Chapter 14

"Come," he commanded, and they darted into the underbrush, he guiding her by her arm. A short dash among the trees and bushes and they were at the base of the bluff, were shielded by a shelf of rock.

"It'll be over soon," he assured her. "But you must stand close or you'll be drenched."

A clap of thunder deafened them as a flame and a force enswathed the sycamore tree a few yards away, blowing off its bark, scattering its branches, making it all in an instant a blackened and blasted wreck. Gladys gave a low scream of terror, fell against him, hid her face in his shoulder. She was trembling violently. He put his arm round her--if he had not supported her she would have fallen. She leaned against him, clinging to him, so that he felt the beat of her heart, the swell and fall of her bosom, felt the rush of her young blood through her veins, felt the thrill from her smooth, delicate, olive skin. And he, too, was trembling--shaken in all his nerves.

"Don't be afraid," he said--in his voice he unconsciously betrayed the impulse that was fighting for possession of him.

She drew herself closer to him with a long, tremulous sigh.

"I'm a coward," she murmured. "I'm shaking so that I can't stand." She tried to draw herself away--or did she only make pretense to him and to herself that she was trying?--then relaxed again into his arms.

The thunder cracked and crashed; the lightnings leaped in streaks and in sheets; the waters gushed from the torn clouds and obscured the light like a heavy veil. She looked up at him in the dimness--she, too, was drunk with the delirium of the storms raging without and within them. His brain swam giddily. The points of gold in her dark eyes were drawing him like so many powerful magnets. Their lips met and he caught her up in his arms. And for a moment all the fire of his intensely masculine nature, so long repressed, raged over her lips, her eyes, her hair, her cheeks, her chin.

A moment she lay, happy as a petrel, beaten by a tempest; a moment her thirsty heart drank in the ecstasy of the lightnings through her lips and skin and hair.

She opened her eyes to find out why there was a sudden calm. She saw him staring with set, white face through the rain-veil. His arms still held her, but where they had been like the clasp of life itself, they were now dead as the arms of a statue. A feeling of cold chilled her skin, trickled icily in and in. She released herself--he did not oppose her.

"It seems to me I'll never be able to look you--or myself--in the face again," he said at last.

"I didn't know it was in me to--to take advantage of a woman's helplessness."

"I wanted you to do what you did," she said simply.

He shook his head. "You are generous," he answered. "But I deserve nothing but your contempt."

"I wanted you to do it," she repeated. She was under the spell of her love and of his touch. She was clutching to save what she could, was desperately hoping it might not be so little as she feared. "I had the--the same impulse that you had." She looked at him timidly, with a pleading smile. "And please don't say you're sorry you did it, even if you feel so. You'll think me very bold--I know it isn't proper for young women to make such admissions. But--don't reproach yourself--please!"

If she could have looked into his mind as he stood there, crushed and degraded in his own eyes, she would have been a little consoled--for, in defiance of his self-scorn and self-hate, his nerves were tingling with the memory of that delirium, and his brain was throbbing with the surge of impulses long dormant, now imperious. But she was not even looking toward him--for, through her sense of shame, of wounded pride, her love was clamoring to her to cry out: "Take me in your arms again! I care not on what terms, only take me and hold me and kiss me."

The rain presently ceased as abruptly as it had begun and they returned under the dripping leaves to the highroad. She glanced anxiously at him as they walked toward the town, but he did not speak. She saw that if the silence was to be broken, she must break it.

"What can I say to convince you?" she asked, as if not he but she were the offender.

He did not answer.

"Won't you look at me, please?"

He looked, the color mounting in his cheeks, his eyes unsteady.

"Now, tell me you'll not make me suffer because you fancy you've wronged me. Isn't it ungallant of you to act this way after I've humiliated myself to confess I didn't mind?"

"Thank you," he said humbly, and looked away.

"You won't have it that I was in the least responsible?" She was teasing him now--he was plainly unaware of the meaning of her yielding. "He's so modest," she thought, and went on: "You won't permit me to flatter myself I was a temptation too strong even for your iron heart, Don Quixote?"

