Together Part 40

Conny did not seem interested in Rob Falkner and his turning up at this juncture. She sat with a solemn face, wondering how she could get back to the city. Finally she resolved to telephone Cairy.

Falkner went over to the unconscious boy, and taking his hand, counted the pulse. "It's all right so far," he said to the mother, who did not hear him. After a time she looked up, and her low voice dragged hoa.r.s.ely,--"You mustn't wait. The doctor will be here soon, and we can do everything now."

"I will wait until the doctor comes," Falkner replied gently, and stepped to the window to watch for the motor.

After the local doctor had come and said, "A slight concussion,--nothing serious, I expect," and the boy had revived somewhat, Conny departed alone in the motor, Isabelle having decided to stay with Margaret over the night.

Falkner helped the doctor carry the patient upstairs, and then started to leave. Isabelle waited for him at the door.

"Mrs. Pole wishes me to thank you for all your kindness."

"I shall look in to-morrow morning," he replied hurriedly. "I would stay now until the boy's father came; but I don't suppose there is anything I can do. I am living at the hotel below, and you can telephone if you want me."

"You are living here?"

"Yes; I am working on the new dam, a few miles from this place."

"I am so glad to see you again," Isabelle said, the only words she could think of.

"Thank you."

Then with a curt nod he was off. He had not shown in any way that he was glad to see her, Isabelle reflected. Falkner was always moody, but she had thought he liked her,--and after all their friends.h.i.+p! Something had kept her from asking more about Bessie.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

Larry did not return for dinner, which Isabelle ate by herself in sombre silence. When she went upstairs to take the mother's place with the boy, Margaret did not seem to notice her husband's absence, though she inquired repeatedly whether the New York doctor had telephoned. Later in the evening when Isabelle suggested that some effort should be made to find the boy's father, Margaret exclaimed impatiently:--

"I can't tell where he is! ... It is easier for me that he isn't here." And in answer to Isabelle's expression, she added: "Don't look so shocked, B!

Larry gets on my nerves frightfully when there is anything extra to bear or do. Of course I shall telephone his office in the morning, and he will come out at once. That doctor said there would be no change before morning. Do you suppose he knows anything, that doctor? He had the look of polite ignorance!"

The New York doctor arrived towards midnight with a nurse, and stayed the night to await developments. Margaret still sat by the boy's bed, and Isabelle left her huddled in a large chair, her eyes staring at the shadow on the faintly lighted bed. She had listened to what Dr. Rogers had to say without a word. She was almost stone, Isabelle felt, looking at her with some awe. What could have made her like this!

She was still in this stony mood the next morning when Larry reached the house. Dressed in a loose black gown that clung to her slight figure and brought out the perfect whiteness of her skin, she stood and listened indifferently to the vague explanation of his absence that her husband poured out profusely. Then with a remark that the doctor would see him before he went, she left the room. Isabelle, who was present, watched the two keenly, trying to divine the secret. To be sure, Larry was not attractive, she decided,--too effusive, too anxious to make the right impression, as if he were acting a part before Isabelle, and full of wordy concern for every one. A little below the medium height, he stood very erect, consciously making the most of his inches. His sandy hair was thin, and he wore gla.s.ses, behind which one eye kept winking nervously. Neatly, almost fas.h.i.+onably dressed, he bore no evident marks of dissipation. After Conny's description, Isabelle had expected to see his shortcomings written all over him. Though he was over-mannered and talkative, there was nothing to mark him as of the outcast cla.s.s. "One doesn't despise one's husband because he's foolish or unfortunate about money matters," Isabelle said to herself. And the sympathy that she had felt for Margaret began to evaporate.

"You say that he fell off that embankment?" Larry remarked to her. "I was afraid he was too young to ride about here by himself with all the motors there are in this neighborhood. But Margaret was anxious to have him fearless.... People who motor are so careless--it has become a curse in the country.... Mrs. Woodyard came out with you? I am so sorry this frightful accident spoiled your day."...

He ran on from remark to remark, with no prompting from Isabelle, and had got to their life in Germany when the doctor entered the room. Larry shook hands punctiliously with him, inquiring in a special tone: "I hope you have good news of the little fellow, Doctor? I thought I would not go up until I had seen you first."...

The doctor cut short the father's prolixity in a burly voice:--

"It's concussion, pa.s.sing off, I think. But n.o.body can say what will happen then,--whether there is anything wrong with the cord. It may clear up in a few days. It may not. No use speculating.... I shall be back to-morrow or send some one. Good day."

Larry followed him into the hall, talking, questioning, exclaiming.

Isabella noticed that the doctor gave Pole a quick, impatient glance, shaking him off with a curt reply, and jumped into the waiting carriage. In some ways men read men more rapidly than women can. They look for fewer details, with an eye to the essential stuff of character.

What had the doctor said to Margaret? Had he let her know his evident fears? When she came into the room for a moment, there was an expression of fixed will in her white face, as if she had gone down into herself and found there the courage to meet whatever was coming.... 'The older boy, too,' thought Isabelle,--'the one so like her, with no outward trace of the father!'

While Margaret was giving directions for telephoning, making in brief phrases her arrangements for the day, Falkner came in. He was in his working clothes, and with his thick beard and scrubby mustache looked quite rough beside the trim Larry.

"How is the boy?" he demanded directly, going up to the mother.

"Better, I think,--comfortable at least," she answered gently. There was a warm gleam in her eyes as she spoke to this stranger, as if she had felt his fibre and liked it.

"I will come in this afternoon. I should like to see him when I can."

"Yes, this afternoon," Margaret replied. "I should be glad to have you come."

