The Cost Part 29

"It was doubly base. I betrayed your friendly trust, I was false to her. Don't misunderstand--she's nothing to me. She's nothing to me, yet everything. I began really to live when I began to love her.

And--every one must have a--a pole-star. And she's mine--the star I sail by, and always must. And--" He halted altogether, then blundered on: "I shall not forgive myself. But you--be merciful--forgive me--forget it!"

"I shall do neither," she replied curtly, jealousy and vanity stamping down the generous impulse that rose in response to his appeal. And she went up her road. A few yards and she paused, hoping to hear him coming after her. A few yards more and she sat down on a big boulder by the wayside. Until now all the wishes of her life had been more or less material, had been wishes which her wealth or the position her wealth gave had enabled her instantly to gratify. She buried her face in her arms and sobbed and rocked herself to and fro, in a cyclone of anger, and jealousy, and shame, and love, and despair.

"I hate him!" she exclaimed between clenched teeth. "I hate him, but--if he came and wanted me, oh, how I would LOVE him!"

Meanwhile Pauline was at her father's.

"He isn't down yet," said her mother. "You know, he doesn't finish dressing nowadays until he has read the papers and his mail. Then he walks in the garden."

"I'll go there," said Pauline. "Won't you bring him when he's ready?"

She never entered the garden that the ghosts of her childhood--how far, far it seemed!--did not join her, brushing against her, or rustling in tree and bush and leafy trellis. She paused at the end of the long arbor and sat on the rustic bench there. A few feet away was the bed of lilies-of-the-valley. Every spring of her childhood she used to run from the house on the first warm morning and hurry to it; and if her glance raised her hopes she would kneel upon the young gra.s.s and lower her head until her long golden hair touched the black ground; and the soil that had been hard and cold all winter would be cracked open this way and that; and from the cracks would issue an odor--the odor of life. And as she would peer into each crack in turn she would see, down, away down, the pale tip of what she knew to be an up-shooting slender shaft. And her heart would thrill with joy, for she knew that the shafts would presently rise green above the black earth, would unfold, would blossom, would bloom, would fling from tremulous bells a perfumed proclamation of the arrival of spring.

As she sat waiting, it seemed to her that through the black earth of her life she could see and feel the backward heralds of her spring--"after the long winter," she said to herself.

She glanced up--her father coming toward her. He was alone, was holding a folded letter uncertainly in his hand. He looked at her, his eyes full of pity and grief. "Pauline," he began, "has everything been--been well--of late between you and--your husband?"

She started. "No, father," she replied. Then, looking at him with clear directness: "I've not been showing you and mother the truth about John and me--not for a long time."

She saw that her answer relieved him. He hesitated, held out the letter.

"The best way is for you to read it," he said. It was a letter to him from Fanshaw. He was writing, he explained, because the discharge of a painful duty to himself would compel him "to give pain to your daughter whom I esteem highly," and he thought it only right "to prepare her and her family for what was coming, in order that they might be ready to take the action that would suggest itself." And he went on to relate his domestic troubles and his impending suit.

"Poor Leonora!" murmured Pauline, as she finished and sat thinking of all that Fanshaw's letter involved.

"Is it true, Polly?" asked her father.

She gave a great sigh of relief. How easy this letter had made all that she had been dreading! "Yes--it's true," she replied. "I've known about--about it ever since the time I came back from the East and didn't return."

The habitual pallor of her father's face changed to gray.

"I left him, father." She lifted her head, impatient of her stammering. A bright flush was in her face as she went on rapidly: "And I came to-day to tell you the whole story--to be truthful and honest again. I'm sick of deception and evasion. I can't stand it any longer--I mustn't. I--you don't know how I've shrunk from wounding mother and you. But I've no choice now. Father, I must be free--free!"

"And you shall be," replied her father. "He shall not wreck your life and Gardiner's."

Pauline stared at him. "Father!" she exclaimed.

He put his arm round her and drew her gently to him.

