"Did you see the storm? Wasn"t it dreadful! I saw it all quite securely from Mrs. Frost"s window. How cosy you all look. I wish I could stay, but I just dropped in to ask you to take a seat in my box on Sat.u.r.day night. Bring Miss Dutcher--Mr. Gallup will be delighted to meet her."
All that she said, and more that she implied enmeshed Rose like folds of an invisible intangible net.
Mrs. Harvey calmly accepted, but Rose exclaimed: "O, you"re very kind but I am going home on Sat.u.r.day morning!"
"How sad! I should have liked to have you come."
After she was gone Rose sprang to her feet. "I must go now," she said and there was a note in her voice which Mrs. Harvey knew meant inflexible decision.
As they went upstairs Rose was filled with dread of some further complication, but Mrs. Harvey only said:
"I love you, my child. I wish you were going to stay here always."
She left the way open for confidences, but Rose was in a panic to get away and kept rigid silence.
In the carriage she contrived to convey to Elbert her desire to be left alone and so he kept back the words of love which were bubbling in his good frank soul. He was saddened by it but not made hopeless. It would have been a beautiful close to a dramatic day could he have kissed her lips and presented her to his mother as his promised wife--but it was impossible for even his volatile nature to break into her somber, almost sullen, silence; and when he said "Good night, Rose!" with tender sweetness she replied curtly, "Good night!" and fled.
She hurried past Mary to her own room and lay for hours on her bed, without undressing, listening to the howl of the wind, the grind of cars and the distant boom of the breakers. There was a storm in her heart also.
She thought of that lovely and gentle home, of the power wealth would give her, of the journeys into the world, of trips to Europe, to the ocean, to Boston and New York and London. It could give her a life of ease, of power, of grace and charm. O, how beautiful it all was, but----
To win it she had to cut off her old father. He never could fit in with these people. She thought of his meeting with the Harveys with a shudder. Then, too, she would need to give up her own striving toward independence, for it was plain these people would not hear to her continued effort. Even if they consented, she would be meshed in a thousand other duties.
And then she thought of Mason toiling at his desk down there in the heart of the terrible town, and the look on his face grew less and less imperious and more wistful and pleading. This day she had caught a new meaning from his eyes--it was as if he needed her; it seemed absurd, and she blushed to think it, but so it seemed. That last look on his face was the look of a lonely man.
His words came to her again and again: "Hitherto I have drifted--henceforth I will sail!"
And she pushed away the splendid picture of a life of ease and reached out for comradeship with a man of toil, of dreams and hidden powers.
CHAPTER XXIV
MASON TAKES A VACATION
As Mason walked away from the lake that terrible day it seemed as if he had ceased to drift. The spirit of that grim helmsman appeared to have entered into him. Life was short and pleasures few. For fifteen years he had planned important things to do, but had never done them--feeling all the time the power to write latent within him, yet lacking stimulus.
From the very first this girl had roused him unaccountably. Her sympathy, her imaginative faculty as well as her beauty, had come to seem the qualities which he most needed.
Could he have gone to his own fireside at once, the determining letter would have been written that night, but the routine of the office, the chaff of his companions, took away his heroic mood, and when he entered a car at twelve o"clock he slouched in his seat like a tired man, and the muscles of his face fell slack and he looked like a hopeless man.
After Rose went home he seemed to Sanborn to be more impa.s.sible than ever. As for Mason himself, it seemed as if some saving incentive had gone out of his life--some redeeming grace. He had grown into the habit of dropping in at Isabel"s once a week, and Isabel had taken care that Rose should be often there on the same evening; and so without giving much thought to it he had come to accept these evenings as the compensating pleasures of his sombre life.
It was such a delight to come up out of the vicious pitiless grind of his newspaper day and sit there before the fire, with the face of a radiant girl to smile upon him. Her voice, with its curiously penetrating yet musical quality, stirred him to new thoughts, and often he went home at ten or eleven and wrote with a feeling of exultant power upon his book. After she went home he wrote no more; he smoked and pondered. When he called upon Isabel and Sanborn he continued to smoke and to ponder.
