In that subdued light the girl"s skin was flawless, her eyes were shaded to murkiness, and a mote-ridden shaft of sunlight struck her hair to a radiant yellow. But out of doors these matters could be seen to another effect. The hair was only a yellowish brown, the eyes lost their shadows and became the lucid green of sea waves, and the face was spotted with tiny freckles, like a bird"s egg. He liked her best out of doors, breathing as she did of wood and field and sky. Skirts she seemed to wear under protest, as a wood nymph might humor, a little awkwardly, the prejudice of an indoor tribe with which she chose to tarry. When she raced over the lawn with her dog, it was not hard to see that clothing was an ungraceful impediment, even the short-skirted gowns she wore by day. In the longer affairs of evening, though she strove to subdue her spirits to them, she still had an air of the open, as if she but played at being a lady and might forget at any moment. Ewing was shyer of her when evening brought this change of habit. At such times he found it easier to talk to Mrs. Laithe, who sat--or, oftener, lay--with her eyes turned from the light, speaking but little.
"I"m glad to be away from town," she said to him, as he sat a moment beside her one day, "and I"m glad you"re away. I need to be quiet, and you shall do as you like. Virginia will go about with you and make you gay. Virginia always makes us gay."
Unconsciously her hand had fallen on his sleeve, curling and fastening there, and when he rose he was disturbed to see that he had shaken off so tender a thing.
"I didn"t know you were holding me," he said, in apology, and lifted the fallen hand.
"Such foolish hands! Your sister"s are tiny, too, but they look as if they could turn a doork.n.o.b." He leisurely turned it this way and that to see its lines, and compared the fingernails with his own to show how absurd they were. And all the time it seemed to the woman that her hand had a little heart in it that was beating to suffocation.
"There, Virginia is beckoning to you from the path--perhaps you can finish my hand another time." She laughed. "I hope you"re not seriously annoyed about it."
"It"s foolish," he insisted, and replaced it with elaborate care. Then he ran to join his ruddy cicerone. He found the girl a good comrade, who helped him to forget those things he wished to forget. Somehow in the quiet air, that nameless secret thing that had been eating his heart drew off a little. Almost he could believe it had all been some hideous mistake.
He tried at first to join Virginia in her sports. Tennis looked foolishly easy, but after sending four of the b.a.l.l.s beyond recovery he suspected that the game might demand something more than willingness and strength, and relinquished his racquet to watch the girl. He felt the glow of the sport in following her swift movements, and he envied the young men who could play with her.
Golf looked not only easy but useless; and it was with only half a heart that he essayed it. He splintered a driver at his first attempt, and he did not venture a second. Still, he liked golf better than tennis, he decided, for he could carry the bag of things she played with and hunt lost b.a.l.l.s, and wander over the course alone with her. He was never able to believe that a stroke more or less in holing the ball could be a matter of real moment, but the girl was worth watching while she believed it. He had never seen a real girl near before, and he was surprised to find it so fine a sight.
In the canoe he was more successful, contriving to accomplish by sheer strength of arm what the girl did more adroitly. They would paddle far up the little river, to float down in the late afternoon. The river, too, was a stage river, running between low, willow-fringed banks, or winding among hay fields that sloped back to the upland, or lush green meadows where cows were posed effectively. The girl became part of the picture when they turned to float homeward, facing him from the bow, her hair glinting yellow and her skin crystal clear against the crimson cushion she leaned upon.
They rode together, too--he could join her there--over the upland and far into the little hills, between tangled hedge rows, past little farms with orchards of ripening fruit. They pa.s.sed many deserted places, mournful in their stagnation, overgrown with wild things, the houses forlornly dismantled, perhaps with the roof sunken, the chimney toppled, and the weather-beaten walls in ruinous decay. He was touched by these places. The houses must have been built with high hope, and once have been alive with full-hearted effort. Their walls had enclosed dreams and joyous dramas. Then discouragement had fallen and the search for another place of beginning. He wondered what had become of all the people who had built these homes. He hoped they had begun in another place with undimmed resolve and had found peace. Yet there were sinister hints that their ghosts haunted these spots of their first failures, beseeching of the ruins something of the first freshness of impulse.
He tried to tell Virginia Bartell that he, too, was like a deserted farm, falling into ruin. But this only made her laugh. She could not believe in failure, it seemed. And he laughed with her, after a little.
It was not possible, after all, to suppose that he could go on being a ruin forever. These frustrated home makers must have succeeded at last, and so would he. In some manner the girl herself became an a.s.surance of this. Her mere buoyancy uplifted him.
These times alone with the girl were not always to be had for the asking. There abounded other youths who prized her companionship; able, dauntless youths and skilled with accomplishments.
