Part 6

Nevertheless, think it over as she would, she made nothing of it. When Preston returned from one of his clubs, several hours later, she was no nearer to a solution than she had at first been, and she told him so.

"I don't understand it," said Ethel. "I don't understand it at all."

Preston enjoyed his clubs so much that he rarely returned from them in his pleasantest mood.

"Then," he asked, "don't you think it might possibly be just as well for you to let it alone?"

This occurred on a Thursday. As the week progressed and passed and James Stainton did not reappear, Mrs. Newberry found it increasingly difficult to follow the advice that her husband had pointedly suggested. She assailed Muriel several times to no purpose. She wrote to Stainton, asking him to come to dinner, but he replied that he was too desperately engaged in some business that she surmised was vaguely connected with a French syndicate and his mine. Then, Muriel's silence unbroken, she made one or two tentative advances, merely inviting the confidence that she had theretofore demanded as her consanguineous right; but her niece's manner of meeting these advances merely served to simplify the task of wifely obedience.

When light was at last cast on the puzzle, it was Muriel's free will that vouchsafed it. On the Wednesday that fell thirteen days after Stainton's mysteriously terminated call, Muriel entered Ethel's boudoir--it was a pink boudoir--where Mrs. Newberry was attempting, at eleven o'clock in the morning, to dress in time for a two o'clock luncheon.

"Can you spare Marie?" asked Muriel. Marie was Mrs. Newberry's maid, just then fluttering about her mistress, who, her dressing advanced only beyond the ordeal of corsets, was seated, in a grandiose kimono, before mirrors.

"In two hours and a half perhaps I can," said Ethel. "Why?"

"Because I want to talk with you."

This was odd. It was so odd that Mrs. Newberry should have scented its import; only, it is difficult to scent the import of anything when one has supped late the night before, when the first "rat" has not been nested upon one's head, and when one has but an eighth part of a day in which to make ready for a luncheon.

"Really, Muriel," complained Ethel. "You do choose the most remarkable moments for conversation. It's only eleven o'clock! What on earth can you want to talk about at such an hour?"

Muriel quietly seated herself by the window.

"About Mr. Stainton," she said.

Mrs. Newberry started so violently that a shower of gilt hairpins clattered upon the dressing-table and floor.

"You may go, Marie," she gasped. She waited until the maid had shut the door. Then she turned her gaze full upon her niece. "What is it?" she cried.

"He wants to marry me."

Mrs. Newberry floundered to her feet and rushed upon Muriel. Her flowing sleeves flew back to her sturdy shoulders. She flung plump arms around Muriel's neck.

"My dear girl!" said she. She kissed the dear girl on both passive cheeks. Then she inquired: "You've had a letter?"

"No," said Muriel. "He asked me."

"But, my dear, he hasn't been here for nearly two weeks. It was--let me see--yes, it will be two weeks to-morrow evening."

"That was when he asked me, Aunty."

Mrs. Newberry's embrace relaxed. She looked hurt.

"And you never told me! I think that implies a lack of confidence--a lack of affection, Muriel."

"I don't know. I wanted to think it over first."

"Think it over! What was there to debate, I should like to know?"

"A good deal, it seemed to me; and anyhow, Aunty, I think this is the sort of thing a girl has to decide for herself--if she can."

"Where ever did you get such notions? A girl never _can_ decide it for herself."

Muriel's answering smile was rueful.

"_I_ couldn't, at any rate," she said, "and so, even if I'm late about it, I've come to you."

Mrs. Newberry was reassured. After all, the thing had happened; Muriel's future--so we fatuous moderns reason--was at last secured. According to the custom of her time and class, Ethel had always taken it for granted that a poor girl married to a rich man is as safe as a good girl gone to Heaven--and more certainly comfortable. She became radiant. It was necessary only that they make such decent speed as would prevent any other young woman from interfering.

"Well," she said, "I'm glad you _have_ come, because, since long engagements aren't fashionable any more, your uncle and I must naturally have all the warning possible--for your uncle will, of course, provide the wedding. I think it had better be next month--yes, next month and at St. Bartholomew's."

