Part 11

The sensation of most runaway couples, after filling up a blank form, and having a marriage service gabbled over them by a shabby stranger in a frock-coat, is one of unmixed astonishment at the facility of the whole proceeding. A dog-license is no harder to obtain, and the formalities attending vaccination are even greater.

Phyllis emerged from the Reverend Josiah Lyell's with a ring on her finger, and a cardboard certificate on which the Almighty, angels, and forked lightning were depicted above her name and Adair's. The first discussion of their married life was what to do with this monstrosity. Phyllis was for tearing it up, but Adair, superstitiously afraid of bad luck, insisted stoutly on its being retained.

"I'll hide it at the bottom of my trunk," he said.

They returned to the carriage, which was awaiting them as composedly as though nothing in particular had happened in the ten-minute interval. Adair wished to take a drive before going back to the hotel, thinking that the air and repose would be soothing for their nerves,--but to his surprise Phyllis demurred.

"I've been married your way," she said, "now you must come and be married mine."

"Yours, Phyllis?"

"Yes, tell him to drive to a Catholic church."

He gave the order good-humoredly. "Aren't you satisfied?" he asked. "Do you want more angels and forked lightning?"

"You see, I've always been a sort of Catholic," she explained. "Not a good Catholic, but a poor little straggler, galloping on half a mile behind, like a baby sheep that's got left. I've never liked the confession part of it, but really, Cyril, there's a sort of whiff of Heaven about a Catholic church that I need occasionally. It's just as though you were awfully hungry, and went in to smell a beautiful dinner a long way off!"

"All right, Phyllis, if we are going to get married we might as well do it thoroughly," assented Adair. "If you think that beautiful dinner will help us any, let's go and smell it by all means."

As kind fate would have it, it was rather an attractive church, and better still it was altogether deserted. The autumn sunshine was streaming through stained-glass windows; a faint perfume of incense lingered in the air; the peace and solitude gave an added dignity to the altar, with its suffering pale Christ, its tall candles, its effulgent brasses gleaming in the rosy light. Phyllis made Adair kneel at her side, and holding his hand tightly in hers, prayed silently with downcast eyes, and the least quiver of a smile at the corner of her lips.

On their way out they stopped at the font. She crossed herself, touched her fingers to the water, and scattered some drops on Adair's face. "That's that you will always love me," she said, with captivating solemnity, "that's that you will always be true to me; and that's that--I may die first!"

Adair dabbled his own hand in the holy water, as though the act had a religious significance, "Oh, God," he said, looking up in all seriousness, "if there is a God--take care of this sweet wife of mine, and guard her from every harm; and if there isn't, I swear by this I am going to do it myself just as well as I know how!"

They kissed each other, and were about to go, when Phyllis noticed the poor-box. She slipped off her best ring, a little diamond such as girls are permitted to wear, and unhesitatingly dropped it in. Adair, caught by the picturesqueness of the offering, would have sacrificed his horseshoe pin had he not been prevented.

"No, that's too pretty," she cried jealously. "Haven't you something you don't like that God _would_?"

A little rummaging discovered a gold pencil-case which seemed to fulfill this demand--at least on Adair's side--and it forthwith followed the ring. Then they sought the open air.

"Now, at last I feel really married," said Phyllis gaily, as they climbed back into the carriage. "What a strange, dizzy, _safe_ sort of feeling it gives one. And just think I could hug you right now before the driver, and that old lady with the basket, and that little boy blowing his baby brother's nose--and nobody could say Boo!"

She alarmed Adair by pretending to carry the hugging into effect until he tried to push her away, and told her to behave. She replied with a delighted, bubbling outcry over her new freedom: "Oh, but I'm married now, and can do just what I like, and can have breakfast in bed with you every morning, and put my shoes out with yours to be blacked, and I'm Mrs. Adair, and have a wedding-ring, and a certificate with forked lightning on it!" She exultantly popped up her feet on the seat in front, showing a shocking amount of black silk stocking with a bravado that made him grab at her skirt to pull it down; and in the ensuing romp there was more silk stocking still, and so much happy laughter on her part, and scandalized protestation on his that the driver turned round, and they were all but disgraced.

