him from the pool of blood where he lay and felt the stiff fold of his coat, one said:—
"He must have been here some time. He's lost an awful lot of blood! The wound is low down."
They looked about for the weapon in the dusk, and not finding it, took the unconscious man into their boat and started up stream.
"Suicide?" one queried.
"Looks that way,—I'll go back after the pistol, later."
* * * * *
Isabelle had had tea with Marian and the governess out in the garden, and afterwards strolled about through the beds, plucking a flower here and there. To the agitation of the morning the calm of settled resolve had succeeded. She looked at the house and the gardens thoughtfully, as one looks who is about to depart on a long journey. In her heart was the stillness after the storm, not joy,—that would come later when the step was taken; when all was irrevocably settled. She thought quite methodically of how it would all be,—what must be done to cut the cords of the old life, to establish the new. John would see the necessity,—he would not make difficulties. He might even be glad to have it all over! Of course her mother would wail, but she would learn to accept. She would leave Molly at first, and John naturally must have his share in her always. That could be worked out later. As for the Farm, they might come back to it afterwards. John had better stay on here for the present,—it was good for Molly. They would probably live in the South, if they decided to live in America. She would prefer London, however…. She was surprised at the sure way in which she could think it all out. That must be because it was right and there was no wavering in her purpose…. Poor Vick! he would care most. But he would come to realize how much better it was thus, how much more right really than to go dragging through a loveless, empty life. And when he saw her happy with Tom—but she wished he liked Tom better.
The failure of Vickers to return in time for tea had not troubled her. He had a desultory, irregular habit of life. He might have stopped at Alice's or even decided to go on to the city with Tom, or merely wandered off across the country by himself….
In the last twilight three men came up the meadow path, carrying something among them, walking slowly. Isabelle caught sight of them as they reached the lower terrace and with her eyes fastened on them, trying to make out the burden they were carrying so carefully, stood waiting before the house.
"What is it?" she asked at last as the men drew nearer, seeing in the gloom only the figures staggering slightly as they mounted the steps.
"Your brother's been hurt, Mrs. Lane," a voice said.
"Hurt!" That nameless fear of supernatural interference, the quiver of the human nerve at the possible message from the infinite, stopped the beating of her heart.
"Yes'm—shot!" the voice said. "Where shall we take him?"
They carried Vickers upstairs and placed him in Isabelle's bed, as she directed. Bending over him, she tried to unbutton the stiff coat with her trembling fingers, and suddenly she felt something warm—his blood. It was red on her hand. She shuddered before an unknown horror, and with mysterious speed the knowledge came to her heart that Fate had overtaken her—here!
The doctors had come, probed for the bullet, and gone. They had not found the bullet. The wound was crooked, they said, entering the fleshy part of the abdomen, ranging upwards in the direction of the heart, then to the back. The wounded man was still unconscious. There was a chance, so the New York surgeon told Isabelle,—only they had not been able to locate the bullet, and the heart was beating feebly. There had been a great loss of blood. If he had been found earlier, perhaps—they did not know….
Outside on the drive the doctors exchanged glances, low words, and signs. Accident? But how, the ball ranging upwards like that? He would have to be on his knees. Well, then, suicide! Had the pistol been found? … There need be no scandal—the family was much loved in the village. Accident, of course. The fellow was always odd, the local practitioner explained to the city doctor, as he carried his distinguished colleague home in his car for breakfast. There was that scandal with a woman in Venice. They said it was all over, but you could never tell about those things….
Upstairs the nurse made ready the room for illness, while Isabelle sat by the bed, watching her brother. Vickers was still unconscious, scarcely breathing. The nurse, having tried a number of ways to get her out of the room, now ignored her, and Isabelle sat in a kind of stupor, waiting for that Fate which had overtaken her to be worked out. When the gray dawn of the morning stole into the dark room, the nurse unbolted the shutters and threw open the window. In the uncertain light Dog Mountain loomed large and distant. Isabelle turned her head from Vickers's face and watched the wooded peak as it came nearer and nearer in the deepening light…. It was this hill that she and Vickers had climbed in the winter morning so long ago! How wonderful it had been then, life, for them both, with glorious possibilities of living! She had put forth her hands to grasp them, these possibilities, one after another, to grasp them for herself. Now they had come to an end—for both. There was no more to grasp….
