Part 15

Lewis had little hope that this was even a possibility. But he had said his prayer—Neil’s prayer, rather—the only one Lewis had ever learned to pray. He was saying it now, as he drew more slowly into Meadowbrook’s environs. His nephews were expecting a romp with Lewis to-night before their supper. Then he would be changing into evening clothes at the Allens’, for Petra’s dinner, and would return there to sleep.

“Yes,” he assured himself, driving slowly and more slowly, “I shall lose her forever to-night—or gain the chance of beginning to win her.” He had decided to tell her that he had read her letter to Dick down at Northeast and how innocent Dick had been in letting him.

“Dick, you see,” Lewis would say to Petra, “simply thought he was fixing things up between you and me without making us wait for the last chapter! He thought in all honesty it was I, not Neil, you meant in that letter. Of course, I knew better.... But Petra, it isn’t broken hearts that make for ruin and unhappiness in lives. Not ultimately, anyway. It is broken faiths. Neil stayed away to-night—don’t you suppose—because of something dearer to him than mere happiness. Something more blessed than happiness.” That was part of what Lewis would say to her. And then, if they kissed—if she let him kiss her there to-night on the edge of the Paradise meadow—

Well! Lewis’ hope, though small, pierced his heart like a sword.

_Chapter Twenty_

The dinner was over—a medley of flowers and fruit, shining candles, extravagantly imaginative food (Clare was no gourmand but her cook was a prize), much banter and some conversation. The cake had crowned it all. It was a perfectly recognizable model, two feet high or so, of the building where Lewis had his offices, and Petra herself, done in violet-colored gumdrops, was represented on the roof, sitting on a typewriter and surrounded by twenty minute candelabras each holding five candles. It was obvious that Dick had conspired with the cook. Every one was enchanted, but Petra most of all. “What a child she is!” Lewis had thought, with a variety of pang he had never before experienced concerning this girl. “A baby, really!” A thousand candelabra of birthday candles might have gone to the shining of her eyes, and her cheeks were rosy. She clapped her hands like a child in a fairy tale ... at least, that is something children outside of fairy tales seem not to do, clap their hands when they are suddenly delighted.

But now they had left the dining room and come through the great hall to a small drawing-room at one side of the street door. Lewis and his hostess, at any rate, were there, sitting together on a sofa with ends curved like a lyre, facing the wide arched doorway into the hall, their backs to open French doors flooded with moonlight. Moonlight, dim lamplight, a fire burning on a white-tiled hearth, roses in silver vases—that was Clare’s little drawing-room to-night. Cynthia and Farwell had drifted through the room with their cigarettes and out the French door to the moonlit road. Farwell called back as they went, “This is delicious, Clare! Your road is like a silver river to-night. You and Doctor Pryne must come.”

But Clare by a glance had held Lewis where he was. She said to him in a low voice, “I’d rather watch Petra! Isn’t she too delightful to-night! This is the way I have dreamed her. If only all days were birthdays!”

Harry Allen had gravitated to the piano up on the dais at the side of the great hall, and now he was drumming out jazz to make your heart jump, while Petra and Dick danced. They did not confine themselves to one small space on the floor in the usual way, but circled the whole hall freely. At dinner Lewis had noticed how the relationship of these two had changed since he had first seen them together, that fateful Saturday in June. Then Dick had only been aware of Petra, it seemed, as an excrescence on Clare’s life. Now they were comrades. You saw it in the way they looked at each other, laughed at each other, teased each other. In fact, they counted with each other every minute. This was a development for which Lewis was totally unprepared; for Dick had kept his promise, and since the fiasco of his and Lewis’ holiday at Northeast Harbor had never so much as mentioned Petra the few times they had met. So Lewis had rather taken it for granted that Petra’s naïve and illusioned letter had destroyed any possibility of an honest relation between them. From what ground had the present happy intimacy evolved? Lewis could not guess. When the cake had been brought in and set on the cleared table in front of Petra and she had clapped her hands, Dick who was beside her had kissed her cheek. It was a brotherly caress, hearty and genuine. But Lewis’ heart had stood still. Was this to be the answer? Why not! How unconscionably unimaginative and stupid he had been!

