Read Ebook: Light-Fingered Gentry by Phillips David Graham Brehm George Illustrator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 2270 lines and 129679 words, and 46 pages

CHAPTER

"She was giving Alois a free hand in planning surroundings"

"'I felt I must see you--must see you at once'"

"'You are my life, the light on my path'"

Toward noon on a stifling July day, a woman, a young woman, left the main walk through the deserted college grounds at Battle Field, and entered the path that makes a faint tracing down the middle of Pine Point. That fingerlike peninsula juts far into Otter Lake; it is a thicket of white pines, primeval, odorous. Not a ripple was breaking the lake's broad, burnished reach. The snowy islets of summer cloud hung motionless, like frescoes in an azure ceiling. But among the pines it was cool, and even murmurously musical.

In dress the young woman was as somber as the foliage above and around her. Her expression, also, was somber--with the soberness of the ascetic, or of the exceedingly shy, rather than of the sad. She seemed to diffuse a chill, like the feel of a precious stone--the absence of heat found both in those who have never been kindled by the fire of life and in those in whom that fire has burned itself out. There was not a trace of coquetry in her appearance, no attempt to display to advantage good points that ought to have been charms. She was above the medium height, and seemed taller by reason of the singular conformation of her face and figure. Her face was long and slim, and also her body, and her neck and arms; her hands, ungloved, and her feet, revealed by her walking skirt, had the same characteristic; the line from her throat to the curve of her bosom was of unusual length, and also the line of her back, of her waist, of her legs. Her hair was abundant, but no one would have guessed how abundant, or how varied its tints, so severely was it plaited and bound to her head. Her eyes were of that long narrow kind which most women, fortunate enough to possess them, know how to use with an effect at once satanic and angelic, at once provoking and rebuking passions tempestuous. But this woman had somehow contrived to reduce even those eyes to the apparently enforced puritanism of the rest of her exterior. She had the elements of beauty, of a rare beauty; yet beautiful she was not. It was as if nature had molded her for love and life, and then, in cruel freakishness, had failed to breathe into her the vital breath. A close observer might have wondered whether this exterior was not a mask deliberately held immobile and severe over an intense, insurgent heart and mind. But close observers are few, and such a secret--if secret she had--would pass unsuspected of mere shallow curiosity.

Within a few yards of the end of the peninsula she lifted her gaze from the ground, on which it had been steadily bent. Across her face drifted a slight smile--cold, or was it merely shy? It revealed the even edge of teeth of that blue-white which is beautiful only when the complexion is clear and fine--and her complexion was dull, sallow, as if from recent illness or much and harassing worry. The smile was an acknowledgment of the salutation of a man who had thrown away a half-finished cigarette and had risen from the bench at the water's edge.

"How d'ye do, Neva," said he, politely enough, but with look and tone no man addresses to a woman who has for him the slightest sex interest.

"How are you, Horace," said she, losing the faint animation her smile had given her face. Somewhat constrainedly, either from coldness or from embarrassment, she gave him her hand.

They seated themselves on the bench with its many carvings of initials and fraternity symbols. She took advantage of his gaze out over the lake to look at him; but her eyes were inscrutable. He was a big, powerful-looking man--built on the large plan, within as well as without, if the bold brow and eyes and the strong mouth, unconcealed by his close-cropped fair mustache, did not mislead. At first glance he seemed about thirty; but there were in his features lines of experience, of firmness, of formed character, of achievement, that could not have come with many less than forty years. He looked significant, successful, the man who is much and shall be more. He was dressed more fashionably than would be regarded as becoming in a man of affairs, except in two or three of our largest cities. In contrast with his vivid, aggressive personality--or, was it simply because of shy, supersensitive shrinking in his presence?--the young woman now seemed colorless and even bleak.

After a silence which she was unable or unwilling to break, he said, "This is very mysterious, Neva--this sending for me to meet you--secretly."

"I was afraid it might not be pleasant for you--at the house," replied she hesitatingly.

His air of surprise was not quite sincere. "Why not?" he inquired. "There isn't anyone I esteem more highly than your father, and he likes me. If he didn't he would not have done all the things that put me under such a heavy debt of gratitude to him." His tone suggested that he had to remind himself of the debt often lest he should be guilty of the baseness of forgetting it.

"It was eighteen months yesterday," said she, "since you were--at the house."

He frowned at what he evidently regarded as a disagreeable and therefore tactless reminder. "Really? Time races for those who have something to do besides watch the clock." Then, ashamed of his irritation, "I suppose it's impossible, in an uneventful place like this, to appreciate how the current of a city like Chicago sweeps a man along and won't release him. There's so much to think about, one has no time for anything."

"Except the things that are important to one," replied she. "Don't misunderstand, please. I'm only stating a fact--not reproaching you--not at all."

"So, your father has turned against me."

