The Empty Sack Part 42

CHAPTER XXII

On landing from the _Venezuela_, Bob drove out to Collingham Lodge. He knew that by this time the family were in the Adirondacks, and that with Gull and his wife to look after him he should have the place to himself.

Now that he was known to be married he had first thought it possible to bring Jennie there, but had decided that the big empty house might frighten her with its loneliness. A hotel in New York was what she would probably prefer; and with all he had to do for Teddy, it would doubtless be most convenient for himself. He went to his old home, therefore, only as to a base from which to make further arrangements. Having unpacked a few things and eaten a snack of lunch, he would go to see his wife at once.

Though he had not expected to hear from her on landing, and still less to see her at the dock, he was faintly disappointed to receive neither of these forms of greeting. He reminded himself that not her coldness, but her inexperience, would account for this, and so made the more of his antic.i.p.ations for the afternoon. She had written to him while he was away, short, noncommittal letters, betraying a mind unused to correspondence rather than a heart opposed to it. Lack of habit, he told himself, would for a long time to come make her seem unresponsive when she would only be hesitating and observant.

It was the hot season at Marillo, and those houses which were not closed were somnolent. At Collingham Lodge, Max, with his madly joyful demonstrations, was the only expression of life. Within the house, the shades were down, the furniture befrocked. Nevertheless, it was home, and all the more home after the alien pageantry of the tropics and the south. Having bathed and changed his clothes, he found pleasure in roaming from one dim airless room to another, as if he had been absent for a year.

It was a greater pleasure for the reason that, ever since receiving his father's amazing cablegram, the vague antagonism he had felt for two or three years toward his parents had given place to affection and grat.i.tude. They had seemingly come round after all to acknowledging his right to be himself. The concession gave him a sense of loving them, of loving the things that belonged to them. He strolled into their rooms, looking about on the objects they used, as though in this way he got some contact with their personalities.

As yet, Jennie's family hardly entered the sphere of his conceptions. He knew she had a mother and sisters; he had seen and spoken to Teddy at the bank. But even the knowledge that the boy was in jail for killing a man didn't bring him or them near to him as realities. While there were things he should do for the boy, they would not be done for him, but for Jennie. What concerned her naturally concerned her husband; but otherwise his father and mother came first. For this new generosity on their part, for this opening of the arms, his heart glowed toward them, making them sensibly his own.

He was thinking of this as he stood in his mother's room, gazing round on the chintzy comfort he had all his life regarded with some awe. Not since he had been a little boy had he felt so warmly toward her as now.

A note from her at Quarantine had a.s.sured him, as she had a.s.sured him before he went to South America, that she was his mother and that in all trials he could count on her. Counting on her, he could count on everything, for however difficult his father might prove, she could manage him in the end. It made everything easier for him and for Jennie, turning an anxious outlook on life into a splendid hopefulness.

He was leaving the room to go and see if Mrs. Gull had cooked a chop for him when he noticed, propped against the wall and near the door by which he had come in, what looked like a picture carelessly covered with a crimson cloth. His mother had long talked of having her portrait done; he wondered if it could be that. He put his hand on it, and felt the frame. It was a picture, and, if a picture, undoubtedly the portrait.

"Let's see what the old lady looks like," were the words that pa.s.sed through his mind.

With a twitch the cloth was off, and he sprang back. The start was one of surprise. Looking for no more than the exquisite conventionality he knew so well, this vital nudity caught his breath and made his heart leap. It was as if he had actually come on some living pagan loveliness seated in one of the empty rooms. Tannhauser first beholding the G.o.ddess in the secrecy of the Venusberg must have felt something like this amazed tumult of the senses.

Turning from the great bay window in which he had hastily pulled up the shades, his excitement had consciously in it a presentiment of evil. She was so alive, and so much there on purpose!

Then a horror stole over him, like a chill that struck his bones. He crept forward, with a stricken, fascinated stare. _It couldn't be_, he was saying to himself; and yet-and yet-_it was_.

The bearings of this conviction didn't come to him all at once. The fact was as much as he could deal with. She had sat and been painted like this! His impressions were as poignant and confused as if he had seen her struck dead. He couldn't account for it. He couldn't explain the presence of the thing here in his mother's room.

On the lower bar of the frame he saw an inscription plate, getting down on all fours to read it-"Life and Death: by Hubert Wray."

So Hubert had done it; Hubert had seen her in this flinging-off of mystery. Of course!