"I know the idea is repellent," he said, as if he were trying to persuade a child. "But it's right, Pauline. There are cases in which not to divorce would be a sin. I hope my daughter sees that this is one."

"I don't understand," she said confusedly. "I thought you and mother believed divorce was dreadful--no matter what might happen."

"We did, Pauline. But we--that is, I--had never had it brought home.

A hint of this story was published just after you came last year. I thought it false, but it set me to thinking. 'If your daughter's husband had turned out to be as you once thought him, would it be right for her to live on with him? To live a lie, to pretend to keep her vows to love and honor him? Would it be right to condemn Gardiner to be poisoned by such a father?' And at last I saw the truth, and your mother agreed with me. We had been too narrow. We had been laying down our own notions as G.o.d's great justice."

Pauline drew away from her father so that she could look at him. And at last she saw into his heart. "If I had only known," she said, and sat numb and stunned.

"When you were coming home from college," her father went on, "your mother and I talked over what we should do. John had just confessed your secret marriage--"

"You knew that!"

"Yes, and we understood, Polly. You were so young--so headstrong--and you couldn't appreciate our reasons."

Pauline's brain was reeling.

"Your mother and I talked it over before you got home and thought it best to leave you entirely free to choose. But when we saw you overcome by joy--"

"Don't!" she interrupted, her voice a cry of pain. "I can't bear it!

Don't!" Years of false self-sacrifice, of deceiving her parents and her child, of self-suppression and self-degradation, and this final cruelty to Gladys--all, all in vain, all a heaping of folly upon folly, of wrong upon wrong.

She rushed toward the house. She must fly somewhere--anywhere--to escape the thoughts that were picking with sharp beaks at her aching heart. Half-way up the walk she turned and fled to a refuge she would not have thought of half an hour before to her father's arms.

"Oh, father," she cried. "If I had only known you!"

Gladys, returning from her walk, went directly to Pauline's sitting-room.

"I'm off for New York and Europe to-morrow morning," she began abruptly, her voice hard, her expression bitter and reckless.

"Where can she have heard about Leonora?" thought Pauline. She said in a strained voice: "I had hoped you would stay here to look after the house."

"To look after the house? What do you mean?" asked Gladys. But she was too full of herself to be interested in the answer, and went on: "I want you to forget what I said to you. I've got over all that. I've come to my senses."

Pauline began a nervous turning of her rings.

Gladys gave a short, grim laugh. "I detest him," she went on. "We're very changeable, we women, aren't we? I went out of this house two hours ago loving him--to distraction. I came back hating him. And all that has happened in between is that I met him and he kissed me a few times and stabbed my pride a few times."

Pauline stopped turning her rings--she rose slowly, mechanically, looked straight at Gladys.

"That is not true," she said calmly.

Gladys laughed sardonically. "You don't know the cold and haughty Governor Scarborough. There's fire under the ice. I can feel the places on my face where it scorched. Can't you see them?"

Pauline gave her a look of disgust. "How like John Dumont's sister!"

she thought. And she shut herself in her room and stayed there, pleading illness in excuse, until Gladys was gone.

XXIII.

A SEA SURPRISE.

On the third day from New York, Gladys was so far recovered from seasickness that she dragged herself to the deck. The water was fairly smooth, but a sticky, foggy rain was falling. A deck-steward put her steamer-chair in a sheltered corner. Her maid and a stewardess swathed her in capes and rugs; she closed her eyes and said: "Now leave me, please, and don't come near me till I send for you."

She slept an hour. When she awoke she felt better. Some one had drawn a chair beside hers and was seated there--a man, for she caught the faint odor of a pipe, though the wind was the other way. She turned her head. It was Langdon, whom she had not seen since she went below a few hours after Sandy Hook disappeared. Indeed, she had almost forgotten that he was on board and that her brother had asked him to look after her. He was staring at her in an absent-minded way, his wonted expression of satire and lazy good-humor fainter than usual.

In fact, his face was almost serious.