IN WHICH HEARTS GO ASTRAY
She was enchantingly pretty, there was no doubt of that, thought Gay as he watched her at dinner. He had rarely seen a face so radiant in expression, and she had lost, he noticed, the touch of provincialism in her voice and manner. To-night, for the first time, he felt that there was a fawn-like shyness about her, as if her soul had flown startled before his approach. Of her meeting with Abel in Applegate he knew nothing, and while he discerned instinctively the softness and the richness of her mood, it was but reasonable that he should attribute it to a different and, as it happened, to a mistaken cause. He liked that faint shadow of her lashes on her vivid cheeks, and while he drank his coffee and cracked his nuts, he told himself, half humorously, that the ideal love, after all, was a perpetual virgin in perpetual flight. As he rose from the table, he remembered Blossom, and the pile of her half-read letters in his travelling bag. "She"s a dear good girl, and just because I"ve got myself into a mess, I"ve no idea of behaving like a cad to her," he thought.
That was downstairs in the hotel dining-room, and an hour later, when he faced Molly alone in the little sitting-room, he repeated the phrase to himself with an additional emphasis--for when the woman before him in flesh and blood looked up at him with entreating eyes, like a child begging a favour, the woman in his memory faded quickly into remoteness.
"What"s the matter, little girl?" he asked.
"Oh, Jonathan, I must go back to Old Church--to-morrow!" she said.
"Why in thunder do you want to do that?"
"There"s something I must see about. I can"t wait. I never can wait when I want anything."
"So I have observed. This something is so important, by the way, that you haven"t thought of it for six months?"
"Well, I"ve thought of it--sometimes," she admitted.
"Can"t you tell me what it is, Molly?"
She shook her head. Her face was pink and her eyes shone; whatever it was, it had obviously enriched her beauty.
"Tell me, little girl," he repeated and leaned closer. There had always been something comfortable and warm in his nearness to her, and under the influence of it, she felt tempted to cry out, "I want to go back to find out if Abel still loves me! I am an idiot, I know, but I feel that I shall die if I discover that he has got over caring. This suspense is more than I can bear, yet I never knew until I felt it, how much he means to me."
This was what she wanted to say, but instead of uttering it, she merely murmured:
"I can"t, Jonathan, you would never understand." Her whole being was vibrant to-night with the desire for love, yet, in spite of his wide experience with the pa.s.sion, she knew that he would not comprehend what she meant by the word. It wasn"t his kind of love in the least that she wanted; it differed from his as the light of the sun differs from the blaze of a prairie fire. "It"s just a feeling," she added, helplessly.
"You don"t have feelings, I suppose?"
"Don"t I?" he echoed. "Oh, Molly, if you only knew how many!"
"While they last--but they don"t last, you know, they have their seasons. That"s the curse of them, or the charm. If they only lasted earth would be paradise or h.e.l.l, wouldn"t it?"
But generalizations had no further attraction for her. Her mind was one great wonder, and she felt that she could hardly keep alive until she could stand face to face with Abel and read the truth in his eyes.
"All the same I want to go," she repeated obstinately.
Suspicion seized him, and his mouth grew a little hard under his short moustache.
"Molly," he asked, "have you been thinking again about the miller?"
"How absurd! What put that into your head?" she retorted indignantly.
The idea, innocent as it was, appeared to incense her. What a little firebrand she looked, and how hot her eyes glowed when she was angry!
"Well, I"m glad you haven"t--because, you know, really it wouldn"t do,"
he answered.
"What wouldn"t do?"
"Your marrying a Revercomb--it wouldn"t do in the least."
"Why wouldn"t it?"
"You can see that for yourself, can"t you? You"ve come entirely out of that life and you couldn"t go back to it."
"I don"t see why I couldn"t if I wanted to?" she threw out at him with sudden violence.
Clearly, as his mother had said, she was lacking in reverence, yet he couldn"t agree that she would never become exactly a lady. Not with that high-bred poise of the head and those small, exquisite hands!
"Well, in the first place, I don"t believe you"d ever want to," he said calmly, "and in the second place, if you ever did such a thing, my little weather-vane, you"d regret it in ten minutes."
"If I did it, I don"t believe I"d ever regret it," was her amazing rejoinder.
Stupefied yet dauntless, he returned to the charge.
"You"re talking sheer nonsense, you silly girl, and you know it," he said. "If you were to go back to Old Church to marry the miller, you"d be sorry before you got up to the altar."
"I"m not going back there to marry him," she persisted stubbornly, "but I don"t" believe if I were to do it, I"d ever regret it."
"You think you"d be satisfied to give up ten thousand a year and settle down to raising chickens for a living?"
"I like raising chickens."
"And you"d expect that pursuit to make up to you for all you would sacrifice--for the world and people and freedom to go and come as you please?"
"I don"t care about the world," she replied, sticking, he told himself, as obstinately as a mule to her point, "and people seem to me just the same everywhere."
"The same?" he repeated, "do you actually mean that you can"t see any difference?"
"No difference that matters. It"s all in the clothes and the sillier things they talk about. Why, I"d rather hear old Adam Doolittle talk than that stupid Judge Grayson, who dined with us the other night, and never mentioned anything but stocks. If I"ve got to hear about a single subject I"d rather it would be crops than stocks--they seem more human, somehow."
"By Jove!" he exclaimed, under his breath, "what"s got into you to-night, Molly? I honestly believe you"ve begun to idealize the miller now you"ve been away from him. He"s a handsome fellow; you don"t see his physical match in a day, I"m willing to admit, but if you went back again you"d be surprised to find how--well, how rustic he would appear to you."
The colour rushed to her face, and her eyes burned hot under the sudden droop of her lashes.
"He"s better than any one I"ve seen anywhere," she replied, "he"s bigger, he"s stronger, he"s kinder. I"m not good enough to marry him, and I know it."
For an instant he looked at her in the pained surprise of one who had never indulged in verbal excesses. Then he said, coldly; "So you"re working yourself into a sentiment over young Revercomb. My dear child, if you only knew how unspeakably silly it is. Nothing could be more absurd than to throw away an income of ten thousand dollars a year in order to marry a poor man." The idea of her committing such folly was intensely distressing to him. His judgment was now in the ascendant, and like most men, while under the cool and firm control of the rational part of his nature, he was incapable of recalling with any sympathy the times when he had followed the lead of those qualities which rise superior to reason.
"I don"t care how poor he is," said Molly pa.s.sionately, for her rational part was plainly not in the ascendant. "n.o.body ever thought about his being so poor until your uncle left me all that horrid money. He was honestly born and I wasn"t, yet he didn"t care. He was big and splendid and I was little and mean, that was the matter!"
"By George, you"re in love with him!" he exclaimed, and beneath the coldness of his manner, his heart suffered an incomprehensible pang.
Undoubtedly he had permitted himself to drift into a feeling for Molly, which, had he been wise, he would have strangled speedily in the beginning. The obstacles which had appeared to make for his safety, had, he realized now, merely afforded shelter to the flame until it had grown strong enough to overleap them. While he stood there, with his angry gaze on her flushing and paling beauty, he had the helpless sensation of a man who returns at sunrise to find a forest fire raging where he had left a few sticks smouldering at midnight.
"I"m not in love with anybody--you"ve no right to say so," she returned, "but I"ll not have him abused. It"s not true, it"s not just, it"s not generous."
This was too much for his forbearance, though he told himself that, after all, there was no "getting at" Molly from the surface, and that this outburst might conceal a fancy for himself quite as well as for the miller. The last idea, while it tantalized him, was not without a pleasant sting for his senses.