His thought flashed back to the day when he had first made her acquaintance. Leaning a little forward, she was sitting in this very Byzantine chair, on this very dais, wearing a flowered dress, a flower-wreathed Leghorn hat in her lap. Wray, in a painting smock, was standing with the palette and brushes in his hand, making a sketch of her more or less on the lines of a Reynolds or a Gainsborough. He had dropped him a line telling him he had taken a studio and inviting him to look him up. He hadn't looked him up till a week or two had gone by; but, having once seen this girl, he did so soon again.

Of him she had taken little or no notice. When, later, he forced himself on her attention, she made his approaches difficult. When he asked her to marry him she had at first laughed him off, and then refused him in so many words. But as she generally based her refusal, unconsciously, perhaps, on the social differences between them, he wouldn't take her "No" for an answer. If he could ignore the social differences, it seemed to him that she could, while the advantages to her in marrying a Collingham were evident.

"And all the while this is what the trouble was."

What he meant by _this_ was more than the picture, "Life and Death,"

though how much more he made no attempt to measure. The truth that now emerged for him out of his memory of the winter months was that Wray loved Jennie, that Jennie loved Wray, and that he had been a blind fool never to have seen it. He threw himself on his mother's couch, burying his face in the cushions.

As much as from anything else he suffered from the breakdown of his convictions. He had been so glib on the subject of his instinct. Love could make mistakes, he had said to Edith, but instinct couldn't. He had been the other half of Jennie; Jennie had been the other half of him.

She couldn't be unfaithful to him, because he knew she couldn't. His love was protecting her like a magic cloak, while she was.... The awful shame of a man whose foolish stammerings of pa.s.sion are held up to public ridicule seemed to kill the heart in his body.

And yet, when he staggered to his feet and strode toward the obsessing thing to pull the cloth over it again, he started back once more. The woman with the skull had changed. She was a coa.r.s.e creature now, common and sensual. Amazement pinned him to the spot, his hands raised as if at sight of an apparition. Then slowly, insensibly, weirdly, Jennie came back again, though not quite the Jennie he had seen at first. This Jennie retained the traits of the second woman-a Jennie coa.r.s.ened, common, and sensual, in spite of being exquisite, too.

He walked in and out of the other rooms on the floor, so as to clear his mind of the suggestion. When he came back, he saw the second woman, and the second woman only; but having moved into a new light, he found Jennie there as before. It was like sorcery. Whether the thing had a baleful life, or whether his perceptions were growing crazed, he couldn't tell.

Neither could he tell what he was to do with regard to the plans he had been making. A hotel in New York _now_....

But the immediate duties were evident. Nominally he had come back to befriend the boy, and the boy must be befriended. To do that he must have a knowledge of the facts. Farther than this he had been unable to progress even by the hour, in the early afternoon, when he was limping along Indiana Avenue.

He had telephoned his coming, and Jennie had answered in a dead voice which could hardly be interpreted as a welcome. It was like a guilty voice, he said to himself, though he corrected the thought instantly, to argue in favor of emotion.

He had spent the intervening two or three hours arguing. Jennie was a model, and he must not be surprised if a model's work, however startling to one who was not a model, should seem a matter of course to her. All professions had peculiarities strange to those who didn't belong to them, and the model's perhaps most of all. He couldn't judge; he couldn't condemn. He must try to understand her from her own point of view. Probably her posing in this way seemed the most natural thing in the world to her; and, if so, he must make it seem the same to himself.

He couldn't expect her to have the hesitations and circ.u.mspections of a girl from Marillo Park. If she was true to her own standards, it was all he had a right to look for.

And yet there was Wray. He had long seen in Hubert a fellow whom no girl could love "and get away with it." These were the words he had used of his friend, and he had considered the detail none of his business. Most men were that way, more or less, and if he himself wasn't, it was not a moral excellence, but a trick of temperament. But that Jennie was in danger from Wray was a thought that never occurred to him. Her innocence and defenselessness, combined with what he had taken to be a kind of studio code of honor, would have been enough to protect her, even had his suspicions been roused, which they never were. He tried to smother those suspicions even now, saying to himself that he had nothing against her except that she had been a model-in all for which a model was ever called upon.

He had that-and the timbre of her voice on the telephone. There was dismay in that voice, and terror. If it wasn't a guilty voice....

But, as a matter of fact, it was a guilty voice. In an overwhelming consciousness of guilt, Jennie had spent the whole of the ten days since the coming of his cablegram. The man who at a distance of four or five thousand miles could know that Teddy was in jail and act so promptly for the good of all might be aware of anything. Having always seemed immense and overshadowing, he became G.o.dlike now from his sheer display of power. It was power so great that she could put forth no claim; she could only wait humbly on his will.

