Chapter 7

Lucy rose abruptly and left the room. I could hear her whispering to him, pleading.

Surely he must have sung that song to her when she was only the little girl with blue eyes over the fence, and it must have had something to do with making her love him. But the qualities of his voice that could once make her heart beat and fire her with love for him could do so no more. He had left, poor fellow, only the power to torture her with remorse and make her cry.

XV

The next day I kept a riding engagement with Lucy, but she didn't.

"She's gone for a walk with John," said Evelyn, who had come out of the house to give me Lucy's messages of regret and apology.

"Lucy gone walking!" I exclaimed. "Have the heavens fallen?"

"Sometimes I think they have," said Evelyn. "But you know more about that than I do."

"Know more about what?"

"Haven't you noticed?"

I shook my head.

"Why, John is all up in the air about something or other, and Lucy is worried sick about him. I thought probably she'd told you what the trouble was. I've asked. She said probably money had something to do with it; and that was all I could get out of her. Come down off that high horse and talk to me. I'm not riding till four."

So I left my pony standing at the front gate and Evelyn and I strolled about the grounds.

"Money isn't the whole trouble," said Evelyn presently. "I know that. Something even more serious has gone terribly wrong. And I want to help."

"Won't they work it out best by themselves?" I suggested.

"Sometimes," she said, "it seems almost as if they had quarreled. Sometimes John looks at her--Oh, as if he was going to die and was looking at her for the last time. Could he have something serious the matter with him?"

"He could, of course, but it doesn't seem likely."

"He doesn't _look_ well."

"True."

"Look here, Archie, don't you know what's wrong?"

"I wish I did," said I. "If I could right it."

As a matter of fact I didn't know what was wrong. I knew only that Lucy no longer loved her husband. But why she no longer loved him was the real trouble, and she had not told me that, even if she knew It herself. But wishing to strengthen my answer, I said: "You're the one who ought to know what's wrong. You're on the spot. And besides, you're a woman and a woman is supposed to have three intuitions to a man's one."

Evelyn ignored this.

"Sometimes," she said, "John's so gentle and pathetic that I want to cry. Sometimes he is cantankerous and flies into rages about trifles. It's getting on my nerves."

"Why not pack up your duds and move on?"

"Oh, because----"

I laughed maliciously. "We might move on together," I suggested.

"_You_ were going to move on," she said, "but you have stayed. I wonder why?"

I did not enlighten her.

"If," she said presently, "people find out that things in this house are at sixes and sevens I wonder if they won't find fault with you and Lucy? Has that occurred to you?"

"It has occurred to you," I said, "to my own mamma and doubtless to other connections. But it hasn't occurred to me. We see too much of each other?"

"Altogether."

"You really think that?"

Evelyn shrugged her shoulders. "For appearance' sake, yes," she said. "Of course you do. But it's my opinion that if you'd been going to get sentimental about each other you'd have done it long ago."

"Evelyn," I said, "I've never made trouble in a family."

"Is that because of your natural virtue or because you have never wanted to?"

"A little of both, I think. People fall in love at first sight. That can't be helped. Or they fall in love very quickly, and that's hard to help. But people who fall in love gradually through long association have no good excuse for doing so, if they oughtn't. They should see it coming and quit seeing each other before it's too late."

"But I don't agree," said Evelyn. "I think love is always a first-sight affair. I don't mean necessarily the first time two people see each other, but that suddenly after years of association even, they will see each other in a new light."

"A light that was never on sea or land?"

"A light that is always where people are, just waiting to be turned on."

At that moment we heard Dawson Cooper's voice calling: "Hallo there! Where are you?"

Presently he hove into sight, and did not seem altogether pleased at finding Evelyn and me together.

"Archie thought he was going to ride with Lucy," Evelyn explained, "but she threw him down, and I suppose we have got to ask him to ride with us!"

"Yes," I said, "I think you have, but I don't have to accept, do I? You're just doing it so's not to hurt my feelings, aren't you? Of course if you really want me----"

"Come along, Coops," said Evelyn. "He's trying to tease us. He wouldn't ride with us for a farm."

