Chapter 4

An hour later Scarborough, his ticket elected and the society adjourned, reached Mrs. Trent's porch. In its darkness he saw the glowing end of a cigarette. "That you, Pierson?" he asked in the tone of one who knows what the answer will be.

"Sit down for a few minutes," came the reply, in a strained voice.

He could not see even the outline of Pierson's face, but with those acute sensibilities which made life alternately a keen pleasure and a pain to him, he felt that his friend was struggling for self-control. He waited in silence.

At last Pierson began: "I owe you an apology. I've been thinking all sorts of things about you. I know they're unjust and--mean, which is worse. But, damn it, Scarborough, I HATE being beaten. And it doesn't make defeat any the easier because YOU did it."

He paused; but Scarborough did not speak.

"I'm going to be frank," Pierson went on with an effort. "I know you had a perfect right to do as you pleased, but--hang it all, old man--you might have warned me."

"But I didn't do as I pleased," said Scarborough. "And as for telling you--" He paused before he interrupted himself with: "But first I want to say that I don't like to give an account of myself to my friends. What does friendship mean if it forbids freedom? I didn't approve or condemn you because you belonged to a fraternity, and because you headed a clique that was destroying the Literary Society by making it a place for petty fraternity politics instead of a place to develop speakers, writers and debaters. Yet now you're bringing me to account because I didn't slavishly accept your ideas as my own. Do you think that's a sound basis for a friendship, Pierson?"

When Scarborough began Pierson was full of a grievance which he thought real and deep. He was proposing to forgive Scarborough, forgive him generously, but not without making him realize that it was an act of generosity. As Scarborough talked he was first irritated, then, and suddenly, convinced that he was himself in the wrong--in the wrong throughout.

"Don't say another word, Scarborough," he replied, impulsively laying his hand on the arm of his friend--how powerful it felt through the sleeve! "I've been spoiled by always having my own way and by people letting me rule them. You gave me my first lesson in defeat. And--I needed it badly. As for your not telling me, you'd have ruined your scheme if you had. Besides, looking back, I see that you did warn me. I know now what you meant by always jumping on the fraternities and the combinations."

"Thank you," said Scarborough, simply. "When I saw you leaving the society hall I feared I'd lost a friend. Instead, I've found what a friend I have." Then after a brief silence he continued: "This little incident up there to-night--this little revolution I took part in--has meant a good deal to me. It was the first chance I'd had to carry out the ideas I've thought over and thought over down there on the farm while I was working in the fields or lying in the hay, staring up at the sky. And I don't suppose in all the future I'll ever have a greater temptation to be false to myself than I had in the dread that's been haunting me--the dread of losing your friendship--and the friendship of--of--some others who might see it as I was afraid you would. There may be lessons in this incident for you, Fred. But the greatest lesson of all is the one you've taught me--NEVER to be afraid to go forward when the Finger points."

Pierson and Olivia walked to chapel together the next morning, and he told her the story of the defeat, putting himself in a worse light than he deserved. But Olivia, who never lost a chance to attack him for his shortcomings, now, to his amazement, burst out against Scarborough.

"It was contemptible," she said hotly. "It was treachery! It was a piece of cold-blooded ambition. He'd sacrifice anything, any one, to ambition. I shall never like him again."

Pierson was puzzled--being in love with her, he had been deceived by her pretense that she had a poor opinion of him; and he did not appreciate that her sense of justice was now clouded by resentment for his sake. At dinner, when the four were together, she attacked Scarborough. Though she did not confess it, he forced her to see that at least his motives were not those she had been attributing to him. When he and Pauline were alone--Olivia and Pierson had to hurry away to a lecture he said: "What do YOU think, Miss Gardiner? You--did you--do you--agree with your cousin?

"I?" Pauline dropped her eyes. "Oh, I----"

She hesitated so long that he said: "Go on--tell me just what you think. I'd rather know than suspect."

"I think you did right. But--I don't see how you had the courage to do it."

"That is, you think I did right--but the sort of right that's worse than wrong."

