At that thought a fierce pain gripped him, and he was sorely tempted to call the G.o.ds to witness that he would not return to a lifetime of wandering in the wilderness. Yet, said a still, small voice within, was it not better so? She was another man"s wife. He must remember that, remember it even when his pent-up pa.s.sions stormed the citadel of his conscience, remember it when the sheer fragrance of her maddened his senses, remember it when the taste of Dead Sea fruit was bitterest in his mouth. Of what worth was he if, for her dear sake, he was not strong in knightly resolve? And how could he ever again dare to receive his mother"s kiss if he betrayed the trust which she, at least, reposed in him?
A mournful and depressing reverie was disturbed by the arrival of a carriage at the porch. Four young people alighted--two honeymoon couples they were supposed to be--and their lively voices seemed to ring the knell of his wrecked existence. He listened, only half hearing, while they chattered like magpies.
They had been to a dance at the Casino, and their broken comments told of a jolly evening, a capital band, the best floor that ever was laid, some wonderful dresses, and an unexcelled supper. Similar young people were telling each other exactly the same inane commonplaces all over the eastern part of America at that hour, and similar cackle would girdle the earth till the crack of doom. Probably the men were wise as he, and the women might be deemed by their swains pretty as Nancy; yet some malign despot among the powers which control poor humanity had decreed that he alone should never know these frivolous moments, never be granted these breathing-s.p.a.ces of mild abandonment. And so, wroth with himself, and vexed with the sorry scheme of things, he went to his rooms.
Next morning, to make sure, he rode to Nancy"s house. No; Mrs. Marten had not ordered her horse; in fact, she had not appeared as yet, and the pleasant-spoken butler, showing the requisite confidence in the discretion of a recognized friend, added that his mistress would not be "at home" to anyone before luncheon.
Then, the weather being glorious and the air like champagne, Power whistled care to the devil, and cantered into the town to review the ground for the night"s fixture.
Newport today boasts of almost uncountable hotels and boarding-houses, nor was the area of choice limited in that respect nearly a generation ago. After careful scrutiny of various buildings in the business quarter, Power selected a cafe run by a certain Giovanni Pestalozzi as the most promising. It looked clean and bright, and an Italian might be trusted to be discreet.
Getting a man to hold his horse, he interviewed Giovanni, and was a.s.sured that Delmonico"s itself could not produce a better meal if the signor invited comparison. The signor wanted nothing elaborate, however.
He admitted he was not well versed in either menus or wines, but demanded the best, and, after inspecting a well-furnished room overlooking the street, lodged a ten-dollar bill as earnest money, with a promise of ample largess if he were pleased. Then he rode away to the Ocean House, sent a note to Nancy, and received a reply which deepened his mystified dismay.
For she wrote:
"Dear Derry, I shall be there at seven-thirty. Meanwhile, go to the Casino, and tell everybody that you are summoned to New York on business, and mean to leave either tonight by the Fall River steamer or by first train tomorrow. You are traveling by the train to oblige me; so I am not asking you to indulge in polite fiction.
"Yours ever, "NANCY."
He carried out instructions to the letter, and was chaffed mildly for deserting the place just as his friends were getting to like him. It was easy to promise a speedy return, if possible; though he felt, somehow, that he would never see Newport again. The conclusion of his horse-dealing transactions took up a good deal of the afternoon, and, to his regret, Dacre was out with a yachting party; so he left a hurriedly written message about his pending departure.
Then he strolled out, went downtown by street car, and met Nancy when she alighted from a rickety cab at the door of Pestalozzi"s cafe. She wore a cream-tinted dress, and her piquant features were daintily framed in a big Leghorn hat. It pleased him to find that she had not even deigned to veil her face, and her cheerful cry of recognition showed no conscience-stricken sense of guilt because of a meeting which, if known, must have excited the suspicions of her intimates.
