The Thing from the Lake Part 5

"Then I must see the man."

"Not--hurt----?"

I recalled the man we had just seen on the skating floor, with a qualm of quite unreasonable bitterness. That anxiety of Phillida's had a flavor of irony for me.

"Hardly," I returned. "There are fortunately other means of persuasion than physical force."

"Oh! But you cannot persuade him to give me up."

I was silent. At which, being a woman, she grew troubled.

"How could you?" she urged.

"You have had no opportunity of judging what influence money has on some people, Phil."

She laughed out in relief.

"Is that all? Try, Cousin."

"You trust him so much?"

"In everything, forever!"

"Then if I succeed in buying him off, promise me that you will come home with me."

"If he takes money to leave me?"

"Yes."

"I should die. But I will promise if you want me to, because I know it never will happen. Just as I might promise to do anything, when I knew that I never would have to carry it out."

"Very well," I accepted the best I could get. "I will go find him."

"There is no need. He is coming here to our table as soon as he is free."

"I will not have you seen with him in this place."

"But I am going to stay here with him," she said.

Her eyes, the meek eyes of Phillida, defied me. My faint authority was a sham. What could be done, I recognized, must be done through the man.

We sat in silence, after that. Presently, her gaze fixed aslant on me as if to dare my interference, she drew up a thin gold chain that hung about her neck and ended beneath her blouse. From it she unfastened a wedding ring and gravely put the thing on her third finger, the school-girl romanticism of the gesture blended with an air of little-girl naughtiness. She looked more fit for a nursery than for this business.

I could tell from the change in her expression when the man was approaching. I rose, meaning to meet him and turn him aside from our table. But Phillida halted me with one deftly planted question.

"You would not leave me alone in this place, Cousin?"

Certainly I would not leave her alone at a table here; not even alone in appearance while I had my interview with the man close at hand. Yet it seemed impossible to speak before her. She calmly answered my perplexity.

"You must talk to him here, of course. I--want to listen to you both.

Indeed, I shall not interfere at all, or be angry or hurt! I know how good you mean to be, dear; only, you do not understand."

I sat down again, perforce. When the man's shadow presently fell across our table, it did not soothe me to see Phil thrust her hand in his, her small face enraptured, her fingers locking about his with a caress plain as a kiss. She said proudly, if tremulously:

"Cousin Roger, this is my husband. Mr. Locke, Ethan dear."

He said nothing. His hesitating movement to offer his hand I chose to ignore. I admit that my spirit rose against him to the point of loathing as he stood there, tall, correct in attire--the focus of admiring glances from other diners--in every way the ant.i.thesis of my poor Phillida.

"Sit down," I bade curtly, when he did not speak. "Miss Knox insists that we have our interview here. I should have preferred otherwise, but her presence must not prevent what has to be said."

"It won't prevent anything I want to say, Mr. Locke," he answered.

He spoke with a drawl. Not the drawl of affectation, nor the drawl of South or West so cherished by the romantic, but the slow, deliberate speech of New England's upper coasts. It had the oddest effect, that honest, homely accent on the lips of a performer in this place. Phil drew him down to the third chair at the table. After which, she folded her hands on the edge of the cloth as if to signify to me how she kept her promise of neutrality, and looked fixedly at her gla.s.s of water instead of at either of us. Plainly, all action was supposed to proceed from me.

"My cousin has just told me of her marriage," I opened, as dryly concise as I could manage explanation. "It is of course impossible that she should adopt your way of living, as she seems to have in mind. You may not understand, yet, that it also is impossible for you to adopt hers.

No doubt you have supposed her to be the daughter of wealthy people, or at least people of whom money could be obtained. You were wrong.

Professor Knox has nothing but his modest salary. Her parents are of the scholarly, not of the moneyed cla.s.s. She has no kin who could or would support her husband or pay largely to be rid of him. Of all her people, I happen to be the best off, financially. It happens also that I am not sentimental, nor alarmed at the idea of newspaper exploitation for either of us. It is necessary that all this be plainly set forth before we go further.

