Cytherea Part 10

"An uncommon lot for Peyton," Lee acknowledged. "I almost think he has been jarred out of his self-complacency. But, on the whole, that is not possible. It's temporary with him. At one time I thought--in the language of youth--he was going to crown me."

"The little beast!" she exclaimed viciously. "If he had I'd have made him sorry. I saw Claire a few minutes ago, and she asked me to tell you, if she missed you, that she had something for you to see. Wasn't it strange that she said nothing to me about it? I should think, in her sc.r.a.pe, she'd rather turn to a woman than to a man. But Claire isn't very feminine: I've always felt her hardness."

"Then that's why she didn't speak to you," Lee a.s.sented superficially.

"I'll go over tonight, after dinner. They must be pretty nearly ready to drop the fox, and it's beginning to drizzle."

There was, soon after that, an exodus from the back of the house to the fields beyond. It was a very fair hunting country, rolling and clear of brush, with grouped woods on the surrounding hills and streams in the swales below. The clouds were broken and aqueous, and the gra.s.s held a silver veil of fine raindrops. Only an inconsiderable part of those present were following the hounds; the others, in a restricted variety of sporting garb--the men in knickerbockers and gaiters or riding breeches, the women breeched and severely coated or swathed in wide reddish tweed capes--stood, with a scattering of umbrellas and upturned collars, in a semi-circle on the soggy turf.

There was a baying of hounds from the direction of the stables, and the Master swung up on a bright chestnut horse with a braided tail.

A huntsman appeared with a shuttered box, holding the fox, and an old brown and white hound b.i.t.c.h, wise with many years of hunting, to follow and establish and announce the scent. "If you are ready, Brace," the Master said to his huntsman, "you may drop." A stable boy held the hound, and, raising the shutter, Brace shook the fox out on the ground.

The animal--in view of the commotion about to pursue it--was surprisingly small, slim flanked; proportionately the tail seemed extravagant. "I hope the brush won't get wet," a man behind Lee spoke; "when it does they can't run." As it was, the fox, obviously, was reluctant to start; it crouched in the rough gra.s.s and glanced fleetly around with incredibly sharp black eyes. The men shouted and flung up their arms; but the animal was indifferent to their laudable efforts.

The hunt, Lee Randon thought, had a.s.sumed an aspect of the ridiculous; the men and women on expensive excited horses, the pack yelping from beyond a road, the expectant on-lookers, were mocked by the immobility of the puzzled subject of the chase. Finally the fox obligingly moved a few steps; it hesitated again, and then trotted forward, slipping under a fence. Lee could follow it clearly across the next field and into the next; its progress was unhurried, deliberate, insolent.

"Give him six minutes," the Master decided.

When the time had gone the leash of the single hound was slipped. She ran around in a circle, whining eagerly, her nose to the sod, and then with a high yelp, set smartly off in a direction absolutely opposite to that taken by the fox. She was brought back and her nose held to the hot scent; again, with a fresh a.s.surance, the b.i.t.c.h gave tongue, followed the trail to where it went under the fence, and turned, instead of bearing to the right, to the left. There were various exclamations. A kennel man declared, "She knows what she's about, and the fox will swing into Sibley's Cover." Someone else more sceptically a.s.serted that the hound was a fool. Her sustained cry floated back from under the hill; and, in another minute, the pack, the hunt, was off. The horses rose gracefully in a sleek brown tide over the first fence; and then there was a division--the hounds scattered and bunched and scattered, some of the riders went to the left after the palpable course of the fox, others pounded direct for Sibley's Cover, and the remainder reined up over the hounds.

Although long a.s.sociation and familiarity had made such scenes a piece with Lee Randon's subconsciousness, today the hunt seemed nothing more than nonsense. He laughed, and made a remark of disparaging humor; but he found no support. Willing Spencer, kept out of the field by a broken collar bone, gazed at him with lifted eyebrows. f.a.n.n.y and Lee turned to their horses, held for them by a groom at a mounting block, and went home. The rain had increased, but, not cold, Lee found it pleasant on his face. They jogged quietly over the roads bordered with gaunt sombre hedges, through the open countryside, into Eastlake.

Nothing, he realized, had been accomplished with Peyton Morris; the other was too numbed, shocked, by the incredible accident that had overtaken him to listen to reason. Lee felt that he could hardly have said more. He wondered what Claire had to show him. Still, he wasn't through with her husband; he had no intention of resting until every hope was exhausted. What particularly impressed him--he must speak of it to Peyton--was that no matter where Morris might get he would find life monotonously the same. It was very much like mountain climbing--every peak looked different, more iridescent and desirable, from the one occupied; but, gazing back, that just left appeared as engaging, as rare, as any in the distance. Every experience in the life surrounding him was the same as all the others; no real change was offered, because the same dull response permeated all living; no escape such as Peyton planned was possible.

Escape, Lee Randon continued, happened within; it was not, he repeated, a place on earth, or any possession, but a freedom, a state, of mind.