Lewis and Clare were in a position to see the dancers during much of their way around the great hall. But Dick and Petra seemed not aware of the little drawing-room and their audience there. They might have been dancing out under the moon alone, so unconscious they appeared of anybody’s eyes or attention. Dick held Petra as if she were a delightful glass doll that might break. And Petra gave the impression of glass. Brittle. Lovely. Her birthday gown made Lewis think of spun glass, it was so stiff and fragile. Even her fantastically high-heeled slippers seemed glassy. And her forehead, leaning against Dick’s bowed-down forehead in the latest absurd mode of the dance, added the last aspect of brittle fragility to what they were doing.

“Petra and Dick are great friends now,” Clare said suddenly. “You can imagine, Doctor Pryne, how that gratifies me.”

“Yes?” he said. “Yes. It’s very nice.” Lewis did not mind the idiotic sound of his own words. Clare simply did not count enough for him to listen to her. She was less than nothing to his consciousness, with Petra out there in Dick Wilder’s arms, turning on fantastic spun-glass heels to Harry’s intrepid, persistent, absolutely compelling jazz.

Clare was all too aware of Lewis’ indifference. Nothing to-night had gone quite as she had planned it. If she were honest with herself, she would have known that the imperfection of the way the birthday party was going really consisted in its perfection. The object of the party, Petra, had somehow, strangely, unbelievably, taken the center of the stage and held it. Even for her father she had held it. Several times, when Clare had said something directly to Lowell down the table, he had been slow to turn his eyes from his daughter. And once he had not turned them at all—merely answered his wife absently, while he continued to smile at some silly byplay between Dick and Petra. As for Doctor Lewis Pryne—who sat at her right during dinner—his manners were impeccable but his attention, she had known perfectly well, was for Petra. Even when he was not looking at the girl—and to be fair, he scarcely looked at her at all—he heard every silly, childish thing she said, every laugh,—heard them through the things Clare was saying to him. This had never happened to Clare before. To sit at her own table and have all the attention sweep over her and away from her toward another. This was something she had never imagined or planned! It filled her with a sort of wild unbelief in its reality. It was dreamlike. Almost nightmarish.

She said now to Lewis, “Aren’t they precious. Sweet! And everything before them! Petra seems to have had enough of young Neil, or he of her. Anyway, he seldom comes here now. But it was none of my doing. I was ready to stand back of him, in spite of my cherished hope that Dick might find his happiness in Petra. Dick told you of that hope, at Northeast. So you know how I have planned and dreamed for both those children, Petra and Dick. We—you and I, Doctor, between us,—seem to have succeeded in giving Petra her chance at life. Your job, anyway, has given her self-respect, self-confidence. And I—well, Doctor Pryne, you know because you are wise—pray Dick never knows—it has not been too easy for me to give her Dick. For one thing, honestly, I am not sure she is big enough for him. I tremble at my daring in taking her ultimate development so for granted.—Tell me—I need you to tell me, Doctor—say that in your judgment I have not been wrong. If I thought what I have done wasn’t to mean Dick’s happiness,—well, I should blame myself eternally. If in trying to mend his life I have complicated it—that is a terrible thought. For you know—he told you—how he feels about me. Through no fault of mine. I saw it happening and I warned him. But I thought if only he could begin to care for Petra a little, in the end—in the end—well—he might come to care for me less. He did tell you?”

Lewis sighed. Little he cared whether she heard the sigh. And she did hear it. He said, “If you were actually giving Dick to Petra so that he might get over his young, romantic infatuation for you, it would, of course, be calamitous, Mrs. Farwell. Calamitous for them both. Ghastly. But that won’t be the way of it. If they do marry, it will be because they have fallen healthily in love. You—and I—we are out of it. Clean out of it. Nothing to worry us.”

“You think Dick no longer cares for me, Doctor Pryne?” Her voice was sharper than she meant it to be.

Lewis did not reply. His hostess or not, she was abominable. He watched the dancers.

