The Cost Part 7

"No--no!" she protested, putting a good deal of feeling into her voice in the effort to rea.s.sure him. "I'd have been ashamed of you if you hadn't done it. And--oh, I despise weakness in a man most of all! And I like to think that if everybody in college had denounced you, you'd have gone straight on. And--you WOULD!"

Within a week after this they were calling each the other by their first names.

For the Christmas holidays she went with her mother from Battle Field direct to Chicago, to her father's sisters Mrs. Hayden--Colonel Gardiner had been called south on business. When she came back she and Scarborough took up their friendship where they had left it. They read the same books, had similar tastes, disagreed sympathetically, agreed with enthusiasm. She saw a great deal of several other men in her cla.s.s, enough not to make her preference for him significant to the college--or to herself. They went for moonlight straw-rides, on moonlight and starlight skating and ice-boat parties, for long walks over the hills--all invariably with others, but they were often practically alone. He rapidly dropped his rural manners and mannerisms--Fred Pierson's tailor in Indianapolis made the most radical of the surface changes in him.

Late in February his cousin, the superintendent of the farm, telegraphed him to come home. He found his mother ill--plainly dying.

And his father--Bladen Scarborough's boast had been that he never took a "dose of drugs" in his life, and for at least seventy of his seventy-nine years he had been "on the jump" daily from long before dawn until long after sundown. Now he was content to sit in his arm-chair and, with no more vigorous protest than a frown and a growl, to swallow the despised drugs.

Each day he made them carry him in his great chair into HER bedroom.

And there he sat all day long, his s.h.a.ggy brows down, his gaze rarely wandering from the little ridge her small body made in the high white bed; and in his stern eyes there was a look of stoic anguish. Each night, as they were carrying him to his own room, they took him near the bed; and he leaned forward, and the voice that in all their years had never been anything but gentle for her said: "Good night, Sallie."

And the small form would move slightly, there would be a feeble turning of the head, a wan smile on the little old face, a soft "Good night, Bladen."

It was on Hampden's ninth day at home that the old man said "Good night, Sallie," and there was no answer--not even a stir. They did not offer to carry him in the next morning; nor did he turn his face from the wall. She died that day; he three days later--he had refused food and medicine; he had not shed a tear or made a sound.

Thus the journey side by side for fifty-one years was a journey no longer. They were asleep side by side on the hillside for ever.

Hampden stayed at home only one day after the funeral. He came back to Battle Field apparently unchanged. He was not in black, for Bladen Scarborough abhorred mourning as he abhorred all outward symbols of the things of the heart. But after a week he told Pauline about it; and as he talked she sobbed, though his voice did not break nor his eyes dim.

"He's like his father," she thought.

When Olivia believed that Dumont was safely forgotten she teased her--"Your adoring and adored Scarborough."

Pauline was amused by this. With his unfailing instinct, Scarborough had felt--and had never permitted himself to forget--that there was some sort of wall round her for him. It was in perfect good faith that she answered Olivia: "You don't understand him. He's a queer man--sometimes I wonder myself that he doesn't get just a little sentimental. I suppose I'd find him exasperating--if I weren't otherwise engaged."

Olivia tried not to show irritation at this reference to Dumont. "I think you're mistaken about which of you is queer," she said. "You are the one--not he."

"I?" Pauline laughed--she was thinking of her charm against any love but one man's, the wedding ring she always wore at her neck. "Why, I COULDN'T fall in love with HIM."

"The woman who gets him will do mighty well for herself--in every way,"

said Olivia.

"Indeed she will. But--I'd as soon think of falling in love with a tree or a mountain."

She liked her phrase; it seemed to her exactly to define her feeling for Scarborough. She liked it so well that she repeated it to herself rea.s.suringly many times in the next few weeks.

VII.

PAULINE AWAKENS.

In the last week of March came a succession of warm rains. The leaves burst from their impatient hiding just within the cracks in the gray bark. And on Monday the unclouded sun was irradiating a pale green world from a pale blue sky. The four windows of Pauline and Olivia's sitting-room were up; a warm, scented wind was blowing this way and that the strays of Pauline's red-brown hair as she sat at the table, her eyes on a book, her thoughts on a letter--Dumont's first letter on landing in America. A knock, and she frowned slightly.

"Come!" she cried, her expression slowly veering toward welcome.

The door swung back and in came Scarborough. Not the awkward youth of last October, but still unable wholly to conceal how much at a disadvantage he felt before the woman he particularly wished to please.

"Yes--I'm ten minutes early," he said, apology in his tone for his instinct told him that he was interrupting, and he had too little vanity to see that the interruption was agreeable. "But I thought you'd be only reading a novel."

For answer she held up the book which lay before her--a solemn volume in light brown calf.

"a.n.a.lytical geometry," he said; "and on the first day of the finest spring the world ever saw!" He was at the window, looking out longingly--sunshine, and soft air washed clean by the rains; the new-born leaves and buds; the pioneer birds and flowers. "Let's go for a walk. We can do the Vergil to-night."

"YOU--talking of neglecting WORK!" Her smile seemed to him to sparkle as much in the waves of her hair as in her even white teeth and gold-brown eyes. "So you're human, just like the rest of us."

"Human!" He glanced at her and instantly glanced away.

"Do leave that window," she begged. "We must get the Vergil now. I'm reading an essay at the society to-night--they've fined me twice for neglecting it. But if you stand there reminding me of what's going on outside I'll not be able to resist."

"How this would look from Indian Rock!"

She flung open a Vergil text-book with a relentless shake of the head.

"I've got the place. Book three, line two forty-five--

"'Una in praecelsa consedit rupe Celaeno----'"

"It doesn't matter what that hideous old Harpy howled at the pious Aeneas," he grumbled. "Let's go out and watch the Great G.o.d Pan dedicate his brand-new temple."

"Do sit there!" She pointed a slim white forefinger at the chair at the opposite side of the table--the side nearer him. "I'll be generous and work the dictionary to-day." And she opened a fat, black, dull-looking book beside the Vergil.

"Where's the Johnnie?" he asked, reluctantly dropping into the chair.

She laid Dryden's translation of the Aeneid on his side of the table.

They always read the poetical version before they began to translate for the cla.s.s-room--Dryden was near enough to the original to give them its spirit, far enough to quiet their consciences. "Find the place yourself," said she. "I'm not going to do everything."

He opened the Dryden and languidly turned the pages. "'At length rebuff'd, they leave their mangled----'" he began.

"No--two or three lines farther down," she interrupted. "That was in the last lesson."

He pushed back the rebellious lock that insisted on falling down the middle of his forehead, plunged his elbows fiercely upon the table, put his fists against his temples, and began again:

"'High on a craggy cliff Celaeno sate And thus her dismal errand did relate--'

Have you got the place in the Latin?" he interrupted himself.

Fortunately he did not look up, for she was watching the waving boughs.

"Yes," she replied, hastily returning to the book. "You do your part and I'll do mine."

He read a few lines in an absent-minded sing-song, then interrupted himself once more: "Did you ever smell anything like that breeze?"

"Never. 'Bellum etiam pro caede bovum'--go on--I'm listening--or trying to."

He read:

"'But know that ere your promised walls you build, My curse shall severely be fulfilled.

Fierce famine is your lot--for this misdeed, Reduced to grind the plates on which you feed.'"