Part 18

"I got a letter from him three days ago. He asked me to take another quarter interest in his work--said he needed the money, as he found he'd been using more of his own in it than he could afford with justice to his family----"

"Oh!" cried Courtney sharply.

"What is it?" asked Basil.

She was looking straight ahead. "Nothing--nothing. Go on." And she started to walk again.

"Your cry sounded like pain."

"Did it? Go on."

"I assumed you had at last succeeded in making the chance for me to come back. So, I telegraphed I'd accept, provided he'd let me work with him again--and that I'd be on at once to talk things over. I took the first train--and here I am."

"Yes, here. That's another mystery to explain."

"Nothing simpler. The station man at Wenona told me you were visiting your father. I jumped at the chance. I can say I thought you all were here. Anything more?"

"I saw the announcement of your engagement."

"It's broken. I couldn't marry her--couldn't have done it in any circumstances. So, I gave her what she was losing by our not marrying. And I'm free. You want me to stay?"

He spoke indifferently about the money he had given up, and he evidently felt indifferent. She would have been hurt had he acted otherwise. At the same time it was a measure of his generosity and of his love, a sordid but certain measure. She regarded that payment as a sort of ransom--his ransom for the right to come to her. "That was his price for the right," thought she. "He paid it without a second thought--would have paid any price. My price for the right to be his may be harder. But I must pay, too--as generously as he."

He was watching her anxiously. "Courtney, I can't go away!"

"You mustn't," replied she. Then a reason--the reason--the solution of her life problem--came to her as if by inspiration. "It's my only chance to be a good woman. That sounds strange, doesn't it?"

"Not to me. I understand. If you hadn't sent for me soon--" he checked himself.

"What?"

"You didn't know that my coming here last spring--and loving you--cured me of the drinking habit. I know, it's stupid and disgusting. I used to loathe myself when I gave way. But it's the only resort in loneliness. And if I realized that you were lost to me, what would I care?"

She nodded sympathetically. "I was going all to pieces, in another way. I was sliding down as fast as Winchie and I were coasting the hill back there. I was going the way of all women who have no love--grown-up love--in their lives. I know now, the reason I used to keep myself together and built myself up and looked after things was because I was waiting and hoping for love, and was expecting it. Love is all of a woman's life, as things are run in this world--at present."

"And quite enough it is, too," said he.

"No," disagreed she. "But let that pass. If I went back to--to that life--alone, I'd be going to ruin. And I'd probably drag him and Winchie down with me. A woman of that unburied-dead sort drags down everybody about her.... You've only to look round, in any station of life, to see those women by the scores. Some few are saved by children--not many and they are of a different nature from me--from most women, I think.... If I don't go back, I either go to you disgraced, a shame to my family, a lifelong stain on my boy here, a miserable, afraid dependent of yours.... No, don't interrupt; I've thought it all out.... Or, I'd plunge into a life of social dissipation. If possible, that sort of woman is worse for herself and for her husband and children than the domestic rotter. A chattering, card-playing gadabout. Possibly I might remain true to my husband, but-- If the world weren't the fool it is, it would have discovered long ago that there are worse vices than--" As always when she forced herself to say frank, merciless things, she looked straight into his eyes with defiant audacity--"worse vices than ours."

"But--" he began, shifting his gaze and coloring.

"Oh, yes, it is. Don't make any mistake about it. But I know lots of 'good' women--liars, gossips, naggers, petty swindlers of their husbands, envious, malicious, spiteful--lots and lots of so-called good women beside whom I'd feel white as this snow."

"Rather!" exclaimed Basil.

"So--if you'll go with me--I'm going home--to make it a home--to be a good mother--to give Richard at least his money's worth in care and comfort and--" She looked at him with eyes suddenly solemn--"and that is all, Basil--all. It's all I can give him, all he has the right to.... I'm going home to be a good woman, if you'll come and be there too."

"There's only one life for me--to be as near you as you'll let me."

