The next day Kedzie was still cantankerous, as it was perfectly natural that she should be. She wanted to be a Marchioness and sail away to the peerful sky. And she could not cut free from her anchor. The Marquess was winding up his propeller to fly alone.
Jim, finding her the poorest of company, called on his mother. She was well enough to be very peevish. So he left her and wandered about the dull town. He had no car with him and he saw a racer that caught his fancy. It had the lean, fleet look of a thoroughbred horse, and the dealer promised that it could triple the speed limit. He went out with a demonstrator and the car made good the dealer's word. It ran with such zeal that Jim was warned by three different policemen on the Boston Post Road that he would be arrested the next time he came by in such haste.
He decided to try it out again at night on other roads. He told the dealer to fill up the tank and see to the lights. The dealer told the garage man and the garage man said he would.
That evening at dinner Jim invited Kedzie to take a spin. She said that she had to spend the evening with her mother, who was miserable. Jim said, “Too bad!” and supposed that he'd better run in and say “Howdy-do” to the poor soul. Kedzie hastily said that she would be unable to see him. She would not even let Jim ride her over in his new buzz-wagon.
Again he made the profane comment to himself that women are unreasonable. Again this statement was due to ignorance of an excellent reason.
Kedzie had tried all day to get in touch with Strathdene. When she ran him down at length by telephone he was dismally dignified and terrifyingly patriotic. His poor country needed him and he must return.
This meant that Kedzie would lose her first and doubtless her last chance at the marquisate. She pleaded for a conference. He assented eagerly, but the problem was where to confer. She dared not invite him to the house she had rented, for Jim would be there. She could not go to Strathdene's rooms at the Hilltop Inn. She thought of the apartment she had stowed her mother in, and asked him there. Then she telephoned her mother to suppress dad and keep out of sight.
She was afraid to have Jim take her to her mother's address lest her woeful luck should bring Strathdene and Jim together at the door. That was her excellent reason for rebuffing her husband's courtesy and setting out alone.
Her mother was only too willing to abet Kedzie's forlorn hope. It was the forlornness of Kedzie that saved her. When Strathdene saw her in her exquisite despair he was helpless. He was no Hun to break the heart of so sweet a being, and he believed her when she told him that she would die if he tried to cross the perilous ocean without her. She told him that she would throw herself on Jim's mercy the next day and implore her freedom. He would not refuse her, she assured him, for Jim was really awfully generous, whatever faults he might have.
Strathdene could well believe that she would have her way with her husband since he found her absolutely irresistible himself. The conference lasted long, and they parted at last as Romeo and Juliet would have parted if Juliet had been married to the County Paris before Romeo met her.
Kedzie even promised Strathdene that she would not wait till the morning, but would at once demand her husband's consent to the divorce. It was only on such an understanding that Strathdene could endure to intrust his delicate treasure to the big brute's keeping.
Kedzie entered her home with her oration all primed. But Jim was not there. He did not come home that night. Kedzie's anxiety was not exactly flattering, but it was sincere.
She wondered if some accident had befallen him in his new car. She really could not bear the thought of losing another husband by a motor accident. Suppose he should just be horribly crippled. Then she could never divorce him.
She hated her thoughts, but she could not be responsible for them. Her mind was like a lighthouse in a storm. It was not to blame for what wild birds the winds brought in from the black to dash against her soul.
But Jim was neither killed nor crippled. The cards still ran for Kedzie.
Speaking of cards, Jim was like a gambler with a new pack of them and nobody to play with.
He darted hither and yon in his racer, childishly happy in its paces, childishly lonely for somebody to show off before. As he ran along the almost deserted sea road he passed the Noxon home.
He knew that Charity was visiting there. He wondered which of the lighted windows was hers. After much backing and filling he turned in and ran up to the steps. He got out and was about to ring the bell when he heard a piano. He went along the piazza to a window, and, peering in, saw Charity playing. She was alone in the music-room and very sadly beautiful.
He tapped on the window. She was startled, rose to leave the room. He tapped again, remembering an old signal they had had as boy and girl lovers. She paused. He could see her smile tenderly. She came forward to the window and stared out. He stared in. Only a pane of glass parted the tips of their flattened noses. It was a sort of sterilized Eskimo kiss.
The window was a door. Charity opened it and invited Jim in, wondering but strangely comforted. He invited her out. He explained about his gorgeous new car and his loneliness and begged her to take the air.
She put back her hands to indicate her inappropriate costume, a flimsy evening gown of brilliant color.
“Mrs. Noxon has gone out to dinner. I was to go with her, but I begged off. I'm going to New York to-morrow, and I was blue and—”
“And so am I. I've got an extra coat in my car, and the night is mild.”
“No, I'd better not.”
“Aw, come along!”
“No-o—”
“Yes!”
“All right. I'll get a veil for my hair.”
She closed the French window and hurried away. She reappeared at the front door and shut it stealthily after her.
“Nobody saw me go. You must get me back before Mrs. Noxon comes home, or there'll be a scandal.”