He flushed scarlet, and the suspicion, the realization of the truth set her eyes to flashing.

"It's before another woman he's abasing himself," she thought, "not before me. He isn't even thinking of me." When she spoke her tone was cold and sneering: "I hope she will forgive you. She certainly would if she could know what a paladin you are."

He winced, but did not answer. At the road up the bluffs she paused and there was an embarrassed silence. Then he poured out abrupt sentences:

"It was doubly base. I betrayed your friendly trust, I was false to her. Don't misunderstand--she's nothing to me. She's nothing to me, yet everything. I began really to live when I began to love her. And--every one must have a--a pole-star. And she's mine--the star I sail by, and always must. And--" He halted altogether, then blundered on: "I shall not forgive myself. But you--be merciful--forgive me--forget it!"

"I shall do neither," she replied curtly, jealousy and vanity stamping down the generous impulse that rose in response to his appeal. And she went up her road. A few yards and she paused, hoping to hear him coming after her. A few yards more and she sat down on a big boulder by the wayside. Until now all the wishes of her life had been more or less material, had been wishes which her wealth or the position her wealth gave had enabled her instantly to gratify. She buried her face in her arms and sobbed and rocked herself to and fro, in a cyclone of anger, and jealousy, and shame, and love, and despair.

"I hate him!" she exclaimed between clenched teeth. "I hate him, but--if he came and wanted me, oh, how I would LOVE him!"

Meanwhile Pauline was at her father's.

"He isn't down yet," said her mother. "You know, he doesn't finish dressing nowadays until he has read the papers and his mail. Then he walks in the garden."

"I'll go there," said Pauline. "Won't you bring him when he's ready?"

She never entered the garden that the ghosts of her childhood--how far, far it seemed!--did not join her, brushing against her, or rustling in tree and bush and leafy trellis. She paused at the end of the long arbor and sat on the rustic bench there. A few feet away was the bed of lilies-of-the-valley. Every spring of her childhood she used to run from the house on the first warm morning and hurry to it; and if her glance raised her hopes she would kneel upon the young grass and lower her head until her long golden hair touched the black ground; and the soil that had been hard and cold all winter would be cracked open this way and that; and from the cracks would issue an odor--the odor of life. And as she would peer into each crack in turn she would see, down, away down, the pale tip of what she knew to be an up-shooting slender shaft. And her heart would thrill with joy, for she knew that the shafts would presently rise green above the black earth, would unfold, would blossom, would bloom, would fling from tremulous bells a perfumed proclamation of the arrival of spring.

As she sat waiting, it seemed to her that through the black earth of her life she could see and feel the backward heralds of her spring--"after the long winter," she said to herself.

She glanced up--her father coming toward her. He was alone, was holding a folded letter uncertainly in his hand. He looked at her, his eyes full of pity and grief. "Pauline," he began, "has everything been--been well--of late between you and--your husband?"

She started. "No, father," she replied. Then, looking at him with clear directness: "I've not been showing you and mother the truth about John and me--not for a long time."

She saw that her answer relieved him. He hesitated, held out the letter.

"The best way is for you to read it," he said. It was a letter to him from Fanshaw. He was writing, he explained, because the discharge of a painful duty to himself would compel him "to give pain to your daughter whom I esteem highly," and he thought it only right "to prepare her and her family for what was coming, in order that they might be ready to take the action that would suggest itself." And he went on to relate his domestic troubles and his impending suit.

"Poor Leonora!" murmured Pauline, as she finished and sat thinking of all that Fanshaw's letter involved.

"Is it true, Polly?" asked her father.

She gave a great sigh of relief. How easy this letter had made all that she had been dreading! "Yes--it's true," she replied. "I've known about--about it ever since the time I came back from the East and didn't return."

The habitual pallor of her father's face changed to gray.