"No--no!" she protested, putting a good deal of feeling into her voice in the effort to reassure him. "I'd have been ashamed of you if you hadn't done it. And--oh, I despise weakness in a man most of all! And I like to think that if everybody in college had denounced you, you'd have gone straight on. And--you WOULD!"

Within a week after this they were calling each the other by their first names.

For the Christmas holidays she went with her mother from Battle Field direct to Chicago, to her father's sisters Mrs. Hayden--Colonel Gardiner had been called south on business. When she came back she and Scarborough took up their friendship where they had left it. They read the same books, had similar tastes, disagreed sympathetically, agreed with enthusiasm. She saw a great deal of several other men in her class, enough not to make her preference for him significant to the college--or to herself. They went for moonlight straw-rides, on moonlight and starlight skating and ice-boat parties, for long walks over the hills--all invariably with others, but they were often practically alone. He rapidly dropped his rural manners and mannerisms--Fred Pierson's tailor in Indianapolis made the most radical of the surface changes in him.

Late in February his cousin, the superintendent of the farm, telegraphed him to come home. He found his mother ill--plainly dying. And his father--Bladen Scarborough's boast had been that he never took a "dose of drugs" in his life, and for at least seventy of his seventy-nine years he had been "on the jump" daily from long before dawn until long after sundown. Now he was content to sit in his arm-chair and, with no more vigorous protest than a frown and a growl, to swallow the despised drugs.

Each day he made them carry him in his great chair into HER bedroom. And there he sat all day long, his shaggy brows down, his gaze rarely wandering from the little ridge her small body made in the high white bed; and in his stern eyes there was a look of stoic anguish. Each night, as they were carrying him to his own room, they took him near the bed; and he leaned forward, and the voice that in all their years had never been anything but gentle for her said: "Good night, Sallie." And the small form would move slightly, there would be a feeble turning of the head, a wan smile on the little old face, a soft "Good night, Bladen."

It was on Hampden's ninth day at home that the old man said "Good night, Sallie," and there was no answer--not even a stir. They did not offer to carry him in the next morning; nor did he turn his face from the wall. She died that day; he three days later--he had refused food and medicine; he had not shed a tear or made a sound.

Thus the journey side by side for fifty-one years was a journey no longer. They were asleep side by side on the hillside for ever.

Hampden stayed at home only one day after the funeral. He came back to Battle Field apparently unchanged. He was not in black, for Bladen Scarborough abhorred mourning as he abhorred all outward symbols of the things of the heart. But after a week he told Pauline about it; and as he talked she sobbed, though his voice did not break nor his eyes dim.

"He's like his father," she thought.

When Olivia believed that Dumont was safely forgotten she teased her--"Your adoring and adored Scarborough."

Pauline was amused by this. With his unfailing instinct, Scarborough had felt--and had never permitted himself to forget--that there was some sort of wall round her for him. It was in perfect good faith that she answered Olivia: "You don't understand him. He's a queer man--sometimes I wonder myself that he doesn't get just a little sentimental. I suppose I'd find him exasperating--if I weren't otherwise engaged."

Olivia tried not to show irritation at this reference to Dumont. "I think you're mistaken about which of you is queer," she said. "You are the one--not he."

"I?" Pauline laughed--she was thinking of her charm against any love but one man's, the wedding ring she always wore at her neck. "Why, I COULDN'T fall in love with HIM."

"The woman who gets him will do mighty well for herself--in every way," said Olivia.

"Indeed she will. But--I'd as soon think of falling in love with a tree or a mountain."

She liked her phrase; it seemed to her exactly to define her feeling for Scarborough. She liked it so well that she repeated it to herself reassuringly many times in the next few weeks.

VII.

PAULINE AWAKENS.

In the last week of March came a succession of warm rains. The leaves burst from their impatient hiding just within the cracks in the gray bark. And on Monday the unclouded sun was irradiating a pale green world from a pale blue sky. The four windows of Pauline and Olivia's sitting-room were up; a warm, scented wind was blowing this way and that the strays of Pauline's red-brown hair as she sat at the table, her eyes on a book, her thoughts on a letter--Dumont's first letter on landing in America. A knock, and she frowned slightly.