“Depend on me!” said Jim.
Muffling their laughter like two runaways, they stole down the steps. Her high-heeled slippers slipped and she toppled against him. She caught him off his balance, and his arms went about her to save her and himself. If he had been Irish, he would have said that he destroyed himself, for she was so unexpectedly warm and silken and lithe that she became instantly something other than the Charity he had adored as a sad, sweet deity.
He realized that she was terribly a woman.
They were no longer boy and girl out on a gay little lark. They were a man unhappily married and a woman unhappily unmarried, setting forth on a wild steed for a wild ride through the reluctant autumn air. The neighboring sea gave out the stored-up warmth of summer, and the moon with the tilted face of a haloed nun yearned over them.
When Jim helped Charity into the car her arm seemed to burn in his palm. He hesitated a moment, and a thought fluttered through his mind that he ought not to hazard the adventure. But another thought chased it away, a thought of the idiocy of being afraid, and another thought of how impossible it was to ask her to get out and go back.
He found the coat, a heavy, short coat, and held it for her, saw her ensconced comfortably, stepped in and closed the door softly. The car went forward as smoothly as a skiff on a swift, smooth water.
Charity was not so solemn as Jim. She was excited and flattered by such an unforeseen diversion breaking in on her doleful solitude.
“It's been so long since a man asked me to go buggy-riding,” she said, “that I've forgotten how to behave. I'm getting to be a regular old maid, Jim.”
“Huh!” was all that Jim could think of.
It was capable of many interpretations—reproof, anger at fate, polite disbelief, deprecation.
Jim tried to run away from his peculiar and most annoying emotions. But Charity went with him. She looked back and said:
“Funny how the moon rides after us in her white limousine.”
“Huh!” said Jim.
“Is that Mexican you're speaking?” she chided.
“I was just thinking,” Jim growled.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing much—except what a ghastly shame it is that so—so—well, I don't know what to call you—but well, a woman like you—that you should be living alone with nothing better to do than run the gantlet of those God-awful submarines and probably get blown up and drowned, or, worse yet, spend your days breaking your heart nursing a lot of poor mangled, groaning Frenchmen that get shot to pieces or poisoned with gas or—Oh, it's rotten! That's all it is: it's rotten!”
“Somebody has to take care of them.”
“Oh, I know; but it oughtn't to be you. If there was any manhood in this country, you'd have Americans to nurse.”
“There are Americans over there, droves of them.”
“Yes, but they're not wearing our uniform. We ought to be over there under our own flag. I ought to be over there.”
“Maybe you will be. I'll go on ahead and be waiting for you.”
There is nothing more pitiful than sorrow that tries to smile, and Jim groaned:
“Oh, Charity Coe! Charity Coe!”
He gripped the wheel to keep from putting his hand out to hers. And they went in silence, thinking in the epic elegy of their time.
Jim drove his car up to the end of Rhode Island and across to Tiverton; then he left the highway for the lonelier roads. The car charged the dark hills and galloped the levels, a black stallion with silent hoofs and dreadful haste. There was so much death, so much death in the world! The youth and strength and genius of all Europe were going over the brink eternally in a Niagara of blood.
And the sea that Charity was about to venture on, the sea whose estuaries lapped this sidelong shore so innocently with such tender luster under the gentle moon, was drawing down every day and every night ships and ships and ships with their treasures of labor and their brave crews till it seemed that the floor of the ocean must be populous with the dead.
Charity felt quite close to death. A very solemn tenderness of farewell endeared the beautiful world and all its doomed creatures. But most dear of all was this big, simple man at her side, the man she ought to have married. It was all her fault that she had not. She owed him a profound eternal apology, and she had not the right to pay the debt—that is, so long as she lived she had not the right. But if they were never to meet again—then she was already dying to him.
It was important that she should not depart this life without making restitution of what she owed. She had owed Jim Dyckman the love he had pleaded for from her and would not get from anyone else.
He had a right to love, and it was to be eternally denied to him. He would go on bitterly grieved and shamed to think that nobody could love him, for Charity had repulsed him, and some day he would learn that Kedzie had deceived him.
Lacking the courage to warn him against his wife, Charity felt that she must have at least the courage to say;
“Good-by, Jim. I have been loving you of late with a great love.”
There would be no injury done to Kedzie thus, for Charity would speak as a ghost, an impalpable departed one. There would be no sin—only a beautiful expiation by confession. She was enfranchised of earthly restraints, enfranchised as the dead are from mortal obligations.
But the moods that are so holy, so pure, and so vast while they are moods resent words. Words are like tin cups to carry the ocean in. It is no longer an ocean when a bit of it is scooped up. It is only a little brackish water, odious to drink and quenching no thirst.
Charity could not devise the first phrase of her huge and oceanic emotion. It would have been only a proffer of brine that Jim could not have relished from her. He understood better her silence. They went blindly on and on, letting the road lead them and the first whim decide which turn to take and which to pass.
And so they were eventually lost in the land as they were lost in their mood.