Peyton Morris, while it was quite possible for him to be destroyed, was incapable of mental liberty, readjustments; he might drive himself on the rocks, on the first reef where he disregarded the clamor of warning bells and carefully charted directions, but he was no Columbus for the discovery of a magical island, a Cuba, of spices and delectable palms. Peyton had looked with a stolid indifference at the dangerously fascinating, the incomprehensible, smile of Cytherea. Yes, if the young donkey could be forced past this tempting patch of grazing, if he could only be driven a short distance farther down the highway of custom, Claire would be safe.

But she must be made to think that such a conclusion had been purely the result of Peyton's reserved strength, and not of a mere negative surrender following doubt. And, above all, there must be no appearance of Mina Raff having, after a short trial, herself discarded him. On such trivialities Claire's ultimate happiness might hang. Truth was once more wholly restrained, hidden, dissimulated; the skillful shifting of painted masks, false-faces, continued uninterrupted its progress. A new lethargy enveloped Lee: his interest, his confidence, in what he was trying to prevent waned. What did it matter who went and who stayed? In the end it was the same, unprofitable and stale. All, probably, that his thought had accomplished was to rob his ride of its glow, make flat the taste of the whiskey and charged water he prepared. However, shortly a pervading warmth--but it was of the spirits--brought back his lately unfamiliar sense of well-being.

The Morrises lived in a large remodelled brick house, pleasantly pseudo-cla.s.sic, beyond the opposite boundary of Eastlake; and, leaving his car in the turn of the drive past the main door, Lee walked into the wide hall which swept from front to back, and found a small dinner party at the stage of coffee and cigarettes. It was composed, he saw at once, of Peyton's friends; as he entered three young men rose punctiliously--Christian Wager, with hair growing close like a mat on a narrow skull and a long irregular nose; Gilbert Bromhead, a round figure and a face with the contours and expression, the fresh color, of a pleasant and apple-like boy; and Peyton. They had been at their university together; and, Lee Randon saw, they were making, with a characteristic masculine innocence, an effort to secure their wives in the same bond of affectionate understanding that held them.

Claire, who had smiled acknowledgingly with her eyes when Lee approached, returned to a withdrawn concentration upon the section of table-cloth immediately before her; she answered the remarks directed to her with a temporary measure of animation vanishing at once with the effort. Christian Wager, who was in London with a branch of an American banking firm, had married an English girl strikingly named Evadore.

She was large, with black hair cut in a scanty bang; but beyond these unastonishing facts there was nothing in her appearance to mark or remember. However, a relative of hers, he had been told, distant but authentic, had been a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Gilbert Bromhead's wife was southern, a small appealing compound of the essence of the superlatively feminine.

Lee Randon, in a chair drawn up for him at the table, studied the women, arbitrarily thrown together, with a secret entertainment. Evadore Wager was frankly--to a degree almost Chinese--curious about the others. At short regular intervals, in a tone of unvaried timbre and inexhaustible surprise, she half exclaimed, "Fancy." Claire was metallic, turned in, with an indifference to her position that was actually rude, upon herself. But Mrs. Gilbert Bromhead made up for any silence around her in a seductive, low-pitched continuous talking. A part of this was superficially addressed to Claire and the solidly amazed Evadore; but all its underlying intention, its musical cadences and breathless suspensions for approval, were flung at the men. The impression she skillfully conveyed to Lee Randon, by an art which never for an instant lost its aspect of the artless, was that he, at least, older in experience than the rest there, alone entirely understood and engaged her.

The men--even Peyton, temporarily--resting confident on a successful bringing of their wives into the masculine simplicity of their common memories and affection, said little. With eyes puckered wisely against the cigarette smoke they made casual remarks about their present occupations and terse references to companions and deeds of the past. Only Peyton had been of any athletic importance; he had played university foot-ball; and, in view of this, there was still a tinge of respect in Bromhead's manner. A long run of Peyton's, crowned with a glorious and winning score, was recalled. But suddenly it failed to stir him. "How young we were then," he observed gloomily.

Christian Wager protested. "That isn't the right tone. We were young then, true, but Princeton was teaching us what it meant to be men.

In that game, Morris, you got something invaluable to you now, hard endurance and fairness--"

"In my day," Lee interposed, "the team was told to sink a heel in any back that looked a little too good for us."

"There were instructors like that," Gilbert Bromhead a.s.sented; "and some graduate coaches are pretty cunning; but they are being discredited."

Wager largely, obliviously, pa.s.sed over this interruption. "We learned decency," he proceeded, "in business and ideals and living; and to give and take evenly. In the war and in civil life we were and are behind the big issues. This new license and socialistic rant, the mental and moral bounders, must be held down, and we are the men to do it. Yes, and I believe in the church, the right church, we're all for that: I tell you the country depends on the men the best colleges turn out."

"My G.o.d, Christian, you must have made a lot of money lately," Bromhead observed. "You talk exactly like the president of a locomotive works.

You have been dining with the best, too; I can tell that with certainty.

