Part 20

Gallatin, in a blouse, rubber apron and gloves appeared from the other part of the shop.

"Well--here's the--the 'prentice," said Dick. "You're not busy nowadays. Take charge of her."

"It'll be a great pleasure, I'm sure," he stammered. He looked about as uncomfortable at sight of her as had Richard. Demurely she followed him into his compartment. As the partition did not extend to the ceiling, they had to content themselves with an exchange of eloquent glances. Then, taking the tone of gentleman chemist to not overbright and densely ignorant lady visitor at a laboratory, he began to explain to her the names and uses of things, and to demonstrate how to use them.

For the entire morning he talked and illustrated, thoroughly enjoying himself at making a fine impression with his display of superior knowledge. He told her little she did not already know. But she was not so tactless as to spoil his pleasure or hurt his vanity. She listened and tried; and when he complimented her on her quickness in learning, she showed delight at being praised. In the afternoon he allowed her to practice his teachings unassisted--set her at weighing a little nitrate of potassium precipitate in the gold and ivory and aluminum balances. She had done this sort of things a hundred times, but was meek under his elaborations of cautioning and explaining.

"I worked a lot in laboratories at school," said she ingenuously, when his guidance became a little tiresome. "It's beginning to come back to me."

He smiled in a way that reminded her of Richard. "All right. Do the best you can," said he. "We'll not expect much of you for the present. I'm afraid you'll soon give up."

She looked at him. "I'm here to stay," said she, "You'll not get rid of me."

"But the work's very hard--not at all feminine."

"That suits me. For, I'm not at all feminine, myself--what men mean by feminine."

He laughed, went about his own business. As she sat at the balances, her whole mind on the needle she was watching through the reading glass, she felt herself caught from behind. She turned her laughing face upward and backward, and they kissed. "Isn't it splendid!" he exclaimed under his breath. "Yes--you must stay." It had been part of her plan of life that they should never caress. Suddenly she realized how impossible this rule was--and how foolish. On occasions--such occasions as this joy in the unexpected kindness of fate--the rule must be suspended.

"How long it's been!" he said in a low voice. "Not since early September have I kissed you--and this is almost February."

She glanced warningly toward the top of the partition.

"Away at the other end," Basil assured her, "and doing something that can't be left an instant for an hour or more."

"Well then--" She blushed, hesitated, gave him a passionate, longing look. "One more kiss--and we go to work."

He seated himself and drew her to his lap. With their heads close together, they talked--of anything, of everything, of nothing--and hardly knew what they were saying--and cared not at all. "Oh, the happiness of it," she murmured. "And we are to work side by side, too. It seems a dream. I can't believe it."

"And soon it will be spring again, and we shall be a little freer."

"Be patient until I get everything settled," she answered, "and we shall be free almost all the time. I have thought it out."

"You think of everything."

"I think of nothing but you--always you," she answered. "What have I but our love? I want to make the house comfortable, your apartment comfortable, myself attractive--all, so that love will never begin to think of taking flight."

"Flight!" He laughed softly. "How absurd! Can't you feel that I'm just wrapped up in you?"

She touched his tight encircling arms. "I can feel that I'm just wrapped up in you," she retorted. "Now, let me go. I am not to keep you from the work--or you me."

"Not just yet."

"Yes"--firmly. "You don't take me any more seriously than Richard does. But I don't in the least care. If I am serious, what does it matter whether anyone thinks so or not?" She laughed a little. "And I'm feminine enough, I'll admit, to want to be what the man who wants me wants me to be."

He was not listening. He held her more tightly, and she knew what was coming before he began to speak. "Let me come to-night, Courtney. Just this once. I simply want to be alone with you----"

"Not yet," she replied. "Don't let's tempt each other to risk years of happiness for a frightened moment." And, afraid she would yield if he kept on urging, she abruptly freed herself and sent him back to his seat.

An hour, and he came to her again. "I've been doing nothing but watch you, and you haven't looked round once."

