The Empty Sack Part 15

And Bob had been so reasonable. He had tried to explain himself. He had used words that scared, that shocked her. Polygamous! Monogamous! The very sounds suggested anatomy or impropriety.

Nevertheless, she could have pardoned this language as an eccentricity if, in the dimness of the parson's hall, he hadn't taken her in his arms and kissed her. This possibility was something she forgot when she followed him up the rectory's brownstone steps. For the inadvertence she blamed herself the more, since, throughout the winter, she had never once lost sight of it. Whenever he had proposed to her, the advantages of marrying so much money had been offset by her terror at his "pawing her about." With no high-flown ideas as to virtue, Jennie would have fought like a wildcat for her virginity of mind and body till ready of her own free will to give them up. And here she had sold herself to Bob Collingham, a man whose touch made her shrink.

"I can't live with you!" she had cried, as she tore herself from his embrace.

And poor Bob had been reasonable again.

"Of course not, Jennie darling-not yet. When I come back-"

She hadn't let him finish. She had dashed through the door and down the steps, so that he had some ado to keep up with her.... Even then, if he had only dragged her away and been a cave man....

And the evening at home had been one of the oddest she had ever spent under her father's roof. Everyone was so queer-or else she was queer herself. Gussie and Gladys, reconciled after their squabble, had both been in high spirits, and Teddy almost hysterical. He gave imitations of the men with whom he worked most closely at the bank, of Fred Inglis, of Mrs. Inglis, of Dolly, Addie, and Sadie Inglis, which made everyone feel that a great actor was being lost to the stage; but on top of these exhibitions he would fall into spells of profound reverie. The father had been apathetic, but he was always apathetic now; the mother, on the other hand, more serene than usual. More than usual, too, her eyes applauded Teddy's high spirits with a quiet, adoring smile. Altogether, the supper had been a merry one, and yet, to Jennie's thinking, merry with a mysterious note in the merriment-a note which perhaps only Pansy's intuitions could have really understood.

But sitting on the edge of her bed in the morning, she saw a ray of hope. There was divorce. Marriage wasn't the irreparable thing which their family traditions a.s.sumed it to be. As a tolerably diligent reader of the personal items in the papers, Jennie had more than once read of divorces granted to young couples who had parted at the church door.

Naturally, she shrank from the fuss it would involve, but better the fuss than....

Having got up, for the reason that she couldn't stay in bed, she dressed slowly, because none of the family was as yet astir. She would surprise her mother by lighting the gas range and making the coffee before anyone came down. Thus it happened that she saw the postman crossing the street with a letter in his hand. Though letters were not rare in the family, they were rare enough to make the arrival of one an incident. She went to the door to take it from the postman's hand. Seeing it addressed to Miss Follett and bearing the postmark "Marillo," her knees trembled under her.

Having read what Mrs. Collingham had written, Jennie's first thought was that her early rising enabled her to keep this missive secret. What it could portend was beyond her surmise. It was not unfriendly, but neither was it cordial. It took the guarded tone, she thought, of a woman who meant to see her face to face before being willing to commit herself. As success on meeting people face to face had mostly been Jennie's portion, she was not so much afraid of the test as of what it might bring afterward.

What it might bring afterward was the recognition of her marriage and her translation into a rich family. This would mean the end of her father's and mother's material cares, Teddy's advancement at the bank, and brilliant careers for Gussie and Gladys in New York social life.

Jennie could think of at least half a dozen picture plays in which the sacrifice of some lovely, virtuous girl had done as much as this for her relatives.

So, all that day, sacrifice was much in her mind. Against a vague background of grandeur, it had the same emotional effect as of pa.s.sion sung to the accompaniment of a great orchestra. To see herself with a limousine at her command, and the family established in a modest villa somewhere near Marillo Park, if not quite within it, enabled her mentally to face another embrace from Bob in the spirit of an early-Christian maiden thinking of the lions awaiting her in the arena.

It would be terrible-but it could be met.

The vision of the limousine at her command seemed to have come partly true as a trim chauffeur stepped up to her in the station at Marillo, touching his cap and asking if he spoke to Miss Follett. He touched his cap again when he closed the door on her, and the car tooled away along a road which bore the same relation to the roads with which Jennie was familiar as a glorified spirit to a living man.