The narrowness of the escape sobered her, and for the rest of the drive she was demureness itself. What a joy it was to recline with half-shut eyes, and let the air fan away all the troubled memories of the night before! Mind and body craved repose, and mind and body found it in the cradle-like movement of the carriage. Adair was very tired, too, and willing enough to share his pretty companion's mood. Deliciously conscious of each other, though more asleep than awake, they abandoned themselves to the fresh bright morning, and breathed in deep drafts of contentment.

On their return to the hotel, the carriage stopped and Tommy Merguelis jumped up on the step. His perennial grin, and withered, foolish face was not unclouded by a certain anxiety. He dropped a bunch of roses into Phyllis' lap, with an awkward compliment which got as far as she was a rose herself, and then ended midway with a terrified giggle.

"I'm awful sorry," he said, addressing Adair, "but you're wanted at the theater, Mr. Adair, and I've been chasing around after you for the last half-hour. They want you to rehearse right off with Miss Clarke, and coach her a bit in the business."

"Why, what's the matter with De Vere?" asked Adair, surprised.

A slight glaze seemed to spread itself over the grin.

"She won't be in the bill for a day or two," said Tommy. "She's been suddenly taken awful bad." He paused, seeking a decorous name for the attack in question, and finally veiled it in the obscurity of a foreign language: "A crisis de nerves," he added.

"Oh, tantrums?" said Adair in a plainer tongue. "What a confounded nuisance!"

"She kept yelling and yelling until we got the doctor," went on Tommy; "and then on top of that Miss Clarke had to get into a hair-pulling match with Miss Larkins--and so I think you had better hurry, Mr. Adair, if there's to be anything doing to-night."

"Great Lord, I think so, too!" cried the latter, to whom, like all stars, the evening performance was next to a religion. "You go on to the hotel," he went on, turning to Phyllis, "and make yourself as comfortable as you can." The vexation in his voice was even a better apology than the one in words. "I'm damned sorry," he said. "It's the most infernal shame. Forgive me, Phyllis, please do, and try not to mind."

Thus it was that she drove to the hotel alone, while Adair and Tommy strode off to quiet the tempest in the theater, and start a tedious and prolonged rehearsal with Miss de Vere's understudy.

Phyllis went to her room, and found one alleviation of its loneliness in examining that mysterious object, her wedding-ring. It was so strange, so unfamiliar, so charged with significance and finality. Just a trifling hoop of gold, and yet with what myriad meanings. Probably in days gone by, when of brass or iron it was riveted on the neck, little brides mirrored themselves in pools with a similar awe at their altered state, and a similar questioning of the unknown future.

For better or worse, for good or evil, her life was linked to Adair's beyond all recalling, and the emblem of their compact glittered on the hand she gazed at so long and earnestly.

But you can not hypnotize yourself for ever with a wedding-ring--even one not two hours old. There was another matter that called more insistently for her attention. Cyril had promised her two hundred and fifty dollars for her clothes, and it behooved her to get pen and ink, and begin making her calculations. This she did with much erasing, much crinkling of girlish brows--with a profound, wise-baby expression as though all the world were at stake. There was a delicious immodesty in spending Adair's money for such laced and ribboned femininities--nightgowns, stockings, chemises, and what she wrote down ambiguously as "those things," and colored as she wrote it. How thrilling it was, and how exquisitely shocking! Oh, dear, what nice ones they would have to be,--twenty-five dollars gone for six in the twinkling of an eye, for surely economy here would be a crime, men being notoriously fond of--

"Mrs. Adair?"

Her new name was so unfamiliar that she hesitated before answering: "Come in."

"A gentleman to see you, Mrs. Adair."

The door opened, and there on the threshold stood her father! His face was white, his eyes morose and sunken, his whole air so formidable that in the first shock of recognition Phyllis could do no more than stare at him in terror.