We separated at the mounting-block, and I watched them a little way down the road. And felt a little touch of envy. Evelyn was looking very alluring that afternoon.

I rode in the opposite direction until I came to the big open flat north of the racetrack; there, a long way off, I saw John Fulton and Lucy walking slowly side by side. John was sabering dead weed stalks with his stick. So I turned east to avoid them, then north, until I had passed the forlorn yellow pesthouse with its high, deer-park fence, and was well out in the country.

Then I left the main road, and followed one tortuous sandy track after another. Suddenly Heroine shied. I looked up from a deep, aimless reverie, and saw sitting at the side of a trail a withered old negress. She looked like a monkey buried in a mound of rags.

"Evening, Auntie," I said.

"Evening, boss."

Heroine had broken into a sweat, and was trembling. She kept her eyes on the old negress and her ears pointed at her, her nostrils widely dilated.

"My horse thinks you're a witch, Auntie," I said. "Hope you'll excuse her."

"I allows I got ter, boss, caze that's jes what I is."

"Honest to Gospel?" I laughed.

"You got fifty cents, boss?"

I found such a coin in my pocket and tossed it to her.

"I used to have," I said.

She rose to her feet and Heroine drew away from her, firmly and rudely.

"Don' min' me, honey," said the old woman, and she held out a hand like a monkey's paw. To my astonishment Heroine began to crane her head toward the hand, sniffed at it presently, gave a long sigh of relief and stood at ease, muscles relaxed, and eyelids drooping.

"Now I believe you," I said. "What else can you do?"

She turned her bright, beady eyes this way and that, searching perhaps for anyone who might be watching and listening. Then she said, "I kin tell fo'tunes, boss."

"Just tell me my name."

"You is Mista Mannering, boss."

"Hum, that's too easy," I said. "I've been coming to Aiken a great many years. What is my horse's name?"

"Her name is He'win, boss."

"Hum," I said and felt a little creepy feeling of wonder.

"Does you want to know any mo'?"

I nodded.

"You's flighty, boss, but you ain't bad. You is goin' ter be lucky in love, 'n then you is goin' ter be unlucky. You is goin' ter risk gettin' shot, but dere ain't goin' ter be no shootin'. When summer come around you is goin' ter have sorrer in you' breas', and when winter comes around dere'll be de same ole sorrer, a twistin' and a gnawin'."

"What sort of a sorrow, Auntie?"

"Sorrer like when you strikes a lil chile what ain't done no harm, only seem like he done harm, sorrer like you feels w'en you baby dies, 'case you is too close-fisted ter sen' fer de doctor, sorrer like----"

She broke off short, looking a little dazed and foolish.

"You've had your share of sorrow, Auntie, I can see that."

"Is I a beas' o' de fiel'?" she exclaimed indignantly, "or is I a humanous bein'?"

"Must all human beings have sorrows?"

"Yes, boss, but each has he own kin'! Big man has big sorrer, little man have little sorrer, and dem as is middlin' men dey has middlin' sorrers."

"It's all one," I said, "each gets what he can stand and no more. Put a big sorrow on a little man and he'd break under it; put a little sorrow on a big man and he wouldn't know that he was carrying it. What else can you tell me, Auntie?"

"I ain't goin' ter tell yo' no mo'."

"Not for another half-dollar?"

"No, boss."

"Well, there it is anyway. Good evening."

"Good evening, boss."

She had made me feel a little shivery and I rode off at the gallop.

XVI

I was surprised to find John Fulton in the Club. As a home-loving man he was not a frequent visitor. He had dropped in, he said, to get a game of bridge, had tired of waiting for somebody to cut out, and had been reading the newspapers to find out how the world was getting along.

"I haven't more than glanced at them in a week," he said, "but there's nothing new, is there? Just new variations of public animosity and domestic misfortunes. Have you read this Overman business?"

"I haven't."

"It's a case or a hard-working, thoroughly respectable man who, for no reason that is known, suddenly shoots down his wife and children in cold blood, and then blows his own head to smithereens."

"But of course there was a reason," I said; "he must have felt that he was justified."