"Come!" she cried, her expression slowly veering toward welcome.

The door swung back and in came Scarborough. Not the awkward youth of last October, but still unable wholly to conceal how much at a disadvantage he felt before the woman he particularly wished to please.

"Yes--I'm ten minutes early," he said, apology in his tone for his instinct told him that he was interrupting, and he had too little vanity to see that the interruption was agreeable. "But I thought you'd be only reading a novel."

For answer she held up the book which lay before her--a solemn volume in light brown calf.

"Analytical geometry," he said; "and on the first day of the finest spring the world ever saw!" He was at the window, looking out longingly--sunshine, and soft air washed clean by the rains; the new-born leaves and buds; the pioneer birds and flowers. "Let's go for a walk. We can do the Vergil to-night."

"YOU--talking of neglecting WORK!" Her smile seemed to him to sparkle as much in the waves of her hair as in her even white teeth and gold-brown eyes. "So you're human, just like the rest of us."

"Human!" He glanced at her and instantly glanced away.

"Do leave that window," she begged. "We must get the Vergil now. I'm reading an essay at the society to-night--they've fined me twice for neglecting it. But if you stand there reminding me of what's going on outside I'll not be able to resist."

"How this would look from Indian Rock!"

She flung open a Vergil text-book with a relentless shake of the head. "I've got the place. Book three, line two forty-five--

"'Una in praecelsa consedit rupe Celaeno----'"

"It doesn't matter what that hideous old Harpy howled at the pious Aeneas," he grumbled. "Let's go out and watch the Great God Pan dedicate his brand-new temple."

"Do sit there!" She pointed a slim white forefinger at the chair at the opposite side of the table--the side nearer him. "I'll be generous and work the dictionary to-day." And she opened a fat, black, dull-looking book beside the Vergil.

"Where's the Johnnie?" he asked, reluctantly dropping into the chair.

She laid Dryden's translation of the Aeneid on his side of the table. They always read the poetical version before they began to translate for the class-room--Dryden was near enough to the original to give them its spirit, far enough to quiet their consciences. "Find the place yourself," said she. "I'm not going to do everything."

He opened the Dryden and languidly turned the pages. "'At length rebuff'd, they leave their mangled----'" he began.

"No--two or three lines farther down," she interrupted. "That was in the last lesson."

He pushed back the rebellious lock that insisted on falling down the middle of his forehead, plunged his elbows fiercely upon the table, put his fists against his temples, and began again:

"'High on a craggy cliff Celaeno sate And thus her dismal errand did relate--'

Have you got the place in the Latin?" he interrupted himself.

Fortunately he did not look up, for she was watching the waving boughs. "Yes," she replied, hastily returning to the book. "You do your part and I'll do mine."

He read a few lines in an absent-minded sing-song, then interrupted himself once more: "Did you ever smell anything like that breeze?"

"Never. 'Bellum etiam pro caede bovum'--go on--I'm listening--or trying to."

He read:

"'But know that ere your promised walls you build, My curse shall severely be fulfilled. Fierce famine is your lot--for this misdeed, Reduced to grind the plates on which you feed.'"

He glanced at her. She was leaning on her elbow, obviously weaving day-dreams round those boughs as they trembled with the ecstasy of spring.

"You are happy to-day?" he said.

"Yes--happier than I have been for a year." She smiled mysteriously. "I've had good news." She turned abruptly, looked him in the eyes with that frank, clear expression--his favorite among his memory-pictures of her had it. "There's one thing that worries me--it's never off my mind longer than a few minutes. And when I'm blue, as I usually am on rainy days, it makes me--horribly uncomfortable. I've often almost asked your advice about it."

"If you'd be sorry afterward that you told me," said he, "I hope you won't. But if I can help you, you know how glad I'd be."

"It's no use to tell Olivia," Pauline went on. "She's bitterly prejudiced. But ever since the first month I knew you, I felt that I could trust you, that you were a real friend. And you're so fair in judging people and things."