"This work is interesting," replied she--and it was the simple truth.

"No--not once!"

"What a good example I'm setting you. I always used to like chemistry. And I was a harum-scarum girl then. Now, I see I'm going to be tremendously fond of it."

"Courtney--I can't stand--our--our compact. I simply can't. I feel as if you had thrust me out of your life. And-- Have you no memory, sweetheart? Courtney, we're only human beings, after all. And we've the right. Aren't you my wife?"

"Don't tempt me, Basil," she answered with a sigh. "Do you suppose I don't feel it? Sometimes I get to thinking what might be-- But I will not! You do not wish it." And she glanced meaningly at the partition.

"You are mine!" he whispered, moved by the reminder but not abashed. "If I had never known love in its fullness, I might be able to endure this cold, repellent pretense of virtue--for, it's nothing but a flimsy pretense. Courtney, if you love me----"

"Is your love only--_that_!"

"If you loved me," he repeated, "you'd not calculate so puritanically. If I weren't seeing you, dear, I could bear it. But seeing you all the time--touching you--kissing you--Courtney, Courtney, how can you make me, and yourself too, suffer so needlessly? If you really love, how can you keep me out of your inmost life--as if I were not everything to you?"

"I explained to you----"

"Explained! Explained!" he said, impatiently. "We explain and explain, but it's all sophistry. The truth is--what? That we are lovers. And, if our love is a sin, why not take all its reward since we'll have to take all its punishment?"

"Don't harass me now," she begged, agitated and trembling.

"Harass you!" He drew away offendedly. "I thought I was pleading for you, as well as for myself. If I am not, please forget what I said."

"I didn't mean that!"

"Then I may come to-night--or you to me?"

She gave him a sad, pleading look. "Not to-night, dear. Not just yet. We _must_ wait till things are going quietly in a routine."

"How easily you put us off!"

"Basil!--_Please_!"

He stared sulkily out of the window. "It does sting my pride that you care so much less than I. It does make me--almost doubt."

"Not so loud!"

"You don't realize how far away he is, and how absorbed.... I take back all I said." And he straightened himself coldly and went to his own part of the room.

A moment, and she followed him. "You are offended, Basil."

"No--hurt."

She sighed. "I will come to-night."

"You do not wish to come!"

"To be honest, no. I should feel--" She hesitated. She wished to be frank; but how could she be, when he was in that mood of doubt? How could she explain again that, in some respects, she loathed the memory of the times they had been stealthily together--the alarms, the narrow escapes from discovery--the commonness of it all--like those low intrigues that get into the newspapers, to make coarse mouths water and vulgar eyes sparkle? If she tried to tell him, he would misunderstand. "Not just yet," she went on. "I'm in a queer mood--not myself. You----"

She was so tender, so loving, so deeply distressed that, in shame and contrition, he embraced her. "I'm sorry I said anything. But you'll understand. How can I help longing for you? It's your own fault--you beautiful, wonderful _woman_!"

And their first clash ended in kisses, in serenity restored, with him saying--and thinking--"How much braver and better you are than I! Yours is the love that makes a man stronger and decenter."

Her look was eloquent of gratitude and happiness. But the happiness in it was forced, at least in part, was rather what she felt she ought to feel than what she actually did feel--as is so often the case. And she went back to work with a certain heaviness of heart--and a foreboding. The slightest alarm, however fanciful, was enough to call up the specter of those months of loneliness and despair after he left. That specter haunted her, was in her mind the fixed idea that becomes an obsession. She knew that to quiet it, she would if necessary stop at nothing. "I can never give him up again. I'd do anything--anything--rather than even risk it." Pride and self-respect were all very well, but those who could put such things before love had not loved. She hoped and prayed Basil would not force her to the test. But--if he did-- She sighed, and bade herself wait until that situation arose before worrying over it.

*XIX*

Now that the throes of birth were over, their love bade fair to be like those robust infants that almost kill mothers in the bearing but thereafter give not a moment's anxiety. Outdoors it was rivalling the previous winter; indoors--at the house and at the laboratory--there reigned mid-summer serenity. Nanny--always a shadow, though very faint indeed latterly--had yielded before her arch enemy, rheumatism, had been pensioned off, had gone to her brother's, seventeen miles into the wilderness. She would shadow them no more. Richard had come to another crisis in his researches; and a mind in the act of gestation is like a hen on eggs--solitary, brooding, best left utterly alone. He was as unconscious of Courtney and Basil as of himself; all three were, for him, simply instruments to the strange and terrible marvels of chemical action that were unfolding. Soon Basil felt about him as did Courtney--that is, lost all sense of his being related to her or to the life of the household. As they held to their compact, they experienced none of passion's inevitable alternations of rapture and revulsion. Habit is equally the friend of virtue and of vice. It was not a matter of months but of weeks when they were looking on their love as not only moral but even exalted, since they were self-restrained.

The chief factor in the tranquillity was the work. Courtney began at the laboratory solely that she and Basil might be together. Soon she had another reason--love of the work itself. Everything worth while, whether for achievement or for amusement, involves drudgery at the outset--tennis or bridge no less than a trade or an art. Although Courtney had done at school the worst part of the drudgery in acquiring chemistry, it was nearly a month before she began to enjoy. Then came the first haunting alluring glimpses of the elusive mystery which makes chemistry the most fascinating of the sciences; and from that hour forth she forgot the difficulties in the delights. She often stole in to gaze longingly at Richard's work--for, he kept the main part of the great task of finding a new and universal fuel altogether in his own hands and used the other two as mere helpers. She would have liked to work with him; and, as she understood better and better what he was about, the temptation to try to bring her skill and her knowledge to his attention became strong at times. But she was afraid that if he began to think attentively about her being there, he would send her away. No, it was best to remain hidden behind Basil, to do nothing to remind Richard of her existence.

At first Basil assumed she was toiling like another Richard because she wished quickly to get knowledge enough to make plausible her necessary pretense of interest. But after a few weeks he saw she was in earnest, or thought she was--for, he could not believe one so pretty, so charming, so light of spirit and of mind, could be deeply in earnest about such a heavy, unwomanly matter as chemistry--or about anything else, except of course love. He was fond of chemistry; but it was in the fashion of most men's fondness for serious effort--to get excuse and appetite for idling. However, partly through pride, partly because her enthusiasm was contagious, he buckled to and worked as Richard had never been able to make him.

"Really, you needn't crowd yourself quite so hard," said he to Courtney, when his own energy began to flag.

"I've got to choose between being a drag and a help. Besides--" She glanced down with the shy, subtle smile he had learned to recognize as a cover for something she meant very much indeed--"don't you find that being occupied is a great aid?"

"I'd not have thought it possible to live as we're living--and be happy."

"You are happy?" As she asked this, she scrutinized his face in woman's familiar veiled fashion. She was always watching, watching, for the first faint dreaded sign of discontent.

"So much so," answered he, earnestly, "that I'd be afraid to change anything."

She saw that he meant it, that he felt it with all the intensity of the fine side of his nature. And she breathed a secret sigh of relief. She said: "Every day--time and again--I say to myself, 'If only this will last!'"

"It will!" declared he.

And, pessimist though she had been made by disappointment on disappointment in small things and large her whole life through, she began to hope that this would last, that the worst of her life was perhaps over, that her life problem was settling and settling right. The watchdogs of presentiment are like their much overrated animal prototypes. They bark at everything, that they may get credit for usefulness if by chance they once do happen to vent their nerve-racking warnings in advance of a real peril. Even presentiment called its dogs off duty.

She had been brought up among people who imagine they see the operations of natural law in the artificial conventions of morality that differ for every age and race and creed, really for every individual. She had long discarded as superstition the creed of her parents; but she had not been able wholly to uproot all the ramifications of beliefs dependent upon that creed for vitality. Thus, she vaguely felt a relationship of effect and cause between her sufferings in the autumn and early winter and those fear-shadowed, shame-alloyed but ecstatic moments of joy in the summer. And in the same vague way, there seemed to her some sort of connection between their present happiness and their self-restraint. She would have, quite honestly, denied, had she been accused of harboring such a "remnant of superstition." Nevertheless, it was the fact. However, she did not analyze or reason about her happiness. She simply accepted and enjoyed it--and forgot the foundations on which it rested.

And the days--the long, long days that only people who live in quiet places have--moved tranquilly and happily by, swift yet slow. The weeks seemed to be flying, and the days went very fast; but each hour presented its full quota of sixty minutes for enjoyment. In those dreadful days of the previous fall she had wished every hour that she was living in a city, because in the city a thousand resolute intrusions compel distraction, make the moments seem to fly, whether the heart is heavy or light. Now, she was glad with all her heart that she was living and loving where there were no distractions, where each moment could be lived as a connoisseur drinks his glass of rare old wine drop by drop.

One day late in April she and Richard, it so happened, were alone for a few minutes before supper. He abruptly emerged from his abstraction to say, "Basil and Helen are getting on famously."

She startled, then lapsed into her usual isolation when alone with him.

"I expect there'll be a marriage before the summer is out."

"Yes?" said Courtney, absently.

"Well, it's a good match. They're both comfortably shallow. They're fond of the same kind of harmless pretenses. They look well together.... I hope they'll stay on with us--at least until the first baby comes."

She shivered, rose abruptly. "Supper must certainly be ready," said she.

"Then," pursued Dick, intent upon his train of thought, "they might get the Donaldson place. The Donaldsons want to sell."

She smiled ironically. "I suppose you've spoken to Donaldson about it."

"Not yet. But next time I see him, I'll give him a hint. He might sell to some one else."

Basil now came in. "Sell what?" he asked, to join in the conversation.

"Oh, nothing," answered Dick. "Courtney and I were discussing the Donaldson place. Donaldson wants to sell, and we thought we might get neighbors we didn't like."

"Richard suggested," said Courtney, in her most innocent manner, "that you might buy it."

Dick looked alarmed. Basil, with his eyes on Courtney, promptly said: "Maybe I will. It's second only to this place. And I shall always live here."

"Richard thought it would be a good idea for you to settle there when you and Helen marry," said Courtney, with a smile only Basil could understand.

If anything, Basil looked more confused and nervous than did Richard; he laughed hysterically. "Really--really--that's very attractive--if--" he stammered.

Just then Helen, out of hearing on the lake-front veranda, happened to call, "Oh, Mr. Gallatin!"

"Yes," he answered, and hastened out to join her. Richard stared helplessly at his wife. "Now, why did you do that?" he demanded.

"What?"

"You certainly are the most thoughtless, frivolous person! I never knew you to be serious about anything--except something that was of not the least importance. I must remember to be always on guard when I speak before you."

"Yes, you ought to be careful. I'm not intellectual, like Helen. But I was forgetting; now you say she's shallow, too."

"All intellectual women are shallow," said Dick. He was ashamed of his heat of the moment before. "And I never said you were shallow. You ought to be glad you have no intellectual tendencies, but are a bundle of instincts and impulses, as a woman should be. I guess you didn't spill the milk, after all. If Gallatin loves Helen, a little break such as you made won't scare him off."

"No indeed. When a man's in love, the sight of the net doesn't frighten him. He helps to hold it open so that he can jump in deep."

Courtney intended to tease Basil, the next time they were alone. But it slipped her mind until nearly a week later. Basil had got into the habit of going out for a stroll and a smoke every morning about ten. She never went with him, because she did not wish to interrupt her work to which she could give only the mornings, as the time for gardens and growing things was at hand. One morning it so chanced that her task of the moment was just finished when Basil moved toward the door. "I'll go with you," said she.

He hesitated, looked disconcerted.

"Oh, if you don't want me," laughed she.

"Indeed I do," he hastened to say. "Only--usually you don't."

They went out together, walked up and down the wide retaining wall of the lake, beyond the Smoke House. Presently Helen appeared, on her way to the apartment over the laboratory. Now that she had charge of the housekeeping, it was part of her duties to look at the apartment and see that Lizzie was keeping things clean and was making Gallatin comfortable. At sight of Basil and Courtney, she stopped short, colored painfully. She answered their greetings with embarrassment, went with awkward haste in at the apartment entrance.

"Helen's extremely shy," said Courtney.

"She _is_ difficult to get acquainted with," replied Basil. His manner might have been either absent or constrained.

"I'm afraid I haven't given you much chance," said Courtney, merely by way of saying something.

"Oh, I know her pretty well," Basil hastened to protest. "There's a lot more to her than one sees at first."

"Indeed there is," said Courtney, warmly. "I've grown very fond of her--fonder than I ever thought I could be of another woman. I don't care much for women. They're so small toward each other--because they're all brought up to be cutthroat rivals in the same low business--husband-catching. But Helen isn't a bit small. She has a real heart."

"And real intellect, too."

Courtney's smile was absolutely free from malice. "That's just what she has not," she replied, for she talked with perfect frankness to him, her other self. "I suppose the man never lived who could judge a good-looking woman. Women don't always misjudge men. But men always fancy beauty means brains, if the woman's heavy and serious--and not downright imbecile."

"I shouldn't call Miss March imbecile," said he. "Or even heavy."

"Now don't be cross because I hinted that women could fool you," teased Courtney. "And I didn't mean to suggest that Helen is imbecile or heavy."

"She knows an awful lot," said Basil. "She often corrects me--in little slips about authors and poetry, and so on."

Courtney could hardly keep from showing her amusement that Basil should be impressed by what was really one of Helen's weaknesses. For Helen, like so many who have small or very imperfect knowledge, attached as great importance to trifles of worthless learning as a college professor; she became agitated if anyone showed lack of knowledge of some infinitesimal in etiquette or grammar or what not, just as fashionable people sweat with mortification or distend with vast inward derision if some one, however intelligent, however capable, appears among them in an out-of-style garment or uses an expression not in their tiny vocabulary. Courtney was striving tactfully to open out a less ignorant point of view to Helen. And here was Basil showing that Helen's weakness was in reality a strength, highly useful in dealing with men.

Courtney said: "Helen is a fine, sensible, capable girl--about the finest I ever knew. And she has genuine sweetness and good taste."

"She does dress well," said Basil warmly. "If she had the means, she'd be stunning."

"Could be, but wouldn't be," replied Courtney, perfectly just and good humored, but perhaps a little weary of hearing another young woman's praises in her lover's voice. "She'd 'settle down' if she married. She's resolutely old fashioned--hates to think or to exert herself. She'll make a fine, old-fashioned wife for some man who likes to be mildly bored at home and wants his fun elsewhere. This reminds me. Richard has you and her married--wedding in the fall--baby next spring."

Basil flushed at this teasing.

"You don't seem enthusiastic."

"I don't care to hear a good young girl spoken of so lightly," said he, with some stiffness.

And now Courtney colored. After a moment she said, apologetic without knowing why: "Perhaps I shouldn't have done it. But I always feel free to speak out to you any stray thought that drifts into my head--without choosing my words."

Helen now reappeared, cast a peculiar glance in their direction, blushed rosily, hastened away toward the house. "She'd better be careful how she blushes at sight of you," said Courtney smiling, "or you'll be thinking she's in love with you."

"Nonsense!" protested Basil, again unaccountably irritated.

"How solemn you are to-day, dear. And, why shouldn't she fall in love with you? I can see how a woman might."

He did not respond to her glance. He stared straight ahead, answered awkwardly, "Helen and I are simply good friends."