"May I enter?" he asked, in that deeper intonation of his which he never used except under some special stress. As he spoke he looked about sharply, and with a bristling hostility as though expecting to discover a second occupant of the room.

"Mr. Adair isn't here," she said, answering the silent question. "I am all alone, Papa."

She would have kissed him, but he brushed past her to a chair, and seated himself heavily, laying his silk hat and his gloves on the floor beside him. Thus stalwartly in possession of the chamber, he appeared more formidable than ever, and the deliberate gaze he bent on Phyllis was masterful and menacing.

"So you've gone and thrown away your life," he said at last. "Forgive me, my dear, if I am not able to congratulate you upon it."

"I married Mr. Adair this morning, if that's what you mean." She hardly knew how to say more without adding to her offense. Her father was bound to put her in the wrong whatever reply she made. A terrible hopelessness weighed her down, and crushed the unspoken appeal on her lips.

"Thrown away like that," he repeated, with a gesture. "You, who had everything; you, with beauty, position, money, brains--my God, the folly of it--the cruel, wicked, heartless folly of it!"

"Don't, Papa!" she pleaded. "It's done, and so what's the good of wounding me now?"

"Done!" he cried out bitterly. "That depends on what you mean by the word. I will call it done in six months when you will leave him for good, and he will name his price for a divorce. That's the way adventurers marry money nowadays. They enjoy the girl till they are tired of her, and then sell!"

Phyllis struggled to keep her composure under the affront. "You are very unjust," she returned in a low voice that trembled in spite of herself. "You are determined to think the worst of him, and make it impossible for us ever to be friends. But you are wrong, Papa. He's not an adventurer, nor anything like it. Surely I ought to know better than you, and if I have been willing to love him, and marry him--"

"Oh, I'm not going to argue with you about him," interrupted Mr. Ladd harshly. "You believe in him now, of course. One can't reason with lunatics, and I shan't try. I'll give you six months--perhaps even less--and then I want you to remember what I am saying to you now."

"That you were right?"--Her voice was scornful.--"Oh, Papa, this is unworthy of you."

"Phyllis," he retorted, "that's the last thing on earth I would ever say to you. If you should come back to me disillusioned, broken, utterly weary of the muddle you have made of it all, you will find everything unchanged between us and the whole matter as ignored as though it had never been. That's what you are to remember--that my heart and my purse will never be closed against you."

"Though both are dependent on my giving up my husband?"

"He will give you up, my dear, fast enough."

"How dare you say that, Papa--how dare you!" A mist of anger was in her eyes, and two spots of crimson glowed dangerously on her cheeks. Never in her life had she been more roused; up to that moment she had still hoped to save the day and win her father over, but now she perceived the irrevocable nature of what was being said. Yet outwardly, at least, she restrained herself, and hid within her quivering breast a tumult that seemed to rend her to pieces.

"If I seem to be misjudging Mr. Adair it is only because I know more about him that you do," continued Mr. Ladd in a tone not untinged with a grim satisfaction. Even as he spoke he drew out a thick packet, and unfolded it on his knee. It was a mass of typewriting, with here and there a notorial seal on paper of a different color, and an occasional newspaper cutting neatly pasted in the center of a little sea of comment. "Here we have him in black and white," he went on, "and frankly, Phyllis, he offers you a very poor promise of a happy married life."

"And you expect me on my wedding morning to sit down and read these things--these abominable slanders your detectives have scraped together?"

"Oh, no. But I demand to have Mr. Adair sit down and answer them."

"Would you believe him if he did?"

"Facts are facts. He can't deny them."

"And you called _me_ unreasonable? Oh, Papa!"

Mr. Ladd ignored the taunt.

"When he appreciates that his whole disreputable past is known to me," he went on, with the same inflexible composure, "he may condescend to consider--an arrangement."

"An arrangement?--What do you mean?"

"I have brought a blank check with me," he explained. "He can name anything--and get it. I'd rather pay more now than less later."

His brutality overwhelmed her. It took her a few seconds to understand the incredible baseness he imputed to Adair. In the light of this her father's previous insults paled to insignificance. She was too stunned to make any reply, and for a while could do nothing but look at him in speechless wonder. Then she rose, and rang the bell.

"The marriage could be annulled," said Mr. Ladd, oblivious of everything except his one preoccupation. "The next thing is to keep the newspapers quiet, and that I can do. We'll go abroad--"

The darky came running up with a pitcher of ice water. No one ever rang for anything else in the Clarendon Hotel. He entered, jingling the ice.

"Show this gentleman out," said Phyllis, "and I want you to remember I shall not be home to him again."

"Phyllis!"

The entreaty in his voice moved her not a bit, nor the outstretched hand, veined, wrinkled and shaking.

"It's conceivable I may forgive you for this, Papa," she exclaimed, "though God knows it will be hard. But if you offer that check to Cyril I shall hate you till the day I die!"

"Have it your own way then," he returned dully, and with a curious break in his voice. "Take your own wilful road, and come back to me when your heart's broken. I'll be waiting for you, Phyllis, and ready to forget and forgive."

She disdained to make any reply. The darky officiously gathered up the silk hat and gloves from the floor, and presented them to Mr. Ladd. The latter, with a last look at his daughter's unrelenting face, turned in silence, and passed out.

"The stairs are to the left, sah," said the darky.

*CHAPTER XVIII*

Whether disillusion was finally destined to arrive or not, there was certainly not a hint of it during those succeeding weeks. There was no happier little bride in America, than Phyllis Adair, and intimate acquaintance with that extraordinary creature, man, only redoubled her delight in him. The bigness, directness, simplicity, intolerance, and dog-like devotion of her husband were an unfailing joy to her. No little girl who had been given a coveted St. Bernard could have taken more anxious, eager, excited care of him. She would feed Adair with the daintiest morsels from her own plate; she would exert every faculty she possessed to amuse and distract him when he fell into one of his despondent moods; she would mock him with such pretty archness when he grew irritable over trifles. "Damn it all, where did that fool Williams put my patent leather shoes?"--"Damn it all, you will find them in the bottom of the wardrobe neatly ranged with the others," she would answer. No matter how ill his humor she always found the means to make him smile; her quick wit, or her slim, audacious body each exultantly willing to tease and bewitch him.

Of all human gifts surely that of loving has received the least general recognition. A genius for music, a genius for mathematics or natural history, or sculpture, or mechanics, is at once admitted and acclaimed. But what of a genius for loving, which of all is infinitely the rarest? The trouble is that every one is conceited enough to think that he (or she) is a wonder at it. But frankly, do we really indeed see so many love-geniuses about us? Are we not rather struck instead by an almost universal love-poverty? If the husband stays drearily at home every night of his life, and if the wife is entirely absorbed in the baby, are we not asked enthusiastically to applaud a happy home? This is the national ideal, and tens of thousands are yawning heroically through it. But where's love in any but half-pint sizes? Everybody insists it is there in barrelfuls, much as they insisted in the fairy tale in the case of the man with the invisible clothes.--We are not defending hubby when he gets tangled up with the blonde lady, but emotionally speaking (only _emotionally_, be it understood), it may be an upward step. If you have a ten per cent. capacity to love, it is hard to be fobbed off with a four per cent. partner.

Phyllis was one of the chosen few in whom the capacity to love was inordinate. Her one thought was to make herself indispensable to the man to whom she had given herself. Adair was the last thing in her head at night, the first at dawn. Hardly was there an act of hers in which his personality was not a contributing factor. Her insatiable ambition was to please and delight him, and her brain was ever busy to find fresh ways, and improve on the old. Her finesse, her humor, her ardent and tender imagination--all were enlisted to a single end. Passion she had in plenty, for she was of a voluptuous nature, and the blood coursed hotly in her veins--but she had more than that to give him, and was possessed of a thousand captivating arts to ensnare this love that was said to be so elusive, and bind it tight with a myriad silken threads.