The park was not so much a park as it was a country. It had hills, valleys, landscapes, lakes, and what seemed to Jennie immense estates for which there was plenty of room. There were houses as big as hotels and much more beautiful. Trees, flowers, lawns, terraces, fountains, tennis courts, dogs, horses, and motor cars were as silver in the building of the Temple of Jerusalem-nothing accounted of. Jennie had seen high life as lived by the motion-picture heroine, but she had not believed that even wealth could buy such a Garden of Eden as this.

Expecting to reach Collingham Lodge a few minutes after pa.s.sing the grille, she had gone on and on, over roads that branched, and then branched, and then branched again, like the veinings of a leaf.

After descending at the white-columned portico, she went up the steps in a state bordering on trance. She knew what to do much as Elijah, having come by the chariot of fire to another plane of life, must have known what to do when required to get out and go onward. Since a man in livery opened a door of wrought-iron tracery over gla.s.s, she had no choice but to pa.s.s through.

It is possible that Max, by his supersenses, knew that she belonged to his master, for, springing toward her, he nosed her hand. It was, as she put it to herself, the only human touch in the first stages of her welcome. Thenceforward, during all the forty or fifty minutes of her stay, he kept close to her, either on foot or crouched beside her chair, till a curious thing happened when she regained the car.

I have said in the first stages of her welcome, for as soon as she entered the hall she heard a cheery voice.

"Oh, so it's you, Miss Follett! So glad you've come. It's really too bad to bring you so far-only, it seemed to me we might be cozier here than if I went up to town."

Adown the golden s.p.a.ce which seemed to Jennie much too majestic for anyone's private dwelling, a brisk figure moved, with hand outstretched.

A few seconds later Jennie was looking into eyes such as she didn't suppose existed in human faces. Beauty, dignity, poise, white hair dressed to perfection, and clothes such as Jennie had never seen off the stage-and rarely on it-were all subordinated to a hearty, kindly, womanly greeting before which they sank out of sight. Overpowered as she was by the material costliness of all she saw, the girl was well-nigh crushed by this unaffected affability. Like the Queen of Sheba at the court of Solomon, to be Scriptural again, there was no more spirit left in her.

Mrs. Collingham went on talking as, side by side, they walked slowly up the strip of red carpet into the cool recesses of the house.

"I hope you didn't find the train too stuffy. It's too bad they won't give us a parlor car on the locals. For the last three or four years we only have a parlor car on what they call the 'husbands' trains'-one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and, my dear, they make us pay for it as if-"

A toss of the hands proved to Jennie that Mrs. Collingham knew the difference between cheap and dear, which again took her by surprise.

They pa.s.sed through the terrace drawing-room, which Jennie couldn't notice because she trod on air, and came out to the flagged pavement.

Even here, Mrs. Collingham didn't pause, but, leading the way to the end of it, she went round a corner to the northern and more private side of the house, which looked into a little wood.

"Mr. Collingham's at home-just driven down-but I'm not going to have him here. Men are such a nuisance when women talk about intimate things, don't you think? They make such mountains of molehills. It's just as when you have a cry. They think your heart must be breaking, and never seem to understand that it gives you some relief."

Jennie was still more astounded. That the mistress of Collingham Lodge, a great figure in Marillo Park, and therefore high up in the peerage of the United States, could have the same feelings as herself seemed the touch of nature that makes the whole world kin to a degree she had put beyond the limits of the human heart.

They came to a construction like a giant birdcage-a room out of doors, yet sheltered from noisome insects like their own screened piazza, furnished with an outdoor-indoor luxury.

"We don't have many mosquitoes at Marillo," Mrs. Collingham explained, as she led the way in, "but in spring they can be troublesome. So we'll have our tea here. Gossip will bring it presently. Where will you sit? I think you'll like that chair. There! What about a cushion? Oh, I'm sure you don't need it at your age, but, still, one likes to be comfortable.

No, Max; stay out. Well, if you must come in, come in. He seems to like you," she chatted on. "He's Bob's dog, and I suppose he takes to Bob's friends."

