The Cost Part 4

He glanced at her to note the effect of his words. She had drawn her tall figure to its full height, and her cheeks were flushed and her eyes curiously bright. He had stabbed straight and deep into the heart of her weakness, but also into the heart of her pride.

The only effect of his thrust that was visible to him put him in a panic. "Don't--PLEASE don't look that way, Polly," he went on hastily.

"You don't see what I'm driving at yet. I didn't mean that I'd marry her, or think of it. There isn't anybody but you. There couldn't be, you know that."

"Why did you tell me, then?" she asked haughtily.

"Because--I had to begin somewhere. Polly, I'm going away, going abroad. And I'm not to see you for--for I don't know how long--and--we must be married!"

She looked at him in a daze.

"We can cross on the ferry at half-past ten," he went on. "You see that house--the white one?" He pointed to the other bank of the river where a white cottage shrank among the trees not far from a little church.

"Mr. Barker lives there--you must have heard of him. He's married scores and hundreds of couples from this side. And we can be back here at half-past eleven--twelve at the latest."

She shook her head expressed, not determination, only doubt.

"I can't, Jack," she said. "They----"

"Then you aren't certain you're ever going to marry me," he interrupted bitterly. "You don't mean what you promised me. You care more for them than you do for me. You don't really care for me at all."

"You don't believe that," she protested, her eyes and her mind on the little white cottage. "You couldn't--you know me too well."

"Then there's no reason why we shouldn't get married. Don't we belong to each other now? Why should we refuse to stand up and say so?"

That seemed unanswerable--a perfect excuse for doing what she wished to do. For the little white cottage fascinated her--how she did long to be sure of him! And she felt so free, so absolutely her own mistress in these new surroundings, where no one attempted to exercise authority over another.

"I must feel sure of you, Pauline. Sometimes everything seems to be against me, and I even doubt you. And--that's when the temptations pull hardest. If we were married it'd all be different."

Yes, it would be different. And he would be securely hers, with her mind at rest instead of hara.s.sed as it would be if she let him go so far away, free. And where was the harm in merely repeating before a preacher the promise that now bound them both? She looked at him and he at her.

"You don't put any others before me, do you, dear?" he asked.

"No, Jack--no one. I belong to you."

"Come!" he pleaded, and they went down to the boat. She seemed to herself to be in a dream--in a trance.

As she walked beside him along the country road on the other sh.o.r.e a voice was ringing in her ears: "Don't! Don't! Ask Olivia's advice first!" But she walked on, her will suspended, subst.i.tuted for it his will and her jealousy and her fears of his yielding to the urgings of his father and the blandishments of "that Cleveland girl." He said little but kept close to her, watching her narrowly, touching her tenderly now and then.

The Reverend Josiah Barker was waiting for them--an oily smirk on a face smooth save where a thin fringe of white whiskers dangled from his jaw-bone, ear to ear; fat, damp hands rubbing in antic.i.p.ation of the large fee that was to repay him for celebrating the marriage and for keeping quiet about it afterward. At the proper place in the brief ceremony Dumont, with a sly smile at Pauline which she faintly returned, produced the ring--he had bought it at Saint X a week before and so had started a rumor that he and Caroline Sylvester were to be married in haste. He held Pauline's hand firmly as he put the ring on her finger--he was significantly cool and calm for his age and for the circ.u.mstances. She was trembling violently, was pale and wan. The ring burned into her flesh.

"Whom G.o.d hath joined together let no man put asunder," ended Barker, with pompous solemnity.

Dumont kissed her--her cheek was cold and at the touch of his lips she shuddered.

"Don't be afraid," he said in a low voice that was perfectly steady.

They went out and along the sunny road in silence. "Whom G.o.d hath joined," the voice was now dinning into her ears. And she was saying to herself, "Has G.o.d joined us? If so, why do I feel as if I had committed a crime?" She looked guiltily at him--she felt no thrill of pride or love at the thought that he was her husband, she his wife.

And into her mind poured all her father's condemnations of him, with a vague menacing fear riding the crest of the flood.

"You're sorry you've done it?" he said sullenly.