"Ah, there you are, Derry!" she said. "Was there ever a more punctual person? Am I late? I had such a load of things to do that I left dressing till the last moment. Is this where we dine? What a jolly little cafe! It is just like hundreds of such establishments in Rome and Naples. I suppose these Italian restaurateurs employ their fellow-countrymen as builders and decorators; so they carry their architecture and fittings with them."
"They change their skies, but not their soups," said Power, falling in with her mood, and the driver of Nancy"s cab recognized the adaptation of Horace"s tag, and was pleased to grin, being himself a broken-down graduate of Harvard.
Ushered to the dining-room, they tackled the _hors d"oeuvres_ at once, and Nancy chatted about current events with the tranquil self-possession she would have displayed at Mrs. Van Ralten"s dinner-table. The meal, excellently cooked and deftly served, marched to its end without a word from her as to its particular purpose. She delighted Pestalozzi by taking minute instructions for the preparation of an exquisite spaghetti, and even noted the brands of Italian wines which should be tabled with each course. At half-past eight, when coffee appeared, she rose:
"Pay the bill now, Derry," she said. "We must be off in five minutes, and I am sure you want to smoke at least one cigarette in peace. Perhaps Signor Pestalozzi will be good enough to order a cab?"
Signor Pestalozzi was charmed, and decidedly puzzled. He believed for many a year that those two had dined at his cafe for a wager. If any doubter scoffed, he would say, with appropriate gesture:
"Sango la Madonna! I tella you he no squeeze-a de gell, not-ta one time; so, if dey no make-a de bet, what-a for he give "er dat pranzo superbo?"
Really, from Giovanni"s point of view, there was no answer.
"Tell the man to drive us to the Easton"s Beach end of the Cliff Walk,"
she said nonchalantly, when the cab was in evidence, and away they went.
"There is no moon; but these summer nights are never quite dark," she began, by way of polite conversation. "It ought to be restful tonight down there by the Atlantic. It is a horrid thing to confess, but the memories of Venice which are most vivid in my mind are not connected with St. Mark"s or the Doge"s Palace, but center round just such a night as this on the Lido. Coming back in the gondola, I almost wanted to slip over the side into the still waters, and drift away to the unknown."
"Do we swim tonight, then?" he asked.
It was a relief to hear his own voice in some such apparently light-hearted quip. The cab was narrow, and hung on indifferent springs, and its lurching across the roadway to avoid other vehicles often threw him against Nancy"s supple body. He could never touch her without feeling the thrill of contact, and, fight as he would against it, the desire to clasp her in his arms and stifle her protests with hot kisses would come on him at such moments with an almost overwhelming ecstasy.
"If I led, would you follow, Derry?" she whispered.
Heaven help him, it seemed as though she was nestling close deliberately; yet he refused to believe, and strove to answer with a jest.
"I have a picture of you and me striking out across the bay for Narragansett, like a pair of dolphins," he said.
"I thought of you that night on the Lido," she went on, unheeding. "I imagined then that when you skipped off to Sacramento you had forgotten the little girl of the Dolores ranch. At any rate, such was my every-day common-sense sort of belief; but tucked away in some cute little nerve center of intuition was another notion, which told me that we had been driven apart by wicked and deceitful contriving. And now, thank my stars, I know that my subconscious feeling was right! Oh, Derry! How you must have despised me! What if we had not met for many a year, and you had schooled yourself into real forgetfulness, and some other girl had crept into a corner of your heart, thrusting out poor little me forever?"
The gathering gloom without had now made the cab"s interior so dark that she could not see the rigid lines in his face, nor could she make out by any convulsive movement that his hands were clenched, and that beads of perspiration stood on his forehead. But she knew, yes, she knew, and timid fingers caught his arm.
"You are not to think me mad or cruel to speak in this way," she cooed.
"I have looked into my very soul, Dear, and a great peace has come from my self-communing. You have wearied your clever brain with guesses as to my motive in meeting you tonight, and I giggled like a schoolgirl today at the thought of your absolute amazement when you read my note bidding you prepare to leave Newport. But it is all part and parcel of my plan, Derry, which rests on your reply to one small question. Do you want to go away from _me_? Are you ready to face a world in which there will be no Nancy, never, no more?"