A long silence. Then she again, sadly: "I don't know how it will work out. But--what else is there for us? We're not heroes. We're human. We must do the best we can. Together we may survive. Apart, I at least will perish--and destroy those near me. I suppose I'm all wrong. But"--with a sigh--"I'm doing the best I can."

Silence again. Then he, deeply moved: "I'll try to be worthy of you, dear."

"Worthy of _me_? For God's sake, don't say those things. There isn't any pedestal I wouldn't fall off of and break to bits.... Basil--" wistfully--"you don't care for me in just a physical way--do you, dear?"

"I care for you in every way," he answered. "Courtney, I never believed I could respect a woman as I respect you. You know, men aren't brought up really to respect women--or themselves, for that matter."

"Then--couldn't we try to--" She lowered her head, faltered--"couldn't we live as if we were engaged only?"

"Why should we?" he cried.

"I know it's only a fancy. But fancies count more than facts.... I'd feel less the--" She faltered--paused.

"Yes--yes--I understand. And-- Well, it doesn't do a man any good to be pretending friendship and smiling in another fellow's face, when all the time-- I'll try, Courtney-- But--it won't be exactly easy."

Her gaze burned for an instant on his, then dropped. "I should hope not!" murmured she.

They, absorbed in each other, moved so slowly along the road that Winchie, silent, motionless, sullen, upon the sled they were trailing as far as the rope permitted, was stiff with cold. But he did not murmur. By the time they reached the door of the farmhouse, Courtney and Basil had it all planned. He was to leave immediately after supper, was to go at once to Vaughan, make the arrangements, reinstall himself. She was to come home in three or four days--unless Vaughan sent, asking her to come sooner. He dined with the family at the farmhouse, made himself so agreeable that they were all pleased with him--even sister Ann whose bitterness over her failure at what she secretly regarded as woman's only excuse for being alive, took the unoriginal disguise of aggressive man-hating. At six o'clock he drove away in the starlight with a merry jingling of sleigh bells that echoed in Courtney's happy heart. The cold was intense; but she felt only warmth--that delicious warmth that comes from within. She stood on the little front porch, with the stars brilliant above and the snow white and smooth over hill and valley. She watched the swift dark sleigh--listened to those laughing bells, their music growing fainter and fainter--but not in her heart. She was so happy that the tears were in her eyes and the sobs in her throat. It was for her one of those moments in life when she asked nothing more, could imagine nothing that would add to joy. Love again!--and oh, what exalted love, to warm the heart and fill it with light and joy, to brighten every moment of life, to guide her up and ever up.

Winchie, standing beside her and looking up at her rapt face, tugged angrily at her skirts.

*XVII*

When the mail cart on the third afternoon failed to bring a letter from Richard, she decided that prudence had been satisfied, that she need wait no longer. Toward four she and Winchie set out, snuggled deep in furs and straw in the rear of a huge country sleigh. The roads were perfect; the snow was like a strand at low tide, rolled smooth and firm by the broad tires of high tide's billows. The big horses, steaming as if they were engines, flew as if they were a wind. But her impatient heart was always far ahead, fretting at their laggard pace.

They dashed into the outskirts of Wenona. The journey was ended except the mile and a half round the curve of the lake. She became all at once serenely calm. Life her real life--was now about to begin. It was far from the life she would have chosen, had she been prearranging her own fate. However--who could live an ideal life in such a topsy-turvy world? Nature and conventionality ever at war; right and wrong, not two straight paths, one up, the other down, but a tangle, a maze, a labyrinth. One must often travel the path of the wrong in order to reach the path of the right; and keeping to the path of the right often meant arriving in a hopeless network of blind alleys of the wrong. She was in the confused state about right and wrong characteristic of this era of transition that has seen the crumbling of the despotism of dogma, and has not yet received, or created, a moral guidance to replace it. "Life is a compromise, unless one lives alone and miserably and uselessly," thought she. "My life's to be a thistle with fig grafts. I'll do the best I can with it--Basil and I. With him to help me--his strength and character and self-denying love--with him to help, all may go well. Is my compromise--Basil's and mine--worse than those almost everyone has to make? If so, then they ought to educate women differently, and change marriage."

