I've Married Marjorie Part 19

He rose and went over to where the banjo lay and brought it back to her. It was growing dusk now in the little cabin.

"Play for me, and sing, won't you, Marjorie?" he asked abruptly. "I haven't heard you for a long time."

In Marjorie's mind there arose the memory of that boyish, loving little note that she had found under the banjo, and for a minute her throat clutched so that she couldn't answer. She had moments of being so intolerably sorry for Francis that it hurt; quite irrational moments, when he seemed to need it not at all. This was one.

"Yes," she said, pulling herself together. "That is, if you will take my word for it that I have no designs on poor old Mr. Pennington."

"Of course I know you haven't," he said. "It was the other way about that I was afraid of."

"His having designs on me?"

She laughed aloud as she began tuning her strings. It did seem like the funniest thing she had ever heard. The picture of Pennington, girt with a sack for an ap.r.o.n, with that plump, quaint face of his, and those kindly, fussy ways, drying cups for her and having designs while he did it--it was enough to make even Logan laugh, and _he_ had never been known to be amused by anything that wasn't intellectual humor.

"Just a-wearyin' for you,"

she began, in her soft little sympathetic voice, that wasn't much good for anything but just this sort of thing, but could pull the heartstrings out of you at it, and sang it through. She went on after that without being asked, just because she liked it. She knew where the simple chords were in the dark, and she sang everything she wanted to, forgetting finally Francis, and the woods, and everything else in the world except the music and the old things she was singing.

When she had finally done, after an hour or so, and laid the banjo across her lap and leaned back with a little laugh, saying "There! You must be tired by this time!" Francis rose with scarcely a thank-you, and walked out of the door.

"I want a turn in the air before I come to bed," he said.

Marjorie said nothing. She was sleepy, as usual--would she never get over being sleepy up here?--and she laid the instrument on the floor and stretched out thoughtlessly on the window-seat, instead of going off to bed as she had been intending to do. As for her husband, he walked across the veranda straight into a group of his listening men.

The music had drawn them over, and, regardless of mosquitoes, they were sitting about on the steps, liking the concert.

"We owe you a vote of thanks for importing that little wife of yours, Ellison," said Pennington, getting up and stretching himself widely in the moonlight. "Maybe if I do some more dishes for her, she'll come and sing for us when she knows it, sometime soon."

Francis had an irrational wish to hit Pennington. But there was no reason why he should. Pennington's particular kind of flippancy was merely a result of his having been, in those far days before he was a remittance man, an Oxford graduate. So was his soft and charmingly inflected voice. But, quite reasonlessly, it was all Francis could do to respond with the politeness which is due to your almost irreplaceable second-in-command on a rush job. His manners once made, he decided that he didn't want the air, after all. He faced about, saying good-night to the risen men, who responded jovially or respectfully, according to their temperaments, and returned to the cabin where he was, for all they knew, living an idyllic life with the wife he adored and who adored him.

He went over, drawn in spite of himself, to the window-seat where Marjorie lay. There was enough moonlight to see her dimly, and he could tell that she had, all in a minute, fallen asleep. She looked very young and tired and childish in the shadows, with her lips just parted, and her hands out and half open at her sides.

"Marjorie! Marjorie, dear!" he said. "Wake up! It's time you were in bed."

He spoke to her affectionately, scarcely knowing that he said it. She was very tired, and she did not wake till he put his hand on her shoulder. Even then she just moved a little, and turned back to her old position.

He finally bent and lifted her to a sitting position, but she only lay against him, heavy still with sleep.

"Don't want to get up," she murmured, like a child. So finally he had to do as he had done the night he brought her home, pick her up bodily and lay her on her own bed. Her arms fell from his shoulders as he straightened himself from laying her down. "'Night," she said, still sleepily and half-affectionately; and Francis did not kiss her good-night. But he did want to badly. Francis, unlike Marjorie, was not sleeping well these nights.

But then he was used to his work and she was not used to hers. He called her quite unemotionally next morning, and she rose and went through her routine as usual. All the camp watched its mascot apprehensively, as if she might break--well, not every one, for two of them were tough old souls who thought that hard work was what women were "fur." But, aside from these unregenerates, they did more. Fired by Pennington's example of unremitting help, they did everything for her that thought could suggest. They brought her in posies for the table; they swept out the cabin for her; they dried her dishes in desperate compet.i.tion; they filled the kerosene stoves so thoroughly that there was always a dripping trail of oil on the floor, and Pennington had to lay down the law about it; they ate what she fed them gladly, and even sometimes forbore to ask for more out of a wish to seem mannerly.