And after a time of wonderful enthusiasms in their common grief the realities began to claim them back. A loud report like a pistol-shot announced that the poetry of motion had become prose.
Jim stopped the car and became a blacksmith while he went through the tool-box, found a jack for the wheel, laboriously unshipped the demountable rim, replaced it with the extra wheel, and set forth again.
The job had not improved the cleanliness of his hands nor spared the chastity of his shirt-bosom. But the car had four wheels to go on, and they regained a main road at last and found a signboard announcing, “Tiverton, 18 miles.” That meant thirty miles to Newport.
Charity looked at her watch. It brought her back from the timelessness of her meditation to the world where the dock had a great deal to say about what was respectable and what not.
“Good Lord!” she groaned. “Mrs. Noxon is home long ago and scared or shocked to death. We must fly!”
They flew, angry, both of them, at having to hurry back to school and a withering reprimand, as if they were still mere brats. Gradually the car began to refuse the call for haste. Its speed sickened, gasped, died.
Jim swore quite informally, and raged: “I told that infernal hound to fill the tank. He forgot! The gas is gone.”
Charity shrugged her shoulders. “I deserved it,” she said. “I only hope I don't get you into trouble. What will your wife say?”
“What won't she say? But I'm thinking about you.”
“It doesn't matter about me. I've got nobody who cares enough to scold me.”
They were suddenly illumined by the headlights of an approaching car. They shielded their faces from the glare instinctively. They felt honest, but they did not look honest out here together.
The car was checked and a voice called from the blur, “Want any help?”
“No, thanks,” Jim answered from his shadow.
The car rolled on. While Jim made a vain post-mortem examination of the car's machinery Charity looked about for a guide-post. She found a large signboard proclaiming “Viewcrest Inn, 1 mile.” She told Jim.
He said: “I know of it. It has a bad name, but so long as the gasolene is good—I'll go get some. Make yourself at home.” He paused. “I can't leave you alone here in the wilderness at midnight.”
“I'll go along.”
“In those high-heeled shoes?”
“And these low-necked gown,” sighed Charity. “Oh, what a fool, what a stupid fool I've been!”
But she set forth. Jim offered his arm. She declined it at first, but she was glad enough of it later. They made an odd-looking couple, both in evening dress, promenading a country road. All the wealth of both of them was insufficient to purchase them so much as a street-car ride. They were paupers—the slaves, not the captains, of their fate. Charity stumbled and tottered, her ankles wrenched by the ruts, her stilted slippers going to ruin. Jim offered to carry her. She refused indignantly. She would have accepted a lift from any other vehicle now, but none appeared. The only lights were in the sky, where a storm was practising with fireworks.
“Just our luck to get drenched,” said Jim.
It was about the only bad luck they escaped, but the threat of it lent Charity speed. They passed one farm, whose dogs rushed out and bayed at them carnivorously.
“That's the way people will bark when they find out about our innocent little picnic,” said Charity.
“They're not going to find out,” said Jim.
“Trying to keep it secret gives it a guilty look,” said Charity.
“What people don't know won't hurt 'em,” said Jim.
“What they do imagine will hurt us,” said Charity.
At the top of a knoll in a clandestine group of trees they found “Viewcrest Inn.” It was dark but for a dim light in the office. The door of that was locked.
Trade was dull, now that the Newport season was over, and only an occasional couple from Fall River, Providence, or New Bedford tested the diminished hospitality. But to-night there had been a concurrence of visitors. Jim rattled at the door. A waiter appeared, yawning candidly. He limped to the door with a gait that Kedzie would have recognized.
He peered out and shook his head, waving the intruders away. Jim shook the knob and glowered back.
The waiter, who, in the classic phrase, was “none other than” Skip Magruder, unlocked the door.
“Nothin' doin', folks,” said Skip. “Standin' room only. Not a room left.”
“I don't want any of your dirty rooms,” said Jim. “I want some gasolene.”
“Bar's closed,” said Skip, who had a nimble wit.
“I said gasolene!” said Jim, menacingly.
“Sorry, boss, but the last car out took the last drop we had in the pump. We'll have some more to-morrow mornin'.”
“My God!” Jim whispered.
Then the storm broke. A thunder smash like the bolt of an indignant Heaven. It turned on all the faucets above.
“Where's the telephone?” Jim demanded.
“T.D.,” said Skip.
“What's that?”
“Temporary discontinued.” Skip grew confidential. “The boss was a little slow on the pay and they shut him off. We're takin' in a lot of dough to-night, though, and he'll prob'ly get it goin' to-morrow all right.”
To-morrow again! Jim snarled back at the pack of wolfish circumstances closing in on him. He turned to Charity.
“We've got to stay here.”
Charity “went white,” as the saying is. The rain streamed down.
“We 'ain't a room left,” said Skip.
“You've got to have,” said Jim.
“Have to speak to the artshiteck,” said Skip. Then he rubbed his head, trying to get out an idea by massage. “There's the poller. Big lounge there, but not made up. Would you and your wife wish the poller?”
He dragged the “wife” with a tone that nearly got him throttled. But Jim paused. A complicated thought held him. To protest that Charity was not his wife seemed hardly the most reassuring thing to do. He let the word go and ignored Skip's cynical intonation. Jim's knuckles ached to rebuke him, but he had not fought a waiter since his wild young days. And Skip was protected by his infirmity.
Charity was frightened and revolted, abject with remorse for such a disgusting consequence of such a sweet, harmless impulse. She was afraid of Jim's temper. She said:
“Take the parlor by all means.”
“All right,” said Jim.
Skip fumbled about the desk for a big book, and, finding it, opened it and handed Jim a pen.
“Register, please,” said Skip.
“I will not.”
“Rules of the house.”
“What do I care about your rules!”
“Have to wake the boss, then.”
“Give me the pen.”
He started to write his own name; that left Charity's designation in doubt. He glanced at the other names. “Mr. and Mrs. George Washington” were there, “Mr. and Mrs. John Smith” twice, as well as “William Jones and wife.”
Jim wondered if the waiter knew him. So many waiters did. At length, with a flash of angry impulse, he wrote: “James D—,” paused, finished “Dysart,” hesitated again, then put “Mr. and Mrs.” before it. Skip read, and grinned. He did not know who Jim was, but he knew he was no Dysart.
Skip led the way to the parlor up-stairs, lighted the lights, and hastily disappeared, fearing that he might be asked to fetch something to eat or drink. He was so tired and sleepy that even the prospect of a tip did not interest him so much as the prospect of his cot in the attic, where he could dream that he was in New York again.
Jim and Charity looked at each other. Jim munched his own curses, and Charity laughed and cried together. Jim's arms had an instinct for taking her to his heart, but he felt that he must be more respectful than ever since they were in so respectless a plight. She never seemed purer and sadder to him than then.
She noted how haggard and dismal he looked, and said, “Aren't you going to sit down?”
“No—not here,” he said. “You curl up on that plush horror and get some rest.”
“I will not!” said Charity.
“You will, too,” said Jim. “You're a wreck, and I ought to be shot. Get some sleep, for God's sake!”
“What becomes of you?”
“I'll scout round and find a place in the office. I think there is a billiard-room. If worst comes to worst, I'll do what Mrs. Leslie Carter did in a play I saw—sleep on the dining-room table.”
“Not less than a table d'hote will hold you,” Charity smiled, wanly.
“Don't worry about me. You go by-by and pray the Lord to forgive me and help us both.”
He waved his hand to her in a heartbreak of bemocked and benighted tenderness and closed the door. He prowled softly about the office and the adjacent rooms, but found no place to sleep. He was in such a fever of wrath at himself that he walked out in the rain to cool his head. Then he sank into a chair, read an old Boston paper twice, and fell asleep among the advertisements.
He woke at daybreak. The rain had ended and he wandered out in the chill, wet grounds of the shabby inn. The morning light was merciless on the buildings, the leafless trees, and on his own costume. The promised view from the crest was swathed in haze—so was his outlook on the future.
His fury at the situation grew as he pondered it. He was like a tiger in a pit. He raged as much at himself as at the people who would take advantage of him. The ludicrousness of the situation added the ultimate torment. He could not save Charity except by ingenious deceptions which would be a proof of guilt if they did not succeed miraculously.
The dress he was in and the dress she was in were the very habiliments of guilt. Getting back to Newport in evening clothes would be the advertisement of their escapade. His expansive shirt-bosom might as well have been a sandwich-board. His broadcloth trousers and his patent-leather pumps would be worse than rags.
And Charity had no hat. There was an unmistakable dressed-up eveningness about them both.
This struck him as the first evil to remedy. As with an escaped convict, his prime necessity was a change of clothes. There was only one way to manage that. He went back to the hotel and found a startled early-morning waiter sweeping out the office. Jim asked where the nearest telephone was, and learned that it was half a mile away at a farm-house.
Jim turned up his collar, pulled down his motor-cap, and struck out along the muddy road. He startled the farmer's family and their large hands were not wide enough to hide their wider smiles.
On the long hike thither Jim had worked out his stratagem. He called up his house, or, rather, Kedzie's house, in Newport, and after much delay got his yawning valet to the telephone. He never had liked that valet less than now.
“That you, Dallam? My car broke down out in the country,” he explained, every syllable a sugarless quinine pill in his throat. “That is to say, the gasolene gave out. I am in my evening clothes, so is—er—Mrs.—er—the lady I was with. I want you to bring me at once an outfit of day clothes, and a—one of my wife's long motor-coats—a very long one—and one of her small hats. Then get out my wife's limousine and send the suit-case and the coat and hat to me here at the Viewcrest Inn, and tell the chauffeur to bring an extra can of gasolene.”
A voice with an intolerable smile in it came back: “Very good, sir. I presume I'd better not waken Mrs. Dyckman?”
“Naturally not. I don't want to—er—alarm her.”
“She was quite alarmed when you didn't come home, sir, last night.”
“Well, I'll explain when I see her. Do you understand the situation?”
“Perfectly, sir.”
Jim writhed at that. But he had done his best and he would take the worst.
The farmer gave him a ride to the hotel in his milk-wagon. When Jim rode up in a parody of state he saw Charity peeping from the parlor window. The morning light had made the situation plain to her. It did not improve on inspection. It took very little imagination to predict a disastrous event, though Jim explained the felicity of his scheme. He had planned to have Charity ride in in the limousine alone, while he took his own car back with the gasolene that was on the way.
The twain were compelled by their costume to stay in the parlor together. They were ferociously hungry and ordered breakfast at last. It took forever to get it, for guests of that hotel were not ordinarily early risers.
Skip Magruder, dragged from his slumbers to serve the meal, found Charity and Jim in the room where he had left them. He made such vigorous efforts to overlook their appearance in bedraggled dinner clothes at a country breakfast that Jim threatened to break his head. Skip grew surly and was ordered out.
After breakfast Jim and Charity waited and waited, keeping to the parlor lest the other guests see them.
At last the limousine arrived. As soon as he heard it coming Jim hurried to the window to make sure that it was his—or, rather, his wife's.
It was—so much his wife's that she stepped out of it. Also her mother. Also her father. They advanced on the hotel.
Jim and Charity were stupefied. There was a look on Kedzie's face that frightened him.
“She means business,” he groaned.
Charity sighed: “Divorce! And me to be named!”
“She won't do that. She owes you everything.”
“What an ideal chance to pay off the debt!”
“Don't you worry. I'll protect you,” Jim insisted.
“How?” said Charity.
“I'll fight the case to the limit.”
“Are you so eager to keep your wife?” said Charity.
“No. I never did love her. I'll never forgive her for this.”
But he had not the courage to go and meet Kedzie and her mother and her father. They were an unconscionable time coming.
He did not know that Kedzie and Skip Magruder were renewing old acquaintance.
While he waited the full horror of his dilemma came over him. Kedzie would undoubtedly sue him for divorce. If he lost, Charity would be publicly disgraced. If he won, he would be tied to Kedzie for life.
A quick temper is an excellent friend for bolstering up an ailing conscience, especially if itself is bolstered by an inability to see the point of view of the other party to a conflict.
Kedzie's wrath at Charity justified to Kedzie any cruelty, especially as Kedzie was all harrowed up by the fear of losing the Marquess of Strathdene. And Kedzie loved Strathdene as much as she could ever love anybody.
For one thing Strathdene was fiercely jealous of her—and the poor child had been simply famished for a little jealousy. Her first husband had hardly known what the word meant. Before their marriage Gilfoyle had permitted her to dance the Greek dances without paying her the compliment of a beating. After their marriage he had gone to Chicago to earn a living and left her alone in New York City where there were millions of rivals.
Her second husband had been very philosophical about her career and had taken the news of her previous marriage with disgusting stoicism. Finally he had gone to the Mexican Border for an indefinite stay, leaving her to her own devices and the devices of any man who came along. It was too much like leaving a diamond outdoors: it cheapened the diamond.
But Strathdene—ah, Strathdene! He turned blue at the mention of Kedzie's husband. When Jim came back from Texas and Kedzie had to be polite to him Strathdene almost had hydrophobia. He accused Kedzie of actually welcoming Jim. He charged her with polyandry. He threatened to shoot her and her husband and himself. He comported himself unlike any traditional Englishman of literature. He was, in fact, himself and what he did was like him. He was a born aviator. His heart was used to racing at unheard-of speeds. He could sustain superhuman exaltations and depressions.
Being in love with him was like going up in an airship with him, which was one of Kedzie's ambitions for the future. She dreamed of a third honeymoonin excelsis.
Strathdene told her that if she ever looked at another man after she married him he would take her up ten thousand feet in the clouds, set his airship on fire, and drop with her as one cinder into the ocean. What handsomer tribute could any woman ask of a man? He was a lover worth fighting for.
But she had felt uncertain of winning him till that wonderful morning when Jim did not come back home. She woke up early all by herself and heard the valet answer Jim's call from Viewcrest.
She had made a friend of Dallam by her flirtation with the nobility. The poor fellow had suffered tortures from the degradation of his master's alliance with a commoner like Kedzie until Kedzie developed her alliance with the Marquess. Then his valetic soul expanded again.
He looked upon her as his salvation.
Over the telephone she heard him now promising Jim that he would not tell Kedzie. If Jim's old valet, Jules, had not gone to France and his death he would have saved Jim from infernal distresses, but this substitute had a malignant interest in his master's confusion. Dallam proceeded forthwith to rap at Mrs. Dyckman's door and spoke through it, deferentially:
“Beg pardon, ma'am, but could I have a word?”
Kedzie wrapped herself in a bath-robe and opened the door a chink to hear the rest of what she had heard in part. The valet had no collar on and his overnight beard not off, and he, too, was in a bath-robe. Man and mistress stood there like genius and madness, “and thin partitions did their bounds divide.”