Answer us this, honestly--do you mention the Royal Family in your prayers?"

Evadore laughed. "Do you know, that's really awfully good. He does put it on a bit, doesn't he?"

"If you let Christian go on," Peyton added, "he'll talk about the sacred ties of Anglo-Saxon blood and tradition, with the English and American exchange ruling the world. Gilbert, how did your artillery company get along with the Londoners?"

"All right, if we were near a brick yard."

Claire rose abruptly, and they drifted out to a reception room opening, with a wide arch, beyond the hall. Gilbert Bromhead's wife hesitated; then, confidentially, she told Lee that she adored to sit on stairs.

"Very well," he a.s.sented; "these of the Morrises' are splendid." He was a step below her, and her knees and his shoulder settled together.

"I like older men so much," she admitted what she had already so adroitly conveyed; "patches of grey above the ears are so distinguished."

"Older than what?"

Apparently forgetful that her gesture included Gilbert Bromhead she indicated the rooms that now held the others. "Young men are so head over heels," she particularized; "they are always disarranging things."

She laughed, a delectable sound. "I oughtn't to have said that, and I wouldn't--to them. I might almost tell you the story about the man in the department store and the drawers." Their contact was more p.r.o.nounced. "Isn't that English girl extraordinary? I didn't believe for a minute that was her own color till I was close to it. Her hair isn't dyed; but why does she wear that skimpy bang?" Again she laughed, a pure golden melody. "But you admired it, I know you did; men are so unaccountable. Could you trust her, do you think? It wasn't very nice to make fun of her husband." Adroitly, without the flutter of a ruffle, she moved to a higher step, and Claire--before Lee had any premonition of her appearance--stood below them with chocolates.

"She is rather attractive," his companion admitted, when Claire had gone. "She doesn't like me, or Mrs. Wager, though; and I must say she made it plain in her own house. I've been studying her, and there is something wrong. Is she happy with Peyton Morris? I thought he was right nice until you came." She turned for a better view, through the bal.u.s.trade, of the doors beyond, and then drew her skirt close so that he could move up beside her. "It's just like a smoke-house in there,"

she reported. "I don't truthfully think cigarettes are nice for a woman; and I wouldn't dream of taking whiskey; in the South we never. You'd call that out of date." She bent forward, arranging the ribbon of a slipper, and her mouth met his in a long kiss.

"What made you suppose you could do that?" she demanded; "how did you know I wouldn't be cross with you? But ... somehow I didn't mind.

Although you mustn't again, so publicly. I wonder why, with you, it seemed so perfectly nice, and not at all as if I had only met you?"

There was a response to that as recognized, as exact, as the bishop's move in chess; indeed, it was expected of him; she was hesitating, waiting for it; but he was unable to rea.s.sure her with the conventional sentiment. A month ago he would have commanded and developed an enticing situation; but now, for Lee Randon, it was without possibilities, hardly more than perfunctory. A shade of vexation invaded her bearing, and she moved a significant infinitesimal fraction away from him. Then she discovered a wind blowing down the stairs. "I have to take such good care of myself," she told Lee, preparing to descend. "It is because I am so delicate--I can get upset at nothing. Here you are all so strong; you have an advantage over me. Gilbert, dear," she called from the hall, her voice musical with tender reproach, "I can't see how you love me, you stay away so far."

"What did the little a.s.s say to you?" Claire asked. Lee was standing with her by the piano, and the others were around the fireplace in the farther s.p.a.ciousness. "Nothing much," he replied. "You mean that she never stopped. I'll admit she's skillful; but she needn't think I'm a fool. But you will never guess what I want to tell you. My dear Lee, that Mrs. Grove wrote me a letter. I have it here in my dress, for you to read. It's a scream." He took the sheet of note paper: it was grey with an address on East Sixty-sixth Street embossed in pale vermilion, and had an indefinable scent. The writing was decisive:

"MY DEAR MRS. MORRIS,

"It is so difficult for me to express my disturbance at what Mina Raff has just told me, that I am asking to see you here, at my house in New York. Engagements make it difficult for me to leave at present. I hope you will not find this impertinent from an older woman, threatened very much as you in her affections by an impossible calamity--"

The signature, Savina Grove, had the crispness of a name often attached to opinions and papers of authority.

"That's rather cool," he agreed.

"Cool! The woman's demented. No, I suppose she thinks I am an honest wronged woman or something objectionable of the sort. I was going to throw it away when I kept it to amuse you."

"It does, Claire; and I'm glad to see it; impertinent as she admits it may be, you must consider. As Mrs. Grove writes, you are both caught."

"If you think I'll go see her you are madder still."

"I realize you won't; but worse things could happen. It's the only possible approach to Mina Raff; I had a chance to try Peyton, but it did no good. It seems to me this Mina ought to have some understanding."

Claire Morris said: "You can do it."

He reflected. "Well, perhaps; I'm your uncle; there are no brothers, and what other family you have is away. It might be useful. Anyhow, she would hear a thing or two about you from me."