Big Timber Part 19

"Try it, Stella," he whispered pa.s.sionately. "Try wanting to like me, for a change. I can't make love by myself. Shake off that infernal apathy that's taking possession of you where I'm concerned. If you can't love me, for G.o.d's sake fight with me. Do _something_!"

CHAPTER XVI

THE CRISIS

Looking back at that evening as the summer wore on, Stella perceived that it was the starting point of many things, no one of them definitely outstanding by itself but bulking large as a whole. Fyfe made his appeal, and it left her unmoved save in certain superficial aspects. She was sorry, but she was mostly sorry for herself. And she denied his premonition of disaster. If, she said to herself, they got no raptures out of life, at least they got along without friction. In her mind their marriage, no matter that it lacked what she no less than Fyfe deemed an essential to happiness, was a fixed state, final, irrevocable, not to be altered by any emotional vagaries.

No man, she told herself, could make her forget her duty. If it should befall that her heart, lacking safe anchorage, went astray, that would be her personal cross--not Jack Fyfe's. _He_ should never know. One might feel deeply without being moved to act upon one's feelings. So she a.s.sured herself.

She never dreamed that Jack Fyfe could possibly have foreseen in Walter Monohan a dangerous factor in their lives. A man is not supposed to have uncanny intuitions, even when his wife is a wonderfully attractive woman who does not care for him except in a friendly sort of way.

Stella herself had ample warning. From the first time of meeting, the man's presence affected her strangely, made an appeal to her that no man had ever made. She felt it sitting beside him in the plunging launch that day when Roaring Lake reached its watery arms for her. There was seldom a time when they were together that she did not feel it. And she pitted her will against it, as something to be conquered and crushed.

There was no denying the man's personal charm in the ordinary sense of the word. He was virile, handsome, cultured, just such a man as she could easily have centered her heart upon in times past,--just such a man as can set a woman's heart thrilling when he lays siege to her. If he had made an open bid for Stella's affection, she, entrenched behind all the accepted canons of her upbringing, would have recoiled from him, viewed him with wholly distrustful eyes.

But he did nothing of the sort. He was a friend, or at least he became so. Inevitably they were thrown much together. There was a continual informal running back and forth between Fyfe's place and Abbey's.

Monohan was a lily of the field, although it was common knowledge on Roaring Lake that he was a heavy stock-holder in the Abbey-Monohan combination. At any rate, he was holidaying on the lake that summer.

There had grown up a genuine intimacy between Linda and Stella. There were always people at the Abbeys'; sometimes a few guests at the Fyfe bungalow. Stella's marvellous voice served to heighten her popularity.

The net result of it all was that in the following three months source three days went by that she did not converse with Monohan.

She could not help making comparisons between the two men. They stood out in marked contrast, in manner, physique, in everything. Where Fyfe was reserved almost to taciturnity, impa.s.sive-featured, save for that whimsical gleam that was never wholly absent from his keen blue eyes, Monohan talked with facile ease, with wonderful expressiveness of face.

He was a finished product of courteous generations. Moreover, he had been everywhere, done a little of everything, acquired in his manner something of the versatility of his experience. Physically he was fit as any logger in the camps, a big, active-bodied, clear-eyed, ruddy man.

What it was about him that stirred her so, Stella could never determine.

She knew beyond peradventure that he had that power. He had the gift of quick, sympathetic perception,--but so too had Jack Fyfe, she reminded herself. Yet no tone of Jack Fyfe's voice could raise a flutter in her breast, make a faint flush glow in her cheeks, while Monohan could do that. He did not need to be actively attentive. It was only necessary for him to be near.

It dawned upon Stella Fyfe in the fullness of the season, when the first cool October days were upon them, and the lake sh.o.r.es flamed again with the red and yellow and umber of autumn, that she had been playing with fire--and that fire burns.

This did not filter into her consciousness by degrees. She had steeled herself to seeing him pa.s.s away with the rest of the summer folk, to take himself out of her life. She admitted that there would be a gap.

But that had to be. No word other than friendly ones would ever pa.s.s between them. He would go away, and she would go on as before. That was all. She was scarcely aware how far they had traveled along that road whereon travelers converse by glance of eye, by subtle intuitions, eloquent silences. Monohan himself delivered the shock that awakened her to despairing clearness of vision.

