"Get what you wanted, Rue?"
"Yes, thank you."
"Been waiting long?"
"I--don"t think so."
"All right," he said cheerily, climbing in beside her. "I"m sorry I kept you waiting. Had a business matter to settle. Hungry?"
Rue, very still and colourless, said no, with a mechanical smile. The chauffeur climbed to the rumble.
"I"ll jam her through," nodded Brandes as the car moved swiftly westward. "We"ll lunch in Albany on time."
Half a mile, and they pa.s.sed Neeland"s Mills, where old d.i.c.k Neeland stood in his boat out on the pond and cast a glittering lure for pickerel.
She caught a glimpse of him--his st.u.r.dy frame, white hair, and ruddy visage--and a swift, almost wistful memory of young Jim Neeland pa.s.sed through her mind.
But it was a very confused mind--only the bewildered mind of a very young girl--and the memory of the boy flashed into its confusion and out again as rapidly as the landscape sped away behind the flying car.
Dully she was aware that she was leaving familiar and beloved things, but could not seem to realise it--childhood, girlhood, father and mother, Brookhollow, the mill, Gayfield, her friends, all were vanishing in the flying dust behind her, dwindling, dissolving into an infinitely growing distance.
They took the gradual slope of a mile-long hill as swallows take the air; houses, barns, woods, orchards, grain fields, flew by on either side; other cars approaching pa.s.sed them like cannon b.a.l.l.s; the sunlit, undulating world flowed glittering away behind; only the stainless blue ahead confronted them immovably--a vast, magnificent goal, vague with the mystery of promise.
"On this trip," said Brandes, "we may only have time to see the Loove and the palaces and all like that. Next year we"ll fix it so we can stay in Paris and you can study art."
Ruhannah"s lips formed the words, "Thank you."
"Can"t you learn to call me Eddie?" he urged.
The girl was silent.
"You"re everything in the world to me, Rue."
The same little mechanical smile fixed itself on her lips, and she looked straight ahead of her.
"Haven"t you begun to love me just a little bit, Rue?"
"I like you. You are very kind to us."
"Don"t your affection seem to grow a little stronger now?" he urged.
"You are so kind to us," she repeated gratefully; "I like you for it."
The utterly unawakened youth of her had always alternately fascinated and troubled him. Gambler that he was, he had once understood that patience is a gambler"s only stock in trade. But now for the first time in his career he found himself without it.
"You said," he insisted, "that you"d love me when we were married."
She turned her child"s eyes on him in faint surprise:
"A wife loves her husband always, doesn"t she?"
"Do _you_?"
"I suppose I shall.... I haven"t been married very long--long enough to feel as though I am really married. When I begin to realise it I shall understand, of course, that I love you."
It was the calm and immature reply of a little girl playing house. He knew it. He looked at her pure, perplexed profile of a child and knew that what he had said was futile--understood that it was meaningless to her, that it was only confusing a mind already dazed--a mind of which too much had been expected, too much demanded.
He leaned over and kissed the cold, almost colourless cheek; her little mechanical smile came back. Then they remembered the chauffeur behind them and Brandes reddened. He was unaccustomed to a man on the rumble.
"Could I talk to mother on the telephone when we get to New York?" she asked presently, still painfully flushed.
"Yes, darling, of course."
"I just want to hear her voice," murmured Rue.
"Certainly. We can send her a wireless, too, when we"re at sea."
That interested her. She enquired curiously in regard to wireless telegraphy and other matters concerning ocean steamers.
In Albany her first wave of loneliness came over her in the stuffy dining-room of the big, pretentious hotel, when she found herself seated at a small table alone with this man whom she seemed, somehow or other, to have married.
As she did not appear inclined to eat, Brandes began to search the card for something to tempt her. And, glancing up presently, saw tears glimmering in her eyes.
For a moment he remained dumb as though stunned by some sudden and terrible accusation--for a moment only. Then, in an unsteady voice:
"Rue, darling. You must not feel lonely and frightened. I"ll do anything in the world for you. Don"t you know it?"
She nodded.
"I tell you," he said in that even, concentrated voice of his which scarcely moved his narrow lips, "I"m just crazy about you. You"re my own little wife. You"re all I care about. If I can"t make you happy somebody ought to shoot me."
She tried to smile; her full lips trembled; a single tear, br.i.m.m.i.n.g, fell on the cloth.
"I--don"t mean to be silly.... But--Brookhollow seems--ended--forever...."
"It"s only forty miles," he said with heavy joviality. "Shall we turn around and go back?"
She glanced up at him with an odd expression, as though she hoped he meant it; then her little mechanical smile returned, and she dried her eyes navely.
"I don"t know why I cannot seem to get used to being married," she said. "I never thought that getting married would make me so--so--lonely."
"Let"s talk about art," he suggested. "You"re crazy about art and you"re going to Paris. Isn"t that fine."
"Oh, yes----"
"Sure, it"s fine. That"s where art grows. Artville is Paris" other name. It"s all there, Rue--the Loove, the palaces, the Latin Quarter, the statues, the churches, and all like that."