"I shall ask nothing," his father replied, gently. "If you mean to marry her you must do so now, when she will need you most. There can be no compromise, unless your own mind is divided."
As Jarvis Thornton left the house that night he felt that he had dealt his father a blow.
VII
Some days later when Jarvis Thornton took the familiar turnpike road he had not recovered from the serious mood his father"s talk had brought about. It hung on him like a weight. He did not ride at a lover"s pace; rather, cool and determined, with a spice of pride in following his own judgment. But the old man"s prophecy met an answering fear in his own mind--it was dangerous to pluck roses from some ruins.
His father"s sweetness in the matter got hold of him, and he began to appreciate, in a vague way, the yearning that old men have to witness fulfilment on the part of the younger generation. Mere age, he saw, reduces the complexity of desire, but renders it single and intense.
Whether his father was right or not in his gloomy a.n.a.lysis, he was deeply convinced and foiled. His last method of success had turned out illusive, yet he had not reproached, nor domineered, nor dictated, nor appealed. He had expressed a little of his keen sorrow, but insidiously this att.i.tude had tainted the young man"s ecstasy.
Would _she_ comprehend his father"s n.o.bility? He could hardly explain the situation to her in all its bearings, even if she were fitted to understand. And he felt that hers would be a woman"s sympathy, so ready, yet on the surface. It needed a man, with his less expressive nature, to comprehend deep down the bearings of this case. However, if she loved him--it was pleasant to feel that she _did_ love him--she must plan with him to defeat the old man"s prophecy. They would cut loose from the conditions, come what might. He closed his mouth firmly. Manlike he planned as if he knew all the elements of the question.
His horse trotted up the little gravel way to the Four Corners.
Suddenly she appeared standing on the big grooved millstone which served as a horse-block. Her white dress had an under bodice of pink, that gave her more than ever the appearance of an opening water-lily.
"I have a new walk for you to-day."
Her greeting betrayed no surprise. She was evidently sure of the outcome. As Thornton flung himself from his horse, he had a sensation of yielding--to the pre-arranged.
"But you must be so hot," she added, taking in his solemn face. "Come into the pantry while I make you a c.o.c.ktail. Papa says I could get a place as a bar-maid."
With a ripple of contented laughter she led the way to the little pantry over the wine-cellar. It was stocked and arranged like a miniature bar; a high side-board was carefully crowded with polished cut-gla.s.s, and the little room exhaled aromatic odors from the various wines and bitters. He sat down near the open window while she busied herself in crushing ice to a flaky coolness and gathering the materials. To see her at this job seemed to put all of the solemnity of the occasion far away. Yet he sneered at himself for his prudery.
The sun blazed down outside on the scorched lawn; here the summer heat brought out all the pungent odors of the place, permeated, so it seemed, by the stock-broker, by the kind of American who could endure life only when his nerves were soothed in some way. Pfa! The atmosphere of the Four Corners" swine! They reminded him of the bondage to the flesh that in his masterful mood he hated. He sipped his c.o.c.ktail and lit a cigarette, inhaling it with deliberation, noting with idle curiosity how his pulses responded by sharp little beats.
The escape from reality! He had always liked blunt reality, and believed in it professionally. You must have a sane mind and a normal body to believe in reality, and hence few cared for that kind of bitter bread. The mob tried to escape. Would he too, perhaps, try to escape? What a time he was losing from that slow methodical task he had set himself? Three months ago had occurred the first break in his regular current of thought, and now he was drifting about aimlessly in a mess of pa.s.sions and desires.
"Do you like it?" Miss Ellwell asked, anxiously. He had it on his lips to say:
"I hate it." That would sound silly and incomprehensible, like an impromptu lecture on the sins of strong drink. His eyes wandered over her, resting on one white arm that lolled across the side-board.
"I like you," his eyes said. A wave of brutal indifference to everything but immediate desire surged in the man. However, tossing away his cigarette, he nodded.
A little dash of pink in her face and neck answered his eyes.
"Now come." She put back the last gla.s.s and pulled down the shade, shutting in the heavy odors.
They sauntered out through the orchard to the wood-road that led eastward from the Four Corners.
There was a section of Middleton dominated by a high hill, with a country pond at its foot, that possessed an air of distinction, of being apart from the flat village and the small barren farms. High stone-walls ribbed its green surfaces, meeting in a heap at the top, where also a few wind-blown apple-trees maintained their stunted growth. A little below the crown of the hill there was a thick cl.u.s.ter of nut-trees. From this height one could see the Hampton hills to the east, outlined by a thin row of trees drawn as if with a heavy brush along the margin of the landscape. Elsewhere the hills were rounded bare mounds. Farther north this undulating line dipped into a green plain, and there, so the tradition ran, you could see on a clear day the white sails of coasting schooners and a shimmer of eastern light that might be the marshes of Ess.e.x, or indeed the blue sea itself. This apple-tree crowned peak was a kind of lookout from the dead country to the living sea.
