Who Cares? Part 35

She thought that he didn't love her, and he had done his best to obey.

But he did love her, more than Martin, it seemed, more than Gilbert, he thought, and by this time she was well on her way to--what?

PART FOUR

THE PAYMENT

I

It was one of those golden evenings that sometimes follows a hot clear day--one of those rare evenings which linger in the memory when summer has slipped away and which come back into the mind like a smile, an endearment or a broad sweet melody, renewing optimism and replenis.h.i.+ng faith. The sun had gone, but its warm glow lingered in a sky that was utterly unspotted. The quiet unruffled trees in all the rich green of early maturity stood out against it almost as though they were painted on canvas. The light was so true that distances were brought up to the eye. Far-away sounds came closely to the ear. The murmur from the earth gathered like that of a mult.i.tude of voices responding to prayers.

Palgrave drove slowly. The G.o.d-given peace and beauty that lay over everything quieted the stress and storm of his mind. Somehow, too, with Joan at his side on the road to the cottage in which he was to play out the second or the last act of the drama of his Great Emotion, life and death caught something of the truth and dignity of that memorable evening--the sounds of life and the distance of death. If he was not to live with Joan he would die with her. There was, to him, in the state of mind into which this absorbing pa.s.sion had worked him, no alternative. Love, that he had made his lodestar in early youth and sought in vain, had come at last. Marriage, convention, obligations, responsibility, balance and even sanity mattered nothing. They were swept like chaff before this s.e.x-storm. Ten years of dreams were epitomized in Joan. She was the ideal that he had placed on the secret altar of his soul. She struck, all vibrant with youth, the one poetic note that was hidden in his character behind vanity and sloth, cynicism and the ingrained belief that whatever he desired he must have. And as he drove away from Easthampton and the Hosack house he left behind him Alice and all that she was and meant. She receded from his mind like the white cliffs of a sh.o.r.e to which he never intended to return. He was happier than he had ever been. In his curious exaltation, life, with its tips and downs, its pettiness, its monotony, lay far below him, as the moving panorama of land does to a flying man. His head was clear, his plan definite. He felt years younger--almost boyish.

Laughter came easy--the sort of reasonless laughter that comes to tired men as they start out on a holiday. He saw the strangeness of it all with some wonder and much triumph. The Gilbert Palgrave who had been molded by money and inertia and autocracy was discarded, and the man with Joan at his side was the young Gilbert whom he had caught sight of that night in Paris, when, on his way home under the stars, Joan, with her brown hair and laughing eyes, tip-tilted nose and the spirit of spring in her breath, had come out of his inner consciousness and established herself like a shape in a dream.

His heart turned when he looked at Joan's face. Was its unusual gravity due to the fact that she had come to the end of fooling--that she, too, had sensed the finality or the beginning? He thought so. He believed so. She looked younger than ever, but sweeter, less flippant, less triumphantly irresponsible. She sat, like a child, with her hands in her lap, her mouth soft, an odd wistfulness in her eyes with their long curling lashes. A black straight-brimmed straw hat sat well down on her small head and put a shadow on her face. The slim roundness of her arms showed through the white silk s.h.i.+rt, and her low collar proved all the beauty of her throat and neck. She looked more than ever unplucked, untouched, like a rosebud.

On the tip of his tongue there were words of adoration, not fastidious and carefully chosen, but simple, elemental words such as a farmhand might blunder out in the deep shadow of a lane, after dark. But he held them back. He would wait until after they had dined together and all round them there were silence and solitude. He drove still more slowly in order to give the two j.a.panese servants time to carry out his instructions and remove themselves. That cottage, which he had bought on the spur of the moment, fitted out with elaborate care and used only twice, for two weeks since, was to justify itself, after all. Who knows? He might have bought it two years before under an inspiration.

Even then, months and months before he met Joan or knew of her existence, this very evening might have been mapped out He was a fatalist, and it fell into his creed to think so.

He didn't wonder why Joan was silent or ask himself jealously of what she was thinking. He chose to believe that she had arrived at the end of impishness, had grown weary of Harry Oldershaw and his cubbish ways and had turned to himself naturally and with relief, choosing her moment with the uncanny intuition that is the gift of women. She was only just in time. To-morrow would have found him following the faithful Alice on her forlorn hope--the incurable man.