“Very sorry to trouble you, ma'am,” he said, “but I'm compelled to. The master has just telephoned me that his car broke down at the Viewcrest Inn out Tiverton way, and he wants his morning clothes, and also—if you'll pardon me, ma'am—he instructed me to send him a long motor-coat of yours and a large hat and your limousine. I was directed not to—ahem—to trouble you about it, ma'am, but I 'ardly dared.”
He helped her out so perfectly that she had no need to say anything more than, “Quite right.”
She was glad that the door screened her from observation, for she went through a crisis of emotions, wrath and disgust at Jim's perfidyversusecstasy and gratitude to him for it.
She beat her breast with her hand as if to keep her trembling heart from turning a somersault into her mouth. Then she spoke with a calm that showed how far she had traveled in self-control.
“Very good. You were quite right. Call the chauffeur and tell him to bring round my closed car. Then send me my maid and have the cook get me some coffee. Then you may telephone my mother and father and ask them to come over at once. Please send my car for them. You might have coffee for them also. For we'll all be riding out to—did you say Viewcrest Inn?”
“Yes, ma'am. Very good, ma'am. Thank you!”
He went away thinking to himself. He thought in cockney: “My Gawd! w'at a milit'ry genius! She dictites a horder loike a Proosian general. I'm beginnin' to fink she's gowing to do milord the mokkis prahd. There's no daht abaht it. Stroike me, if there is.”
By the time Kedzie was dressed and coffeed her panicky father and mother were collected and fed, and she had selected her best motor-coat for the shroud of whatever woman it was at Viewcrest. She dared not dream it was Charity.
She had time enough to tell her parents all there was to tell on the voyage, but she had no idea that her limousine was taking her to the very inn that Strathdene had lured her to on that night when he tested her worthiness of his respect.
It had been dark on that occasion and she had been in such a chaos that she had paid no heed to the name of the place or the dark roads leading thither.
She almost swooned when she reached the Viewcrest Inn and found herself confronted by Skip Magruder. And so did Skip. He had not recognized the back of her head before, but her face smote him now. There was no escaping him. Her beauty was enriched by her costume and her mien was ripened by experience, but she was unforgetably herself. He was still a waiter, and the apron he had on and the napkin he clutched might have been the same one he had when she first saw him.
When he saw her now again he gasped the name he had known her by: “Anitar! Anitar Adair! Well, I'll be—”
Then his face darkened with the memory of disprized love. He recalled the cruel answer, “Nothing doing,” that she had indorsed on the stage-door letter he sent her long ago.
But the military genius that had guided Kedzie this morning inspired her still. She was not going to lose her victory for any flank attack from an ally in ambush. She sent out a flag of truce.
“Why, Skip!” she cried. “Dear old Skip! I want you to meet my father and mother. Mr. Magruder was terribly kind to me when I was alone and friendless in New York.”
Mrs. Thropp had outgrown waiters and even Adna regretted the reversion to Nimrim that led him to shake hands and say, “Please to meecher.”
The stupefied proprietor of the inn was begging for explanations of this unheard-of colloquy, but Skip flicked him away with his napkin as if he were a bluebottle fly and motioned Kedzie to a corner of the office. Kedzie explained, breathlessly:
“Skip, I'm in terrible trouble, and I'm so glad to find you here, for you never failed me. I was very rude to you when you sent me that note, but I—I was engaged to be married at the time and I didn't think it proper to see anybody. And—well, I'm getting my punishment now, for my husband is here with a strange woman—and—oh, it's terrible, Skip! My heart is broken, but you've got to help me. I know I can rely on you, can't I, dear old Skip?”
The girl was so efficient that she almost deserved her success. It cost her something, though, to beguile a waiter with intimate appeals that she might earn a title. But then in time of war no ally is to be scorned and the lowliest recruit is worth enlisting. A Christian can piously engage a Turk to help him whip another Christian.
When Kedzie pulled out the tremolo stop and looked up, big-eyed, and pouted at him, Skip was hers.
“Your husband, Anitar? Your husband here? Why, the low-life hound! I'll go up and kill him for you if you want me to.”
Kedzie explained that she didn't want to get her dear Skip into any trouble, but she did want his help. Skip found her a good boarding-place the first time he met her, and now she had to dupe him into securing her furnished rooms and board in a castle. She may have rather encouraged him to imagine that once she was free from Jim she would listen once more to Skip. But there is no evidence on that point and he must have felt a certain awe of her. His pretty duckling had become so gorgeous a swan.
Her parley with Skip had delayed her march up-stairs to the attack, but Jim and Charity could only wait in befuddled suspense, unwilling and afraid to attempt a flight.
Kedzie went up-stairs at last, backed by her father and mother and Skip and the chauffeur with the suit-case of Jim's clothes. Kedzie was dazed at the sight of Charity.
But there was no need of any oration.
After a little sniffing and nodding of the head she spoke:
“Well, I thought as much! Jim, you telephoned for some things of mine and of yours. Here they are. There's a can of gasolene down-stairs for you. Here's your suit-case, and the coat and hat for Mrs. Cheever. I presume you will go back in your own car.”