Clare said, after a minute, “I see what you think! If only you were right! How happy that would make me, Doctor! But life isn’t like that. Life makes us suffer. What I am so tortured by now is the fear that in my blundering I may not only have failed to help Dick, but I may have involved Petra in something amounting almost to tragedy for her. If she cares for him, as she seems to lately—if she has given up Neil for Dick, and Dick fails her—all our hearts may break in the end. But mine the most. For I am the cause of the muddle. I have wanted only the best for them both. For us all. And what have I really done! I begin to fear that Dick—no matter how hard he tries—will never be satisfied with Petra. Knowing Dick, I ought to have known that.—But I wanted his happiness so.”

She was crying. Unashamedly. But they were angry, baffled tears and Lewis knew it. The unkind part was that Clare knew he knew it. But she would show him. She would give him a demonstration of how he was wrong, how absolutely wrong he was. She would show him that Petra had no possible chance of being her, Clare Farwell’s, rival! After long weeks of fearing it, to-night Clare was faced with the fact that this Doctor Lewis Pryne was not to increase her roll of wonderful friendships. But one slight gratification she would yet wrest from the humiliating situation: the man might himself distrust, even dislike her; but he should see that Dick Wilder was still her slave.

She got up and went to the door: stood by it, one bare, rather thin arm reached up along the jamb, watching the dancers. Lewis stayed where he was and smoked his interminable cigarettes. He was glad his hostess had left him, but concerned for the direction her steps had taken.

This time, as Petra and Dick neared the arch of the drawing-room doorway, they could not fail to know that they were the object of some one’s attention. Dick wavered, let Petra go from his arms, seemed to wake from a fragile dream.

“Want to dance, Clare?” he said.

She shook her head.

“No. But Doctor Pryne is tired of talking to just me. Come on in and play with us.”

Lewis got up and stood by the fire. Petra came and stood irresolutely near him, at a loss and waiting for Clare to lead the “play,” whatever it was to be. But Clare wandered toward the French doors and stood, her back half turned, looking out onto the moonlight road. No one said anything. Lewis had no intention of “playing.” He was swearing angry. Clare turned her head after a minute’s silence, during which the three of them—Lewis, Petra, Dick—had stayed watching her, turned her head and looked at Dick over her shoulder. Then she stepped out into the moonlight.

Harry, oblivious that his dancers no longer existed, that the frail dream had broken, went on pouring out jazz. Dick had followed Clare, of course. He went as naturally and with as little fuss as if he were her shadow. Lewis and Petra were left, silent, by the fire.

Neither of them had a thing to say. The clock ticked,—an elegant little glass clock with glass flowers for dials, on the mantel near them. Then they heard Cynthia’s voice out in the moonlight. “You’ll need a scarf, Clare dear. There’s an autumn tang.”

“Oh, no. The moonlight’s warm! We’ll be right back. Get out the cards, Lowell, and since your heart is set on it, we’ll have some poker.”

But before Farwell and Cynthia came in through the French doors, Lewis had said quickly to Petra, “My darling, you mustn’t mind. Dick’s such a fool he’s not worth your little finger.”

That brought Petra’s face around to Lewis’. She took hold of the high carved back of a chair between them. Took hold hard. Eyes, lips,—suddenly they had become the attentive eyes of her childhood, looking outward onto a wonder-filled world. The unsullen lips of her childhood sweetly parted with expectant breath. For just that instant it might have been Petra back in the Cambridge apartment three years ago.

But unfortunately Lewis was totally unaware that “my darling” had come from his lips at all. He had no cue to the transformation. And then Cynthia and Farwell joined them and Farwell was getting out the cards. He sent Petra for a table. But as she started to obey, she was intercepted by Elise in the doorway. Petra was wanted on the telephone.

“Who is it?” Farwell called after his daughter. “It can’t be important. Why do you bother?”

The maid answered, not Petra. “He didn’t give his name, sir. But he said it _was_ very important.”