When she turned back to the silent form by her side, she saw that Vickers had opened his eyes. His face was very white and the eyes were buried deep beneath the eyebrows as of a man long sick, and he lay motionless. But the eyes had meaning in them; they were the eyes of the living. So brother and sister looked into each other, thus, and without words, without a murmur, it was all known between them. She understood! He had thrown his life into the abyss before her that she might be kept to that vision they had had as boy and girl. It was not to be for him. But for her!
"Vick!" she whispered, falling on her knees by his side. For reply there was that steady searching look, which spoke to unknown depths within her. "Vick!" she moaned. The white lips of the dying man trembled, and a faint flutter of breath crossed them—but no words. His fingers touched her hair. When she looked at him again through her tears, the eyes were closed, and the face bore an austere look of preoccupation, as of one withdrawn from the business of life…. Afterwards the nurse touched the kneeling woman, the doctor came, she was led away. She knew that Vickers was dead.
* * * * *
Late that afternoon there came a knock at the door of the room where Isabelle was, and her husband, hearing no sound, entered. She looked up wonderingly from the lounge where she lay. She did not know that John was in the house, that he had been sent for. She was unaware what time had elapsed since the evening before.
"Isabelle," he said and stopped. She looked at him questioningly. The irritation that of late his very presence had caused her she was not conscious of now. All the irritations of life had been suddenly wiped out in the great fact. As she looked at her husband's grave face, she saw it with a new sense,—she saw what was behind it, as if she had had the power given her to read beneath matter. She saw his concern, his real sorrow, his consideration, the distress for her in the heart of this man, whom she had thrust out of her life….
"Isabelle," he said very gently, hesitantly. "Tom has come—is downstairs—wants to see you. He asked me if you would see him for a moment."
This also did not surprise her. She was silent for a moment, and her husband said:—
"Do you want to see him?"
"Yes," she replied finally. "I will see him…. I will go down at once."
She rose and stepped towards the door.
"Isabelle!" Her husband's voice broke. Still standing with one hand on the knob of the door, he took from his pocket with the other a small pistol, and held it towards her on the palm of his hand. "Isabelle," he said, "this was in the river—near where they found him!"
She looked at it calmly. It was that little gold and ivory chased toy which she remembered Tom had used one afternoon to shoot the magnolia blossoms with. She remembered it well. It was broken open, and a cartridge half protruded from the breach.
"I thought you should know," Lane added.
"Yes," Isabelle whispered. "I know. I knew! … But I will go down and see him."
Her husband replaced the pistol in his pocket and opened the door for her.
* * * * *
Cairy was waiting before the fireplace in the library, nervously pacing to and fro across the rug. Would she see him? How much did she know? How much did they all know? How much would she forgive? … These questions had racked him every hour since in a spasm of nervous terror he had flung the pistol over the bushes and heard it splash in the river, and with one terrified look at the wounded man, whom he had dragged into the thicket, had got himself in some unremembered fashion to the junction in time for the express. These and other considerations—what story should he tell?—had racked him all through the evening, which he had been obliged to spend with the actress, answering her silly objections to this and that in his play. Then during the night it became clear to him that he must return to the Farm in the morning as he had planned, as if nothing had happened. His story would be that Vickers had turned back before they reached the junction, and had borrowed his pistol to shoot at woodchucks…. Would Isabelle believe this? Shemustbelieve it! … It took courage to walk up to the familiar house, but he must see her. It was the only way. And he had been steadying himself for his part ever since he had left the city.
When Isabelle entered the room, she closed the door behind her and stood with her back against it for support. She wore the same white dress that she had had on when Cairy and Vickers had left her, not having changed it for tea. It had across the breast a small red stain,—the stain of her brother's blood. Cairy reached out his hands and started towards her, crying:—
"Isabelle! Isabelle! how awful! Isabelle,—I—" She raised her arm as if to forbid him to advance, and he stood still, his words dying on his lips. Looking at him out of her weary eyes, Isabelle seemed to see through the man, with that same curious insight that had come when she had read the truth in her brother's eyes; the same insight that had enabled her to see the kindness and the pity beneath her husband's impassive gravity. So now she knew what he was going to say, the lie he would try to tell her. It was as if she knew every secret corner of the man's soul, had known it always really, and had merely veiled her eyes to him wilfully. Now the veil had been torn aside. Had Vickers given her this power to see into the heart of things, for always, so that the truths behind the veil she made should never be hid?