And when the sleigh reached the drive-front porch, making a dashing and musical arrival, she was in a mood of moral exaltation that might have stirred the enthusiasm of a saint--that is, a saint ignorant of the foundations of that mood or the processes by which it had reared itself skyward. Saints who are wise in the ways of humanity do not interrogate too closely the glitter and lift of moral temples; they know humanity has only humble materials with which to build.

The doors opened wide and, in a flood of bright warm air, redolent of the perfume of flowers, out came Dick to welcome them. "I _am_ glad!" cried he. Because of the peculiar relations long established between them--relations such as must exist in some degree between a husband and a wife before the triangular situation can ever even threaten--because of these peculiar relations, she had not anticipated and did not feel the least embarrassment. She was not defying or ignoring her husband; she had no husband. After he swung Winchie to the porch he turned to do the same service for her. But she had quickly disengaged herself from the robes and was standing beside him. He looked into her face, fully revealed by the pour of soft light from the hall. "Your trip certainly has done you good," said he.

"Thank you," replied she absently, presenting her left cheek for the necessary formality of the occasion. Her attention was wholly elsewhere.

In the hall before her there had appeared two people, hanging back discreetly, so that they would not intrude upon the family reunion. Basil, she expected. The woman beside him so astonished her that she forgot to be glad to see him. _Who_ was she? This tall, slender girl with the proud, regular features, the attractively done dark hair, the big, honest brown eyes? She glanced at Basil, standing beside this lovely girl and making a laughing remark; her feminine sight instantly noted how the remark was received by the girl--the flattering glance and smile a marriageable woman rarely wastes upon anything from one of her own sex or from an ineligible man. And through Courtney shot a pang that dissolved her structure of moral uplift as a needle thrust collapses a toy balloon. Who was this woman?--this _young_ woman--this _tall_ woman--this _handsome_ woman--so pleased with Basil Gallatin?

"Aren't you surprised to find Helen March here?" Dick was now saying.

Helen March! So, that scrawny, raw-boned girl, all freckles and pimples, and unable to manage her mouth, the Helen March she had seen three years before and had not seen since--so, that prim and homely gawk had developed into this stately creature! Prim, still--unless that expression was the familiar maidenly pose to attract wife hunters. But certainly neither homely nor awkward. She even dressed her hair well, and wore her clothes with quite an air. All this Courtney saw and felt and thought in a few twinklings of an eye--for in such circumstances a woman's mind works with the rapidity of genius, and with genius's grasp of essential detail. Helen was advancing.

"Don't you recognize me, Courtney?" she asked. The voice was one of those honest, pleasant voices that disarm the most cynical pessimists about human nature--the voice that makes the _blase_ city man fall to dreaming of taking a country girl to wife.

"_Now_ I do, of course," said Courtney sweetly. And the two embraced and kissed.

To do this, Helen had to bend, as she was more than a head the taller. She bent with not a suggestion of condescension in manner or in thought. Nevertheless Courtney, for the first time in her life painfully sensitive about her stature, flamed and was resentful--and in her scorn of her own pettiness felt tinier within than without. True, Helen's figure was commonplace, the bust too high and ominously large for her age, the hips already faintly menacing, the waist and arms somewhat too short for the great length of leg. True, her own figure was--certainly better. Still, Helen had that advantage of height--could look at Basil level-eyed, could make her seem--short! And this Helen here to stay indefinitely!