"Ah, you are trying me beyond endurance!" he almost sobbed.
"But you _must_ tell me _that_, Derry. I have gone a long way daringly.
It is my privilege, my right. If you love me, you must expect it of me, because, as things are, I am forced to take the first step. But a woman must be sure that she is loved, and her lover alone can still her doubts."
An impulse stronger than his own strength of will brought strange, wild words to his dry lips.
"Nancy," he said, with the calm accents of despair, "I have never loved any woman but you, and, G.o.d willing, I never shall!"
"That is all that really matters," she sighed, with a contented note in her voice that rang in his ears like a chord of sweet music heard from afar in the depths of a forest.
After that they sat in silence, she seemingly wrapped in dreams, and he wandering in a maze wherein impa.s.sable walls showed no gateway of escape; though the guarded path was alluring, and the air was heavy with the scent of flowers.
The cab stopped, and they alighted; for Nancy, demurely self-controlled, announced that she meant to take him for a stroll along the Cliff Walk.
Power, deaf and blind to externals, would have accompanied her straightway; but she laughingly called him back from the clouds.
"Tell the cabman to wait," she said, "and give him some money, or the poor fellow will think that we have come this long way from town purposely, and mean to go off without payment."
He handed the driver a subsidy which caused the man to avow his willingness to wait till morning if necessary. Once away from the main road, and with no other company than the stars and the sea, Nancy took her escort"s arm, and kept step with him.
"Now," she said, "I"m perversely disinclined to discuss personal affairs until we reach a certain rock at the foot of the Forty Steps. I mean to sit on that rock, and you will curl up on the shingle at my feet, and light a nice-smelling cigar, and listen while I explain the method in my madness of the last twenty-four hours. But I cannot arrange my thoughts in sequence till we are settled there comfortably. In the meantime, I"ll make you acquainted with my best friend, the d.u.c.h.esse de Brasnes, whom you will meet some day in Paris, I hope, and then you will see for yourself some of her delightful eccentricities which I"ll recount to you now, and you will laugh quietly and say, "What an observant little person that Nancy is! Now, who"d have thought she could quiz and con a great lady of the Faubourg so accurately?" But you"re not to misunderstand my joking; for the d.u.c.h.ess is a dear, and I"m very fond of her."
To this day Power has never recalled a single syllable of Nancy"s utterances concerning one of the leaders of Parisian society. All that he knew, or cared to know, was that the voice of his beloved was murmuring words which were curiously soothing to his tingling nerves. By this time he had cast scruples to the winds. His mind was armored with triple steel against any other consideration than that Nancy was by his side, that her hand rested confidently on his wrist, that he could feel her slender arm warm and soft near his heart.
And the supreme moment was rushing upon him with the wings of love on a summer"s night, than which no flight of bird is so swift and noiseless.
They reached the top of the rocky staircase, and began to descend. A fairy radiance from off the dark-blue mirror of the Atlantic made plain each downward step; but Nancy wore the high-heeled shoes which women affected then more generally than is the fashion today, and Power held her hand lest she slipped and fell. Thus they made their way to the beach, until they had almost negotiated the last short flight. Power, indeed, was standing on the shingle, and the girl--for, married woman though she was, her years were still those of a girl--was poised gracefully on the lowermost slab.
There she hesitated perceptibly. His eyes met hers in a subtle underlook, and he saw that her face was deathly white. Yet there was neither fear nor indecision in her steadfast glance. Even while he asked dumbly why she waited, her lips parted, she held out her hands with a gesture of pleading, and she murmured:
"Oh, Derry, my own dear love, it is not the first but the last step which counts now!"
Then he took her in his arms, and their lips met--and for her there was no uncertainty ever more.
CHAPTER VIII
THE STEP THAT COUNTED