Muriel's cheek paled. She turned again to the window and looked out.

"I don't think you quite understand," she said. "I'm not sure----"

"Now, don't be silly," interrupted Mrs. Newberry. "I won't hear any foolish talk about a home wedding or a quiet wedding. It isn't the proper thing for a wedding to be quiet; it isn't natural; besides, you have been living here in your uncle's house, and you owe something to his position."

"That's not it." Muriel's back was still turned; her eyes were fixed on the cold rain that was falling.

"Well," asked Mrs. Newberry, in complete bewilderment, "then what _is_ it?"

"I am not sure that I love Mr. Stainton."

The plump Mrs. Newberry again rose. Her face was a pretty blank.

"Love?" she repeated, as if she had heard that word somewhere before but could not for the life of her recall where. "_Love_, did you say?"

"Yes," replied Muriel; "I don't know whether I love him."

"What next?" asked Ethel. "Love? You don't know whether you love him! The idea! You're too young to know anything about it, my child. Of course you love him. You're just too young to know it, that's all."

Muriel displayed a wistful face.

"I'm eighteen."

"A mere baby."

"Then I should think I was too young to marry."

"_Do_ you think so?"

"No, only----"

Mrs. Newberry waxed wise.

"As a matter of fact, Muriel, haven't you," she enquired, "often thought of marrying even when you were younger than you are now?"

"Oh, yes!"

"_Well_, then!" Mrs. Newberry in the past few weeks had acquired a few of her husband's mannerisms, together with some of his convictions.

But this convincing argument did not settle matters. Muriel again faced the window; she seemed to draw inspiration for her incomprehensible stubbornness from the prospect of dripping Madison Avenue.

"It's not so easy----" she began.

"Isn't he kind?" demanded Mrs. Newberry.

"Yes, he's kind."

"You certainly think him good-looking, child. In fact, _I_ should call him handsome."

"I think he is _almost_ handsome, Aunty."

"Of course he is. I have heard lots of women simply _rave_ about him. And he is in love with you? You can't deny that?"

"Did you know it, Aunty?"

"How could anyone help knowing it? He shows it all the time. He can't keep his eyes off you."

"Then, why didn't you tell me?"

"Because----Why, it was so evident that we took it for granted you knew."

"We?"

"Your uncle and I, yes."

"Oh! There doesn't seem to be any doubt in _his_ mind that he's in love with me."

"Exactly, Muriel; and he is rich--quite rich. Why, there are hundreds of girls in New York who would give their eyes to catch him. Hundreds of them."

"But he is----" Muriel hesitated.

"Yes?"

"He's not young, Aunty."

"What has that to do with it?"

"I don't know, but I should think it might have a good deal to do with it. Don't people say that the young love the young?"

"And marry them, you mean? Really, my dear, you have such romantic notions! In that case, what's to become of the old?"

"They're supposed to have married before they became old, I should think. Now, I am only eighteen. I don't know--I'm only speculating about it, and I like Mr. Stainton very much--but when you think of a man of his age marrying----"

Again Mrs. Newberry interrupted. She had her position to maintain: her position as Preston Newberry's wife.

"Muriel," she said, "I can guess what is in your mind, but I cannot guess how it got there. You shock me."

"But, Aunty----"

"That is enough. There are _some_ things that a young girl should not discuss."

Muriel put her hands to her burning cheeks.

"Oh, you don't understand!" she cried. "You don't understand at all. I don't know what you mean! But he's fifty." She almost sobbed. "I don't care what Uncle Preston says. I _know_ he is fifty!"

It was a trying moment for Mrs. Newberry, but she met it bravely. She considered Muriel. Then, in the glass, she considered her own image.

"Look at me," commanded Mrs. Newberry.

Her eyes still suffused with unshed tears, Muriel obeyed.

"_I_," said her aunt--"do _I_ look old?"

She did not look young, but Muriel loved her, and those whom a child loves seldom grow old.

"No," said Muriel, loyally.