"He seems to have had enough money and good health. And he passed for a sane, matter-of-fact sort of fellow."

"If it was the regular reason," I said, "jealousy, he wouldn't have hurt the children."

"Only a very unhappy man could kill his children," said Fulton. "His idea would be to save them from such unhappiness as he himself had experienced. But in nine cases out of ten it would be a mistaken kindness. Causes similar to those which drove the father into a despair of unhappiness would in all probability affect the children less. No two persons enjoy to the same degree, suffer to the same degree or are tempted alike. How many wronged husbands are there who swallow their trouble and endure to one who shoots?"

"Legions," I said. "Fortunately. Otherwise one could hardly sleep for the popping of pistols."

"Do you believe that or do you say it to be amusing?"

"I think that the number of husbands who find out that they have been wronged is only exceeded by the number who never even suspect it. But they are not the husbands we know, the modern novelist to the contrary notwithstanding. In our class it is the wives who are wronged as a rule; in the lower classes, the husbands. I've known hundreds of what the newspapers call society people; the women are good, with just enough exceptions to prove the rule: the men aren't."

"When you say that the women are good, you mean they are technically good?"

"Who is technically good?"

"Hallo, Harry!"

Colemain, having pushed a bell, pulled up a big chair and joined us.

"We were saying that the average woman we know is technically good."

"You bet she is!" said Colemain. "She has to be! If she wasn't how could she ever put over the things she does put over? And as a rule her husband isn't technically good and so she has power over him. She says nothing, but he knows that she knows, and so when she does something peculiarly extravagant and outrageous, he reaches meekly for his checkbook. For one man who is ruined by drink there are ten ruined by women; and not by the kind of women who are supposed to ruin men either; not by the street-walker, the chorus girl or the demi-mondaine. American men are ruined by their wives and daughters who are technically good. Don't we know dozens of cases? When there is a crash in Wall Street how many well-to-do married men go to smash to one well-to-do bachelor? A marriage isn't a partnership. It's the opposite except in name. It's a partnership in which the junior partner gives her whole mind to extracting from the business sums of money which ought to go back into it. And she spends those sums almost invariably on things which diminish in value the moment they are bought. It isn't the serpent that is the arch enemy of mankind. It's the pool in which Eve first saw that she was beautiful, or would be if she could only get her fig-leaf skirt to hang right."

"But I think," said Fulton gently, "that women ought to have pretty clothes, and bright jewels and luxuries. If a girl loves a man, and proves it and keeps on loving him, how is it possible for him to pay her back short of ruining himself? Haven't you ever felt that if the whole world was yours to give you'd give it gladly? Why complain then when afterwards you are only asked to give that infinitesimal portion of the world that happens at the moment to be yours? If a man is ruined for his wife, if cares shorten his life, even then he has done far, far less than he once said he was willing and eager to do."

He looked at the big clock over the mantelpiece, sat silent for a moment, then rose, wished us good-night and went out.

"You wouldn't think," said Harry, "to hear him talk that a woman was playing chuck-cherry with that infinitesimal portion of the world that happens to be his. I was in the bank this morning and I saw him come out of the President's room. He looked a little as if he'd just identified the body of a missing dear one in the morgue."

"I'm afraid he is frightfully hard up," I said, "but he hasn't said anything to me about it, and I don't like to volunteer."

"He's a good man," said Harry, "one of the few really good men I know, and it's a blamed shame."

"Oh, it will all come out in the wash."

"It depends on how dirty the linen is!"

"American men," I said, "never seem to have the courage to retrench. Why not take your family to a cheap boarding-house for a year or two? Cut the Gordian knot and get right down to bed rock? Boarding-house food may be bad for the spirit, but it's good for the body. My father had dyspepsia one spring, and his doctor told him to spend six weeks in a summer hotel--_any_ summer hotel--and take _all_ his meals in it."

Just then one of the bell-boys interrupted us. He said that Mrs. Fulton wished to speak with me. He followed me into the coat room, where the telephone is, in a persistent sort of way, so that I turned on him rather sharply and asked what he wanted.