She did not answer.

"Well, it's done," he went on, "and it can't be undone. And I've got you, Polly, in spite of them. They might have known better than to try to keep me from getting what I wanted. I always did, and I always shall!"

She looked at him startled, then hastily looked away. Even more than his words and his tone, she disliked his eyes--gloating, triumphant.

But not until she was years more experienced did she study that never-forgotten expression, study it as a whole--words, tone, look.

Then, and not until then, did she know that she had instinctively shrunk because he had laid bare his base and all but loveless motive in marrying her.

"And," he added, "I'll force father to give me a big interest in the business very soon. Then--we'll announce it."

Announce IT? Announce WHAT? "Why, I'm a married woman," she thought, and she stumbled and almost fell. The way danced before her eyes, all spotted with black. She was just able to walk aboard the boat and drop into a seat.

He sat beside her, took her hand and bent over it; as he kissed it a tear fell on it. He looked at her and she saw that his eyes were swimming. A sob surged into her throat, but she choked it back.

"Jack!" she murmured, and hid her face in her handkerchief.

When they looked each at the other both smiled--her foreboding had retreated to the background. She began to turn the ring round and round upon her finger.

"Mrs. John Dumont," she said. "Doesn't it sound queer?" And she gazed dreamily away toward the ranges of hills between which the river danced and sparkled as it journeyed westward. When she again became conscious of her immediate surroundings--other than Dumont--she saw a deck-hand looking at her with a friendly grin.

Instantly she covered the ring with her hand and handkerchief. "But I mustn't wear it," she said to Dumont.

"No--not on your finger." He laughed and drew from his pocket a slender gold chain. "But you might wear it on this, round your neck.

It'll help to remind you that you don't belong to yourself any more, but to me."

She took the chain--she was coloring in a most becoming way--and hid it and the ring in her bosom. Then she drew off a narrow hoop of gold with a small setting and pushed it on his big little finger.

"And THAT, sir," she said, with a bewitching look, "may help you not to forget that YOU belong to me."

She left the ferry in advance of him and faced Olivia just in time for them to go down together to the half-past twelve o'clock dinner.

V.

FOUR FRIENDS.

As Mrs. Trent's was the best board in Battle Field there were more applicants than she could make places for at her one table. In the second week of the term she put a small table in the alcove of the dining-room and gave it to her "star" boarders--Pierson, Olivia and Pauline. They invited Scarborough to take the fourth place. Not only did Pierson sit opposite Olivia and Scarborough opposite Pauline three times a day in circ.u.mstances which make for intimacy, but also Olivia and Pierson studied together in his sitting-room and Pauline and Scarborough in her sitting-room for several hours three or four times a week. Olivia and Pierson were soph.o.m.ores. Pauline and Scarborough were freshmen; also, they happened to have the same three "senior prep"

conditions to "work off"--Latin, zoology and mathematics.

Such intimacies as these were the matter-of-course at Battle Field.

They were usually brief and strenuous. A young man and a young woman would be seen together constantly, would fall in love, would come to know each the other thoroughly. Then, with the mind and character and looks and moods of each fully revealed to the other, they would drift or fly in opposite directions, wholly disillusioned. Occasionally they found that they were really congenial, and either love remained or a cordial friendship sprang up. The modes of thought, inconceivable to Europeans or Europeanized Americans, made catastrophe all but impossible.

It was through the girls that Scarborough got his invitation to the alcove table. There he came to know Pierson and to like him. One evening he went into Pierson's rooms--the suite under Olivia and Pauline's. He had never seen--but had dreamed of--such a luxurious bachelor interior. Pierson's father had insisted that his son must go to the college where forty years before he had split wood and lighted fires and swept corridors to earn two years of higher education.

Pierson's mother, defeated in her wish that her son should go East to college, had tried to mitigate the rigors of Battle Field's primitive simplicity by herself fitting up his quarters. And she made them the show-rooms of the college.

"Now let's see what can be done for you," said Pierson, with the superiority of a whole year's experience where Scarborough was a beginner. "I'll put you in the Sigma Alpha fraternity for one thing.

It's the best here."