It was only when they turned into the narrow sandy road that was within a quarter of a mile of the club at Devon that Joan came out of the numbness that had settled upon her and recognized things that were stamped with the marks of an afternoon that was never to be forgotten.

Martin--Martin--and it was all her fault.

"But why are you coming this way?" she asked, drawing back into her seat.

"Because my cottage is just here," said Gilbert.

"At Devon?"

"Yes. Why not? I had a fancy for playing hermit from time to time. I saw the sun set behind the water,--a Byron sunset,--and in the hope of seeing just such another I bought this shack. I did those things once for want of something better. Look at it," he said, and turned the car through a rustic gate, alive with honeysuckle.

It was a bungalow, put up on a s.p.a.ce cleared among a wood of young trees that was carpeted with ferns. It might have been built for a poet or a novelist or just an ordinary muscular man who loved the water and the silences and the sense of being on the edge of the world. It was a bungalow of logs, roughly constructed and saved from utter ba.n.a.lity by being almost completely clothed in wisteria. It was admirably suited to two men who found amus.e.m.e.nt in being primitive or to a romantic honeymoon couple who wanted to fancy themselves on a desert island.

Better still, it might have been built for just that night, for Palgrave and the girl who had taken shape in his one good dream.

Joan got out of the opulent car and watched Gilbert run it round to the side of the house. There was no garage and not even a shed to give it cover. Gilbert left it in the open, where it remained sulky and supercilious, like a grand piano in an empty kitchen.

Joan had noticed this place twice that day--on the way out to find Martin, and again on the way back from having heard the voice of the girl with the white face and the red lips and the hair that came out of a bottle. Martin--Martin--and it was all her fault.

She wondered for a moment why no one came to open the door. Some one was there because smoke was coming out of a chimney. But she refused to be impatient. She had decided to give Gilbert one evening--to be nice to him for one evening. He was terribly humble. Fate had dealt her a smas.h.i.+ng blow on the heart, and she had returned to consciousness wistfully eager to make up at least to this man as well as she could for the pain that she had caused. There was only this one evening in which to do so because to-morrow she was going back to the old house, the old people, the old servants and the old days, a failure, having fallen off the Round-about, of which she had spoken so much. She was going back a sort of cripple to the place from which she had escaped to put the key into life; once more to read to her grandfather, to obey the orders of her grandmother, to sleep in the warm kind arms of her old bedroom, to go among the flowers and trees among which she had grown up, herself old and tired and ashamed and broken-hearted, with her gold ring burning into her finger and the constant vision of Martin's s.h.i.+ning armor lying bent and rusty before her eyes. What an end to her great adventure!

Gilbert came up. He walked without his usual affectation of never permitting anything to hurry him. All about him there was still a sort of exaltation. His eyes were amazingly bright. His face had lost its cynicism. Ten years seemed to have fallen from his shoulders like a pack. He was a youth again, like Martin and Harry and Howard. Joan noticed all this and was vaguely surprised--and glad, because obviously she was giving him pleasure. He deserved it after her impish treatment of him. What a fool she had been.

He said, bending down, "We keep the key here," and picked it up, unlocked the door and stood back for her to pa.s.s.

"Oh, isn't this nice!" said Joan.

"Do you like it? It amused me to make it comfortable."

"Comfortable! But it's like a picture."

Gilbert laughed boyishly. Her enthusiasm delighted him. To make the long low living room with its big brick chimney and open fireplace absolutely right had dispelled his boredom--little as he had intended to use it. The whole thing was carried out on the lines of the main room in an English shooting box. The walls were matchboarded and stained an oak color, and the floor was polished and covered with skins. Old pewter plates and mugs, and queer ugly delightful bits of pottery were everywhere--on shelves, on the wide mantelpiece, and hanging from the beams. Colored sporting prints covered the walls, among stuffed fish and heads of deer with royal antlers and beady eyes with a fixed stare. The furniture was Jacobean--the chairs with ladder backs and cane seats; a wide dresser, lined with colored plates; a long narrow table with rails and bulging legs. Two old oak church pews were set on each side of the fireplace filled with cus.h.i.+ons covered with a merry chintz. There were flowers everywhere in big bowls--red rambler roses, primula, sweet williams, Shasta daisies, and scarlet poppies.