There was pathos in the slow, sweet smile Courtney gave Basil as their trembling hands met in what seemed to the others a formal greeting. She turned away with a sigh. Just as she, the thirsty, the desert-bound, was all ready to rush forward and drink--the mirage vanished. Was it to be always so? Was life to be ever a succession of mirages, vanishing at approach, only to reappear and revive hope--and cheat again? Through her mind flashed the memory of the first one--an indelible memory, always for her symbolic of vain expectation: A fourth of July when she was a very small child--how she awakened at sunrise, rushed to the window to find sky clear and world radiant and ready for the picnic that was to be her first great positive joy; how she was dressed in her best, in wonderful new white frock, in white stockings and shoes and white bows covering the top buttons, shimmering sash of pale green, and bows of pale green on her braids; how, just as she descended in all her glory to issue forth, down came the rain--in floods--and no picnic, nothing but stay at home all day and weep and watch the downpour. "It was my horoscope," thought she, as she stood there in the hall too sad for bitterness over her spoiled home-coming. "Is it fate? Or, is it somehow my fault? My fault, I suppose. I must be asking of life something no one--at least, no woman--has the right to expect."

She was near the library door, with Winchie on its threshold staring round big-eyed and crying, "Oh, mamma Courtney. Look!" His eyes were no more wondering than her own. She had been too disheartened to make the library over into a conservatory that year; now, here it was transformed into a conservatory--the carpet up from the hardwood floor, plants beautiful for bloom or for foliage or for both in boxes, in jars, in pots--everywhere. A conservatory like that of former years, but more elaborate.

The others were laughing and watching her face. So she exclaimed "I am surprised!" in the indefinite tone the listener can easily adapt to his expectations. But she was not pleased--far from it. Another fierce pang of jealousy. She, modest about her own abilities, did not realize that the room lacked just the finishing touch of her exquisite taste. To her it seemed better far than she could have done. Why, she hadn't been needed, or missed even! Things went on as well in her absence as when she was here. And near her, side by side, were Basil and Helen--how she could feel them!--so well matched physically--and he fair, she dark. And Courtney had not that self-complacent, satisfied vanity which shelters so many of us from any and all misgivings and doubts.

"Helen did most of it," explained Vaughan. "She's a trump, you'll find. Look out, Helen, or we'll make you do all the work."

"Cousin Dick proposed it and really carried it out," protested Helen in her school-teacherish or collegiate speech and manner. "And Mr. Gallatin was invaluable in showing us how you had it last winter. We wanted to get it exactly the same."

Courtney turned brilliant, grateful eyes on Basil. "So, you remembered, did you?" she ventured to say, sure her meaning and her tone would pass the others safely.

Basil flushed. "You can judge for yourself," said he.

"I'm so overcome I don't know what to say." Their smiling, friendly faces, all bent upon her, made her natural generosity burst forth like April's unending green at the first warmth of the sun. Her eyes filled. "Thank you--thank you all!" she cried. "I am so--_so_--happy!" And she kissed Helen again, ashamed of her mean impulses toward one whose aloneness and poverty commanded kindness and consideration and help from another woman, especially from a woman who had known the bitterness of dependence and aloneness.

Good sense and decent instincts, having driven off jealousy, held the field--not without occasional alarms and excursions, but still decisively. It was the merriest party that had gathered about the mahogany dining-room table since Colonel 'Kill imported it from beyond the mountains, along with sundry novelties in those parts, in that early day--carpets and curtains and window glass, wall paper and carved beds and crystal chandeliers. In Colonel 'Kill's time the atmosphere had been genial but austere; Aunt Eudosia, during her brief reign between his death and her own, had maintained his traditions reverently; and Courtney had struggled not altogether with success, though bravely and resolutely, against the atmosphere that lingered on after all her brightening changes. But that night, the spell was broken. Dick put aside his chemistry; Basil and Courtney forgot him and their burden of deceit. Helen belied her mourning which, as Courtney had shrewdly guessed, was mere formality anyhow. Everyone was gay, even jealous little Winchie, devoting himself to Helen, determined to make her love him. And Courtney was gayest of all; was not that vacant place at the table filled once more? Her heart overflowed with joy and her lips and eyes with laughter each time she looked in that direction and saw--_him_! Everyone was gay except old Nanny, listening sourly to the merriment that came through door and hall into kitchen and sounded like a burst from a ballroom whenever Lizzie was passing in or out. "Poor young man!" muttered Nanny to her dishes and pans. "If he only knowed the whited sepulchre he's living amidst, what a holocaust there'd be." She did not know what holocaust meant, having got merely its vague sense from a sermon; thus, it gave her a conception of anarchy and chaos far beyond the scope of words she understood.