'Why does he try to lie to me?' she seemed to ask herself. 'It is so weak to lie in this world where all becomes known.' She merely gazed at him in wonder, seeing the deformed soul of the deformed body, eaten by egotism and passions. And this last—cowardice! And he was the man she had loved! That she had been ready to die for, to throw away all for, even the happiness of others! … It was all strangely dead. A body stood there before her in its nakedness.
"What do you want?" she demanded almost indifferently.
"I had to see you!" He had forgotten his story, his emotion,—everything beneath that piercing stare, which stripped him to the bone.
"Haven't you—a word—" he muttered.
Her eyes cried: 'I know. I know! I know ALL—even as those who are dead know.'
"Nothing!" she said.
"Isabelle!" he cried, and moved nearer. But the warning hand stopped him again, and the empty voice said, "Nothing!"
Then he saw that it was all ended between them, that this brother's blood, which stained her breast, lay forever between them, could not be crossed by any human will. And more, that the verity of life itself lay like a blinding light between them, revealing him and her and their love. It was dead, that love which they had thought was sacred and eternal, in the clear light of truth.
Without a word he walked to the open window and stepped into the garden, and his footstep on the gravel died away. Then Isabelle went back to the dead body in her room above.
On the terrace Lane was sitting beside his little girl, the father talking in low tones to the child, explaining what is death.
It was a long, cold drive from the station at White River up into the hills. In the gloom of the December afternoon the aspect of the austere, pitiless northern winter was intensified. A thin crust of snow through which the young pines and firs forced their green tips covered the dead blackberry vines along the roadside. The ice of the brooks was broken in the centre like cracked sheets of glass, revealing the black water gurgling between the frozen banks. The road lay steadily uphill, and the two rough-coated farm horses pulled heavily at the stiff harness, slipping constantly in the track that was worn smooth and polished by the shoes of the wood-sleds. As the valley fell behind, the country opened out in broad sheets of snow-covered fields where frozen wisps of dead weeds fluttered above the crust. Then came the woods, dark with "black growth," and more distant hillsides, gray and black, where the leafless deciduous growth mingled with the evergreens. At infrequent intervals along the road appeared little farm-houses,—two rooms and an attic, with rickety outhouses and barns, all banked with earth to protect them from the winter. These were forlorn enough when they showed marks of life; but again and again they were deserted, with their special air of decay, the wind sucking through the paneless windows, the snow lying in unbroken drifts up to the rotting sills. Sometimes a lane led from the highroad to where one or perhaps two houses were hidden under the shelter of a hill, removed still farther from the artery of life. Already the lamps had begun to glimmer from these remote habitations, dotting the hillsides like widely scattered candles.
Lonely and desolate! These human beings lived in an isolation of snow and frozen earth. So thought Isabelle Lane, chilled beneath the old fur robe, cold to the heart…. Ahead the hills lifted with broader lines, higher, more lonely, and the gray clouds almost touched their tops. In a cleft of the range towards which the road was winding, there shone a saffron light, the last effort of the December sun to break through the heavy sky. And for a few moments there gleamed far away to the left a spot of bright light, marvellously clear and illuming, where the white breast of a clearing on the mountain had received these last few rays of sun. A warm golden pathway led through the forest to it from the sun. That distant spot of sunny snow was radiant, still, uplifting. Suddenly gloom again! The saffron glow faded from the Pass between the hills, and the north wind drew down into the valley, drifting the manes and the tails of the plodding horses. Soft wisps of snow circled and fell,—the heralding flakes of winter storm….
It seemed to Isabelle that she had been journeying on like this for uncounted time, and would plod on like this always,—chilled, numbed to the heart, moving through a frozen, lonely world far from the voices of men, remote from the multitudinous feet bent on the joyous errands of life…. She had sunk into a lethargy of body and mind, in which the cheerless physical atmosphere reflected the condition of being within,—something empty or dead, with a dull ache instead of consciousness….
The sleigh surmounted the long hill, swept at a trot around the edge of the mountain through dark woods, then out into an unexpected plateau of open fields. There was a cluster of lights in a small village, and they came to a sudden stop before a little brick house that was swathed in spruce boughs, like a blanket drawn close about the feet, to keep out the storm. The door opened and against the lighted room a small black figure stood out. Isabelle, stumbling numbly up the steps, fell into the arms of Margaret Pole.