“Well, Elise, don’t interrupt us again to-night with telephone messages or anything else,” Farwell commanded. And then to Cynthia and Lewis, “Telephones are the devil! Damned intrusions on decent privacy! Clare agrees with me. We’re thinking of having ’em taken out. As it is, it’s a private number, of course, but Petra has given it to several of her friends. Only natural, I suppose. But I detest it.”

Petra was back almost before her father was done grumbling. She came only to the door, however, and said, “I’m terribly sorry, Father, but I’ve got a headache. Elise is bringing the table. I couldn’t possibly play. Tell Clare when they come in, will you? I am going to bed.”

It would have been absurdly impossible to accept illness as an explanation of Petra’s leaving her own birthday party so suddenly, if her story were not so borne out by her look. She had lost all the unusual high color of the earlier part of the evening and become extraordinarily white and peaked. Cynthia saw it as plainly as her doctor brother. She cried, “Petra, dear child! You must let me come with you. You do look really ill. And at your own party! It’s a shame!”

“No, don’t come, please. I’ll be perfectly all right. I just want to be alone. Will you tell Clare, please, not to come in, afterwards, to-night? I may be asleep and I’d rather she didn’t. Good night, Doctor Pryne. Good night, Mrs. Allen, and Father. I’m so sorry....”

When Clare and Dick drifted in a few minutes later, it was Cynthia who did Petra’s explaining. But by then Harry had waked to the fact that nobody was taking advantage of his jazz and had come to the drawing-room.

“That’s funny!” he said, breaking into his wife’s account of Petra’s sudden desertion. “Petra didn’t go to bed, you know. She went out of the door. I saw her. That’s why I stopped playing. I thought you and Petra were dancing, Dick. Then I looked up and saw Petra going alone out the front door in a tearing hurry.”

“Did she have a wrap on?” Cynthia asked, concerned.

“No. Just her pretty party frock.”

“She’s back now then,” Clare said, “and in her bed. It’s really cold.” But she looked at Lewis, her eyes distraught. Had the woman any compunction for what she had done? If not, it was superb acting. She was a Duse, Lewis thought, but with her genius devoted to personal, secret dramas.

“Anyway, I’d better go up and see how she is,” Clare murmured. “She doesn’t have headaches like this, you know. Not suddenly. She must have been—disturbed about something. Put out. I’ll go up. I think she’ll come back.”

“No, don’t.” That was Lewis. He did not care how sharply he spoke. “The child really looked ill. _And she particularly asked that you shouldn’t go to her._”

Clare’s eyes grew wide,—darkened. She was superb! “Really? Well—” And then to her husband she said, with a shrug. “And I wanted her party to be a success!”

“Well, it was, my dear. It still is. And Petra’ll be all right in the morning. She doesn’t care much for poker, anyway. Let’s start playing. It’s going on eleven.”

But Lewis was destined to blame himself, before many hours had passed, for dissuading Clare from going up to see about Petra. Afterwards, he never understood why he had sat there playing poker until midnight, after what Harry had said of Petra’s going out of the door and not up to bed. He had been stupid to the point of imbecility. But the reason was that Petra’s transformation when he told her Dick wasn’t worth her little finger, while she stood holding the back of that chair, had filled his mind so full of a simply blinding hope that there was no room for shadows—hardly for thought itself! He had accepted her story quite simply, when she returned from the telephone: she had a headache. He knew, too, of course, that she was furious with Clare. Any girl would be, under the circumstances. But for Lewis himself she had had that look.

It was hard for Lewis to have to wait until morning to see Petra again. That was all her going to bed in the middle of the party had meant to him—that he must wait now until morning. He was not to tell her his love by moonlight in the Paradise meadow, but to-morrow, in daylight, driving her in to Boston. He had got ahead of Dick in this, and it had been agreed he should come to Green Doors from the Allens’ a little before eight.

He won steadily at the game they were playing, but smiled now and then his lighted smile that had nothing to do with material, mundane winnings.

_Chapter Twenty-One_

Cynthia, bless her heart, came down for an early breakfast with her brother.

“If Petra’s not over her headache, what will you do? Make her stay home?” she asked.