"Well," confessed Ethel, "_I_ am fifty." She was fifty-two. It was a sacrifice, nobly offered, upon the altar of family affection. She saw nothing in the future for her niece if Stainton could not be made to suffice. "But," she added, "you must never tell anyone. All I want to explain to you is that fifty is nothing--absolutely nothing at all."

It is, however, the common fate of sacrifices made for family affection to go unrecognised by the family. Muriel, honest within the limits of her limited training, clear-sighted, was unconvinced.

"Anyhow," she decided, "the question isn't whether he is old or young, I suppose. I guess the only question is: Do I love him? I thought all last night perhaps you could answer that, but of course I was wrong. I see that now. I dare say no person can ever really answer such a question but the person that asks it. I was right in the first place: I have to find out for myself--and yet I don't seem able to find out for myself, either."

VII

FIRE AND TOW

Mrs. Newberry's arguments were unavailing. Her pleas failed and so did her eulogies of Stainton: both of Stainton the hero and Stainton the rich man. Her tears sufficed not. There was no course but to recall her luncheon engagement. Her incompetence in the matter sharpened her tongue.

They quarrelled. Muriel, in a tempest of sobbing anger, fled to her own room; Mrs. Newberry fled to the luncheon.

Upon her return Ethel found that Muriel had gone out. Preston was in his "study," studying the stock reports in the Wall Street edition of his evening paper, and to him she straightway unburdened herself.

"_What_ do you think of it?" She breathlessly enquired.

"I think you meddled," said her husband.

"But, Preston, the child came to me. I didn't go to her."

"If you didn't, it was no fault of yours. You've been trying to get at her for God knows how long. Let her be. For Heaven's sake, let her be, Ethel. If you do, she is sure to take him, because I have always carefully given her to understand that she may expect nothing from me. I have been conscientious about that. And she must know that we are doing her a good-sized favour this winter. But if you don't let her alone, she is bound to botch the whole affair."

He put aside his newspaper and prepared to go to that one of his clubs at which he could obtain the best cocktail. As he was about to leave the house, Muriel entered it. Preston smiled.

"Hello," he said. "Been for a walk?"

The girl was flushed and patently troubled.

"Yes, Uncle Preston," she said.

"Hum. Just going myself. How's the weather?"

"Lovely," murmured Muriel. She wanted to hurry to her room.

"What? Why, when I looked out a bit ago, I was sure it was raining."

"Oh, yes; I believe it is raining. I didn't notice."

Preston chuckled. He put out a thick thumb and forefinger and pinched her cheek.

"I've always heard that love was blind," he said, "but nowadays it seems to be water-proof, too. Look here, my dear: your aunt has been dropping a hint or two to me, and I congratulate you."

"On what?" asked Muriel, bristling into immediate rebellion.

Again Preston chuckled.

"Tut, tut!" he said: he always treated her as if she were the child that he had always maintained to his wife she was not. "You know well enough. He's a fine fellow and well-to-do. Even if we could afford to keep you on here indefinitely, which of course we can't, it would be a good job. Lucky girl!"

He went out after that and left his wife's niece free again to hide herself. But not entirely. Ethel, unable to resist her desire for finality, soon tapped at Muriel's door.

"Muriel!" she called.

For some time there was no answer, though Mrs. Newberry made sure that she heard sounds within the room.

"Muriel!"

"Yes. Who is there?"

"It's me--Aunt Ethel."

"Yes, Aunt Ethel?"

"Well, Muriel--are you all right?"

"Quite, thanks."

"Don't you want anything?"

"No."

"Nothing at _all_?"

"Nothing at all, thank you."

Ethel hesitated.

"But, Muriel----"

The girl apparently waited for her aunt to finish the sentence that Ethel had not completed.

"Muriel----"

"Yes?"

Ethel softly tried the door: as she had supposed, it was locked.

"O, Muriel, do open the door and let me in."

"Why?"

"Because, Muriel."

"But why? I'm--I'm dressing."

"But--surely you know why, Muriel. Why won't you confide in me?"