All the windows were open, and there was nothing damp or musty in the smell of the room. On the contrary, the companionable aroma of tobacco smoke hung in the air mixed with the sweet faint scent of flowers. The place seemed "lived-in"--as well it might. The two j.a.ps had played gentlemen there for some weeks. The table was laid for two, and appetizing dishes of cold food, salad and fruit were spread out on the dresser and sideboard, with iced champagne and claret cup.

"The outside of the cottage didn't suggest all this comfort," said Joan.

"Comfort's the easiest thing in the world when you can pay for it.

There's one bedroom half the size of this and two small ones. A bathroom and kitchen beyond. There's water, of course, and electric light, and there's a telephone. I loathe the telephone, the destroyer of aloofness, the missionary that breaks into privacy." He switched on the lights in several old lanterns as he spoke. The day had almost disappeared.

He went over to her and stood smiling.

"Well, isn't this better than a road-house reeking of food and flies and made hideous by a Jazz band?"

"Much better," she said.

The delightful silence was broken by the crickets.

"Martin--Martin," she thought, "and it was all my fault."

A sort of tremble ran over Gilbert as he looked at her. Agony and joy clashed in his heart. He had suffered, gone sleepless, worn himself out by hard, grim exercise in order, who knew how many times, to master his almost unendurable pa.s.sion. He had killed long nights, the very thought of which made him shudder, by reading books of which he never took in a word. He had stood up in the dark, unmanned, and cursed himself and her and life. He had denounced her to himself and once to her as a flapper, a fool-girl, an empty-minded frivolous thing encased in a body as beautiful as spring. He had thrown himself on his knees and wept like a young boy who had been hurt to the very quick by a great injustice. He had faced himself up, and with the sort of fear that comes to men in moments of physical danger, recognized madness in his eyes. But not until that instant, as she stood before him unguarded in his lonely cottage, so slight and sweet and unexpectedly gentle, her eyes as limpid as the water of a brook, her lips soft and kind and unkissed, her whole young body radiating virginity, did he really know how amazingly and frighteningly he loved her. But once again he held back a rush of adoring words and a desire to touch and hold and claim. The time had not come yet. Let her warm to him. Let him live down the ugliness of the mood that she had recently put him into, do away with the impression he must have given her of jealousy and petulance and scorn. Let her get used to him as a man who had it in him to be as natural and impersonal, and even as cubbish, as some of the boys she knew. Later, when night had laid its magic on the earth, he would make his last bid for her kisses--or take her with him across the horizon.

"How do you like that?" he asked, and pointed to a charmingly grotesque piece of old Staffords.h.i.+re pottery which made St. George a stunted churchwarden with the legs of a child, his horse the kind of animal that would be used in a green grocer's cart and the dragon a cross between a leopard and a half-bred bulldog.

"Very amusing," she said, going over to it.

And the instant her back was turned, he opened a drawer in a sideboard and satisfied himself that the thing which might have to put them into Eternity together lay there, loaded.

II

"And now," he said gayly, "let's dine and, if you don't mind, I will b.u.t.tle. I hate servants in a place like this." He went to the head of the table and drew back a chair.

Joan sat down, thanking him with a smile. It was hard to believe that, with the words of that girl still ringing in her ears and the debris of her hopes lying in a heap about her feet, she was going through the process of being nice to this man who had his claims. It was unreal, fantastic. It wasn't really happening. She must be lying face down on some quiet corner of Mother Earth and watering its bosom with tears of blood. Martin--Martin! It was all her fault.

Tomorrow she would be back again in the old house, with the old people and the old dogs and the old trees and follow her old routine--old, old. That was the price she must pay for being a kid when she should have been a woman.

Palgrave stood at the sideboard and carved a cold chicken decorated with slips of parsley. "Have you ever gone into a room in which you've never been before and recognized everything in it or done some thing for the first time that you suddenly realize isn't new to you?"

"Yes, often," replied Joan. "Why?"

"You've never sat in that chair until this minute and this chicken was probably killed this morning. But I've seen you sitting in just that att.i.tude at that table and cut the wing of this very bird and watched that identical smile round your lips when I put the plate in front of you." He put it in front of her and the scent of her hair made him catch his breath. "Oh, my G.o.d!" he said to himself. "This girl--this beautiful, cool, bewitching thing--the dew of youth upon her, as chaste as unsunned snow--Oh, my G.o.d...."