There was one of these, a tall young man, spectacled, of a high shiny forehead, a student of a youth, who haunted the gray house like a malignant wraith of erudition, and condescended to the girl almost as flagrantly as he did to Ewing. His talk, whether of machinery or morals, socialism or chemistry, was meant to instruct. Wherefore the girl slunk from him, not always so skilfully as might have been wished--with far less subtlety, indeed, than her aunt wished.
"I"m almost certain you offended him this afternoon," she remarked on a day when they had fled flagrantly to the river, "though why you should wish to avoid him is beyond me. You know that he"s from one of the very oldest families in West Roxbury." The girl"s tone was penitent as she answered: "But I"d promised to go in the canoe with Mr. Ewing." There was no penitence, however, in the look she flashed at Ewing over her aunt"s shoulder, daring him to prove if he were a man. He nerved himself in the glance.
"But you see, Mrs. Ranley, I"m from one of the very oldest families in Hinsdale County, Colorado." The girl applauded him with her eyes, and the incident was closed with a word of mild gratification from the old lady. She was pleased to observe that he felt a family pride, even though any county in Colorado was, of course, beyond consideration.
Their favorite walk home from the golf links led them through a churchyard, and here they often rested in the cool of the afternoon; not in the new part where monument and mound were obtrusively recent, but up the hill from these, where death was so ancient as to be touched with the grace of the antique. Here, in a pleasant gloom of oak shade, cypress and elm, they loitered among the drab stones that headed mounds worn down and overgrown with sweetbrier, wild rose, and matted gra.s.s; and here Mrs. Laithe sometimes joined them for the homeward stroll, walking too much, Ewing thought, like one who had risen from the forgotten mult.i.tude under foot. Yet, when he spoke of her health she always responded with her gay a.s.surances, and seemed, indeed, to be more concerned about his welfare than her own. He had not been able to talk to her freely. There was so much about Teevan that he felt she would not understand. Besides, he could not speak to her about Teevan.
At the end of the first week he had written to Teevan to say that he must talk with him. The little man had replied from his favorite sea place, naming a day when he would be back in town.
The prospect depressed Ewing anew. It had been easy to lie on his back in a field, nettled by disgust with himself, and frame speeches of self-mastery. But reflection had brought him doubt. The speeches would have to be made, and yet, in a way, he was Teevan"s property; Teevan had invested money in him. This added to his depression. And this was why the girl reported him to her sister as a youth joyful in odd moments of forgetting, but sunk in some black despair when he remembered; a young man she could not at all understand. And Mrs. Laithe, puzzling over his trouble, divining that Teevan would somehow be at the bottom of it, determined on a move to aid him, a move that would take her once more to Teevan himself. She had sought him the night after her talk with Sydenham, but the interview had come to nothing. Teevan had been so plausibly solicitous about Ewing"s success that she had found herself unready to tax him with a knowledge of Ewing"s ident.i.ty, or with motives inimical to him. His excessive amiability, his air of unsuspecting sincerity, had disarmed her. But this time, she determined, there would be no more fencing. She would attack straightforwardly.
The day they left the girl lightly bade Ewing farewell with talk of meetings in town. He had not told her of a resolve formed the day before when they had ridden to a hill above the village from which they could see veritable mountains in the distance--his own delectable mountains they had seemed, calling to him. Instantly he had determined to go back to his own. Not in defeat, but for fresh courage. He would stay there working as he could, until Teevan was paid. Then the Rookery would know him again, and the men of the Monastery--know him going his own way.
He was meditating gloomily on his retreat as the train bore him back to town with Mrs. Laithe. And she, alive to the distress that showed in his face, forgot everything but him, the one she had helplessly and irrevocably taken for her own, half her entreating child, half her master, terrible and beloved. She watched his face from half-closed eyes, finding it unutterably sad, and, without her being able to withhold it, her mind constantly repeated the image of an embrace, to soothe and sustain him. Incessantly this unsubstantial enfoldment took place in her inner sense, like some wild drama among ocean-bed things, far below an unrippled surface. Over and over the phantom woman beat down his enemies, encircled him from harm, consoled him against her heart, cherished him like the dear walls of a home. And she could not halt this phantom play. Once she divided her arms and raised them a little, as one in a dream faintly acts his vision. Ewing thought she was drawing her chiffon boa about her, and he replaced it on her shoulders.
Floating about this obsession in her mind was the dismayed thought of Teevan. She was fixed on going to him for the truth, and this disturbed her like a coming battle. She was not used to the feeling of antagonism, she, with her gentle woman"s life, but she felt an unknown energy welling up in her--the fierceness of the defender. She would have the truth from Teevan.