His eyes were bulging with a look of importance and his black face had an expression of mystery. "She ain't on de telephone," he said, "she's outside."

"Well, why couldn't you say so?"

I went out bareheaded into the dusk and walked quickly between the bedded hyacinths and the evergreen hedges of Carolina cherry to the sidewalk. But she wasn't there. Far up the street I saw a familiar horse and buggy, and a whip that signaled to me.

She was all alone. Even Cornelius Twombley, as much a part of the buggy as one of the wheels, had been dropped off somewhere.

"I haven't seen you all day," she said. "I thought maybe you'd like to go for a little drive."

I simply climbed into the buggy and sat down beside her.

"Evelyn and Dawson," she explained, "were crowding the living-room, so I thought of this. Is John in the Club?"

"He was, but he said good-night to Harry Colemain and me, and I think he went home. . . . How is everything? I saw you and John from afar, walking together. I knew you could run because I've seen you play tennis, but I didn't suppose you'd ever learned to walk. You're always either on a horse or behind one."

"Was it very bold of me to come to the Club for you? I suppose I ought to have telephoned." Then she laughed. "I ought to have had more consideration of your reputation," she said.

"My reputation will survive," I said. "But look here, Lucy----"

"I'm looking!"

"I meant look with your mind. I don't know if I ought to bring it up; it's just gossip. Harry saw John coming out of the President's room in the bank. He said it looked to him as if John had been trying to make a touch and hadn't gotten away with it. You know I hate to see him distressed for money, especially now when other things are distressing him, and I wonder if there isn't some tactful arrangement by which I could let him have some money without his knowing that it came from me."

"_Aren't_ you good!" she exclaimed. "Oh, I suppose he makes things out as bad as he can so as to influence me as much as possible; but he says we are in a terrible hole, that we oughtn't to have come here at all, that if he'd had any idea how much money I'd been spending in New York before we came he wouldn't have considered coming, that everybody is hounding him for money, and that he doesn't see how he can possibly pay his bills at the end of the season. Of course it's mostly my fault; but I can't help it if the Democrats are in power and business is bad, can I?"

"Well," I said, "I'm flush just now and I'll think up a scheme. Meanwhile let's forget about everything that isn't pleasant. Where are you going to drive me?"

"I don't care. Let's get away from the lights. What time is it? John doesn't like me to be late; and besides I haven't kissed the kiddies good-night. Let's just take a little dip in the woods. On a hot night it's almost like going for a swim. Oughtn't you to have a hat or something? If you get cold you can put the cooler on like a shawl."

Her manner affected me as it had never affected me before.

The dip from the hot dusk of the dusty road into the cool midnight of the pine woods had all the exhilaration of an adventure. The fact that she had sent into the Club for me flattered my vanity. She wanted me and not another to be with her. I felt a tenderness for her that I had never felt before. I wanted a chance to show that I understood her and was her friend without qualification. Shoulder touched shoulder now and then and it seemed to me as if I was being appealed to by that contact for support, countenance, and protection.

We chattered about the night and the pale stars, and the smells of flowers. We wished that there was no such thing as dinner, that the woods lasted forever, and that we might drive on through the soft perfumed air until we came to the end of them.

Then there was quite a long silence, and for the first time in my life I experienced the wish, well, not to kiss her, but to lay my cheek against hers. It was a wish singularly hard to resist.

"I suppose we ought to turn back."

"You know best," I said.

"Do you want to?"

"No, do you?"

"No."

But we turned back and came up out of the woods into the lights of the town.

"Where shall I drop you--at the Club?"

"Let me drop you," I said, "and borrow your buggy afterward to take me home. You ought not to drive alone at night."

"Maybe it would be better if I did," she said.

We said good-night at the door of her house, but not easily. For once it seemed hard to say anything final.

"Was I very brazen," she said, "to ask you to go with me, when I didn't want to be alone?"

"You were not," I said, "it was sweet of you. I loved it."

Cornelius Twombly lunged from the black shadow of a cedar tree and went to the horse's head.

"Good-night, Lucy. Good luck!"

Just then we heard John calling.