Courtney's emerald eyes, dancing and laughing though they were, scrutinized Basil. Not that she really suspected him; she simply wished to fortify herself against the folly and the unhappiness of suspicion--as women look under a bed before getting into it. Having fortified herself, she concentrated on Helen--Helen, the homeless, the unmarried, the eager to be married. There the results of her scrutiny were not so satisfactory. Basil would have called Helen's manner mere civility; and perhaps, in strict justice, it was nothing more. But Courtney the woman, judging Helen the woman, saw the hidden truth beneath the surface truth--saw that Helen was not without an instinct for a possible customer for the virtue so carefully nurtured against the coming of an opportunity for it to expand in the garden of matrimony with the flower and leaf and fruit of wife and mother. Courtney judged fairly, conceded that Helen was the reverse of forward, was using no arts, no subtleties. But the candidate for matrimony showed in her charmingly receptive and appreciative attitude toward the young man. The danger which Courtney foresaw and feared lay in the fact that Basil and Helen were both attractive. To Courtney it seemed a question of a very brief time when, without any effort whatever on her part, Helen must fall in love with him. What then? A well-bred, pretty woman in love is always more and ever more attractive to the man she centers upon. And Helen was free--and could be honorable throughout!

As Courtney undressed for bed, these reflections, so forbidding of aspect, faced her whichever way she turned. "I like Helen," she thought, "and it's decent and right to give her a home. If I were what I ought to be--ought to try to be--I'd give her every opportunity to win Basil. She's got to have some one to support her. I'm provided for. It's mean of me to stand in her way." She found some cheer in the reflection that, while most women would straight off hate Helen and look on her as an impudent interloper, she herself had generosity enough to be just in thought at least. "But I'm human," said she. "Helen has got to go. She doesn't love him. I do. She doesn't need him. I do. She's got to go!"

It was her habit to sit on the rug before the fire in her sitting room, and do her hair for the night; then she would sometimes stretch herself out flat upon her breast and read by the fire light or watch it and dream or think. She was lying that way, head pillowed upon a book and face toward the fire, when Dick opened the door, glanced in, entered. So absorbed was she that she did not know he was in the room until he spoke.

"It's like what Nanny would call a special providence, isn't it?" said he, seating himself on the sofa parallel to the fireplace but well back from it. He had a long dressing gown over his pajamas and was smoking a last cigarette.

"Special providence? What?" inquired she without turning her head. His entrance had not interrupted her train of thought. Her answer was, as usual, a reflex action from her surface mind.

"Why, Basil's coming back."

No reply. She was not thinking of Dick's statement of Basil's return as coming from him but as if she had herself begun to revolve it of her own accord.

"And Helen's being here."

A restless shiver. She was unconscious of Dick's presence. She was gazing absorbed at the proposition: Helen is here.

"It's just as we wanted it," he went on.

The lithe, delicately formed body grew tense. "Speak for yourself," she said curtly.

Richard received this rebuff in silence. "I know you don't like Basil," said he at length. "And, it's true he was a tank and a tear-about at college----"

There he stopped, shamefaced. He forgot he had told her about Basil; he felt it was undignified and unworthy gossip now that he had matrimonial designs upon him. "That slipped out," he said to her apologetically. "I never intended to tell you. Anyhow, he has dropped all that sort of thing, and I don't believe he'll ever turn loose again.... I wonder why that girl broke the engagement. He tells me he's free, and I suspect he wanted to come back because he's pretty badly cut up.... You will be nice to him, Courtney?--and help him and Helen along? They were intended for each other--height--contrast of coloring----"