"Estelle--she has treated me shamefully," said Adelaide. "I haven"t seen her for more than a year--except just a glimpse as I was driving down Monroe Street one day. How beautiful she has become! But, then, she always was pretty. And neither her father nor her mother, nor any of the rest of the family is especially good-looking. She doesn"t in the least resemble them."
"There probably was a time when her father and mother really loved," said Dory. "I"ve often thought that when one sees a beautiful man or woman, one is seeing the monument to some moment of supreme, perfect happiness.
There are hours when even the meanest creatures see the islands of enchantment floating in the opal sea."
Adelaide was gazing dreamily into the sunset. It was some time before she came back, dropped from the impersonal to the personal, which is the normal att.i.tude of most young people and of all the self-absorbed.
Simeon, who had been inspecting Dory from the far upper end of the hammock, now descended to the floor of the veranda, and slowly advanced toward him. Dory put out his hand. "How are you, cousin?" he said, gravely shaking Simeon"s extended paw. Simeon chattered delightedly and sprang into Dory"s lap to nestle comfortably there.
"I always thought you would fall in love with Estelle, some day,"
Adelaide was saying.
Dory looked at Simeon with an ironical smile. "Why does she say those things to me?" he asked. Simeon looked at Adelaide with a puzzled frown that said, "Why, indeed?"
"You and Estelle are exactly suited to each other," explained she.
"Exactly unsuited," replied he. "I have nothing that she needs; she has nothing that I need. And love is an exchange of needs. Now, I have hurt your vanity."
"Why do you say that?" demanded Adelaide.
"You"d like to feel that your lover came to you empty-handed, asking everything, humbly protesting that he had nothing to give. And you know that I--" He smiled soberly. "Sometimes I think you have really nothing I need or want, that I care for you because you so much need what I can give. You poor pauper, with the delusion that you are rich!"
"You are frank," said she, smiling, but not liking it.
"And why shouldn"t I be? I"ve given up hope of your ever seeing the situation as it is. I"ve nothing to lose with you. Besides, I shouldn"t want you on any false terms. One has only to glance about him to shrink from the horrors of marriage based on delusions and lies. So, I can afford to be frank."
She gave him a puzzled look. She had known him all her life; they had played together almost every day until she was seventeen and went East, to school, with Janet Whitney. It was while she was at home on her first long vacation that she had flirted with him, had trapped him into an avowal of love; and then, having made sure of the truth which her vanity of conquest and the fascination of his free and frank manliness for her, though she denied it to herself, had led her on to discover beyond doubt, she became conscience-stricken. And she confessed to him that she loved Ross Whitney and was engaged to him; and he had taken the disclosure so calmly that she almost thought he, like herself, had been simply flirting. And yet--She dimly understood his creed of making the best of the inevitable, and of the ridiculousness of taking oneself too seriously. "He probably has his own peculiar way of caring for a woman,"
she was now reflecting, "just as he has his own peculiar way in every other respect."
Arthur came, and their mother; and not until long after supper, when her father had been got to bed, did she have the chance to continue the conversation. As soon as she appeared on the veranda, where Dory and Arthur were smoking, Arthur sauntered away. She was alone with Dory; but she felt that she had nothing to say to him. The surge of fury against Ross and Theresa had subsided; also, now that she had seen Theodore Hargrave again, she realized that he was not the sort of man one tries to use for the purpose she had on impulse formed, nor she the sort of woman who, in the deliberateness of the second thought, carries into effect an impulse to such a purpose.
When they had sat there in the moonlight several minutes in silence, she said: "I find I haven"t anything especial to say to you, after all."
A wait, then from him: "I"m sorry. I had hoped--" He halted.
"Hoped--what?"
"Hoped it was off with you and Whitney."
"Has some one been saying it was?" she asked sharply.
"No. I thought I felt it when I first saw you."