As, hidden behind a curtain, she watched for his coming along the avenue, all her thoughts were focused into speculation as to how he would approach her. Would he be sorry for having married her? She could only fear that he would be. She had never mistrusted his mother's reading of his character-that he made love to girls one day and forgot them the next-in addition to which she had involved him in this terrible disgrace. Whatever excuse those who loved Teddy might make for him, the fact remained that to the world he was a bank robber and a murderer. All his kin must share in the condemnation meted out to him, and Bob's first task as a married man must be that of defending her and hers against public disdain. He might be as brave as a lion in doing that, but, she reasoned, he couldn't like the necessity. He might say he did, and yet she wouldn't be able to believe him. Even if he still cared for her as he had cared when he went away, his marriage to her couldn't possibly be viewed otherwise than as a misfortune; and he might not still care for her.

She saw him as he limped round the corner at the very end of the street.

He wore a Panama hat and a white-linen suit. Luckily, Gussie and Gladys had gone back to work and her mother was lying down. She couldn't have borne the suspense had she not been all alone. Even Pansy's searching eyes, as she stood with her little squat legs planted wide apart, trying to understand this new element in the situation, were almost more than Jennie could endure.

Bob advanced slowly, examining the numbers of the houses, many of which were lacking. Seventeen, Fifteen, and Thirteen were, however, over their doors, so that he was duly prepared for Eleven.

"I'll know by the first look in his eyes," she kept saying to herself, "whether he's sorry he married me or not."

As he pa.s.sed number Thirteen she got up from the arm of the big chair on which she had been perched, and found she could hardly stand. It was all she could do to creep into the entry and open the front door. When he turned into the little cement strip leading up to it, she shrank back into the shadow. He was abreast of the two hydrangea trees before he saw her. When he did so he stood still. It seemed to her that an unreckonable time went by before a smile stole to his lips, and when it did it was wavering, flickering, more poignant than no smile at all.

Her inner comment was: "Yes; he's sorry. Now I know." Pride, another new force in her character, made of her a woman with a will, as she added, "I must help him to get out of it-somehow."

But Pansy, sensing a nimbus of good will as imperceptible to Jennie as the pervasive scent of the summer, lilted down the steps, raised her forepaws against his shin, and gazed up into his face adoringly.

CHAPTER XXIII

It was a help to Bob Collingham that his first glance at Jennie decided his att.i.tude for the near future. Whatever his doubts and questionings, he could add nothing to the trials she had to face. Whatever she had done, whatever the net of circ.u.mstances in which she had been caught, he must act as if, as far as he himself was concerned, he was satisfied.

Whether she loved him or whether she didn't, or whether her duties as a model had or had not made her indifferent to considerations to which most people were sensitive, were questions that must be postponed.

This conviction, which flashed on him as he saw her shrinking in the entry, was confirmed when he felt her crumpled in his arms, relieved by his presence and yet frightened by the new conditions which it wrought.

It was the same dependent but rebellious little Jennie, clinging to him and yet trying to slip away from him. It was as if she begged for a love which the perversity of her tortured little heart wouldn't allow her to accept. Very well then; he must measure it out to her a little at a time, as you fed a sick person or a starving man, till she got used to it. When she was stronger and he more at peace with himself, they could tackle the personal problems between them.

So, when she struggled from his arms, he let her go, following her into the living-room.

"Gussie and Gladys are back at work," she said at once, to explain the fact that none of his new connections were there to greet him, "and momma's lying down. She always lies down at this time of day, ever since daddy died." She dropped into one big shabby armchair, motioning him to another. "And there's something else I must tell you. Ever since-this thing happened to Teddy-she hasn't been-well, not right in her mind."

The stand he had taken became more imperative. A father's death, a mother's collapse, a brother's crime had put her at the head of her little troop of three, to bear everything alone. He had left behind him an inexperienced girl; he had come back to find a woman already accustomed to rising to emergencies. The change was perceptible in the clearer, slightly older cutting of her features, as well as in the greater authority with which she spoke. Where the contours of her profile had been soft and vague, there was now a delicate chiseling; where there had been hesitation in words, there was now the firmness of one obliged to know her mind.

As she sketched her mother's mental state, he sat on the extreme edge of his big chair, straining forward so as to be near her without touching her, his fingers clasped between his knees. She continued to speak nervously, with agitation, and yet lucidly.

"She isn't very bad. She's only what you'd call unsettled. It's not that she does anything, but rather that, after all the years when she's worked so hard, she just sits and does nothing. It's as if she was lost in thinking; and when she comes back she says such terribly strange things."