"You must be nearly dead, poor dear! I have lighted a fire in your room upstairs…. I am so glad you have come. I have hoped for it so long!"
When they were before the blazing wood fire, Margaret unfastened Isabelle's long cloak and they stood, both in black, pale in the firelight, and looked at each other, then embraced without a word.
"I wanted to come," Isabelle said at last when she was settled into the old arm-chair beside the fire, "when you first wrote. But I was too ill. I seemed to have lost not only strength but will to move…. It's good to be here."
"They are the nicest people, these Shorts! He's a wheelwright and blacksmith, and she used to teach school. It's all very plain, like one of our mountain places in Virginia; but it's heavenly peaceful—removed. You'll feel in a day or two that you have left everything behind you, down there below!"
"And the children?"
"They are splendidly. And Ned is really getting better—the doctor has worked a miracle for the poor little man. We think it won't be long now before he can walk and do what the others do. And he is happy. He used to have sullen fits,—resented his misfortune just like a grown person. He's different now!"
There was a buoyant note in Margaret's deep tones. Pale as she was in her black dress and slight,—"the mere spirit of a woman," as Falkner had called her,—there was a gentler curve to the lips, less chafing in the sunken eyes.
'I suppose it is a great relief,' thought Isabelle,—'Larry's death, even with all its horror,—she can breathe once more, poor Margaret!'
"Tell me!" she said idly, as Margaret wheeled the lounge to the fire for Isabelle to rest on; "however did you happen to come up here to the land's end in Vermont—or is it Canada?"
"Grosvenor is just inside the line…. Why, it was the doctor—Dr. Renault, you know, the one who operated on Ned. I wanted to be near him. It was in July after Larry's death that we came, and I haven't been away since. And I shall stay, always perhaps, at least as long as the doctor can do anything for the little man. And for me…. I like it. At first it seemed a bit lonesome and far away, this tiny village shut in among the hills, with nobody to talk to. But after a time you come to see a lot just here in this mite of a village. One's glasses become adjusted, as the doctor says, and you can see what you have never taken the time to see before. There's a stirring world up here on Grosvenor Flat! And the country is so lovely,—bigger and sterner than my old Virginia hills, but not unlike them."
"And why does your wonderful doctor live out of the world like this?"
"Dr. Renault used to be in New York, you know,—had his own private hospital there for his operations. He had to leave the city and his work because he was threatened with consumption. For a year he went the usual round of cures,—to the Adirondacks, out West; and he told me that one night while he was camping on the plains in Arizona, lying awake watching the stars, it came to him suddenly that the one thing for him to do was to stop this health-hunt, go back where he came from, and go to work—and forget he was ill until he died. The next morning he broke camp, rode out to the railroad, came straight here from Arizona, and has been here ever since."
"But whyhere?"
"Because he came from Grosvenor as a boy. It must be a French family—Renault—and it is only a few miles north to the line…. So he came here, and the climate or the life or something suits him wonderfully. He works like a horse!"
"Is he interesting, your doctor?" Isabelle asked idly.
"That's as you take him," Margaret replied with a little smile. "Not fromConny Woodyard's point of view, I should say. He has too many blind sides.But I have come to think him a really great man! And that, my dear, is morethan what we used to call 'interesting.'"
"But how can he do his work up here?"
"That's the wonderful part of it all! He'smadethe world come to him,—what he needs of it. He says there is nothing marvellous in it; that all through the middle ages the sick and the needy flocked to remote spots, to deserts and mountain villages, wherever they thought help was to be found. Most great cures are not made even now in the cities."
"But hospitals?"
"He has his own, right here in Grosvenor Flat, and a perfect one. The great surgeons and doctors come up here and send patients here. He has all he can do, with two assistants."
"He must be a strong man."
"You will see! The place is Renault. It all bears the print of his hand. He says himself that given a man with a real idea, a persistent idea, and he will make the desert blossom like a garden or move mountains,—in some way he will make that idea part of the organism of life! … There! I am quoting the doctor again, the third time. It's a habit one gets into up here!"
At the tinkle of a bell below, Margaret exclaimed:—
"It's six and supper, and you have had no real rest. You see the hours are primitive here,—breakfast at seven, dinner noon, and supper six. You will get used to it in a few days."
