So Isabelle was occupied, as she believed profitably, spending her new energy wisely, and though she was getting worn, it was only a month to the date she had set for sailing. Vickers had promised to meet her at Genoa and take her into the Dolomites and then to San Moritz, where she could rest.
As her life filled up, she saw less of her husband than ever, for he, too, was busy, "with that railroad thing," as she called the great Atlantic and Pacific. She made him buy a horse and ride in the Park afternoons when he could get the time, because he was growing too heavy. He had developed laziness socially, liked to go to some restaurant for dinner with chance friends that were drifting continually through New York, and afterwards to the theatre,--"to see something lively," as he put it, preferably Weber and Fields", or Broadway opera. Isabelle felt that this was not the right thing, and boring, too; but it would all be changed when they were "settled." Meantime she went out more or less by herself, as the wives of busy men have to do.
"It is so much better not to bring a yawning husband home at midnight," she laughed to Cairy on one of these occasions when she had given him a seat down town in her cab. "By the way, you haven"t spoken of Conny lately,--don"t you see her any more?"
Isabelle still had her girlish habit of asking indiscreet, impertinent questions. She carried them off with a lively good nature, but they irritated Cairy occasionally.
"I have been busy with my play," he replied shortly.
As a matter of fact he had been attacked by one of those fits of intense occupation which came upon him in the intervals of his devotions. At such times he worked to better effect, with a kind of abandoned fury, than when his thoughts and feelings were engaged, as if to make up to his muse for his periods of neglect. The experience, he philosophized, which had stored itself, was now finding vent,--the spiritual travail as well as the knowledge of life. A man, an artist, had but one real pa.s.sion, he told Isabelle,--and that was his work. Everything else was mere fertilizer or waste. Since the night that Conny had turned him from the door, he had completed his new play, which had been hanging fire all winter, and he was convinced it was his best. "Yes, a man"s work, no matter what it may be, is G.o.d"s solace for living." In response to which Isabelle mischievously remarked:--
"So you and Conny really have had a tiff? I must get her to tell me about it."
"Do you think she would tell you the truth?"
"No."
Isabelle, in spite of Cairy"s protestations about his work, was gratified with her discovery, as she called it. She had decided that Conny was "a bad influence" on the Southerner; that Cairy was simple and ingenuous,--"really a nice boy," so she told her husband. Just what evil Conny had done to Cairy Isabelle could not say, ending always with the phrase, "but I don"t trust her," or "she is so selfish." She had made these comments to Margaret Pole, and Margaret had answered with one of her enigmatic smiles and the remark:--
"Conny"s no more selfish than most of us women,--only her methods are more direct--and successful."
"That is cynical," Isabelle retorted. "Most of us women are not selfish; I am not!"
And in her childlike way she asked her husband that very night:--
"John, do you think I am selfish?"
John answered this large question with a laugh and a pleasant compliment.
"I suppose Margaret means that I don"t go in for charities, like that Mrs.
Knop of the Relief and Aid, or for her old Consumers" League. Well, I had enough of that sort of thing in St. Louis. And I don"t believe it does any good; it is better to give money to those who know how to spend it.... Have you any poor relatives we could be good to, John? ... Any cousins that ought to be sent to college, any old aunts pining for a trip to California?"
"Lots of "em, I suppose," her husband responded amiably. "They turn up every now and then, and I do what I can for them. I believe I am sending two young women to college to fit themselves for teaching."
Lane was generous, though he had the successful man"s suspicion of all those who wanted help. He had no more formulated ideas about doing for others than his wife had. But when anything appealed to him, he gave and had a comfortable sense that he was helping things along.
Isabelle, in spite of the disquiet caused by Margaret"s statement, felt convinced that she was doing her duty in life broadly, "in that station where Providence had called her." "She was sure that she was a good wife, a good daughter, a good mother. And now she meant to be more than these humdrum things,--she meant to be Somebody, she meant to live! ...
When she found time to call at the Woodyards", she saw that the house was closed, and the caretaker, who was routed out with difficulty, informed her that the master and mistress had sailed for Europe the week before.
"Very sudden," mused Isabelle. "I don"t see how Percy could get away."
Half the houses on the neighboring square were closed already, however, and she thought as she drove up town that it was time for her to be going. The city was becoming hot and dusty, and she was rather tired of it, too. Mrs.
Price was to open the Farm for the summer and have Miss b.u.t.ts and the little girl with her. John promised "to run over and get her" in September, if he could find time. Her little world was all arranged for, she reflected complacently. John would stay at the hotel and go up to Grafton over Sundays, and he had joined a club. Yes, the Lanes were shaking into place in New York.