"I left him, father." She lifted her head, impatient of her stammering. A bright flush was in her face as she went on rapidly: "And I came to-day to tell you the whole story--to be truthful and honest again. I'm sick of deception and evasion. I can't stand it any longer--I mustn't. I--you don't know how I've shrunk from wounding mother and you. But I've no choice now. Father, I must be free--free!"

"And you shall be," replied her father. "He shall not wreck your life and Gardiner's."

Pauline stared at him. "Father!" she exclaimed.

He put his arm round her and drew her gently to him.

"I know the idea is repellent," he said, as if he were trying to persuade a child. "But it's right, Pauline. There are cases in which not to divorce would be a sin. I hope my daughter sees that this is one."

"I don't understand," she said confusedly. "I thought you and mother believed divorce was dreadful--no matter what might happen."

"We did, Pauline. But we--that is, I--had never had it brought home. A hint of this story was published just after you came last year. I thought it false, but it set me to thinking. 'If your daughter's husband had turned out to be as you once thought him, would it be right for her to live on with him? To live a lie, to pretend to keep her vows to love and honor him? Would it be right to condemn Gardiner to be poisoned by such a father?' And at last I saw the truth, and your mother agreed with me. We had been too narrow. We had been laying down our own notions as God's great justice."

Pauline drew away from her father so that she could look at him. And at last she saw into his heart. "If I had only known," she said, and sat numb and stunned.

"When you were coming home from college," her father went on, "your mother and I talked over what we should do. John had just confessed your secret marriage--"

"You knew that!"

"Yes, and we understood, Polly. You were so young--so headstrong--and you couldn't appreciate our reasons."

Pauline's brain was reeling.

"Your mother and I talked it over before you got home and thought it best to leave you entirely free to choose. But when we saw you overcome by joy--"

"Don't!" she interrupted, her voice a cry of pain. "I can't bear it! Don't!" Years of false self-sacrifice, of deceiving her parents and her child, of self-suppression and self-degradation, and this final cruelty to Gladys--all, all in vain, all a heaping of folly upon folly, of wrong upon wrong.

She rushed toward the house. She must fly somewhere--anywhere--to escape the thoughts that were picking with sharp beaks at her aching heart. Half-way up the walk she turned and fled to a refuge she would not have thought of half an hour before to her father's arms.

"Oh, father," she cried. "If I had only known you!"

Gladys, returning from her walk, went directly to Pauline's sitting-room.

"I'm off for New York and Europe to-morrow morning," she began abruptly, her voice hard, her expression bitter and reckless.

"Where can she have heard about Leonora?" thought Pauline. She said in a strained voice: "I had hoped you would stay here to look after the house."

"To look after the house? What do you mean?" asked Gladys. But she was too full of herself to be interested in the answer, and went on: "I want you to forget what I said to you. I've got over all that. I've come to my senses."

Pauline began a nervous turning of her rings.

Gladys gave a short, grim laugh. "I detest him," she went on. "We're very changeable, we women, aren't we? I went out of this house two hours ago loving him--to distraction. I came back hating him. And all that has happened in between is that I met him and he kissed me a few times and stabbed my pride a few times."

Pauline stopped turning her rings--she rose slowly, mechanically, looked straight at Gladys.

"That is not true," she said calmly.

Gladys laughed sardonically. "You don't know the cold and haughty Governor Scarborough. There's fire under the ice. I can feel the places on my face where it scorched. Can't you see them?"

Pauline gave her a look of disgust. "How like John Dumont's sister!" she thought. And she shut herself in her room and stayed there, pleading illness in excuse, until Gladys was gone.

XXIII.

A SEA SURPRISE.

On the third day from New York, Gladys was so far recovered from seasickness that she dragged herself to the deck. The water was fairly smooth, but a sticky, foggy rain was falling. A deck-steward put her steamer-chair in a sheltered corner. Her maid and a stewardess swathed her in capes and rugs; she closed her eyes and said: "Now leave me, please, and don't come near me till I send for you."