"Now, for your side: you have involved Miss Knox to the extent of marriage. To free her from this trap into which her inexperience has walked is worth a reasonable price. I will pay it. I shall take her home to her father and mother tonight, and consult my lawyer tomorrow. He will conduct negotiations with you. The day Miss Knox is divorced from you without useless scandal or trouble-making, I will pay to you the sum agreed upon with my lawyer. If you prefer to make yourself objectionable, you will get nothing, now or later."

He took it all without a flicker of the eyelids, not interrupting or displaying any affectation of being insulted. I acknowledge, now, that it was an outrageous speech to make to a man of whom I knew nothing. But it was so intended; summing up what I considered an outrageous situation brought about by his playing upon a young girl's ignorance of such fellows as himself. Phillida's usually pale cheeks were burning. Several times she would have broken in upon me with protests, if Vere had not silenced her by the merest glances of warning. A proof of his influence over her which had not inclined me toward gentleness with him!

When I finished there was a pause before he turned his dark eyes to mine, and held them there.

"Honest enough!" he drawled, with that incongruous coast-of-Maine tang to his leisureliness. "I'll match you there, Mr. Locke. I don't care whether you make fifty thousand a year with your music writing, or whether you grind a street-piano with a tin-cup on top. It's nothing to me. I guess we can do without your lawyer, too. Because, you see, I married Mrs. Vere because I wanted her; and I figure on supporting her.

If her folks are too cultivated to stand me, I'm sorry. But they won't have to see me. So that's settled!"

He was honest. His glance drove that fact home to me with a fist-like impact. There was nothing I was so poorly prepared to meet.

Phillida's hands went out to him in an impulsive movement. He covered them both with one of his for a moment before gently putting them in her lap with a gesture of reminder toward the revellers all about us. The delicacy of that thought for her was another disclosure of character, unconsciously made. Worthy or unworthy, he did love Phil.

I am not too dully obstinate to recognize a mistake of my own. Whatever my bitterness against the man, I had to accord him some respect. I sat for a while striving to align my forces to attack this new front.

"I don't blame you for thinking what you said, Mr. Locke," his voice presently spoke across my perplexity. "I can see the way things came to you; finding me here, and all! I'm glad to have had this chance to talk it out with one of my wife's relations. I'd like them to know she'll be taken care of. Outside of that, I guess there is nothing we have to say to each other."

"I suppose I owe you both an apology," I said stiffly.

"Oh, that's all right--for both of us! I can see how much store you set by her."

"But what are you going to do with her, man?" I burst forth. "Do you expect to keep her here; sitting at a table in this place and watching you do your turn, making your fellow performers her friends, seeing and learning----?" I checked my outpouring of disgust. "Or do you propose to shut her up in some third-cla.s.s boarding house day and night while you hang around here? Good heavens, Vere, do you realize what either life would be for an nineteen-year-old girl brought up as she has been?"

He colored.

"As for bringing up," he retorted, "I guess she couldn't be a lot more miserable than her folks worried her into being. But--you're right about the rest. That's why I was going to leave her with her folks yet a while, until I had a place for her. I mean, while I saved up enough to get the place."

"But I wrote to him when I failed in my exams, Cousin Roger," Phillida broke in. "I told him that I would not go home. I could not bear it. I was coming to him, and he would just have to keep me with him or I should _die_. Indeed, I do not care about places. I think it will be lovely fun to sit here and watch him, or go behind the scenes with him and make friends with the other people. I--I am surprised that you are so narrow, Cousin Roger, when all your own best friends are theatrical people and artists and you think so highly of them."

I answered nothing to that. The distance between the stage and this cla.s.s of cabaret show was not to be traversed in a few seven-league words. I looked at Vere, who returned my look squarely and soberly.