Rendered speechless by this frank reference to the man who was the bond between them, there was, fortunately, no immediate need for Jennie to speak, since Gossip appeared in the doorway pushing the tea equipage. It was a little table on wheels, and on it Jennie noticed, in a general way, every magnificent detail-the silver tray, the silver kettle, the silver teapot, the silver tongs, the silver spoons. "And all of them solid," she said to herself, awesomely. She regretted that she wouldn't be at liberty to recount these marvels at home. At home, they thought her merely at the studio, while she had been borne away through the air as by a witch on a broomstick.

Jennie would have said that Mrs. Collingham had hardly looked at her, but then, she reflected, every woman knew how little _looking_ you had to do to grasp the details of another woman's personality. You took them all in at a glance, as if you brought seven or eight senses into play.

Each time her hostess, now settled behind the tea table, lifted her fine eyes, Jennie was sure they "got" her, like a camera.

"You pose, don't you?" The words came out in a casual, friendly tone, as she busied herself with the spirit lamp. "That must be so interesting. I often wonder, when I'm in the big galleries, what the immortal women would have said had they known how their features would go down through the ages. Take Dorotea Nachtigal, for instance, the original of Holbein's 'Meyer Madonna' in Darmstadt-the most wonderful of all the Madonnas, I always say-and how queer I suppose she would have felt if she'd known that we should be adoring her when she's no more than a handful of dust. Or the model who posed for the Madonna di San Sisto! Or the young things who sat to Greuze! Did you ever think of them?"

Jennie saw how Bob could have come by words like "polygamous" and "monogamous." People at Marillo Park spoke a language of their own-"English with frills on it," was the way she put it to herself. From the intonation, she was able to frame her answer in the negative, while, once more, the superb eyes, which were oddly like Bob's little steely ones, were lifted on her with a smile.

"You know, I should think people would be crazy to paint you. How do you like your tea? Sugar? Cream? One lump? Two lumps?" Having flung out answers at random, Jennie leaned forward to take her cup, while the kindly voice ran on: "Just as you sit there you're a picture. Funny I should have given you a tan-colored cushion, because it tones in exactly."

Jennie explained that the various shades of brown and some of the deeper ones of red were among her favorites.

"Because they go so well with your hair," her hostess said, comprehendingly, and studying her now more frankly. "My dear, you've got the most lovely hair! It isn't auburn; it isn't coppery; it isn't red.

It's-what is it? Oh, I see! It's amber-it's the extraordinary shade Romney gets into some of his portraits of Lady Hamilton. You see it in the one in the Frick gallery, if I remember rightly. You must look the next time you're there."

Jennie tried to stammer that she would, only that her syllables ran into one another and became incoherent.

"But Romney couldn't paint _you_," Mrs. Collingham declared, enthusiastically, putting her cup to her lips. "He's too Georgian.

You're the twentieth century. You're the perfect spirit of the age-restless, rebellious, wistful, and delicate all at once. Girls nowadays remind me of exquisite fragile things like the spire of the Sainte Chapelle, only built of steel. You've got the steel look-all slender and unbendable. It's curious that-the way women look like the ages in which they're born. You've only to go through a portrait collection to see that it's so. Take the Stuart women, for instance-the Vand.y.k.e and Lely women-great saucer-eyed things, with sensual lips and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. And then the Holbein women, so terribly got up in their stiff Sunday clothes, which they must have hurried to put into their cedar chests the minute they got home from ma.s.s. But they belong to their time, don't you think?"

Jennie could only say she did think, vowing in her heart that the next day would see her going round the Metropolitan Museum with a catalogue.

"But you! Hubert Wray says he's done a wonderful study of you, and I'm crazy to see it. The only thing I don't like from his description is that he's got you in a Greek dress and att.i.tude, and _I_ think, now that I've seen you, that the day after to-morrow is your style. What do you say yourself?"

"I don't know about the day after to-morrow; I'm so busy with to-day."

Mrs. Collingham took this with a pleasant little laugh.

"You clever thing! You won't give yourself away." She mused a few seconds, a smile on her lips, and then said, with a sudden lifting of the eyes, "What do you think of Bob?"

The girl could only stammer:

"Think of him-in what way?"

"Do you think he looks like me?"

In this rapid, unexpected shifting of the ground, Jennie was like a giddy person trying to keep her head.