“I think she’ll be over it. Miss Frazier’s away on vacation, and I need Petra more than ordinary these days.”

“You seem a trifle brutal, darling. Don’t you believe the girl had a headache? I do. She looked terrible. I know Clare didn’t believe it, but then she hadn’t seen her. I heard Clare telling Lowell it was temper. I thought that was rather horrid of Clare, I must say. And now you are almost as heartless.”

“Cynthia Pryne Allen! Do I hear criticism of Clare? I’d better take your temperature. You look all right but I am afraid you must be delirious!”

Cynthia leaned back in her chair. She had finished her grapefruit and black coffee. That was all she allowed herself for breakfast, having no ambition to compete with her Harry in avoirdupois.

“No, I’m not criticizing Clare. Not exactly. But lately—well, lately I’ve sort of come to understand Petra a little better. I feel as if I have, anyway. I don’t think things are so frightfully easy for her at Green Doors. Not that Clare means to be unkind. Oh, hardly! But their temperaments don’t jibe, that’s all. Clare can’t take it in, that any one can be so simple as Petra is. That’s the trouble, I think. She thinks Petra’s simplicity is always covering some design. But Petra hasn’t any design. She’s just a healthy, nice, rather sweet girl. She seems sweet to me, anyway. Just these last few weeks I’ve grown fond of her. You don’t have to wonder where you are with her, ever. Why, I told Clare just last night that if I had a daughter I’d adore her to be a second Petra. She’d be so _comfortable_ to live with.”

“Yes? And what did Clare reply, if anything?”

“That made me rather cross, Lewis. She said that I didn’t know Petra. She said she was ‘deep.’”

“Did she mean it as insult or compliment?”

“Dear Lewis! When one woman calls another deep!—It has looked to me lately—nights at the Country Club, when they were all there together, the Farwells and Dick and Neil (that simply grand McCloud person, you know)—that Clare was almost jealous of Petra. Harry’s got an idea that that’s why Neil doesn’t come to Green Doors any more. I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s seeing Petra secretly, somewhere else. I think Clare suspects it too. She’s almost insufferable, anyway, the way she questions Petra as to where she has been and what she has been doing. And she doesn’t mind who’s there, listening. It makes one very uncomfortable. It’s hateful for Petra.”

“Yes. One feels that,” Lewis agreed. “But it isn’t worth Petra’s bothering about, or yours, really. Clare is—incorrigible. All the same, she must have some nice qualities, I suppose, or she couldn’t plan gardens so astutely, and care about the books she does care about, and music and all. She does honestly care for those things. That’s not sham. One can’t sham that. Do you know what I think, Cynthia? I think that people like Clare are so awful simply because they are so close to being really fine. If Clare were just any silly woman, ‘out for the men,’ you’d laugh at her and find her, possibly, rather touchingly human. You might even like her. But it’s precisely because she isn’t a silly, superficial creature that the cruelty and ugliness in her seems such wretched cruelty, such wretched ugliness. She is an exquisite person—has exquisite perceptions, anyway. There’s only that one unpleasant spot, her vanity in the admiration she excites in every one around her. If she were only sensual or selfish (openly, healthily selfish, I mean)—if she had any mean qualities at all, like the rest of us—she’d be forgivable. But it is the under-bogging of all this highly emphasized spirituality with endless quicksands of vanity that gives a fellow the jitters—unless he’s sucked under, like Dick, and suffocated in it. It is obvious that Clare deliberately took Petra on as handicap to add to the zest of a game that was becoming almost too easy to be exciting any longer. But now that the handicap begins really to weigh—as it did last night—she’s lost her poise—and her pose. Last night Clare was openly vicious. One could sympathize—just possibly—with her wanting to vie with Petra for Dick’s attention. But when it is in enchanting and holding Petra’s own father she uses the girl as her foil, I must say I find it revolting. That’s vanity gone rotten. It’s better, though, she should show her hand. It won’t do Farwell any harm to see it. He had it coming to him. I didn’t mind seeing him squirm last night. It’s for Petra I mind.”