His eyes twinkled.

"I'm afraid I'd tilt the scales--just a little--where you were concerned."

"Oh, I want you to do that," she answered with a smile. "Last fall I did something--well, it was foolish, though I wouldn't admit that to any one else. I was carried away by an impulse. Not that I regret. In the only really important way, I wouldn't undo it if I could--I think." Those last two words came absently, as if she were debating the matter with herself.

"If it's done and can't be undone," he said cheerfully, "I don't see that advice is needed."

"But--you don't understand." She seemed to be casting about for words. "As I said, it was last fall--here. In Saint X there was a man--and he and I--we'd cared for each other ever since we were children. And then he went away to college. He did several things father didn't like. You know how older people are--they don't make allowances. And though father's the gentlest, best--at any rate, he turned against Jack, and--"

Scarborough abruptly went to the window and stood with his back to her.

After a pause Pauline said, in a rush, "And he came here last fall and we got married."

There was a long silence.

"It was DREADFUL, wasn't it?" she said in the tone of one who has just made a shocking discovery.

Scarborough did not answer.

"I never realized till this minute," she went on after a while. "Not that I'm sorry or that I don't--don't CARE--just as I always did. But somehow, telling it out loud to some one else has made me see it in a different light. It didn't seem like treachery to them--to father and mother--then. It hasn't seemed like a--a marriage REALLY marriage--until now."

Another long silence. Then she burst out appealingly: "Oh, I don't see how I'm ever going to tell them!"

Scarborough came back to his chair and seated himself. His face was curiously white. It was in an unnatural voice that he said: "How old is he?"

"Twenty-five," she replied, then instantly flared up, as if he had attacked Dumont: "But it wasn't his fault--not in the least. I knew what I was doing--and I wanted to do it. You mustn't get a false impression of him, Hampden. You'd admire and respect him. You--any one--would have done as he did in the same circumstances." She blushed slightly. "You and he are ever so much alike--even in looks. It was that that made me tell you, that made me like you as I have--and trust you."

Scarborough winced. Presently he began: "Yet you regret----"

"No--no!" she protested--too vehemently. "I do NOT regret marrying him. That was certain to be sooner or later. All I regret is that I did something that seems underhanded. Perhaps I'm really only sorry I didn't tell them as soon as I'd done it."

She waited until she saw he was not going to speak. "And now," she said, "I don't know HOW to tell them." Again she waited, but he did not speak, continued to look steadily out into the sky. "What do you think?" she asked nervously. "But I can see without your saying. Only I--wish you'd SAY it."

"No, I don't condemn you," he said slowly. "I know you. YOU couldn't possibly do anything underhanded. If you'd been where you'd have had to conceal it directly, face to face, from some one who had the right to know--you'd never have done it." He rested his arms on the table and looked straight at her. "I feel I must tell you what I think. And I feel, too, it wouldn't be fair and honest if I didn't let you see why you might not want to take my advice."

She returned his gaze inquiringly.

"I love you," he went on calmly. "I've known it ever since I missed you so at the Christmas holidays. I love you for what you are, and for what you're as certain to be as--as a rosebud is certain to be a full-blown rose. I love you as my father loved my mother. I shall love you always." His manner was calm, matter-of-fact; but there was in his musical, magical voice a certain quality which set her nerves and her blood suddenly to vibrating. She felt as if she were struggling in a great sea--the sea of his love for her--struggling to reach the safety of the shore.

"Oh--I WISH you hadn't told me!" she exclaimed.

"Suppose I hadn't; suppose you had taken my advice? No"--he shook his head slowly--"I couldn't do that, Pauline--not even to win you."

"I'm sorry I said anything to you about it."

"You needn't be. You haven't harmed yourself. And maybe I can help you."

"No--we won't talk of it," she said--she was pressing her hand on her bosom where she could feel her wedding ring. "It wouldn't be right, now. I don't wish your advice."

"But I must give it. I'm years and years older than you--many, many years more than the six between us. And----"

"I don't wish to hear."