"Oh!" she said, enormously relieved. A pause, then constrainedly, "Your guess was right."
"And was that why you sent for me?"
The a.s.sent of silence.
"You thought perhaps you might--care for--me?"
It seemed almost true, with him looking so earnestly and hopefully at her, and in the moonlight--moonlight that can soften even falsehood until true and false seem gently to merge. She hesitated to say No. "I don"t know just what I thought," she replied.
But her tone jarred on the young man whose nerves were as sensitive as a thermostat. "You mean, when you saw me again, you felt you really didn"t care," he said, drawing back so that she could not see his face.
"No," she replied, earnestly and honestly. "Not that." And then she flung out the truth. "Ross has engaged himself to Theresa Howland, a girl with a huge big fortune. And I--I--"
"You needn"t say it," he interrupted, feeling how it was distressing her to confess. "I understand."
"I wasn"t altogether--wicked," she pleaded. "I didn"t think of you wholly because I thought you cared for me. I thought of you chiefly because I feel more at home with you than with anyone else. It has always seemed to me that you see me exactly as I am, with all the pretenses and meannesses--yet not unkindly, either. And, while you"ve made me angry sometimes, when you have refused to be taken in by my best tricks, still it was as one gets angry with--with oneself. It simply wouldn"t last.
And, as you see, I tell you anything and everything."
"You thought you"d engage yourself to me--and see how it worked out?"
"I"m afraid I did."
A pause. She knew what he was going to say next, and waited for him to say it. At last it came. "Well, now that there"s no deception, why shouldn"t you?"
"Somehow, I don"t seem to mind--about Ross, so much. It--it was while I was in with father this evening. You haven"t seen him since he became so ill, but you will understand why he is a rebuke to all mean thoughts. I suppose I"ll be squirming again to-morrow, but to-night I feel--"
"That Ross has done you a great service. That you"ve lost nothing but a dangerous illusion; that you have been honorable with him, and all the wrong and the shame are upon him. You must feel it, for it is true."
Adelaide sighed. "I wish I were strong enough to feel it with my friends jeering at me, as I can feel it now, Dory."
He moved nearer the hammock in which she was sitting. "Del," he said, "shall we become engaged, with the condition that we"ll not marry unless we both wish to, when the time comes?"
"But you"re doing this only to help me--to help me in a weakness I ought to be ashamed of."
"Not altogether," he replied. "You on your part give me a chance to win you. You will look at me differently--and there"s a great deal in that, a very great deal, Del."
She smiled--laughed. "I see what you mean."
But he looked gravely at her. "You promise to do your best to care? An engagement is a very solemn thing, Del. You promise?"
She put out her hand. "Yes," she answered. And, after a moment, in tones he would have known meant opportunity had he been less in love with her, less modest about his own powers where she was concerned, she went on: "The night you told me you loved me I did not sleep. What you said--what I saw when you opened your heart to me--oh, Dory, I believed then, and I believe now, that the reason I have not loved you is because I am not worthy of you. And I"m afraid I never can--for just that reason."
He laughed and kissed her hand. "If _that"s_ all that stands in the way,"
said he, "you"ll love me to distraction."
Her spirits went soaring as she realized that she had gained honorably all she had been tempted to gain by artifice. "But you said a while ago,"
she reminded him mischievously, "that you didn"t need me."
"So I did," said he, "but the fox shouldn"t be taken too literally as he talks about the grapes that are out of reach."
Suddenly she was longing for him to take her in his arms and compel her to feel, and to yield to, his strength and his love. But he, realizing that he was in danger of losing his self-control, released her hand and drew away--to burn aloof, when he might have set her on fire.
Ross Whitney found his cousin, Ernest Belden, in the Chicago express next morning. When they were well on their way, Belden said: "I"m really sorry it"s all off between you and Adelaide, Ross."
Ross was silent, struggling against curiosity. Finally curiosity won.
"How did you know, Ernest?" he asked.