He had come to bring her a book, he and Linda Abbey and Charlie together,--a commonplace enough little courtesy. And it happened that this day Fyfe had taken his rifle and vanished into the woods immediately after luncheon. Between Linda Abbey and Charlie Benton matters had so far progressed that it was now the most natural thing for them to seek a corner or poke along the beach together, oblivious to all but themselves. This afternoon they chatted a while with Stella and then gradually detached themselves until Monohan, glancing through the window, pointed them out to his hostess. They were seated on a log at the edge of the lawn, a stone's throw from the house.

"They're getting on," he said. "Lucky beggars. It's all plain sailing for them."

There was a note of infinite regret in his voice, a sadness that stabbed Stella Fyfe like a lance. She did not dare look at him. Something rose chokingly in her throat. She felt and fought against a slow welling of tears to her eyes. Before she sensed that she was betraying herself, Monohan was holding both her hands fast between his own, gripping them with a fierce, insistent pressure, speaking in a pa.s.sionate undertone.

"Why should we have to beat our heads against a stone wall like this?"

he was saying wildly. "Why couldn't we have met and loved and been happy, as we could have been? It was fated to happen. I felt it that day I dragged you out of the lake. It's been growing on me ever since. I've struggled against it, and it's no use. It's something stronger than I am. I love you, Stella, and it maddens me to see you chafing in your chains. Oh, my dear, why couldn't it have been different?"

"You mustn't talk like that," she protested weakly. "You mustn't. It isn't right."

"I suppose it's right for you to live with a man you don't love, when your heart's crying out against it?" he broke out. "My G.o.d, do you think I can't see? I don't have to see things; I can feel them. I know you're the kind of woman who goes through h.e.l.l for her conceptions of right and wrong. I honor you for that, dear. But, oh, the pity of it. Why should it have to be? Life could have held so much that is fine and true for you and me together. For you do care, don't you?"

"What difference does that make?" she whispered. "What difference can it make? Oh, you mustn't tell me these things, I mustn't listen. I mustn't."

"But they're terribly, tragically true," Monohan returned. "Look at me, Stella. Don't turn your face away, dear. I wouldn't do anything that might bring the least shadow on you. I know the pitiful hopelessness of it. You're fettered, and there's no apparent loophole to freedom. I know it's best for me to keep this locked tight in my heart, as something precious and sorrowful. I never meant to tell you. But the flesh isn't always equal to the task the spirit imposes."

She did not answer him immediately, for she was struggling for a grip on herself, fighting back an impulse to lay her head against him and cry her agony out on his breast. All the resources of will that she possessed she called upon now to still that tumult of emotion that racked her. When she did speak, it was in a hard, strained tone. But she faced the issue squarely, knowing beyond all doubt what she had to face.

"Whether I care or not isn't the question," she said. "I'm neither little enough nor prudish enough to deny a feeling that's big and clean.

I see no shame in that. I'm afraid of it--if you can understand that.

But that's neither here nor there. I know what I have to do. I married without love, with my eyes wide open, and I have to pay the price. So you must never talk to me of love. You mustn't even see me, if it can be avoided. It's better that way. We can't make over our lives to suit ourselves--at least I can't. I must play the game according to the only rules I know. We daren't--we mustn't trifle with this sort of a feeling.

With you--footloose, and all the world before you--it'll die out presently."

"No," he flared. "I deny that. I'm not an impressionable boy. I know myself."

He paused, and the grip of his hands on hers tightened till the pain of it ran to her elbows. Then his fingers relaxed a little.

"Oh, I know," he said haltingly. "I know it's got to be that way. I have to go my road and leave you to yours. Oh, the blank hopelessness of it, the useless misery of it. We're made for each other, and we have to grin and say good-by, go along our separate ways, trying to smile. What a devilish state of affairs! But I love you, dear, and no matter--I--ah--"

His voice flattened out. His hands released hers, he straightened quickly. Stella turned her head. Jack Fyfe stood in the doorway. His face was fixed in its habitual mask. He was biting the end off a cigar.

He struck a match and put it to the cigar end with steady fingers as he walked slowly across the big room.

"I hear the kid peeping," he said to Stella quite casually, "and I noticed Martha outside as I came in. Better go see what's up with him."

Trained to repression, schooled in self-control, Stella rose to obey, for under the smoothness of his tone there was the iron edge of command.