"He has said nothing. But his expression, when I happened to speak of you the other day, told me it would be better for you not to come to the house--at least, until we had had a talk."

"Well, Neva, I don't feel I have any reason to reproach myself. I'm not the sort of man who stands about on the tail of his wife's dress or sits round the house in slippers. I'm trying to make a career, and that means work."

"Chicago is only six hours from Battle Field," she said with curiously quiet persistence.

"When I got the position in Chicago," he reminded her with some asperity, "I asked you to go with me. You refused."

"Did you wish me to go?"

"Did you wish to go?"

She was silent.

"You know you did not," he went on. "We had been married nearly six years, and you cared no more about me--" He paused to seek a comparison.

"Than you cared for me," she suggested. Then, with a little more energy and color, "I repeat, Horace, I'm not reproaching you. All I want is that you be frank. I asked you to come here to-day that we might talk over our situation honestly. How can we be honest with each other if you begin by pretending that business is your reason for staying away?"

He studied her unreadable, impassive face. In all the years of their married life she had never shown such energy or interest, except about her everlasting painting, which she was always mussing with, shut away from everybody; and never had she been so communicative. But it was too late, far too late, for any sign of personality, however alluringly suggestive of mystery unexplored, to rouse him to interest in her. He was looking at her merely because he wished to discover what she was just now beating toward. "In the fall," he said, "I'm going to New York to live. Of course, that will mean even fewer chances of my coming--here--coming home."

At the word "home," which she had avoided using, a smile--her secret smile--flitted into her face, instantly died away again. He colored.

"I heard you were going to New York," said she. "I saw it in the newspapers."

"Do you wish me to go?"

He did not answer. A prolonged silence which she broke: "You see, Horace, I was right. We mustn't any longer refuse to look our situation squarely in the face."

His heart leaped. When he got her letter with its mysterious, urgent summons, a hope had sprung within him; but he had quickly dismissed it as a mere offspring of his longing for freedom--had there ever been an instance of a woman's releasing a man who was on his way up? But now, he began to hope again.

"Ever since the baby was born--dead," she went on, face and voice calm, but fingers fiercely interlocked under a fold of her dress where he could not see, "I've been thinking we ought not to let our mistake grow into a tragedy."

"Our mistake?"

"Our marriage."

He waited until he could conceal his astonishment before he said, "You, too, feel it was a mistake?"

"I feared so, when we were marrying," she replied. "I knew it, when I saw how hard you ere trying to do your 'duty' as a husband--oh, yes, I saw. And, when the baby and the suffering failed to bring us together, only showed how far apart we were, I realized there wasn't any hope. You would have told me, would have asked for your freedom--yes, I saw that, too--if it hadn't been for the feeling you had about father--and, perhaps also--" She paused, then went bravely on, "--because you were ashamed of having married me for other reasons than love. Don't deny it, please. To-day, we can speak the truth to each other without bitterness."

"I shan't deny," replied he. "I saw that your father, who had done everything for me, had his heart set on the marriage. And I'll even admit I was dazzled by the fact that yours was one of the first and richest families in the State--I, who was obscure and poor. It wasn't difficult for me to deceive myself into thinking my awe of you was the feeling a man ought to have for the woman he marries." He seemed to have forgotten she was there. "I had worked hard, too hard, at college," he went on. "I was exhausted--without courage. The obstacles to my getting where I was determined to go staggered me. To marry you seemed to promise a path level and straight to success."

"I understand," she said. Her voice startled him back to complete consciousness of her presence. "There was more excuse for you than for me."

"That's it!" he cried. "What puzzles me, what I've often asked myself is, 'Why did she marry me?'"

"Not for the reason you think," evaded she.

"What is that?" he asked, his tone not wholly easy.

"It wasn't because I thought you were going to have a distinguished career."

This penetration disconcerted him, surprised him. And he might have gone on to suspect he would do well to revise his estimate of her, formed in the first months of their married life and never since even questioned, had not her next remark started a fresh train of thought. "So," she said, with her faint smile, "you see you've had no ground for the fear that, no matter how plainly you might show me you wished to be free, I'd hold on to you."

"A woman might have other reasons than mere sordidness for not freeing a man," replied he, on the defensive.

"That is cynical," said he, once more puzzled.

"The truth often is--as we both well know," replied she. Then, abruptly, but with no surface trace of effort: "You wish to be free. Well, you are free."

"What do you mean, Neva?" he demanded, ashamed of the exultation that surged up in him, and trying to conceal it.

"Just what I say," was her quiet answer.

After a pause, he asked with gentle consideration of strong for weak that made her wince, "Neva, have you consulted with anyone--with your father or brother?"

"I haven't spoken to them about it. Why should I? Are not our relations a matter between ourselves alone? Who else could understand? Who could advise?"

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet