Part 9

She held the garment at arms' length, eyeing the hem critically. "No, you don't. You're like all the men. You fancy weak woman can always be overborne by man, big and strong and superior."

"You wrong me."

"Why else should you talk of going away?"

"Because it's torment to me to be near you--to----"

She stopped sewing, looked at him with anger in her deep green eyes. "Then your feeling is just what I thought."

"It is not! It is love!"

Again she sewed a long time in silence. It was very calm there, in that quiet room with its flowers and tasteful, gracefully arranged furniture, and the single lamp like a jewel shedding all its radiances upon her small industrious figure. "Then tell me," she said in her sweet, gentle way, without looking up or pausing, "what do you want that you cannot have? You can see me as much as you like. You can talk as freely as you like. You can count on sympathy, on friendship. And, if you want to, you can keep right on loving me in that exalted way you profess. Nobody's going to hinder you."

She sewed on in silence, he motionless watching her, perplexity in his honest, rather boyish face. After a while her voice broke the silence. "Love!" She laughed with raillery that did not sting. "My dear friend, don't you see I was right? Go away for a few days and----"

"For God's sake, don't suggest that again."

"Then don't say it's love that makes you want to leave and upset everything." She put the needles, thread, and thimble into her workbox, rolled up the little suit, rose. "It's always the same story," she said, sad rather than bitter. "A woman means only one thing to a man. Yes, I think you had best go."

"You're too severe," he cried. "It's true there's such a thing as passion without love. And I'll admit that I, like all men have felt it often--have lied to myself as well as to the woman--and have called it love. But it's also true there's no love without some passion--at least, _you_ couldn't hope to inspire it. And though in your innocence you may think so, you'd not want to have less than all love has to give--if you loved."

Her eyes, large and softly brilliant, were burning into the darkness beyond the open window. "I'm not innocent," she said. "And I try not to be a hypocrite. If I loved, I'd want all."

There was a long silence, she at the window gazing out into the gathering night. Then he said: "You were right. It was not love that made me feel like flight. I can conquer that feeling. Will you let me stay?"

She turned slowly. In the look she fixed on him there was doubt, hesitation. "You've made me a little uneasy--a little afraid."

In his eagerness he sprang up. "Don't!" he cried. "Don't send me away. I'll never speak of love again. You've taught me my lesson."

"I do want you to stay," said she. "It'd seem very lonely here with you gone. For I've come to depend on you as a friend. It hurts to find you seeking your own selfish pleasure under the pretense of a feeling for me."

He winced--not because he felt scandalized by her candor, but because he felt convicted by it. "How well you understand men!" he exclaimed. "Better than they understand themselves."

"In that one way I do," was her reply, an arresting hardness in the deep voice that was usually altogether sweet. These last few days she was understanding a great many things about the relations of men and women--or, perhaps, was letting herself realize that she understood them.

He lowered his eyes, that he might not read her thoughts, that she might not read the same thoughts in his own mind. "You often make me think of the lake out there," said he. "There's the surface one sees at a glance. Then there's a little distance below the surface, that one sees when he looks intently straight down. And then there's fathoms on fathoms where all sorts of strange things--strange thoughts and feelings--lie hid. Sometimes--for an instant--one of them shows or almost shows at the surface."

"When one lives alone a great deal, one gets the habit of living within oneself--don't you think?"

"I suppose that's it--partly. A brook couldn't hide very much--and most people are like brooks or ponds. The ones that seem to have depth seem so simply because the water's muddy."

She looked admiringly at him; and her admiration of his originality and insight did not lessen when he added, "At least, so a friend of mine used to say." He returned to _the_ subject. "Then--I may stay?"

Her face brightened. In her eyes as they looked at a smile slowly dawned. Quickly all her features were responding, especially that wide, expressive fascinating mouth. "I hope you will. But--no more dreariness!"

"I hate gloom as much as you do." He glanced round the room--at the harmonies of woodwork and walls and furnishing, with here and there bright flowers always in the restraint of those of gentle hue. "As much as you do," repeated he. "And that's saying a great deal. How _do_ you manage it!--house and garden, always gay yet never gaudy--and such variety! Is there no end to your variety?"

"Oh, one's a new person every day, isn't one?--and different."

"_You_ certainly are. But no one else I ever saw." He colored furiously at his finding himself, without intending it, upon the forbidden ground. She had turned away, and was leaving the room--the safest course, since it enabled her to hide her pleasure in the compliment that peculiarly appealed to her, and also seemed to give him a sufficient yet not harsh rebuke.

Her aversion to restraint was perhaps stronger than is the average woman's--certainly had more courage. She had been too thoroughly trained in the conventionalities not to have the familiar timidity as to action, so strong in all conventionally bred people, so dominant over women. But the "unhand-me" spirit of her time was finding outlet in thought and feeling. Reflecting much in her aloneness, she had reached many audacious conclusions about life and the true meaning of its comedy drama--that meaning so different from what we pretend, from what usually passes as truth in history, philosophy, and literature, based as they are upon man's cheap hankering for idealistic strut. The audacities of thought that occasionally showed at her surface in speech or commentary of smiling eyes and lips were conventional in comparison with whole schools of deep-swimming ideas and fancies that kept hours of aloneness from being hours of loneliness. Physically, her passion for freedom showed itself in her dislike of tight or stuffy garments. She could pass her hand round her waist inside her closest-fitting corset. Her liking for few clothes and for as little yoke and sleeves as custom allowed came not from the thought for the other sex that often explains this taste, but from aversion to restraint.

As usual, the first thing she did that night, when she was alone in her rooms, was to rid herself of all her clothing and put on the thinnest of thin white nightgowns, almost sleeveless, and cut out at the neck. She thrust her feet into bedroom slippers, braided her long hair with its strands of red almost brown, with its strands of brown almost gold. She turned out the light, threw open all the long shutters screening her windows, to let her bedroom fill with warm, perfumed freshness from lake and gardens. She stepped out on the balcony to take the breathing exercises that kept her body straight, her chest high, her bosom firm as a girl's, and her form slim and supple. The fireflies were floating and darting in the creepers and the near-hanging boughs. The slight agitations of the air stole among the folds of her gown and over her neck and arms like charmed fingers. There was no moon; but she did not miss it in the dim splendor of the thronging stars.

"Aren't you about ready to come in?"

She startled, suppressed a scream. She turned. Richard was standing in the window. Her blood which had rushed to her heart surged out again and into her brain in an angry wave. She hated to be taken by surprise. It was on the tip of her tongue to cry furiously, "I detest being spied upon." But she had resolved soon after Winchie was born never to speak angrily to him, never to let him hear her speak angrily. The habit restrained her now, as it had scores of times. Instead, she said: "Why, how did you get in? I'm sure I locked my door."

"So you did," replied Dick in the cheerful unconscious way that so irritated her in certain moods. Not always could she bear with composure his masculine assumption that whatever pleased him must delight his wife. "So you did," said he. "And it's still locked. But there was the window from the front balcony into your sitting room--and the door from your sitting room to this room. You see, I was determined to find you."

His tone of laughing tenderness helped her half to guess, half to make out his expression. Usually she accepted without a protesting thought the whole of the routine of married life. But to-night she grew hot with a burning blush of imperiled modesty as he advanced toward her. "Don't," she said; "I'm doing my exercises."

"No--you were dreaming. Of what?" Then, without waiting for an answer about a matter of so little importance, "Gallatin tells me he has decided to stay on--if he can arrange it--and he seems to think he can. So I'm feeling fine. You don't know what a jolt he gave me at supper. Did you talk with him about it?"

"Yes."

"Urged him to stay?"

"I tried to show him he ought to stay."

"Ever so much obliged."

She stopped in her exercises to say quickly: "Oh, I didn't do it for you. I did it for myself."

"Why, you dislike him."

"He's some one to talk with--some one that listens and answers. And--I don't dislike him."

Richard laughed. "That's right. Try to make the best of it. Well, if you're not coming in----"

"Not for an hour or longer."

"Then--good night. I must be up early. I think I'll sleep down at the Smoke House. I'm so glad about Gallatin--just as much obliged as if you'd done it for me. And I believe you did." He put his arms round her to kiss her good night. As soon as his lips touched her cheek she drew away, disengaged herself. "What's the matter, Courtney?" She had long since learned that for all his absent-mindedness and ignoring of things that didn't directly interest him, he became as sensitive--and as accurate--as photographic plate to light, the instant his attention happened to be caught. "What's the matter? Why do you draw away?"

"I don't know," replied she--truthfully, yet with a sense of being untruthful. "I seem not to like to be touched to-night."

"I don't remember you being that way before."

She went on with her exercises; he yawned and departed.

*VIII*

The morning after Courtney and Basil came to this clear and promising understanding, she got down to the seven-o'clock breakfast perhaps ten minutes late. She expected to find the two men and Winchie there, and was thinking of asking Gallatin to go to town with her and Winchie. When she entered the dining room, there was the table in its usual morning place, in the wide-flung door windows to the cast, and at it sat Winchie only, sunbeams sifting through the trellised morning glories to dance upon his shock of tawny hair.

"Where are the others?" she asked.

Winchie, forgetful of his teaching, had his mouth full, far too full for immediate speech--unless he gulped it empty, and that would have been breaking another rule. So Lizzie, who was just entering from the kitchen hall, answered: "Mr. Richard telephoned up at half past six, and made me wake Mr. Gallatin. They had breakfast down at the Smoke House long ago."

Winchie had climbed from his high chair and had come round to kiss his mother good morning. He was dressed for the trip to town--all white except dark blue edging round his wide collar, and a dark blue belt. His features suggested his father's and his mother's, yet were those of neither. That morning their usual suggestions of will and character were lost in a general expression of sweet good humor. He looked a sturdy bronzed cherub. After searching his mother's face with those inquiring, seeing eyes of his, he said: "Mamma's happy this morning," and resumed breakfast.

"Indeed she is!" exclaimed Courtney.

She drew the bowl of yellow daisies and pink-white mountain holly from the center of the table, and fell to rearranging them. Each blossom seemed to glide into just its right position, as if there were magic in her fingers. She could not remember when she had felt quite so content and hopeful. And her spirits rose as the day advanced. On the way to town she stopped at the Vaughan farm across the highroad to inquire into a slight falling off in quality of butter and milk. She had never seen the farm so fascinating. The very dock weed and dog fennel carpeting the barnyard had an air and a charm. And the road to town, as she and Winchie sped along in the runabout--what a shady lane through Paradise it was! In town everyone seemed so agreeable, so glad to see her. After lunch with Sarah Carpenter, she shopped, made several calls. They did not start home until late, and supper was on the table when they arrived. At the table--always in the middle of the room for the evening meal, and formally set--at the table was Richard, alone, eating and figuring on his everlasting yellow pad.

"Hello!" said he, with barely a glance away from his pencil point. "Glad to have company."

"Where's Mr. Gallatin?" asked Winchie.

"Gone," was Dick's curt answer in the tone of an interrupted man. "I sent him away."

Courtney, crossing the room, halted. A moment of horrible silence. "Gone!" she echoed hoarsely, her eyes wide, as if a monster had suddenly appeared open-jawed in her very face. "You--sent--him away!"

Vaughan, without looking up, said: "What did you say?"

With her hand on her heart, "I thought I understood you to say Mr. Gallatin had gone."

"So he has. For a few days."

"Oh!" Courtney drew a vast breath of relief. She felt a tugging at her skirt, glanced down. It was Winchie, looking up at her with an expression of terror; and she knew she must have revealed herself in her face. Her pale cheeks flooded with color. She sank into her chair opposite her husband. She could lie to herself, cheat herself, no longer. "How much Basil means to me!" she muttered. Then, in terror, she glanced round, for she felt as if she had shouted it. But Vaughan was at his unending calculations. Only Winchie saw. _Only_ Winchie! There was a look in his great gray-green eyes, a look of the accusing angel, that made her hang her head while the dark red burned upon her whole body.

"He'll be back Thursday or Friday," continued Vaughan, tossing the pad into the window seat, a dozen feet away.

"You sent him on business?" inquired she, to make conversation.

"He wanted to go to Pittsburg, so he told me. I guess it's some girl. I suspect our 'dressy' friend of being a ladies' man. He takes too much trouble about his clothes--and silk underclothes! Anyhow, I let him go."

She sat there, the food untouched, her blood pounding at her temples, at her finger ends. For she was remembering her advice to Basil when she was trying both to persuade him to stay and to deceive herself as to why she intensely wished him to stay. And now, on her advice--on the advice of the woman who loved him--he was journeying--even as she sat quietly there at supper in respectable calm--he was journeying to his "old haunts"--to some woman--he who belonged to her! Such a wild tempest raged in her that she wondered how she could sit motionless, why she was not walking the floor and crying out. With another woman! Oh, the vileness of men! "And I was beginning to care for him!" she said to herself. "He's like the rest--worse than most. How many men are there who'd dare talk of love to a woman like me, and then go jauntily away to a low woman?"

She went upstairs immediately after supper, shut herself in. She moved calmly about; she took her exercises; she read for several hours before turning out her light. But beneath a surface that could have been no more tranquil had she been observed and on guard, chaos reigned. One tempest succeeded another--anger against Basil, against herself--disgust, scorn, jealousy--and, before she slept, she had seen that in reality all these moods were jealousy under different forms. The following morning, when the coast was clear, she slipped into his room, knelt by his untouched bed, cried upon its pillow. This humility soon wept itself out, however; she flung herself into her work. "Nonsense! I don't care for him. It's simply pique and outraged friendship. How coarse men are!"

"What's the matter, mamma?" said Winchie, who was following her about the garden, looking after insects and dead leaves. Than his there never was a keener eye for signs of the red spider.

"Why, dear?"

"You treat the flowers as if you wanted to hurt them."

"Your mamma is in a very naughty humor this morning."

"And you were so happy yesterday. Is it because Mr. Gallatin's gone away?"

Courtney, flushing deeply, looked hastily round. "Sh! You mustn't say those things!"

"Why not?"

Already she was teaching the boy to conceal! "I didn't mean that, Winchie," said she. "You are to say whatever you please--as always."

"I don't want you to like Mr. Gallatin. _I_ don't like him."

"Why not?"

"Because he likes you."

"You wouldn't want anybody not to like your mamma, would you?"

"No." A long silence. Then: "But he looks at you exactly like papa does when he's really seeing you."

Courtney's skin burned. The same story--always the same! "Well--dear--I'll not like him."

"I hope he won't come back."

The suggestion set her heart to aching with loneliness. "I have no shame and no pride," she said to herself. "What a contemptible creature a woman is!" But these sneers availed her nothing. As she sat at table--dinner and supper--his vacant place gave her a sense of bereavement not unlike death itself.

Another night of wakefulness and of the subtle and varied torments known only to those blessed and cursed with vivid imagination. What if he should not come back! That was the final and crudest twist of the rack. Next day, it was all day long as if the silence and darkness of the night were still suffocating her. The house, the grounds seemed a desolation of despair. What if he should not come back! A drizzling rain fell, and she sat miserably by the window, unable to sew, unable to read. And at the first sound from the piano--the melancholy notes her fingers instinctively struck--she sprang away as if a hateful ghost had breathed on her. It was only Wednesday; he would not be home until the next day--probably not until Friday--perhaps not then.

She put fresh flowers in vases in all the rooms every day. That day she filled the vases in his sitting room with the best. And she lingered among his belongings, that promised his return. In the drawers, his fine tasteful shirts and ties; in the closets, those attractive suits, silk lined, agreeable to the touch, varied and always tasteful in pattern. She went back to his books--to the poetry, of which he was particularly fond. The volumes fell open naturally at poems that glorified the lofty, the spiritual side of love. Then, like a scorpion, scuttled across the page of Browning's "Last Ride" what Winchie had said--"He looks at you like papa does." She shuddered, was all dread and foreboding again. Was there no such thing in man as love for woman, but only its coarse and lying counterfeit?

She heard an outside door open noisily. She darted along the hall and down to the angle of the stairway, to the landing from which the drive-front entrance could be seen. She leaned over the balustrade, looked. She drew back, stopping the glad cry that rose to her lips; for it was Basil. With features composed she leaned forward again. His soft hat and his rain coat were dripping; evidently, in his eagerness to arrive, he had crossed the lake in an open boat, instead of coming round by the road in a closed carriage. He was gazing toward the sitting-room door with an expression that thrilled her--and at the same time gave her the courage to treat him as her self-respect and her ideas of decency in a man dictated.

"Back already?" said she in a pleasant, indifferent tone.

He turned, looked up at her, his face alight. "How are you?" he cried. "It seems an age."

"We didn't expect you for several days yet," she went on, descending. When she reached the hall, he was waiting with extended hand. "It _is_ good to be here again!" said he. "It was worth going, for the pleasure of getting back."

She shook hands, smiled friendlily, continued on her way to the sitting room. He hesitated, an uneasy look in his eyes that did not escape her. He put his hat and coat on the rack, followed her. "I _am_ glad to be back!" said he.

She laughed, friendlily enough, but her baffling manner only increased his uneasiness. "We're glad to have you," was her polite reply. "If you want to go to your room before supper, you'd better hurry."

"I've been doing a great deal of thinking while I was away."

"Really? That's good."

"I see you've changed your mind--as I felt you would, when I thought it over. Your first impulse was to be lenient. But when you fully realized what a dishonorable thing it was for me to do--to----"

"Don't you think you'd better go up before supper?"

"Not till I've said one thing," replied he doggedly.

"Well?"

"I want you to know that you can trust me never to repeat my offense. I'd go to Vaughan and tell him and apologize----"

"And, pray, what has Richard to do with it?" inquired she coldly.

"I understand," he hastened to protest. "I'm not going to speak of it to him. It might put unjust suspicion of you in his head----"

There she laughed outright at him. "You are making yourself perfectly absurd," she said, and turned away to go into the dining room.

When he came down, the others were at table. Dick, figuring on his yellow pad, glanced up, rose, greeted him with unprecedented cordiality. "Why, when did you blow in?" he exclaimed.

"A few minutes ago." Gallatin glanced at Courtney. The quiet mockery of her absent gaze made him red and awkward. "I--I--got through--so--I--came," he explained with stammering lameness.

"Naturally," said Dick. He had taken up his pencil. "Make yourself at home."

Gallatin's glance fell on Winchie frowning at him. "Howdy, Winchie?" said he.

The boy made a curt bow, resumed his supper. He was permitted--or, rather, under Courtney's system of training him to think and act for himself, he permitted himself to eat only certain simple things, and very little of them--and he was wonderfully sensible about it. When he finished he kissed his mother good night, made his salute to his father and, almost imperceptibly, to Gallatin, and went upstairs. Gallatin nerved himself to several efforts at beginning conversation with Courtney. Each time, as he glanced up, he was checked and flung back into embarrassed silence by seeing in her absent eyes the same disconcerting mockery. After supper, Richard hurried away to the library. When she showed that she was going upstairs, Gallatin detained her. "One moment, please," he pleaded humbly. "What have I done to offend you?"

Courtney flushed. But the raillery came back instantly. "I'm not offended. I'm amused."

"At what?"

"At you." The smile broadened charmingly. "So you've had a successful trip?"

"Yes--in a way."

"And have come back completely cured."

"I want you to be my friend--if you will. I repeat, you can trust me now."

Her eyes sparkled dangerously. "It's fortunate I understand men--and have a sense of humor."