"For his sake, for your own sake, Pauline, tell them! And they'll surely help you to wait till you're older before you do anything--irrevocable."

"But I care for him," she said--angrily, though it could not have been what he was saying so gently that angered her. "You forget that I care for him. It IS irrevocable now. And I'm glad it is!"

"You LIKE him. You don't LOVE him. And--he's not worthy of your love. I'm sure it isn't prejudice that makes me say it. If he were, he'd have waited----"

She was on her feet, her eyes blazing.

"I asked for advice, not a lecture. I DESPISE you! Attacking the man I love and behind his back! I wish to be alone."

He rose but met her look without flinching.

"You can send ME away," he said gently, "but you can't send away my words. And if they're true you'll feel them when you get over your anger. You'll do what you think right. But--be SURE, Pauline. Be SURE!" In his eyes there was a look--the secret altar with the never-to-be-extinguished flame upon it. "Be SURE!, Pauline. Be SURE."

Her anger fell; she sank, forlorn, into a chair. For both, the day had shriveled and shadowed. And as he turned and left the room the warmth and joy died from air and sky and earth; both of them felt the latent chill--it seemed not a reminiscence of winter past but the icy foreboding of winter closing in.

When Olivia came back that evening from shopping in Indianapolis she found her cousin packing.

"Is it something from home?" she asked, alarmed.

Pauline did not look up as she answered:

"No--but I'm going home--to stay--going in the morning. I've telegraphed them."

"To stay!"

"Yes--I was married to Jack--here--last fall."

"You--married! To JOHN DUMONT--you, only seventeen--oh, Pauline--" And Olivia gave way to tears for the first time since she was a baby.

Scarborough was neither at supper nor at breakfast--Pauline left without seeing him again.

VIII.

THE DECISION.

When the sign-board on a station platform said "5.2 miles to St. X," Pauline sank back in her chair in the parlor-car with blanched face. And almost immediately, so it seemed to her, Saint X came into view--home! She fancied she could see the very house as she looked down on the mass of green in which the town was embowered. The train slid into the station, slowed down--there were people waiting on the platform--her father! He was glancing from window to window, trying to catch a glimpse of her; and his expression of almost agonized eagerness made her heartsick. She had been away from him for nearly seven months--long enough to break the habit which makes it impossible for members of a family to know how they really look to each other. How gray and thin his beard seemed! What was the meaning of that gaunt look about his shoulders? What was the strange, terrifying shadow over him? "Why, he's OLD!" The tears welled into her eyes--"He's gliding away from me!" She remembered what she had to tell him and her knees almost refused to support her.

He was at the step as she sprang down. She flew into his arms. He held her away from him and scanned her face with anxious eyes.

"Is my little girl ill?" he asked. "The telegram made me uneasy."

"Oh, no!" she said with a reassuring hug. "Where's mother?"

"She--she's got a--a--surprise for you. We must hurry--she'll be impatient, though she's seen you since I have."

At the curbstone stood the familiar surrey, with Mordecai humped upon the front seat. "I don't see how the colonel ever knowed you," said he, as she shook hands with him. "I never seen the like for growin'."

"But YOU look just the same, Mordecai--you and the surrey and the horses. And how's Amanda?"

"Poorly," replied Mordecai--his invariable answer to inquiries about his wife. She patterned after the old school, which held that for a woman to confess to good health was for her to confess to lack of refinement, if not of delicacy.

"You think I've changed, father?" asked Pauline, when the horses were whirling them home. She was so busily greeting the familiar streets and houses and trees and faces that she hardly heard his reply.

"'I never seen the like for growin','" he quoted, his eyes shining with pride in her. He was a reticent man by nature as well as by training; he could not have SAID how beautiful, how wonderful he thought her, or how intensely he loved her. The most he could do to express himself to her was, a little shyly, to pat her hand--and to LOOK it into Mordecai's back.

She was about to snuggle up to him as a wave of delight at being home again swept over her; but her secret rushed from the background of her mind. "How could I have done it? How can I tell them?" Then, the serene and beautiful kindness of her father's face reassured her.