"If I loved a woman, I should want to make her life all glow and color--and mine--with her--"
Anne"s eyes were shining. What a big pleasant boy he was. He seemed so young. He had a way of running his fingers up through his hair. She was aware of the gesture in the dark. Yes, she liked him. And she felt suddenly gay and light-hearted, as she had felt in the days when she first met Ridgeley.
They talked until the stars shone in the tips of the birch trees.
Ridgeley did not come, and when they went back to the house, they found that he had been called to New York on an urgent case. He would not return until the following Friday.
Anne and Christopher were thus left together for a week to get acquainted. With only old Jeanette Ware to play propriety.
II
It did not take Christopher long to decide that Ridgeley was no longer in love with his wife. "Of course he would call it love. But he could live just as well without her. He has made a machine of himself."
He spoke to Dunbar one night about Anne. "Do you think she is perfectly well?"
"Why not?"
"There"s a touch of breathlessness when we walk. Are you sure about her heart?"
"She has never been strong--" and that had seemed to be the end of it.
But it was not the end of it for Christopher. He watched Anne closely, and once when they climbed a hill together and she gave out, he carried her to the top. He managed to get his ear against her heart, and what he heard drained the blood from his face.
As for Anne, she thought how strong he was--and how fair his hair was with the sun upon it, for he had tucked his cap in his pocket.
That night Christopher again spoke to Ridgeley. "Anne"s in a bad way."
He told of the walk to the top of the hill.
Ridgeley listened this time, and the next day he took Anne down into his office, and did things to her. "But I don"t see why you are doing all this," she complained, as he stuck queer instruments in his ears, and made her draw long breaths while he listened.
"Christopher says you get tired when you walk."
"Well, I do. But there"s nothing really the matter, is there?"
There was a great deal the matter, but there was no hint of it in his manner. If she had not been his wife, he would probably have told her the truth--that she had a few months, perhaps a few years ahead of her.
He was apt to be frank with his patients. But he was not frank with Anne. He had intended to tell Christopher at once. But Christopher was away for a week.
In the week that he was separated from her, Christopher learned that he loved Anne; that he had been in love with her from the moment that she had stood among the birches--like one of them in her white slenderness--and had talked to him of guardian angels;--"_Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John_!"
He did not believe in saints, nor in the angels whose wings seemed to enfold Anne, but he believed in beauty--and Anne"s seemed lighted from within, like an alabaster lamp.
Yet she was very human--and the girl in her and the boy in him had met in the weeks that he had spent with her. They had found a lot of things to do--they had fished in shallow brown streams, they had ridden through miles of lovely country. They had gone forth in search of adventure, and they had found it; in cherries on a tree by the road, and he had climbed the tree and had dropped them down to her, and she had hung them over her ears--He had milked a cow in a pasture as they pa.s.sed, and they had drunk it with their sandwiches, and had tied up a bill in Anne"s fine handkerchief and had knotted it to the halter of the gentle, golden-eared Guernsey.
But they had found more than adventure--they had found romance--shining upon them everywhere. "If I were a gipsy to follow the road, and she could follow it with me," Christopher meditated as he sat in the train on his way back to Anne.
But there was Anne"s husband, and Christopher"s friend--and more than all there were all the specters of modern life--all the hideous wheels which must turn if Anne were ever to be his--treachery to Ridgeley--the divorce court--and then, himself and Anne, living the aftermath, of it all, facing, perhaps, disillusion--
"Oh, not _that_," Christopher told himself, "she"d never grow less--never anything less than she is--if she could once--care--"
For he did not know whether Anne cared or not. He might guess as he pleased--but there had not been a word between them.
Once more the thought flashed, "If I were a gipsy to follow the road--"
As his train sped through the countryside, he became aware of flaming bill-boards--a circus was showing in the towns--the fences fairly blazed with golden chariots, wild beasts, cheap G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, clowns in frilled collars and peaked hats. He remembered a glorious day that he had spent as a boy!
"I"ll take Anne," was his sudden decision.
He laughed to himself, and spent the rest of the way in seeing her at it. They would drink pink lemonade, and there would be pop-corn b.a.l.l.s--the entrancing smell of sawdust--the beat of the band. He hoped there would be a tom-tom, and some of the dark people from the Far East.
He reached his destination at seven o"clock. Dunbar met him at the station. Anne sat with her husband, and Jeanette was in the back seat.
Christopher had, therefore, a side view of Anne as she turned a little that she might talk to him. The glint of her bright hair under her gray sports hat, the light of welcome in her eyes--!
"I am going to take you to the circus to-morrow. Ridgeley, you"ll go too?"
Dunbar shook his head. "I"ve got to get back to town in the morning. And I"m not sure that the excitement will be good for Anne."
"Why not?" quickly. "Aren"t you well, Anne?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "Ridgeley seems to think I"m not. But the circus can"t hurt me."
Nothing more was said about it. Christopher decided to ask Ridgeley later. But the opportunity did not come until Anne had gone up-stairs, and Dunbar and Christopher were smoking a final cigar on the porch.
"What"s the matter with her?" Christopher asked.
Dunbar told him, "She can"t get well."
III
Anne, getting ready for bed, on the evening of Christopher"s arrival, felt unaccountably tired. His presence had been, perhaps, a bit over-stimulating. It was good to have him back. She scarcely dared admit to herself how good. After dinner she and Ridgeley and Christopher had walked down to the grove of birches. There had been a new moon, and she and Ridgeley had sat on the stone bench with Christopher at their feet.
She had leaned her head against her husband"s shoulder, and he had put his arm about her in the dark and had drawn her to him. He was rarely demonstrative, and his tenderness had to-night for some reason hurt her.
She had learned to do without it.
She had talked very little, but Christopher had talked a great deal. She had been content to listen. He really told such wonderful things--he gave her to-night the full story of her silver beads, and how they had been filched from an ancient temple--and he had bought them from the thief. "Until I saw you wear them, I always had a feeling that they ought to go back to the temple--to the G.o.d who had perhaps worn them for a thousand years. If I had known which G.o.d, I might have carried them back. But the thief wouldn"t tell me."
"It would have done no good to carry them back," Ridgeley had said, "and they are nice for Anne." His big hand had patted his wife"s shoulder.
"Oh," Christopher had been eager, "I want you to hear those temple bells some day, Anne. Why won"t you take her, Dunbar? Next winter--drop your work, and we"ll all go--"
"I"ve a fat chance of going."
"Haven"t you made money enough?"
"It isn"t money. You know that. But my patients would set up a howl--"