Jim nodded.
“Then we needn't keep you any longer. Mr. McNiven is your lawyer still, I suppose. I'll send my lawyer to him. Come along, mother—and father.”
She led her little cohort down-stairs and bade Skip a very cordialau revoir.
The Dyckman divorce farce might have been as politely performed asl'affaire Cheever—or even more so than that, since practice makes perfect. At least a temporary secrecy could have been secured with leisureliness by a residence in another State.
But Kedzie felt as Zada did, that she simply could not wait, though her reason was well to the opposite. Zada had been afraid that a child would arrive before the divorce, but Kedzie that a gentleman would depart.
Strathdene was straining at the anchor like one of his own biplanes with the wind nudging its wings. In Europe they were shooting down airships by the score nearly every day and Strathdene wanted to go back. “It's not fair to the Huns,” he said. “They haven't had a pot-shot at me for so long they'll forget I was ever over. And some of those men that were corporals when I made my Ace, are Aces now as well and they're crawling up on my score! I'll have to fly all the time to catch up.”
But he wanted to take with him his beauty. He was jealous of Uncle Sam and afraid to trust Kedzie to him. The more inconvenient she became to him the more determined he grew to overcome the obstacles to her possession.
He abominated the necessity of taking his bride through the side door of the court-house to the altar, but he would not give her up. It looked, however, as if he would have to. And then he received mysteriously an assignment to the inspection of flying-machines purchased in the American market. Kedzie told him that it was a Heaven-sent answer to her prayers, and he believed it.
But it was his poor mother's work; she had written to a friend in the British Embassy imploring him to keep her precious boy out of France as long as possible. Hecatombs of gallant young lords were being butchered and she had lost a son, two brothers, a nephew, and unnumbered friends. The whole nobility of Europe was as deep in mourning as all the other grades of prestige. She wanted a brief respite from terror. She did not know till later to what further risks she was exposing her boy.
Kedzie was grimly resolute about getting her freedom from Jim in order to transfer it to Strathdene. She planned to manage it quietly for the sake of her own future. But a sickening mess was made of it. For Kedzie fell into the hands of a too, too conscientious lawyer. It is impossible to be loyal in all directions, and young Mr. Anson Beattie was loyal first to his wife and children, whom he loved devotedly. They needed money and clients came slowly to him.
His wife had relatives in Newport and they chanced to be visiting there. The relatives were shopkeepers, to whom Pet Bettany owed much money. That was how Kedzie came to consult Mr. Beattie. Kedzie telephoned Pet the moment she got back from the Viewcrest Inn, and Pet told her of Beattie.
When Kedzie drifted into his ken with a word of introduction from Pet Bettany he hailed her as a Heaven-sent messenger. She brought him advertisement, and big fees on a platter.
The very name of Dyckman was incense and myrrh. Mr. Beattie smelled gold. When Kedzie poured out her story and explained that the famous Mrs. Charity Cheever was the wreckress of her home Mr. Beattie saw head-lines everywhere.
If the Dyckmans had been a humble couple he would have tried to reconcile them, perhaps, or he would have separated them with little noise. But it was noise he wanted. The longer and louder the trial the more free space Mr. Beattie would get.
“It Pays to Advertise” is a necessary motto for all professions. The lawyer is advertised by his hating enemies, Beattie said to himself, and to his ecstatic wife when he went to her room after Kedzie left. His wife would never have taken a divorce if divorces were distributed at every door like handbills. Mr. Beattie said to Mrs. Beattie:
“Soul o' my soul, I'm going to handle this case in such a way that it will stir up a smell from here to California. I'll get that little woman an alimony that will break all known records and I'll take a percentage of the gate receipts as they come in. I wouldn't trust my little client a foot away.”
“Don't trust her too close, either,” said his devoted spouse, who was just jealous enough to be remembered in time of stress.
Beattie was the sort of lawyer one reads about oftener than one meets, and he wanted to be read about. He had the almost necessary lawyer gift of beginning to hate the opposition as soon as he learned what it was. If Jim had engaged him he would have hated Kedzie with religious ardor. Kedzie engaged him; so he abominated Jim and everybody and everything associated with him from his name to his scarf-pin.
He warned Kedzie not to spend an hour under Jim Dyckman's roof, lest she seem to condone what she discovered. He advised her to disappear till Beattie was ready to strike.
That was the reason why there was no compromise, no concession, no politeness in the divorce. If collusion is vicious this case was certainly pure of it.
Jim was not permitted a quiet talk with Kedzie from the moment she found him at the Viewcrest Inn. Her arrival there plus her family had thrown him into a stupor. It was a situation for a genius to handle, since the honester a man is the more he is confused at being found in a situation that looks dishonest. Jim was never less a genius than then. Even Charity, who usually found a word when a word was needed, said not one. What could she say? Kedzie ignored her, accused her of nothing, and did not linger.
When Jim and Charity, left alone together again, looked at each other they were too disgusted to regret that they had not been as guilty as they looked. Life had the jaundice in their eyes.