And Marjorie liked it to the core. The lightening of the work was a help, and it made things so that she was not more than healthfully tired, though sometimes she felt that she was more than that; but, being a woodland queen, as Pennington called it, was pleasantest of all. She came to feel as the time went on, there alone in the clearing with them, that they were all her property. She mended their clothes for them, she settled their disputes, she heard their confidences and saw the pictures of their sweethearts and wives, or, sometimes, photographs of movie queens who were the dream-ideals of these simple souls. Sometimes she went out to the place where they worked, before the work moved too far away for her to reach it in a short time. And, curiously enough, she found that she was not lonely, did not miss New York, and--it seemed to her that it was a rather shocking way to feel--she did not in the least feel a "lack of woman's nursing, or dearth of woman's tears."

She got along excellently without Lucille, Cousin Anna, and the girls in the office. And, thinking it over sometimes at twilight, in those rare moments when there weren't from one to three of the men grouped adoringly around her, and Francis wasn't chaperoning her silently in the background, she felt that the work was a small price to pay for the pleasantness of the rest of her life there. Always before she had been a cog in the machinery, wherever she had been. At Cousin Anna's she was a little girl, loved and dominated. With Lucille she was free, but Lucille, in compensation, helped herself to the ungrudgingly given foreground. But here she was lady and mistress, and pet besides. In short, the punishment Francis had laid out for her was only a punishment to him. She could see that he felt guilty by spells. She thought, too, that he had times of being fond of her. How much they meant she could not tell. But in spite of his warnings she became better and better friends with Pennington, always exactly, at least as far as she was concerned, as if he were a maiden aunt of great kindness and experience. Indeed, Pennington, she thought, was what kept her from missing girls so.

He never told her anything about himself. He might or might not have been a remittance man; but he mentioned no remittances, at least. Once he spoke of his childhood, the kind of childhood she had read sometimes in English children's books, not like her own prim American suburban memories of Sunday-school and being sent to school and store, and sometimes playing in her back yard with other little girls. He had had a pony, and brothers and sisters to play with, and a governess, she gathered; and an uncle who was an admiral, and came home once to them in his full uniform, as a treat, so they could see how he looked in it.

And there had been a nurse, and near by was a park where the tale went that there were goblins. But it all must have been very long ago, she thought, because Pennington looked forty and over. And all his stories stopped short before he was ten. After that he went to Eton, he told her, and told her no more.

She did not ask. She liked him, but, after all, he was not an important figure in her life. The goal she never forgot was Francis's admission that she was an honorable woman; and, underneath that, Francis's missing her terribly when she was through and left. Still, when Pennington would come and demand tea from her of a Sunday, and she would sit in her little living-room, or out on the veranda, with the quaint yellow tea-set that was a part of the furnishings, and pour it for him and one or two of the other men, she would like having him about. He talked as interestingly as Logan, but not as egotistically.

She felt as if she were quite a wonderful person when he sat on the step below her, and surrounded her with a soft deference that was almost caressing, but not quite. And in spite of Francis's warnings she made more and more of a friend of him.

The explosion came one Sunday afternoon in June. She came out on the veranda, as usual, with her tea-tray, about four, and waited for her court. Peggy came over once in awhile on Sundays, too. Logan never came. Peggy had never said any more about him since her one outburst, but Marjorie knew that he was ill yet, and being nursed by the O'Maras.

This day no Peggy appeared. Indeed, n.o.body appeared for some time, and Marjorie began to think of putting away the tea-things and considering the men's supper. And then, just as she had come to this resolve, Pennington came through the woods.

He was not sauntering in a seemingly aimless manner, as he usually did.

He was walking straight for her, as if she were something he had been aiming for for hours. And he did not drop at her feet negligently on the steps, as he usually did, and call her some fanciful name like "Queen of the Woodlands," or "Lady Marjorie." He sat erectly on a chair across from her, and Marjorie bethought herself that he was very much like a curate making a call. The kindly expression was always on his face, even when he was most deeply in earnest, and he was apparently in earnest to-day.

"I stopped the other men from coming," began Pennington with no preface. "I wanted to have a long talk with you. I want to tell you a story."