The dining room was a corner of the old kitchen that had been partitioned off. It was warm and bright, with an open fire, and the supper that Mrs. Short put on the table excellent. Mr. Short came in presently and took his seat at the head of the table. He was a large man, with a bony face softened by a thick grizzled beard. He said grace in a low voice, and then served the food. Isabelle noticed that his large hands were finely formed. His manner was kindly, in a subtle way that of the host at his own table; but he said little or nothing at first. The children made the conversation, piping up like little birds about the table and keeping the older people laughing. Isabelle had always felt that children at the table were a bore, either forward and a nuisance, or like little lynxes uncomfortably absorbing conversation, that was not suited to them. Perhaps that was because she knew few families where children were socially educated to take their place at the table, being relegated for the most part to the nurse or the governess.
Isabelle was much interested in Mr. Short. His wife, a thin, gray-haired woman, who wore spectacles and had a timid manner of speaking, was less of a person than the blacksmith. Sol Short, she found out later, had never been fifty miles from Grosvenor Flat in his life, but he had the poise, the self-contained air of a man who had acquired all needed worldly experience.
"Was it chilly coming up the Pass?" he asked Isabelle. "I thought 'twould be when it came on to blow some from the mountains. And Pete Jackson's horsesareslow."
"They seemed frozen!"
The large man laughed.
"Well, you would take your time if you made that journey twice a day most every day in the year. You can't expect them to get exactly excited over it, can you?"
"Mr. Short," Margaret remarked, "I saw a light this evening in the house onWing Hill. What can it be?"
"Some folks from down state have moved in,—renters, I take it."
"How do you know that?"
"From the look of the stuff Bailey's boy was hauling up there this morning.It's travelled often."
"Mr. Short," Margaret explained merrily, "is the GrosvenorTimes. His shop is the centre of our universe. From it he sees all that happens in our world—or his cronies tell him what he can't see. He knows what is going on in the remotest corner of the township,—what Hiram Bailey got for his potatoes, where Bill King sold his apples, whether Mrs. Beans's second son has gone to the Academy at White River. He knows the color and the power of every horse, the number of cows on every farm, the make of every wagon,—everything!"
"Not so bad as all that!" the blacksmith protested. It was evidently a family joke. "We don't gossip, do we, Jenny?"
"We don't gossip! But we keep our eyes open and tell what we see."
It was a pleasant, human sort of atmosphere. After the meal the two friends went back to Isabelle's couch and fire, Mrs. Short offering to put the youngest child to bed for Margaret.
"She likes to," Margaret explained. "Her daughter has gone away to college…. It is marvellous what that frail-looking woman can do; she does most of the cooking and housework, and never seems really busy. She prepared this daughter for college! She makes me ashamed of the little I accomplish,—and she reads, too, half a dozen magazines and all the stray books that come her way."
"But how can you stand it?" Isabelle asked bluntly; "I mean for months."
"Stand it? You mean the hours, the Strongs, Grosvenor? … Why, I feel positively afraid when I think that some day I may be shaken out of this nest! You will see. It is all so simple and easy, so human and natural, just like Mr. Short's day's work,—the same thing for thirty years, ever since he married the school teacher and took this house. You'll hear him building the fires to-morrow before daylight. He is at his shop at six-thirty, home at twelve, back again at one, milks the cow at five, and supper at six, bed at nine. Why, it's an Odyssey, that day,—as Mr. Short lives it!"
Margaret opened the window and drew in the shutters. Outside it was very still, and the snow was falling in fine flakes.
"The children will be so glad to-morrow," she remarked, "with all this snow. They are building a large bob-sled under Mr. Short's direction…. No!" she resumed her former thread of thought. "It doesn't count so much as we used to think—the variety of the thing you do, the change,—the novelty. It's the mind you do it with that makes it worth while."
Isabelle stared at the ceiling which was revealed fitfully by the dying fire. She still felt dead, numb, but this was a peaceful sort of grave, so remote, so silent. That endless torturing thought—the chain of weary reproach and useless speculation, which beset every waking moment—had ceased for the moment. It was like quiet after a perpetual whirring sound.
She liked to look at Margaret, to feel her near, but she mused over her. She was changed. Margaret had had this disease, too, this weariness of living, the torturing doubt,—if this or that, the one thing or the other, had happened, it might have been different,—the haggling of defeated will! No wonder she was glad to be out of the city up here at peace….
"But one can't stay out of life for always," she remonstrated.
"Why not? What you call the world seems to get along very well without us, without any one in particular. And I don't feel the siren call, not yet!"
"But life can't be over at thirty-three,—one can't be really dead, I suppose."
"No,—just beginning!" Margaret responded with an elasticity that amazedIsabelle, who remembered the languid woman she had known so many years."Just beginning," she murmured, "after the journey in the dark."
'Of course,' mused Isabelle, 'she means the relief from Larry, the anxiety over the boy,—all that she has had to bear. Yes, for her there is some beginning anew. She might possibly marry Rob Falkner now, if his wife got somebody else to look after her silly existence. Why shouldn't she? Margaret is still young,—she might even be pretty again.' And Isabelle wished to know what the situation was between Margaret and Falkner.
Nothing, it seemed, could make any difference to herself! She ached to tell some one of the despair in her heart, but even to Margaret she could not speak. Since that summer morning six months before when Vickers had died without a spoken word, she had never said his name. Her husband had mutely respected her muteness. Then she had been ill,—too ill to think or plan, too ill for everything but remembrance. Now it was all shut up, her tragedy, festering at the bottom of her heart like an undrained wound, poisoning her soul…. Suddenly in the midst of her brooding she woke with a start at something Margaret was saying, so unlike her reticent self.
… "You knew, of course, about Larry's death?"
"Yes, John told me."
"It was in the papers, too."
"Poor Margaret!—I was so sorry for you—it was terrible!"
"You mustn't think of it that way,—I mean for me. It was terrible that any human being should be where Larry got,—where he was hunted like a dog by his own acts, and in sheer despair made an end of himself. I often think of that—think what it must be not to have the courage to go on, not to feel the strength in yourself to live another hour!"
"It's always insanity. No sane person would do such a thing!"
"We call it insanity. But what difference does the name make?" Margaret said. "A human being falls into a state of mind where he is without one hope, one consideration,—all is misery. Then he takes what seems the only relief—death—as he would food or drink; that is sad."
"It was Larry's own doing, Margaret; he had his chance!"
"Of course, more than his chance—more than many chances. He was the kind of protoplasm that could not endure life, that carried in itself the seed of decay,—yet—yet—" She raised her pale face with the luminous eyes and said softly: "Sometimes I wonder if it had to be. When I look at little Ned and see how health is coming to that crippled body—the processes are righting themselves—sound and healthy, ready to be helped back to life—I wonder if it may not be so with other processes not wholly physical. I wonder! … Did you ever think, Isabelle, that we are waiting close to other worlds,—we can almost hear from them with our ears,—but we only hear confusedly so far. Some day we may hear more clearly!"
Margaret had reverted, Isabelle concluded, to the religion of her father, the Bishop! What she was vaguely talking about was the Bishop's heaven, in which the widow and orphan were counselled to take comfort.
"I wish I could feel it,—what the church teaches," Isabelle replied. "But I can't,—it isn't real. I go to church and say over the creed and ask myself what it means, and feel the same way when I come out—or worse!"
"I don't mean religion—the church," Margaret smiled back. "That has been dead for me a long time. It's something you come to feel within you about life. I can't explain—only there might have been a light even for poor Larry in that last dreadful darkness! … Some day I want to tell you all about myself, something I have never told any one,—but it will help to explain, perhaps…. Now you must go to bed,—I will send my black Sue up with your coffee in the morning."…
Isabelle, as she lay awake in the stillness, the absolute hush of the snowy night, thought of what Margaret had said about her husband. John had told her how Larry had gradually gone to the bad in a desultory, weak-kneed fashion,—had lost his clerkship in the A. and P. that Lane had got for him; then had taken to hanging about the downtown hotels, betting a little, drinking a little, and finally one morning the curt paragraph in the paper: "Found, in the North River, body of a respectably dressed man about forty years. Papers on him show that he was Lawrence Pole of Westchester," etc., etc.
And John's brief comment,—"Pity that he hadn't done it ten years ago." Yes, thought Isabella, pity that he was ever born, the derelict, ever came into this difficult world to complicate further its issues. Margaret apparently had towards this worthless being who had marred her life a softened feeling. But it was absurd of her now to think that she might have loved him!