He had not abandoned his allegory in talking with Sanborn, and Sanborn and Isabel together could not get at his real feeling for Rose.
Sanborn asked one day plumply:
"Mason, why don"t you marry the coolly girl, and begin to live?"
"It would be taking a mean advantage of her. She"s going to be famous one of these days, and then I should be in the way."
"Nonsense!"
"Besides, she probably would not marry me; and if she would, I don"t think I could keep up the pose."
"What pose?"
"Of husband."
"Is that a pose?" Sanborn smiled.
"It would be for me," Mason said, rather shortly. He was thinking once more of the letter he had promised to write to Rose, but which he had never found himself capable of finishing.
He put it in his pocket when he went up in July to spend a week at the Herrick cottage at Oconomowoc. Isabel and Sanborn were married just before leaving the city.
Sanborn said he had the judge come in to give him legal power to compel Isabel to do his cooking for him, and Isabel replied that her main reason was to secure a legal claim on Sanborn"s practice.
The wedding had been very quiet. Society reporters (who did not see it) called it "an unique affair." But Mason, who did see it, said it was a very simple process, so simple it seemed one ought to be able to go through it oneself. To which Sanborn replied: "Quite right. Try it!"
They had a little cottage on the bank of the lake, and Sanborn came up on Sat.u.r.days with the rest of the madly busy men who rest over Sunday and over-work the rest of the week. Mason had been with them a week, and, though he gave no sign, he was nearing a crisis in his life. He had gone to the point of finishing his letter to Rose--it was lying at that moment in his valise waiting to be posted--but it was a long way from being over with. It was a tremendous moment for him. As he approached the deciding moment the deed grew improbable, impossible. It was a very beautiful life there on the lake, with nothing to do but smoke and dream, but one evening he had the impulse to ask Isabel"s advice, and after dinner he courteously invited her to sail with him.
There was some joking by Sanborn about the impropriety of such a thing on Isabel"s part, and many offers to man the boat, which, Mason said, sprang from jealousy. "I consider I am doing you people a kindness in not letting you bore each other into black hatred." It ended in the two friends drifting away over the lake, while Sanborn called after them threats of war if they were not at the wharf at nine--sharp!
They talked commonplaces for a time, while the sky flushed and faded and the lake gradually cleared of its fisher boats. Slowly the colors grew tender and a subtle, impalpable mist rose from the water, through which the boat drifted before an imperceptible breeze.
The two sailors lay at ease, Mason at the rudder. The sail stood up light and airy and soundless as a b.u.t.terfly"s wing. It pointed at the spa.r.s.e stars as if with warning finger.
The hour and the place were favorable to confidences. As the dusk deepened, a boat-load of young people put off into the lake, singing some wailing sweet song. They were far enough away to be un.o.btrusively impersonal. A plover was faintly calling from the sedgy sh.o.r.e on the other side.
"One should be forever young," said Mason broodingly.
Isabel said: "Once I heard a cow low, and a robin laugh, while a cricket chirped in the gra.s.s. Why should they have moved me so?"
Mason mused a moment. "The cow was maternity pleading for its suckling; the robin"s laugh suggested a thousand springtimes, and the cricket prophesied the coming of frost and age. Love and loss are in the wail of yonder song, the loneliness of age in yonder piping bird, and the infinite and all-absorbing menstruum of death in the growing dusk."
"And the light of man"s optimism in the piercing out of the stars."
"It may be so," he replied uncertainly.
They drifted on in silence. There was a faint ripple at the prow and that was all. At last Mason roused himself to say his word.
"All these intangible essences and powers are no apparent reason why I should do so foolish a thing--but they have influenced me. Today I wrote to our coolly girl--I hope to say _my_ coolly girl."
Isabel caught her breath:
"Warren, did you? I"m very glad. If I could reach you I"d shake your hand."