The Cost Part 18

"I mean, do you like him?"

"Why, certainly. But I've seen him only a few times."

"He's an uncommon man," continued her brother. "He'd make a mighty satisfactory husband for an ambitious woman, especially one with the money to push him fast."

Gladys slowly lifted and slowly lowered her smooth, slender shoulders.

"That sort of thing doesn't interest a woman in a man, unless she's married to him and has got over thinking more about him than about herself."

"It ought to," replied her brother. "A clever woman can always slosh round in sentimental slop with her head above it and cool. If I were a girl I'd make a dead set for that chap."

"If you were a girl," said Gladys, "you'd do nothing of the sort.

You'd compel him to make a dead set for you." And as she put down her gla.s.s she gave his hair an affectionate pull--which was her way of thanking him for saying what she most wished to hear on the subject she most wished to hear about.

XIV.

STRAINING AT THE ANCHORS.

Gladys was now twenty-four and was even more anxious to marry than is the average unmarried person. She had been eleven years a wanderer; she was tired of it. She had no home; and she wanted a home.

Her aunt--her mother's widowed sister--had taken her abroad when she was thirteen. John was able to defy or to deceive their mother. But she could and did enforce upon Gladys the rigid rules which her fanatical nature had evolved--a minute and crus.h.i.+ng tyranny. Therefore Gladys preferred any place to her home. For ten years she had been roaming western Europe, nominally watched by her lazy, selfish, and physically and mentally near-sighted aunt. Actually her only guardian had been her own precocious, curiously prudent, curiously reckless self. She had been free to do as she pleased; and she had pleased to do very free indeed. She had learned all that her intense and catholic curiosity craved to know, had learned it of masters of her own selecting--the men and women who would naturally attract a lively young person, eager to rejoice in an escape from slavery. Her eyes had peered far into the human heart, farthest into the corrupted human heart; yet, with her innocence she had not lost her honesty or her preference for the things she had been brought up to think clean.

But she had at last wearied of a novelty which lay only in changes of scene and of names, without any important change in characters or plot.

She began to be bored with the game of baffling the hopes inspired by her beauty and encouraged by her seeming simplicity. And when her mother came--as she said to Pauline, "The only bearable view of mother is a distant view. I had forgot there were such people left on earth--I had thought they'd all gone to their own kind of heaven." So she fled to America, to her brother and his wife.

Dumont stayed eight days at the Eyrie on that trip, then went back to his congenial life in New York--to his business and his dissipation.

He tempered his indulgence in both nowadays with some exercise--his stomach, his heart, his nerves and his doctor had together given him a bad fright. The evening before he left he saw Pauline and Gladys sitting apart and joined them.

"Why not invite Scarborough to spend a week up here?" he asked, just glancing at his wife. He never ventured to look at her when there was any danger of their eyes meeting.

Her lips tightened and the color swiftly left her cheeks and swiftly returned.

"Wouldn't you like it, Gladys?" he went on.

"Oh, DO ask him, Pauline," said Gladys, with enthusiasm. Like her brother, she always went straight to the point--she was in the habit of deciding for herself, of thinking what she did was above criticism, and of not especially caring if it was criticised. "Please do!"

Pauline waited long--it seemed to her long enough for time to wrinkle her heart--before answering: "We'll need another man. I'll ask him--if you wish."

Gladys pressed her hand gratefully--she was fond of Pauline, and Pauline was liking her again as she had when they were children and playmates and partners in the woes of John Dumont's raids upon their games. Just then Langdon's sister, Mrs. Barrow, called Gladys to the other end of the drawing-room. Dumont's glance followed her.

"I think it'd be a good match," he said reflectively.

Pauline's heart missed a beat and a suffocating choke contracted her throat.

"What?" she succeeded in saying.

"Gladys and Scarborough," replied Dumont. "She ought to marry--she's got no place to go. And it'd be good business for her--and for him, too, for that matter, if she could land him. Don't you think she's attractive to men?"

"Very," said Pauline, lifelessly.

"Don't you think it would be a good match?" he went on.

"Very," she said, looking round wildly, as her breath came more and more quickly.

Langdon strolled up.

"Am I interrupting a family council?" he asked.

"Oh, no," Dumont replied, rising. "Take my chair." And he was gone.

"This room is too warm," said Pauline. "No, don't open the window.

Excuse me a moment." She went into the hall, threw a golf cape round her shoulders and stepped out on the veranda, closing the door-window behind her. It was a moonless, winter night--stars thronging the blue-black sky; the steady lamp of a planet set in the southern horizon.

When she had been walking there for a quarter of an hour the door-window opened and Langdon looked out. "Oh--there you are!" he said.

"Won't you join me?" Her tone a.s.sured him that he would not be intruding. He got a hat and overcoat and they walked up and down together.

"Those stars irritate me," he said after a while. "They make me appreciate that this world's a tiny grain of sand adrift in infinity, and that I'm----there's nothing little enough to express the human atom where the earth's only a grain. And then they go on to taunt me with how short-lived I am and how it'll soon be all over for me--for ever.

A futile little insect, buzzing about, waiting to be crushed under the heel of the Great Executioner."

"Sometimes I feel that," answered Pauline. "But again--often, as a child--and since, when everything has looked dark and ugly for me, I've gone where I could see them. And they seemed to draw all the fever and the fear out of me, and to put there instead a sort of--not happiness, not even content, but--courage."

They were near the rail now, she gazing into the southern sky, he studying her face. It seemed to him that he had not seen any one so beautiful. She was all in black with a diamond star glittering in her hair high above her forehead. She looked like a splendid plume dropped from the starry wing of night.

"The stars make you feel that way," he said, in the light tone that disguises a compliment as a bit of raillery, "because you're of their family. And I feel as I do because I'm a blood-relation of the earthworms."

Her face changed. "Oh, but so am I!" she exclaimed, with a pa.s.sion he had never seen or suspected in her before. She drew a long breath, closed her eyes and opened them very wide.

"You don't know, you can't imagine, how I long to LIVE! And KNOW what 'to live' means."

"Then why don't you?" he asked--he liked to catch people in their confidential moods and to peer into the hidden places in their hearts, not impudently but with a sort of scientific curiosity.

"Because I'm a daughter--that's anchor number one. Because I'm a mother--that's anchor number two. Because I'm a wife--that's anchor number three. And anchor number four--because I'm under the spell of inherited instincts that rule me though I don't in the least believe in them. Tied, hands and feet!"

"Inherited instinct." He shook his head sadly. "That's the skeleton at life's banquet. It takes away my appet.i.te."

She laughed without mirth, then sighed with some self-mockery. "It frightens ME away from the table."

XV.

GRADUATED PEARLS.

But Scarborough declined her invitation. However, he did come to dinner ten days later; and Gladys, who had no lack of confidence in her power to charm when and whom she chose, was elated by his friendliness then and when she met him at other houses.

"He's not a bit sentimental," she told Pauline, whose silence whenever she tried to discuss him did not discourage her. "But if he ever does care for a woman he'll care in the same tremendous way that he sweeps things before him in his career. Don't you think so?"