Her heart apparently ceased to beat. She tried to smile, but she knew that her face was tear-wet. She knew that Jack Fyfe had seen and understood. She had done no wrong, but a terrible apprehension of consequences seized her, a fear that tragedy of her own making might stalk grimly in that room.

In this extremity she banked with implicit faith on the man she had married rather than the man she loved. For the moment she felt overwhelmingly glad that Jack Fyfe was iron--cool, unshakable. He would never give an inch, but he would never descend to any sordid scene. She could not visualize him the jealous, outraged husband, breathing the conventional anathema, but there were elements unreckonable in that room. She knew instinctively that Fyfe once aroused would be deadly in anger and she could not vouch for Monohan's temper under the strain of feeling. That was why she feared.

So she lingered a second or two outside the door, quaking, but there arose only the sound of Fyfe's heavy body settling into a leather chair, and following that the low, even rumble of his voice. She could not distinguish words. The tone sounded ordinary, conversational. She prayed that his intent was to ignore the situation, that Monohan would meet him halfway in that effort. Afterward there would be a reckoning. But for herself she neither thought nor feared. It was a problem to be faced, that was all. And so, the breath of her coming in short, quick respirations, she went to her room. There was no wailing from the nursery. She had known that.

Sitting beside a window, chin in hand, her lower lip compressed between her teeth, she saw Fyfe, after the lapse of ten minutes, leave by the front entrance, stopping to chat a minute with Linda and Charlie Benton, who were moving slowly toward the house. Stella rose to her feet and dabbed at her face with a powdered chamois. She couldn't let Monohan go like that; her heart cried out against it. Very likely they would never meet again.

She flew down the hall to the living room. Monohan stood just within the front door, gazing irresolutely over his shoulder. He took a step or two to meet her. His clean-cut face was drawn into sullen lines, a deep flush mantled his cheek.

"Listen," he said tensely. "I've been made to feel like--like--Well, I controlled myself. I knew it had to be that way. It was unfortunate. I think we could have been trusted to do the decent thing. You and I were bred to do that. I've got a little pride. I can't come here again. And I want to see you once more before I leave here for good. I'll be going away next week. That'll be the end of it--the bitter finish. Will you slip down to the first point south of Cougar Bay about three in the afternoon to-morrow? It'll be the last and only time. He'll have you for life; can't I talk to you for twenty minutes?"

"No," she whispered forlornly. "I can't do that. I--oh, good-by--good-by."

"Stella, Stella," she heard his vibrant whisper follow after. But she ran away through dining room and hall to the bedroom, there to fling herself face down, choking back the pa.s.sionate protest that welled up within her. She lay there, her face buried in the pillow, until the sputtering exhaust of the Abbey cruiser growing fainter and more faint told her they were gone.

She heard her husband walk through the house once after that. When dinner was served, he was not there. It was eleven o'clock by the time-piece on her mantel when she heard him come in, but he did not come to their room. He went quietly into the guest chamber across the hall.

She waited through a leaden period. Then, moved by an impulse she did not attempt to define, a mixture of motives, pity for him, a craving for the outlet of words, a desire to set herself right before him, she slipped on a dressing robe and crossed the hall. The door swung open noiselessly. Fyfe sat slumped in a chair, hat pulled low on his forehead, hands thrust deep in his pockets. He did not even look up. His eyes stared straight ahead, absent, unseeingly fixed on nothing. He seemed to be unconscious of her presence or to ignore it,--she could not tell which.

"Jack," she said. And when he made no response she said again, tremulously, that unyielding silence chilling her, "Jack."

He stirred a little, but only to take off his hat and lay it on a table beside him. With one hand pus.h.i.+ng back mechanically the straight, reddish-tinged hair from his brow, he looked up at her and said briefly, in a tone barren of all emotion:

"Well?"

She was suddenly dumb. Words failed her utterly. Yet there was much to be said, much that was needful to say. They could not go on with a cloud like that over them, a cloud that had to be dissipated in the crucible of words. Yet she could not begin. Fyfe, after a prolonged silence, seemed to grasp her difficulty. Abruptly he began to speak, cutting straight to the heart of his subject, after his fas.h.i.+on.

"It's a pity things had to take his particular turn," said he. "But now that you're face to face with something definite, what do you propose to do about it?"