Isabelle had told Pole that Falkner was the man who had found the boy and brought him home. Larry, with the subtle air of superiority that clothes seem to give a small man, thanked Falkner in suitable language. Isabelle had the suspicion that he was debating with himself whether he should give this workingman a couple of dollars for his trouble, and with an hysterical desire to laugh interposed:--

"Mr. Pole, this is Mr. Falkner, an old friend of ours!"

"Oh," Larry remarked, "I didn't understand!" and he looked at Falkner again, still from a distance.

"Rob," Isabelle continued, turning to Falkner, "you didn't tell me yesterday how Bessie is. I haven't heard from her for a long while,--and Mildred?"

"They are well, I believe. Bessie doesn't write often."

Pole followed him into the hall, making remarks. Isabelle heard Falkner reply gruffly: "Yes, it was a nasty fall. But a kid can fall a good way without hurting himself seriously."

When Pole came back and began to talk to her, Isabelle's sympathy for his wife revived. The house had settled into the dreary imitation of its customary routine that the house of suspense takes on. To live in this, with the mild irritation of Larry's conversational fluency, was quite intolerable. It was not what he said, but the fact that he was forever saying it. "A bag of words," Isabelle called him. "Poor Margaret!" And she concluded that there was nothing more useful for her to do than to take upon herself the burden of Larry until he should dispose of himself in some harmless way.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

No, women such as Margaret Pole do not "despise their husbands because they are unfortunate in money matters,"--not altogether because they prove themselves generally incompetent in the man's struggle for life! This process of the petrification of a woman's heart, slow or rapid as it may be, is always interesting,--if the woman is endowed in the first place with the power to feel. How Margaret Lawton may have come to marry Lawrence Pole, we can defer for the present, as a matter of post-mortem psychology, unprofitable, melancholy, and inexact, however interesting. How does any woman come to marry any man? Poets, psychologists, and philosophers have failed to account for the accidents of this emotional nexus.

What is determinable and more to our purpose is the subsequent process of dissolution, or petrifaction. All that need be said is that Margaret married her husband when she was twenty-four, with confidence, belief in him, and a spiritual aspiration concerning marriage not possible to many who marry. However foolishly she may have deluded herself,--betrayed a fatal incapacity to divine,--she believed when she went to the altar with Lawrence Pole that she was marrying a Man,--one whom she could respect as well as love, and to whom she should remain loyally bound in mind and heart and soul.

She was ardent, this delicate Southern girl. Under a manner that had seemed to comrades at St. Mary's cold because of its reticence, there burned the fire of a crusading race,--of those Southerners who had pushed from the fat lowlands about the sea into the mountains and across them to the wilderness; of that uncle, who after the defeat of his cause had ridden his cavalry horse across the entire country in search of a new opening, to build at forty-three a new life for himself and his wife--after defeat!

There was courage, aspiration, the power of deeds in that blood,--note the high forehead, the moulded chin, the deep eyes of this woman. And there was also in her religious faith, received from her father the Bishop, piety, and accepted beliefs in honor, loyalty, love to one's family and friends, and charity to the world. All this was untested, handed down to her wrapped in the prayer-book by the Bishop. And she had seen a bit of what we call the world, there in Was.h.i.+ngton among her mother's friends,--had been gay, perhaps reckless, played like a girl with love and life, those hours of suns.h.i.+ne. She knew vaguely that some men were liars, and some were carnal; but she came to her marriage virgin in soul as well as body, without a spot from living, without a vicious nerve in her body, ready to learn.

And folly with money, mere incompetence, did not turn that heart to stone,--not that alone. The small segment of the world that knew the Poles might think so, hearing how Larry had gone into Wall Street and fatuously left there his own small fortune, and later, going back after his lesson, had lost what he could of his wife's property. To be sure, after that first "ill luck," Margaret's eyes had opened to the fact that her husband was not "practical," was easily led by vanity. In the Lawton family it had been the Man's part to deal effectively with practical life, and women did not concern themselves with their judgments. But as Margaret had never expected to be rich,--had no ambition for place in the social race,--she would have gone back to her blue-capped mountains and lived there contented, "with something to look at." She had urged this course upon her husband after the first disaster; but he was too vain to "get out," to "quit the game," to leave New York. So with the understanding that henceforth he would stick to prosaic methods of money making, he had started again in his brokerage business. This was at the time when Margaret was occupied with her babies.

As the indubitable clay of her idol revealed itself, she had thought that child-bearing, child-having would be a tolerable compensation for her idyl.

Margaret Pole was one who "didn't mind having babies," and did not consider the fatal nine months a serious deprivation of life. She liked it all, she told Isabelle, and was completely happy only when the children were coming and while they were helpless babies. One real interest suffices for all.

Then one day, after the second boy was born, Larry came in, shaking in hand and heart, and the miserable news was soon out,--"caught in the panic,"

"unexpected turn of the market." But how could he be caught, his wife demanded, with contracting blue eyes? Had his firm failed? And after a little,--lie and subterfuge within lie and subterfuge being unwrapped,--it appeared,--the fact. He had "gone into cotton"--with whose money? His mother's estate,--those excellent four per cent gold bonds that the thrifty judge had put aside for his widow!

With the look that Margaret gave her husband, he might have seen that the process of petrifaction had set in, had gone far, indeed.

Margaret loved her mother-in-law,--the sweet old woman of gentle fancies who lived in an old house in an old town on the Ma.s.sachusetts coast, the town where she and the judge had grown up. An unworldly, gentle woman, who had somehow told her daughter-in-law without words that she knew what was missing in her woman's heart. No, the judge's widow should not pay for her son's folly! So Margaret sold the New York house, which was hers, and also some of those mountain lands that had a growing value now, realizing bitterly that by this early sale she was sacrificing her boys'