It will be asked was Adair worthy of so supreme a devotion? Is it not enough to answer that he was not altogether unworthy? There was a lot of human clay in the creature, and while Phyllis was exerting all her blithe young ardor to keep the altar-fires aflame, he was content to look on lazily, and man-like, take many things for granted. Had she been no better, their love would have run the ordinary course, and perished fast enough on the rocks of habit and satiety. Adair's spiritual side was all but dormant. He was encased in materialism as stoutly as some of us in fat; whatever gropings he had toward higher things were all in the direction of the stage. Feelings he could not initiate himself he took here ready made, and showed almost a genius in their comprehension. He presented a paradox of one who could admirably "get into" any written character, and yet who was wholly unable to "get into" his own.

Phyllis knew much more what laid beneath than he. To her the yearning, troubled, inarticulate soul of the man appealed as pathetically as the sight of some great, ashamed, bearded fellow who had never been taught to read. In the finer sense Adair had never been taught anything. His instincts alone had saved him from being a clod. In his fight up from the bottom he had arrived a good deal splashed with mud; and Phyllis, figuratively speaking, rolled back her sleeves, and set herself to tubbing him.

He was extraordinarily submissive in this respect, extraordinarily grateful and responsive. He made no pretense of hiding his ignorance, but questioned her like a child, and often as artlessly. At thirty-four he was having the universe reconstructed for him, and the process filled him with astonishment. Phyllis read aloud to him from such unheard-of authors as Thackeray, Carlyle, Hardy, Stevenson, and Meredith until these strange names became quite familiar. She could read French, too, translating as she went, while he sat back, profoundly respectful and impressed, his humility tinged with the zest of ownership. Yes, her youth, her beauty, her intelligence, her love, all were his; and as he gazed at her through the haze of his cigar, the words often fell heedlessly on his ear as he felt the mantling of a divine contentment.

Yet he could be very masterful on some matters. Phyllis was not allowed to receive the advances of the company, or to associate with any of its members, a prohibition not a little difficult to obey in the course of their constant traveling together. But if Phyllis shrank from being rude, Adair suffered from no similar delicacy, and was brutally direct in making his wishes plain to his stage companions. It was not only that he feared Lydia de Vere, whose yellowish eyes were full of enmity, and whose powers for mischief he well knew; but in contrast to his dainty wife these theater-people somehow began to strike him as tarnished and common, and he was jealously reluctant to expose her to their familiarities. Intercourse with Phyllis was sharpening his critical faculty; his view-point was insensibly changing; there were even times when he realized his own deficiencies.--Tommy Merguelis was the one exception he made. The lanky young man, when weighed in the new scales, was found to be less wanting than the others. There was something sensitive and refined about Tommy. Ill-health, pins, and years of furniture-polish had been as cleansing fires. He was a humble person who would accept his humble inch and grin gratefully, and not reach out for an ell. Yes, Phyllis might be friends with Tommy.

With them on their travels from town to town went a punching-bag, which Adair inflated and set up as soon as their trunks were unpacked. Every morning, stripped to the waist, Phyllis had to double up her little fists, and start a-pummelling for ten furious minutes. There could be no begging off from this daily rite; it was one of the iron rules of married life; pleadings, caresses, protests all were in vain. An icy bath had to follow, and if she hesitated too long on the brink, or showed too mutinous a row of toes, Adair would jump up, and tumble her in as mercilessly as a boy with a puppy. At night, too, he was no less rigid in regard to her prayers. His own religion was very nebulous. He never prayed himself nor went to church; but apparently that was no reason why Phyllis should be similarly backward. It gave him a peculiar pleasure to see her kneeling beside the bed, her night dress flowing about her slender, girlish body, and her hair drawn back, and held by a circlet of red ribbon. He knew no prettier picture, nor was it without a tender and uplifting value. For it was his name that moved on her lips, and who would not have been proud to send so enchanting a little deputy to plead for one before the Throne of Grace? Then it was that he seemed to love her best; and though all unaware of it, he, too, was praying in the deeper, unspoken language of the heart.

"You've forgotten your prayers!"