Miss Ellwell brought Thornton out at the mound of stones on the crest; they rested their arms on the wall, looking east searchingly for the bit of blue coast and the sails.
"There, there, I can see it," she cried. He looked at her incredulously. There was nothing but a nebulous ma.s.s of blue. "Well, I have seen it," she protested, "two or three times. To-day it is a bit hazy."
"Why do you want to see it?" he asked, idly.
"Oh, it is so different! It is big and strange and unfamiliar; don"t you like it?"
""There is a world beyond!"" He answered without direct appositeness.
They turned to the shade of the nut-trees. In the July sun the woods seemed asleep, merely soothed by a wandering breeze, and they flung themselves down on the warm ground. All about the air swam with pleasant, heated, drowsy, earthy odors.
As she took off her hat and nestled back into the undergrowth, Thornton felt her anaemic body, pale from the fatigue of the hot walk, as if the water-lily were drooping in the mid-day sun. Yet she was somehow intimately connected with the brooding earth. There were two bodies--the body of flesh that had come with fatigue and feebleness into the world, and the body of pa.s.sion that was blooming into power.
She talked of the thousand trivialities that go to make the conversation between a man and a woman. Thornton lay silently, stretched on the warm leaves at her feet, feeling her bloodless face with its sharp blue veining. Each was conscious of a dynamic something in the air; their minds had a frank understanding while the talk skipped in and out among nothings. When she began once more to talk of the sea that lay down there beyond the green meadows and the blue haze, a faint rose-color of animation darted over the pallor and made the moist eyes flash. The sea! That stood in her mind for the mysteries of change, of the unknown. Thornton knew that this wistfulness after change had nothing definite in it, was merely a girl"s hunger for motion; yet that had divided her in his mind from her kind.
"There is a world beyond," she murmured, in wondering repet.i.tion of his words. The branches of the nut-trees swayed in the odorous wind as if whispering, "Yes, yes, we know of it. That world beyond ... over the hills of flesh, and the tedious wastes of tired bodies, there _is_ a world of peace beyond!"
Her eyes came to his face wistfully. He held the keys of that beyond.... Something had snapped in his well-ordered mechanism, and he was going, going, drifting will-lessly into feeling and longing. And the next moment he held her, looking into a face that burned with love. There were no words. Life had been too strong for his little plans; it had mocked him and driven him pa.s.sionward, like a bit of straw caught in a gale. The hours swam on unheeded, while they rested there face to face. Then came the going home across the afternoon woods; she silent and content, he trying to account for himself. When he had speculated about such matters, he had seen himself discussing, quite properly, the serious affairs of life with some tall girl of distinguished carriage, some one of the many young women whose acquaintance had made up his Boston parties. He had expected that their conversation would grow more serious as this intimacy deepened, and that at last, having found themselves of one accord on the sober ideals of life, he should broach to her this final proposition involving both their lives. He had half imagined such a situation with several fine young women; the scene had always been played out in a drawing-room filled with bric-a-brac and heavy hangings, he in his long black afternoon coat. There had been a touch of solemnity in it, a weighty sense of responsibility that would have made their first kiss a little sepulchral.
Now, this! Her hand touched his; his mind left these bizarre images, and suddenly it seemed that life was one wilderness of woods in the late afternoon sun, down which he was fated to wander in a lethargic dream. One dominant feeling of tenderness; one indifference to the baying of reason--merely love, and the soft, warm earth, and the greenness of living things, and the woman whose dress brushed his arm.
Ah! that was sweet and precious at any price.
VIII
He had put something in motion on that languid July day, and suddenly he was whirled along in a stream of consequences. There was an interview with Mr. Ellwell, a sudden opening of the Ellwell family arms, and he was one of them--not much to his relish. Ruby Ellwell brought out her engagement to Bradley, the young stock broker her father had chummed with. The Four Corners renewed its worldly life in a garden-party, at which both engagements were announced. Thornton had to stand in line with his new brother-in-law, and for all this disagreeable business, the sole consolation was the happiness the woman he loved found in it. For her it was a rehabilitation of the family, the first dawn of those better times she had looked for all these years.