There was a long wait for the answer to this question, but the answer, when it came, was resolute enough:

"I've nothing to confide. Please go away now, Aunt Ethel, and leave me alone. Please do."

Ethel went. She returned, of course, from time to time, whenever she could think of a new excuse or a new suggestion; but she was always worsted.

Muriel did not descend to dinner that night until she was sure that Mr. Newberry, whose deterrent attitude she instinctively counted upon, was there with her aunt. She contrived to be left alone not once with Ethel. It was the habit of the members of the Newberry household to breakfast together only by chance, which meant that they generally ate separately. When Thursday's luncheon was announced, Muriel sent down word that she had a headache.

"_What_ do you do when a girl locks her door on you?" asked Ethel of her husband.

"They never lock their doors on me," said Preston.

"Do be serious. What in the world do you make of all this?"

"My dear," answered Newberry, "the only thing I am bothered about is what _you_ may already have made of it. I'm afraid you have made a mess."

"But, Preston----"

"There is nothing to be done now but to wait, my dear."

So it befell that when, exactly at nine o'clock that evening, Stainton's card was sent up to Miss Stannard, Miss Stannard's guardians, one of whom stayed long in the library with ears vainly intent, were as much at sea regarding their ward's decision as was Stainton himself.

Muriel's own emotional condition was no more enlightened. Like all young people, she had had her visions of romance, and, like the visions of most young people, hers had been uninstructed, misdirected, misapplied. All women, it has been said, begin life by having in their inmost heart a self-created Prince Charming, who proves the strongest rival that their destined husbands have to endure. Such a prince was as much Muriel's as he is other girls'! She had created him unknowingly from the books she had read, from the pictures she had seen, out of blue sky and sunshine and the soft first breezes of Spring: the stuff of dreams. But she was eighteen and no longer in school, and Stainton had given her a glimpse of the great happy thing that she accepted as life.

What lacked? Something. While she descended the stairs she counted his attributes in her aching brain. He was handsome, brave, well esteemed. If he was not young, he did not seem anything but young. What was youth, that it should be essential? What did it amount to if it were but the unit of measurement for a life--a mere figure of speech--something simply verbal? This man had, it appeared, the reality without the name. What was this quality worth if its virtue resided in its name and not in its substance? Why should she even ask these questions--and why, when she asked, could she find no answer?

She paused. It struck her suddenly that the fault might lie in her. Perhaps it was she that lacked. Perhaps--as a traveller may see an unfamiliar landscape by a lightning flash--she saw this now; the loss might be not in Stainton; it might be something that she had not yet acquired.

Therein, to be sure, was the clew to the muddle. Nearer than that lightning flash of the situation she did not come. Love, as we know it in our civilisation, is not an element: it is a composite. In this girl, descending to meet the man that wanted to marry her and even now ignorant of the answer she should give him, there lay the Greater Ignorance. Companionship, affection, kindly feeling--all these things and more--she had for him; but the omnipotent force that welds and dominates and forges these elements into one, unified, spiritual, intellectual, and bodily love, the law that begets this and nourishes it--this she did not as yet know, had never known.

The Newberry drawing-room was as it had been two weeks before. The crackling fire danced over its gilt-and-white prettiness, the heavy, ivory curtains, which folded behind her, shut out all the world.

Stainton rose from a seat beside the fire, much as if he had been there since last she saw him. The interval of a fortnight seemed as nothing. She noticed again how tall and strong and fine he seemed, how virile, how much the master, not only of his own fate but of himself. He came forward with outstretched hands.

"Have you thought things over?" he asked.

There was no manoeuvring now, no backing and filling. The time for pretence was passed.

"Yes," she said. "I have thought of nothing else, and yet--and yet----"

His brows contracted slightly, but he kept his steady hand upon the tight rein by which he was accustomed to drive himself.

"And yet you aren't sure?" he supplied. "You have not been able to make up your mind?"

She hung her head. On the edge of the hearth-rug she traced a stupid figure with the toe of her bead-embroidered slipper.

"I can't tell," she said, "I've tried. I've tried very hard----"

"To love me?"

"No." She wished to be honest; she determined upon being honest. She owed him that, even should it hurt him. "No," she said, "not to love you; for if I had to try to love you, it wouldn't be real love at all, would it? What I tried to find out was whether I do love you now."

It was on his lips to say that, as surely as trying to love would not create love, so, if love was, it need not be sought. But she raised her face when she ended, and, when the light fell upon that, he forgot all casuistry. Her slim figure just entering upon womanhood, her blue-black hair, her damp red lips and her great dark eyes: she was as he had seen her first, like an evening in the woods, he reflected: warm and dusky and bathed in the light of stars.

Quite suddenly and wholly without premeditation he came to her and seized her hot palms in his cool hands. For years he had mastered passion; now, at this sight of her after the two weeks' separation, passion mastered him. The rein had snapped.

"Muriel," he said, "I can make you love me. You don't know--there are things you don't know. I can make you love me. Do you hear that? Muriel? Answer! Do you understand? I will make you love me. I will!"

She looked up at his face. It was alight as she had never yet seen any man's. Then, before she had gathered her breath to give him an answer, she was seized by him. She was crushed to him; she was held tight in his strong arms. She was hurt, and, as she was hurt, their lips met.

The miracle--oh, she was sure now that it was the miracle--happened. Something new clutched at her throat. Something new, wonderfully, terrifyingly, deliciously new, gripped at her heart and set her whole body athrill and trembling. The blood pounded in her temples. She tried to look at him, but a violet mist covered her eyes and hid him.

"Kiss me!" she was whispering as his lips left hers. "Kiss me again. I know now. I love you!"

VIII

"THE WORLD-WITHOUT-END BARGAIN"

And so they were married. Mrs. Newberry had her way: they were married within the month and within the church.

Preston's troubles, meanwhile, were hard to bear, and were not borne in silence. By faith, as has been noted, he was a Presbyterian; but by reason of his social position it was incumbent to attend occasionally--so often, in fact, as he went to church at all--an establishment of the Protestant Episcopal persuasion. Yet it appeared, when he came to arrange for the wedding of his wife's niece, which was the first he had ever arranged for, that there were ecclesiastical distinctions about weddings concerning which he had never previously dreamed. There were certain churches where one was expected to be a regular Sunday attendant; but when it came to a wedding, these would not serve: a wedding, to be socially correct, must occur in one of two or three churches in which, apparently, nothing else ever occurred. They seemed to be set aside for the exclusive business of marrying, and they married only exclusive people. Through one's sexton one rented one of these as one rents the Berkeley Lyceum, save that, in the matter of the wedding church, its rector is thrown in for good measure; then, when one proposed to introduce one's friend Buggins, the composer, to play the wedding-marches, one was told that only the church's regular organist was permitted to play the church's superb organ, and that, if one really required music, the regular organist could be hired at so much--and "so much" was not so pleasantly indefinite as it sounded.

"I never before realised what my father-in-law went through for me," said Preston.

"Things are never so hard as you think they'll be," said his wife in an effort at comfort.

"Things are always worse," replied the uncomforted Newberry. "Thank the Lord, I'll never have to arrange for another marriage. I thought that was Heaven's business, anyhow: I thought marriages were made in heaven. I'd rather be the advance agent of a minstrel show."

Still, in some fashion or other--and Mrs. Newberry and the papers were satisfied that it was the very best fashion--the thing was accomplished. There was an immediate "Engagement Dinner" given by Ethel; there were other dinners given by Jim; there were luncheons given by friends of Muriel and the Newberrys; then, at last, there was Stainton's bachelor-supper to George Holt and the ushers-to-be, whom Holt had collected, held at Sherry's, whence everybody except the host departed in one of the four socially requisite stages of drunkenness, and so the climax, with the hired church, the hired parson, the frock coats, the staring eyes, the odour of flowers, the demure bridesmaids, and the hired organist playing Wagner and Mendelssohn and "The Voice That Breathed O'er Eden."