And Lucy, just her head and fingers showing from the great c.o.o.n-skin coat, would give him a look that I should not now interpret as I did then. I thought that it made her feel sick at heart even to think of his going to some far-off place without her!
"Speaking of far-off places," I said once, "Gerald Colebridge is taking some men to Burlingham to play polo. He"s asked me, and I"m tempted almost beyond my strength. What does everybody think?"
"I"d go like a shot," said Dawson Cooper. "Gerald will take his car and everything will be beautifully done; and California just about now!" Here he bunched his fingers, kissed them and sent the kiss heavenward.
"Wish _I_ was asked!" exclaimed Evelyn.
"Ever been to California?" Fulton asked. "Because if not, go. And still I"ve thought sometimes that spring in Aiken is almost as lovely."
Poor fellow, it must have been quite obvious that he didn"t think so any more. But then Evelyn, Dawson, and I were blind and deaf, at this time.
"When," said Lucy at last, "would you go, if you go?"
"Why, in a day or two," I said. "I"d probably leave day after tomorrow on the three o"clock and join the party in New York."
"Oh, dear," she said, "I"ll have to take up golf then. You"re the only man in Aiken who likes to ride. And John won"t let me ride alone."
"Why not," said he, "ask me to ride with you?"
"Oh, I know you"d do it," she said. "You"re a hero, but I"m not quite such a brute."
I wish I could have gone to California.
I rode with Lucy the next afternoon, for the last time as we both thought. As we came home through Lover"s Lane, the ponies walking very slowly, she leaned toward me a little, turned the great praying eyes upon me, and said, her mouth smiling falteringly:
"Please don"t go away. I hate it. Everything"s gone all wrong with the world. And if you"re not my friend that I can talk to and tell things to, I haven"t one."
"Are you serious, Lucy?"
"Oh, it"s no matter!" she said lightly, and began to gather her reins, preparatory to a gallop.
"It"s only that it didn"t seem possible that you could need one particular friend out of so many. Of course, I stay. Will you tell me now what it is that"s gone all wrong?"
"Yes," she said with a quickly drawn breath. "I"ve had to tell John that I don"t love him any more, and don"t want to be his wife."
If one of those still and stately pines which lend Lover"s Lane the appearance of a cathedral aisle had fallen across my shoulders, I could hardly have been more suddenly stunned.
When I looked at her the corners of her lovely mouth were down like those of a child in trouble.
"Please don"t look at me," she said.
We rode on very slowly in silence. Sometimes, without looking, I could not be sure that she was still crying. Then I would hear a little pathetic sniffling--a catching of the breath. Or she would fall to pounding the thigh with her fist.
But she pulled herself together very quickly and borrowed my handkerchief and when we reached the telegraph office her own husband could not have known that she had been crying.
She held my pony while I telegraphed Gerald Colebridge that I could not go to California with him.
Far from looking like one who had recently been crying, she looked a triumphant little creature, as she sat the one pony, and held the other. The color had all come back to her face, and she looked--why, she looked happy!
XIII
"Well, my dear," said my mother, "we shall miss you."
"Oh," I said, "I"ve given it up. I"m not going."
As she had said that she would miss me, this answer ought to have given my mother unmixed pleasure. It didn"t seem to. She smiled upon me with the greatest affection, and at the same time looked troubled.
"When you came into my room this morning your mind was definitely made up. Has anything happened?"
"Only that I"ve changed my mind. Aiken is too nice to leave."
"I sometimes think," said my mother, "that the life you lead is narrowing. At your age, how I should have jumped at the chance to see California in spring! But I shan"t ask you why you don"t jump. I know very well you"d not tell me."
"Must I have a reason? They say women don"t have reasons for doing things. Why should men?"
"A woman," said my mother, "does nothing without a reason. But often she has to be ashamed of her reasons, and so she pretends she hasn"t any. Men are stronger. They don"t have to give their reasons, and so they don"t pretend."
"Maybe," I said, "I"m fond of my family and don"t want to be away from them."
My mother blushed a little, and laughed.
"I shall pretend to myself," she said, "that that is why you have given up your trip. But I"m afraid it isn"t your father and me that you"ve suddenly grown so fond of."
"Now look here, mamma," I said, "we thrashed that all out the other day."
"Thrashed all what out?--Oh, I remember--your attentions to Lucy Fulton, or hers to you, which was it?"
"It wasn"t our attentions to each other, as I remember. It was the attention which Aiken is or was paying to us."
"So it was," said my mother.
She gave me, then, a second cup of tea, and talked cheerfully of other things. Some people came in, and I managed presently to escape from them.
It hadn"t been easy to tell my mother that I had given up the California trip. I knew that her triple intuition would connect the change of plan with Lucy Fulton, and I was not in the mood to meet such an accusation with the banter and levity which it no longer deserved.
Like it or not, I was staying on in Aiken because Lucy had asked me to.
That we had been gossiped about had angered me; but it could do so no longer. That we were good friends, and enjoyed riding and being together, was no longer the whole truth. There was in addition this: that Lucy no longer loved her husband, and that she had made me her confidant.
From the first to the last of my dressing for dinner that night, everything went wrong. I stepped into a cold tub, under the impression that I had told my man to run a hot one. He had laid out for me an undershirt that had lost all its b.u.t.tons, and a pair of socks that I hated. I broke the buckle of the belt that I always wear with my dinner trousers; I dropped my watch face downward on the brick hearth, and I spilled a c.o.c.ktail all over my dress shirt, _after_ I had got my collar on and tied my tie!
Usually such a succession of misadventures would have given rise to one rage after another. But I was too busy thinking about Lucy. I could no longer deny that she attracted me immensely. Perhaps she had from the beginning. I can"t be sure. But I should never have confessed this to myself, or so I think, if I had not learned that she had suddenly fallen out of love with her husband. In that ideal state of matrimony, in which I had first gotten to know her, she had seemed a holy thing upon a plane far above this covetous world. But now the angel had fallen out of that which had been her heaven, and come down to earth. That I had had anything to do with this, I should even now have denied to G.o.d or man with complete conviction. I had no interest in the causes of her descent, only in the fact of it. And all that time of bungling dressing for dinner I kept thinking, not that I should help her look for a new heaven, but that I must try, as her true friend, to get her back into her old one. At that time John Fulton had no better friend than I. It seemed to me really terrible that things should have gone wrong with these two.
My father came in while I was still dressing.
"Hear you"ve given up California," he said bluntly; "do you think that"s wise? . . . Where do you keep your bell?"