But they had to get back to the world by way of material things. Jim had to change his evening clothes. He asked Charity to wait in the office below. He pointed to the motor-coat and hat that Kedzie had brought and tossed on a lounge.
Charity recoiled from wearing Kedzie's cast-off clothes or from disguising as Jim's wife, but her downcast eyes revealed her bare shoulders and arms and her delicate evening gown. They had been exquisitely appropriate to night and night lights, but they were ghastly in the day.
She put on Kedzie's mantle; it blistered her like the mantle Medea sent to her successor in her husband's love. She sat in the office and some of the guests passed through. She could see that they took her to be one of their sort, and shocks of red and white alternated through her skin.
When Jim was ready he came down with his evening clothes in the suit-case. The baggage was the final convincing touch. He picked up the gasolene-can and toted it that weary mile. One of the hotel servants offered to carry it, but Jim was in no mood for company. There are things that the wealthiest man does not want to have done for him.
They found the car studded with pools of water from the rain, and Charity shook out the cushions while Jim filled up the tank.
“Quite domestic,” said Charity, in the last dregs of bitterness.
Jim did not answer. He flung the can over into a field and hopped into the car. He regretted that he had no spurs to dig into its sides, no curb bit to jerk. He owed his destruction to that car. For want of gasolene, the car was lost; for want of the car, a reputation was lost.
He thought with frenzy as he drove. He had little imagination, but it did not require an expert dreamer to foresee dire possibilities ahead. He was so sorry for Charity that he could have wept. He wanted to enfold her in his arms and promise her security. He wanted to stand in front of her and take in his own breast all the arrows of scorn that might shower upon her.
But the nearest approach to protection in his power lay along the lines of appearing to be indifferent to her. He had not been told of Kedzie's infatuation for Strathdene and he had not suspected it.
Charity was tempted to refer to it, but she felt that it would be contemptibly petty at the moment. So Jim was permitted to hope that he could find Kedzie, throw himself on her mercy and implore her to believe in his innocence. It was a sickly hope, and his heart filled with gall and with hatred of Kedzie and all she had brought on him.
He reached Newport with a terrific speed, and left Charity at Mrs. Noxon's to make her own explanations. Mrs. Noxon had defended Charity against gossip once before, but to defend her against appearances was too much to ask.
“Well-behaved people,” she told Charity, “do not have appearances.”
She was so cold that Charity froze also, and set her maid to packing. Mrs. Noxon's frigidity was a terrifying example of what she was to expect. She returned to New York on the first train. Jim was on it, too.
He had sped home, expecting to find Kedzie. She was gone and none of the servants knew where. If he had found her in the ferocious humor he had arrived at he might have given her the sort of divorce popular in divorce-less countries, where they annul the wife instead of the marriage. He might have sent Kedzie to the realm where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage—which should save a heap of trouble.
Jim fancied that Kedzie must have taken the train to New York, since she spoke of sending her lawyer to McNiven. It did not occur to him that she could find a New York lawyer in Newport.
He met Charity, and not Kedzie, on the train. That made bad look worse. But it gave Jim and Charity an opportunity to face the calamity that was impending. Jim tried to reassure Charity that he would keep her from suffering any public harm. The mere thought of her liability to notoriety, the realization that her long life of decency and devotion were at the mercy of the whim of a woman like Kedzie, drove her frantic.
She begged Jim to leave her to her thoughts and he went away to the purgatory of his own. Reaching New York, he returned to Charity to offer his escort to her home. She broke out, petulantly:
“Don't take me any more places, Jim. I beg you!”
“Forgive me,” he mumbled, and relieved her of his compromising chivalry.
They went to their homes in separate taxicabs. Jim made haste to his apartment. Kedzie was not there and had not been heard from.
Late as it was, he set out on a telephone chase for McNiven and dragged him to a conference. It was midnight and Jim was haggard with excitement.
There are two people at least to whom a wise man tells the truth—his doctor and his lawyer. Neither of them has many illusions left, but both usually know fact when they get a chance to face it.
Jim had nothing to conceal from McNiven and his innocence transpired through all his bewilderment. He told just what had happened in its farcical-funeral details. McNiven did not smile. Jim finished with all his energy:
“Sandy, you know that Charity is the whitest woman on earth, a saint if ever there was a saint. She's the one that's got to be protected. Not a breath of her name must come out. If it takes the last cent I've got and dad's got I want you to buy off that wife of mine. You warned me against marrying her, and I wish to God I'd listened to you. I'm not blaming her for being suspicious, but I can't let her smash Charity. I'll protect Charity if I have to build a wall of solid gold around her.”
McNiven tried to quiet him. He saw no reason for alarm. “You don't have to urge me to protect Charity,” he said. “She's an angel as well as my client. All you need is a little sleep. Go to bed and don't worry. Remember, there never was a storm so big that it didn't blow over.”
“Yes, but what does it blow over before it blows over?” said Jim.
“You're talking in your sleep already. Good night,” said McNiven.