"I wish you would," she said, though she had had so many scenes of late that, without any idea what was coming, a little tremor of terror crept around her heart. She leaned back in her rustic rocker, there on the veranda, and looked at him in her innocent, friendly fashion. He paused a little before he began.

"Once upon a time," he began abruptly, "there was a man who had a very fair start in life. His people saw to it that everything was smooth for him--too smooth, perhaps. He didn't realize that he could ever be in a position where they wouldn't be able to straighten things out for him. He was a decent enough chap; weak, perhaps, but kind, at least.

He went to school and college, and finally took orders, and was given a living in a county near where his people lived. Life went along easily enough for him, and perhaps a bit stupidly. Too stupidly. He got bored by it. So after a while he gambled. He played the stock-market.

Presently he used some money that was not his--that had been intrusted to him by another. He lost that. So he had to give up everything--home, friends, profession, country--and go and live in a strange country. His people, good always, straightened things out for him, at a great sacrifice; but they made it a condition that he should stay where he was. Time went on, and things were forgotten. And the people who had made him promise not to return died. They left him, in dying, some money. Not a great deal, but enough to keep him comfortably. And he didn't know what to do. He was happy, for the first time in his life, with a little friend he had found, some one almost like a daughter, some one who seemed, in humble ways, to need him to help her in what wasn't a very easy part of her life. So he stayed yet a little longer. And presently he found that he was in danger of something happening. He had never been very good at making himself feel as he wished to feel, or at holding his feelings to what they should be, let us say. And his feelings for this little daughter were not quite, he was afraid, like a father's. But he still did not know what to do, Marjorie. She would never care, and there were reasons why he did not want or expect her to. It was only that he wondered which was right--which he ought to do."

Pennington stopped.

Marjorie colored up.

"What--what do you mean? Why--why do you tell me about it?"

"Because," said Pennington, "I would like to know what you think that man ought to do. Ought he to go back home, against his people's wish, but where he belongs, and try to pick up the rest of his life there, or do you think that the need of him over here is enough to counterbalance the danger he runs? You see, it's rather a problem."

Marjorie was a perfectly intelligent girl. She knew very well that Pennington was, at last, telling her the outlines of his own pitiful story. And he was leaving the decision in her hands.

She sat quietly for awhile, and tried to think. It was hard to think, because there was a queer, hazy feeling in her head, and her hands were hot. She had felt unusually excited and energetic and gay earlier in the day, but that was all gone, and only the hazy feeling left. She did not want to move, or, particularly, to speak. She wondered if a trip she had made that afternoon before to a little swampy place, where she had sat and strung berries for an hour, had been bad for her.

But there was Pennington--he looked very large, suddenly, and then seemed to fade away far off for a minute, and have to be focused with an effort--and he had to be answered.

"I think," she said hesitatingly, "that he ought to do what seemed to him right, without thinking of his feelings, or--or any one else's."

"But that's just the trouble. He couldn't see which _was_ right."

Marjorie tried to focus harder than ever. She wanted to be unselfish, and tell him the thing that was right to do, at any cost--though she had not realized how much Pennington's help and society had been to her. She felt a terror at the idea of his going, the more because she felt ill. But that didn't count--that mustn't count. You have no right to let a man stay where he may fall in love with you, merely because you need him for a maiden aunt or something of the sort. And that was the ultimate and entire extent of her affection for him, strong though it had come to be.

"I think--I think that man had better go back to the place where he had really belonged at first," she said in a low voice. "No matter how much the girl missed him, or needed him, she had no right to want him to be hurt by staying near her."

"You really think that?" he said.

"Yes," she answered. And then incoherently, "Oh, Mr. Pennington, I do want to be good!"

She meant that she had done enough wrong, in acting as she had toward Francis in the first place. She felt now, very strongly, that all the trouble had come from her cowardice when Francis came home. She should have shut her teeth and gone through the thing, no matter what her personal feelings had been at first. It would all have come out right then. She knew now that she and Francis, the plunge once taken, could have stood each other. And she would have kept her faith. She had learned the meaning of honor.

"You are good," said Pennington in a moved tone. "Then--I have my answer. Yes--I'll go back."

She leaned her heavy head on the chair-back again. He seemed once more suddenly remote.

"I--I wish you weren't going," she said, only half conscious of what she said.

He leaned forward, suddenly moved, and caught her hand hard. Still in that dream, she felt him kiss it. She did not care. And then, still in the dream, Francis's quick tread up the steps, and his sharp voice--