She slept an hour. When she awoke she felt better. Some one had drawn a chair beside hers and was seated there--a man, for she caught the faint odor of a pipe, though the wind was the other way. She turned her head. It was Langdon, whom she had not seen since she went below a few hours after Sandy Hook disappeared. Indeed, she had almost forgotten that he was on board and that her brother had asked him to look after her. He was staring at her in an absent-minded way, his wonted expression of satire and lazy good-humor fainter than usual. In fact, his face was almost serious.

"That pipe," she grumbled. "Please do put it away."

He tossed it into the sea. "Beg pardon," he said. "It was stupid of me. I was absorbed in--in my book."

"What's the name of it?"

He turned it to glance at the cover, but she went on: "No--don't tell me. I've no desire to know. I asked merely to confirm my suspicion."

"You're right," he said. "I wasn't reading. I was looking at you."

"That was impertinent. A man should not look at a woman when she doesn't intend him to look."

"Then I'd never look at all. I'm interested only in things not meant for my eyes. I might even read letters not addressed to me if I didn't know how dull letters are. No intelligent person ever says anything in a letter nowadays. They use the telegraph for ordinary correspondence, and telepathy for the other kind. But it was interesting--looking at you as you lay asleep."

"Was my mouth open?"

"A little."

"Am I yellow?"

"Very."

"Eyes red? Hair in strings? Lips blue?"

"All that," he said, "and skin somewhat mottled. But I was not so much interested in your beauty as I was in trying to determine whether you were well enough to stand two shocks."

"I need them," replied Gladys.

"One is rather unpleasant, the other--the reverse, in fact a happiness."

"The unpleasant first, please."

"Certainly," he replied. "Always the medicine first, then the candy." And he leaned back and closed his eyes and seemed to be settling himself for indefinite silence.

"Go on," she said impatiently. "What's the medicine? A death?"

"I said unpleasant, didn't I? When an enemy dies it's all joy. When a friend passes over to eternal bliss, why, being good Christians, we are not so faithless and selfish as to let the momentary separation distress us."

"But what is it? You're trying to gain time by all this beating about the bush. You ought to know me well enough to know you can speak straight out."

"Fanshaw's suing his wife for divorce--and he names Jack."

"Is that your news?" said Gladys, languidly. Suddenly she flung aside the robes and sat up.

"What's Pauline going to do? Can she--" Gladys paused.

"Yes, she can--if she wishes to."

"But--will she? Will she?" demanded Gladys.

"Jack doesn't know what she'll do," replied Langdon. "He's keeping quiet--the only sane course when that kind of storm breaks. He had hoped you'd be there to smooth her down, but he says when he opened the subject of your going back to Saint X you cut him off."

"Does she know?"

"Somebody must have told her the day you left. Don't you remember, she was taken ill suddenly?"

"Oh!" Gladys vividly recalled Pauline's strange look and manner. She could see her sister-in-law--the long, lithe form, the small, graceful head, with its thick, soft, waving hair, the oval face, the skin as fine as the petals at the heart of a rose, the arched brows and golden-brown eyes; that look, that air, as of buoyant life locked in the spell of an icy trance, mysterious, fascinating, sometimes so melancholy.

"I almost hope she'll do it, Mowbray," she said. "Jack doesn't deserve her. He's not a bit her sort. She ought to have married--"

"Some one who had her sort of ideals--some one like that big, handsome chap--the one you admired so frantically--Governor Scarborough. He was chock full of ideals. And he's making the sort of career she could sympathize with."

"Scarborough!" exclaimed Gladys, with some success at self-concealment. "I detest him! I detest 'careers'!"

"Good," said Langdon, his face serious, his eyes amused. "That opens the way for my other shock."

"Oh, the good news. What is it?"

"That I'd like it if you'd marry me."

Gladys glanced into his still amused eyes, then with a shrug sank back among her wraps. "A poor joke," she said.

"I should say that marriage was a stale joke rather than a poor one. Will you try it--with me? You might do worse."

"How did you have the courage to speak when I'm looking such a wreck?" she asked with mock gravity.

"But you ain't--you're looking better now. That first shock braced you up. Besides, this isn't romance. It's no high flight with all the longer drop and all the harder jolt at the landing. It's a plain, practical proposition."

Gladys slowly sat up and studied him curiously.

"Do you really mean it?" she asked. Each was leaning on an elbow, gazing gravely into the other's face.

"I'd never joke on such a dangerous subject as marriage. I'm far too timid for that. What do you say, Gladys?"

She had never seen him look serious before, and she was thinking that the expression became him.

"He knows how to make himself attractive to a woman when he cares to," she said to herself.

"I'd like a man that has lightness of mind. Serious people bore one so after a while." By "serious people" she meant one serious person whom she had admired particularly for his seriousness. But she was in another mood now, another atmosphere--the atmosphere she had breathed since she was thirteen, except in the brief period when her infatuation for Scarborough had swept her away from her world.

"No!" She shook her head with decision--and felt decided. But to his practised ear there was in her voice a hint that she might hear him further on the subject.

They lay back in their chairs, he watching the ragged, dirty, scurrying clouds, she watching him. After a while he said: "Where are you going when we reach the other side?"

"To join mother and auntie."

"And how long will you stay with them?"

"Not more than a week, I should say," she answered with a grimace.

"And then--where?"

She did not reply for some time. Studying her face, he saw an expression of lonesomeness gather and strengthen and deepen until she looked so forlorn that he felt as if he must take her in his arms. When she spoke it was to say dubiously: "Back to New York--to keep house for my brother--perhaps."

"And when his wife frees herself and he marries again--where will you go?"

Gladys lifted a fold of her cape and drew it about her as if she were cold. But he noted that it hid her face from him.

"You want--you need--a home? So do I," he went on tranquilly. "You are tired of wandering? So am I. You are bored with parade and parade--people? So am I. You wish freedom, not bondage, when you marry? I refuse to be bound, and I don't wish to bind any one. We have the same friends, the same tastes, have had pretty much the same experiences. You don't want to be married for your money. I'm not likely to be suspected of doing that sort of thing."

"Some one has said that rich men marry more often for money than poor men," interrupted Gladys. And then she colored as she recalled who had said it.

Langdon noted her color as he noted every point in any game he was playing; he shrewdly guessed its origin. "When Scarborough told you that," he replied calmly, "he told you a great truth. But please remember, I merely said I shouldn't be SUSPECTED of marrying you for money. I didn't say I wasn't guilty."

"Is your list of reasons complete?"

"Two more the clinchers. You are disappointed in love--so am I. You need consolation--so do I. When one can't have the best one takes the best one can get, if one is sensible. It has been known to turn out not so badly."

They once more lay back watching the clouds. An hour passed without either's speaking. The deck-steward brought them tea and biscuits which he declined and she accepted. She tried the big, hard, tasteless disk between her strong white teeth, then said with a sly smile: "You pried into my secret a few minutes ago. I'm going to pry into yours. Who was she?"

"As the lady would have none of me, there's no harm in confessing," replied Langdon, carelessly. "She was--and is--and--" he looked at her--"ever shall be, world without end--Gladys Dumont."

Gladys gasped and glanced at him with swift suspicion that he was jesting. He returned her glance in a calm, matter-of-fact way. She leaned back in her chair and they watched the slippery rail slide up and down against the background of chilly, rainy sea and sky.

"Are you asleep?" he asked after a long silence.

"No," she replied. "I was thinking."

"Of my--proposition?"

"Yes."

"Doesn't it grow on you?"

"Yes."

He shifted himself to a sitting position with much deliberateness. He put his hand in among her rugs and wraps until it touched hers. "It may turn out better than you anticipate," he said, a little sentiment in his eyes and smile, a little raillery in his voice.

"I doubt if it will," she answered, without looking at him directly. "For--I--anticipate a great deal."

XXIV.

DUMONT BETRAYS DUMONT.