CHAPTER XXIV
EWING INTERRUPTS
Eleanor Laithe started from a half sleep. She had begun to dream while still conscious of the library walls, the couch on which she lay, the curtains swelling in and out of the opened windows with a heated breeze of late afternoon, the rattle of a wagon through the street, and the shrilling of boys at a game.
She turned her face from the wall, fixed the pillows more easily under her head, and stared into the room, her eyes narrowing in calculation as she went lucidly back for the hundredth time since she had flung herself there, to check off the details of that half hour with the man who healed--or did not heal.
She had shrewdly rejected the specialist Birley had named for another who would not know her. She wanted no mistaken kindness, no polite reluctance or glossing, and she feared to find this in one who might regard her as something more than a casual human body in evil case. She had felt bound to have plain words. She would know what she faced as one knows heat or cold.
And she had gained the full of her wish. The man had taken her as casually as she offered herself. His questions were few, his examination mechanically impersonal, his diagnosis cool and informing. She had felt herself a culprit, listening to sentence.
"You think I have a year to live?"
"Longer, perhaps, if you take it this way, without worry. Worry eats the tissue even faster than those little vegetable parasites. I take it you eliminate worry?" He drew on his gloves.
She smiled now, with pride in her cunning. Her simulation of unconcerned curiosity had been perfect, as if it were another"s wasting body she brought him. She had hidden all that fond love of life, her life of action, sensation; of hope ever enlarging, of fruitions certain, innumerable, and dear. No sign had the practiced eyes read of the inner rage that maddened her at thought of so much life unlived--life of mirth and tears, height and depth, grief, ecstasy and common levels. She was avid of them all, dared them all, wished only to play the game, vaunting a fine zest for the sport with all its hazards.
She had found in her hour alone there that she did not fear death--only detested it. She feared it as little as a child fears sleep; hated it as a child, torn untimely from play, hates to go to bed.
"Longer, perhaps, if you take it this way--eliminate worry." But she knew she could not take it "this way;" could not give up as this judge believed she had done. She must rebel to the last. As long as she played she must play in the true spirit. She might be vanquished, but she would not debase the sport. She smiled at a reminiscence of her brother"s college life, catching at a phrase. "It seems I"m not a "quitter,"" she thought.
Then she halted this race of thought in sudden amus.e.m.e.nt. She felt her evening fever rising, the sinister warmth and false glow that burned like a red flame below the outer corners of her eyes. It had come earlier than usual, hurried, doubtless, by the very pa.s.sion of her rebelling. The man had been right. But she would have no waiting, half-hearted conflict, for all that.
She sat up quickly. A certain battle was set for this day, one that would test her gameness. She rose to look at a clock, and knew that Teevan probably awaited Ewing. But she could be first there, and she felt equal to the clash. The very fever would sustain her. And she would be wary once more that day, cunning to learn what she had to oppose.
Then she would be valiant. If the fever only gave her strength, small matter the fuel that fed it.
She smoothed her hair, flung a scarf over her shoulders, and stepped out into the early twilight. She felt a slight giddiness as she walked the short distance to Teevan"s door, but she had shrugged this away by the time she rang the bell. There was a wait, and she rang again. Then, when she began to fear that she a.s.sailed an empty house, she heard rapid steps; the door swung back, and Teevan himself stood before her, Teevan jaunty in summer negligee of flannels and silken shirt, who deftly covered with his froth of gallantry whatever surprise he felt at sight of her.
"My dear lady! So neighborly of you, and what luck I was in! I"m off Neville"s yacht for the evening only on a bit of business. Come up to my den. It"s stifling down here."
She followed him up the stairs, feeling a reckless strength for combat.
He took her to a room at the front of the house where there was a desk, a few lounging chairs, and an air of mannish comfort.
"I"ll not keep you long, Randall," she said, hesitating at first to sit, illogically fearing that weakness might seize her if she relaxed her body. After a moment, however, she took the chair he pushed forward.
"As long as you like, Eleanor. The breeze comes cooler through those south windows while you"re here. Let me offer you a brandy and soda. No?
You"ll let me take this alone, then? Thanks! I"m feeling a bit done up by the heat." He seated himself at the desk, sipped from his gla.s.s and looked a question at her. She debated her beginning.
"It"s about Gilbert Ewing."
His dark little eyes narrowed upon her with agreeable interest.
"Ah, to be sure--Ewing."
"You know he"s been staying a fortnight with us at Kensington."
He nodded a gracious a.s.sent, still waiting, still veiled with an effect that aroused all her caution.
"He came back to town yesterday."