Cairy sent her some roses when she sailed and was in the mob at the pier to bid her good-by.
"Perhaps I shall be over myself later on," he said, "to see if I can place the play."
"Oh, do!" Isabelle exclaimed. "And we"ll buy things. I am going to ruin John."
Lane smiled placidly, as one not easily ruined. When the visitors were driven down the gangway, Isabelle called to Cairy:--
"Come on and go back in the tug with John!"
So Cairy limped back. Isabelle was nervous and tired, and now that she was actually on the steamer felt sad at seeing accustomed people and things about to slip away. She wanted to hold on to them as long as possible.
Presently the hulking steamer was pulled out into the stream and headed for the sea. It was a hot June morning and through the haze the great buildings towered loftily. The long city raised a jagged sky-line of human immensity, and the harbor swarmed with craft,--car ferries, and sailing vessels dropping down stream carefully to take the sea breeze, steamers lined with black figures, screeching tugs, and occasionally a gleaming yacht. The three stood together on the deck looking at the scene.
"It always gives me the same old thrill," Cairy said. "Coming or going, it makes no difference,--it is the biggest fact in the modern world."
"I love it!" murmured Isabelle, her eyes fastened on the serried walls about the end of the island. "I shall never forget when I saw it as a child, the first time. It was mystery, like a story-book then, and it has been the same ever since."
Lane said nothing, but watched the city with smiling lips. To him the squat car ferries, the lighters, the dirty tramp steamers, the railroad yards across the river, as well as the lofty buildings of the long city--all the teeming life here at the mouth of the country--meant Traffic, the intercourse of men. And he, too, loved the great roaring city. He looked at it with a vista that reached from the Iowa town where he had first "railroaded it," up through the intervening steps at St. Louis and Torso, to his niche in the largest of these buildings,--all the busy years which he had spent dealing with men.
Isabelle touched his arm.
"I wish you were coming, too, John," she said as the breeze struck in from the open sea. "Do you remember how we talked of going over when we were in Torso?"
What a stretch of time there was between those first years of marriage and to-day! She would never have considered in the Torso days that she could sail off like this alone with a maid and leave her husband behind.
"Oh, it will be only a few weeks,--you"ll enjoy yourself," he replied. He had been very good about her going over to join Vickers, made no objections to it this time. They were both growing more tolerant, as they grew older and saw more of life.
"What is in the paper?" she asked idly, as her husband rolled it up.
"There"s a dirty roast on your friend, Percy Woodyard,--nothing else!"
"See, that must be the tug!" exclaimed Isabelle, pushing up her veil to kiss her husband. "Good-by--I wish you were going, too--I shall miss you so--be sure you exercise and keep thin!"...
She watched the two men climb down into the bobbing tug and take places beside the pilot room,--her tall, square-shouldered husband, and the slighter man, leaning on a cane, both looking up at her with smiles. John waved his paper at her,--the one that had the "roast" about Percy Woodyard.
She had meant to read that,--she might see the Woodyards in Paris. Then the tug moved off, both men still waving to her. She hurried to the rear deck to get a last look, sentimental forlornness at leaving her husband coming over her afresh. As she gazed back at the retreating tug there was also in her heart a warm feeling for Cairy. "Poor Tom!" she murmured without knowing why.
On this great ship, among the thousand or more first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers, there were a goodly number of women like her, leaving home and husband for a foreign trip. After all, as she had often said, it was a good idea for husbands and wives to have vacations from each other. There was no real reason why two people should stick together in an endless daily intimacy because they were married....
Thus the great city--the city of her ambitions--sank mistily on the horizon.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER x.x.xVII
Mrs. Pole"s house stood on the outskirts of the old town of Bedmouth, facing the narrow road that ran eastward to the Point. In the days of Mrs.
Pole"s father the ships pa.s.sing to and from Bedmouth on the river could be seen from the front windows. Now the wires of a trolley road disfigured the old street and cheap wooden houses cut off the view of the river. In the rear there was a small garden, sloping down to an inlet of the sea, from which could be seen Bedmouth-way the slender spires of two churches that rose among the drooping branches of the elms, and seaward the squat outline of a great summer hotel, bedecked with many flags. In the black mould of the old garden grew tall syringa bushes, lilacs, pampas gra.s.s, and a few tiger lilies, and over the crumbling brick walls hung dusty leaves of grapevines. When the gate at the bottom of the garden was open, there was a view of the inlet, bordered with marsh gra.s.s, and farther away a segment of the open sea, with the lighthouse on Goose Rock.
Here the Judge"s wife had come to live when her husband died, forsaking Washington, which had grown "too busy for an old woman." ...