"That you, Lucy? You're late. I was getting anxious."

We could see him coming down the path, a vague shadow among the shadows, his cigarette burning brightly.

"Hallo, who is it? I can't see."

"It's Archie Mannering," said Lucy.

"Oh, is it? Won't you come in?"

"Can't, thanks. Got to dress. Lovely night, isn't it? Good-night. Good-night, Lucy."

When I had driven a little way I turned and looked over my shoulder, but though I could only see the fire of John's cigarette, I imagined that I could see his face--a little puzzled, a little anxious, and very sad.

It was on that same night that he said to Lucy: "Aren't you seeing a good deal of Archie Mannering?"

And she answered:

"Am I? I suppose I am. I like him awfully."

XVII

I awoke the next morning with the feeling that something or other was impending. I had no idea what it might be, pleasant or unpleasant. I felt a little the way you feel just before a race on which you have bet altogether too much money, a little excited, a little nervous, equally ready for laughter or anger. I had also the feeling that I had a great many things to do, and could not possibly get them done in so short a space of time as one day.

I hurried through breakfast. I hurried through the papers. And then I realized with a sense of anti-climax that until four o'clock, when I was to ride with Lucy, I had but one thing of any possible importance to do. And upon that business from first to last including the walk to the village and thence to the Club I spent no more than three-quarters of an hour. It had been an eccentric piece of business, and I was rather pleased with myself for having brought it to a satisfactory conclusion. But I wanted others to know what I had done and to be pleased with me for doing it; and to tell anyone was quite out of the question.

In the Club letter-box under "M," I saw a small gray envelope. Instinct told me that it was for me, and that it was from Lucy. Then somehow all my feeling of restlessness and suspense melted away like a lump of sugar in hot tea. I felt at once serene and comfortable.

I carried the note to a writing-table, for I imagined that it would require an immediate answer, and then read it. Like all Lucy's notes it began without the conventional endearment, and ended with initials. It contained also her usual half-dozen mistakes in spelling.

John says he has no money and can't get any. So we've got to close the house and go back north, and live very cheaply till better times. So I've got to begin packing. So I can't ride this afternoon. Isn't it all a beastly shame? But please drop in and say how-dy-do just the same, and don't mind if you have to sit on a trunk. And please be a little sorry because I'm going away and we can't have any more rides. And please don't say anything about this; because John isn't just himself and maybe when we get all packed up he'll change his mind.

L. F.

Long before they were "all packed up," John did change his mind. I was present when he changed it. Lucy, Evelyn, and I were in the living-room helping each other to pack large silver-framed photographs into the tray of a trunk. It was slow work. During the winter none of us had looked at the photographs or commented on the originals, but now that they were to be swathed in tissue paper and put out of sight each one had to be approved or disapproved, and long excursions had to be made into the life histories and affairs of the friends who had sat for them.

Lucy had just taken a large photograph of Evelyn from the top of the low bookshelves that filled one end of the room when John came in from the garden with an open letter in his hand. He was smiling in a puzzled sort of way.

"What do you know about this!" he exclaimed rather than asked.

"Nothing," said Lucy, "_yet_." And she began to wrap Evelyn's photograph in many folds of tissue paper.

"Yesterday," said John, "I tried to get some money from the bank, but they turned me down. Now they write that upon reconsideration I can have anything I like."

Well, Lucy's expression at that moment was worth a great deal more than the few thousands which her husband would see fit to borrow from the bank, and I couldn't but feel that there are moments when it is really worth while to be alive and rich.

"Wonder what made 'em change their minds?" said John.

"There's one thing sure," said Lucy. "You are not to look a gift horse in the mouth."

She unwrapped the photograph of Evelyn and put it back in its old place on top of the bookshelves.

"This settles everything, does it?" asked John. "We don't go back to New York?"

"We do not," said Lucy firmly.

"Well," said John, "I'd better see the bank before it changes its mind again. Is the buggy outside?"

"No, but you can take Archie's or Evelyn's. Can't he? I sent Cornelius Twombly to do some chores."

"I'll drive you down," said Evelyn, "having a telegram to send."