He remembered for all his lifetime how his father had met her; how he had walked across the lawn, old, and gray, and aloof, and had taken both her hands. He had smiled at her tenderly, as if she were a little girl, much as he had smiled years before at Jarvis"s mother. Then he had kissed her on both cheeks, and had stood patting her hands in a gentle caress. Later he had slipped away in the same quiet abstracted manner. For the rest of the day Jarvis Thornton had been a little sad, as well as bored, without knowing exactly why.
They had planned a simple wedding for September; they would walk to the village church, the old white box of a meeting-house where the first Roper Ellwell had led his congregation. Martinson, Thornton"s youthful hero at the Camberton Theological School, would meet them in his episcopal robes on the little green in front of the church, and then the party, not more than a dozen, could walk together into the bare old building, and in the solemn quiet of the country noon complete the marriage. A quiet dinner, and then away from the Four Corners.
But it could not be so. The handsome Ruby wished to have a "function,"
some of the conventional excitements of this entertainment. The two sisters must be married together; a special train must come from Boston; a grand reunion would be held of all the old family friends who had shaken their heads over the Ellwell misfortunes. So the two quieter souls yielded, and the marriage left a bad taste in the young bridegroom"s cup of joy.
Almost at once they had gone abroad to Berlin, where Thornton proposed to work for an indefinite time. It seemed to him that he should accomplish more than one object, by carrying on his work in Europe; he could insensibly divide himself and his wife from the Ellwell connection. All went sweetly for his first months; he had begun to regard his marriage as an idyl slipped in between pages of prose. But when their child was coming, his wife grew restless; she must go home, he saw; it was natural that she should long to return to her mother at such a time.
So back to Boston they had gone, Thornton contenting himself with the reflection that he could go ahead in Boston almost as well as in Europe; that fortunately he was not tied by money wants, and that the Camberton laboratories were always open to him. When the little daughter came he schemed a new move; he was offered a headship of a laboratory somewhere in the middle West. He began to feel the force of his father"s remarks about transplanting.
Yet they never went. Another man got the appointment while he was persuading his wife. Her mother was so lonely, now that Ruby was living in New York. They had no necessity to live far away in order to earn money. When he proposed moving to Washington, the same ground had to be gone over again, and the same gentle obstinate resistance to be met.
"Go to Washington," old Thornton said when his son stood by his bedside during the last illness. "Go to Washington," he repeated, querulously. And as the younger man made no reply, but sat with his hands shoved in his pockets, brooding, the sick man spoke again, "You will never do anything here."
"Yes, we must make a move," a.s.sented his son in a voice that said "no."
After his father"s death, they went to live in the Marlboro" Street house. There was no more talk of moving away. The Ellwells came in town for the winter, living in a flat at one of the new hotels near by. Mrs. Thornton had the habit of spending her mornings in the flat with her mother and the baby. Thornton could find no reasonable grounds for the rebellion he felt over this tie, this close proximity to decay in which he was compelled to live. Yet he loathed the thought that his child, unimportant as she was now, should begin her life by imbibing such a forlorn atmosphere.
He could tell each day what had been going on in those long morning hours; how his wife"s sympathies had been on the rack; how mother and daughter had sighed over the unaccountable miseries of life. She seemed to him to come home with the old anaemic look, with the old restless hunger in her face, and then he was reminded that their child was more than delicate. It would lead him to envy mere gross flesh and blood, the coa.r.s.e fibre of some riotously healthy common folk. Indeed it was a crime against his fellow-men, this maintaining a bankrupt stock unless he could patch it into vigor. There were hints too that fell indefinably now and then about the Ellwell affairs, the stock-broker"s poor health, the perpetual disappointments that discouraged him. His wife had relapsed into the Four Corner"s habit of regarding incapacity and folly as mere misfortune. It irritated him to realize all this sentimental pity over a blackguard. Yet she was right; she had the opinion of centuries on her side; was she not their daughter before she was his wife?
There were times when Ruby came on from New York for a visit, bringing her child, a boy, with her. Thornton grimly noted this vigorous little animal of a nephew and compared him minutely with his own feeble child. He compared also the mothers. Ruby had already begun the period of over-bloom. The Bradleys, he gathered, lived a kind of a tramp existence, moving from boarding-house to hotel as Bradley went up or down. And Ruby, with all her a.s.surance and her affluent person, had not lost the Ellwell ailments. Yet to her child had been given the strong stock he envied. Nature had coolly overlooked his, and carried her blessings where they were not deserved.
Such reflections made him more tender to his wife. He wondered if she ever thought of this contrast.