The Fifth Wheel Part 7

"Don't, please, _here_. It's so fearfully light. Don't, Breck," I said.

"I've got the car," he whispered. "It will take us two hours. I've got it all planned. It's a peach of a night. You've got to come. I'm not for waiting any longer. You've got to marry me tonight, you little fish!

I'll wake you up. Do you hear me? Tonight in two hours. I'm not going to hang around any longer. You've got to come!"

I managed to struggle away.

"Don't talk like that to me. It's insulting! Don't!" I said.

"Insulting! Say, ring off on that--will you? Insulting to ask a girl to marry you! Say, that's good! Well, insulting or not, I've made up my mind not to hang around any longer. I'll marry you tonight or not at all! You needn't be afraid. I've got it all fixed up--license and everything." He whipped a paper out of his pocket. "We'll surprise 'em, we will--you and I. I'm mad about you, and always have been. The mater--huh! Be a shock to her--but she'll survive."

"I wouldn't elope with the king of England!" I said hotly. "What do you think I am? Understand this, Breck. I require all the honors and high ceremonies that exist."

"d.a.m.n it," he said, "you've been letting me come here without much ceremony every night, late, on the quiet. What have you got to say to that? I'm tired of seeing you pose on that high horse of yours. Come down. You know as well as I you've been leading me along as hard as you could for the last week. Good Lord--what for? Say, what's the game? I don't know. But listen--if you don't marry me _now_, then you never will. There's a limit to a man's endurance. Come, come, you can't do better for yourself. You aren't so much. The mater will never come around. She's got her teeth set. The car's ready. I shan't come again."

"Wait a minute," I said. "I'll be back in a minute." And I went straight into the house and upstairs to my room, knelt down before my bureau and drew out a blue velvet box. Breck's ring was inside.

Just as I was stealing down the stairs again, ever-on-the-guard, Edith appeared in the hall in her nightdress.

"What are you after?" she asked.

For answer I held out the box toward her. She came down two or three of the stairs.

"What you going to do with it?" she demanded.

"Give it back to Breck."

She grasped my wrist. "You little fool!" she exclaimed.

"But he wants me to run off with him. He wants me to elope."

"He does!" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, her eyes large. "Well?" she inquired.

I stared up at Edith on the step above me in silence.

"Well?" she repeated.

"You don't mean----" I began.

"His mother is sure to come around in time. They always do. _My_ mother eloped," she said.

"Edith Campbell Vars," I exclaimed, "do you actually mean----" I stopped. Even in the dim light of the hall I saw her flush before my blank astonishment. "Do you mean----"

"Well, if you don't," she interrupted in defense, "everybody will think he threw _you_ over. You'll simply become an old glove. There's not much choice."

"But my pride, my own self-respect! Edith Vars, you'd sell your soul for society; and you'd sell me too! But you can't--you can't! Let go my wrist. I'm sick of the whole miserable game. I'm sick of it. Let me go."

"And I'm sick of it too," flung back Edith. "But _I've_ got a daughter's future to think about, I'd have you know, as well as yours. I've worked hard to establish ourselves in this place, and I've succeeded too. And now you come along, and look at the mess we're in! Humiliated! Ignored!

Insulted! It isn't my fault, is it? If I'd paddled my own canoe, I'd be all right today."

"You can paddle it hereafter," I flashed out. "I shan't trouble you any more."

"Yes, that's pleasant, after you've jabbed it full of holes!"

"Let me go, Edith," I said and pulled away my wrist with a jerk.

"Are you going to give it back to him?"

"Yes, I am!" I retorted and fled down the stairs, out of the door, across the porch, and into the moonlit garden as fast as I could go.

"Here, Breck--here's your ring! Take it. You're free. You don't need to hang around, as you say, any more. And I'm free, too, thank heaven! I would have borne the glory and the honor of your name with pride. Your mother's friendship would have been a happiness, but for no name, and for no woman's favor will I descend to a stolen marriage. You're mistaken in me. Everybody seems to be. I'm mistaken in myself. I don't want to marry you after all. I don't love you, and I don't want to marry you. I'm tired. Please go."

He stared at me. "You little fool!" he exclaimed, just like Edith. Then he slipped the box into his pocket, shrugged his shoulders, and in truly chivalrous fashion added, "Don't imagine I'm going to commit suicide or anything tragic like that, young lady, because I'm not."

"I didn't imagine it," I replied.

"I'm going to marry Gale Oliphant," he informed me coolly. "I'm going to give her a ring in a little box--and she'll wear hers. You'll see." He produced a cigarette and lit it. "She's no fish," he added. "She's a pippin, she is. Good night," he finished, and turned and walked out of the garden.

Three days later I went away from Hilton. Edith's tirades became unendurable. I didn't want even to eat her food. The spinet desk, the bureau, the chiffonier, the closet, I cleared of every trace of me. I stripped the bed of its linen and left the mattress rolled over the foot-board in eloquent abandonment. The waste-basket bulged with discarded odds and ends. One had only to look into that room to feel convinced that its occupant had disappeared, like a spirit from a dead body, never to return.

I went to my sister Lucy's. I did not write her. I simply took a morning train to Boston and called her up on the 'phone in her not far distant university town. She came trotting cheerfully in to meet me. I told her my news; she tenderly gathered what was left of me together, and carried the bits out here to her little white house on the hill.

CHAPTER X

A UNIVERSITY TOWN

I did not think I would be seated here on my rustic bench writing so soon again. I finished the history of my catastrophe a week ago. But something almost pleasant has occurred, and I'd like to try my pencil at recording a pleasant story. Scarcely a story yet, though. Just a bit of a conversation--that's all--fragmentary. It refers to this very bench where I am sitting as I write, to the hills I am seeing out beyond the little maple tree stripped now of all its glory. I cannot see a dash of color anywhere. The world is brown. The sky is gray. It is rather chilly for writing out-of-doors.

The conversation I refer to began in an ugly little room in a professor's house. There was a roll-top desk in the room, and a map, yellow with age, hanging on the wall. The conversation ended underneath a lamp-post on a street curbing, and it was rainy and dark and cold. And yet when I think of that conversation, sitting here in the brown chill dusk, I see color, I feel warmth.

When I first came here to Lucy's three weeks ago, she a.s.sumed that I was suffering from a broken heart. I had been exposed and showed symptoms--going off alone for long walks and consuming reams of theme paper as if I was half mad. I told Lucy that my heart was too hard to break, but I couldn't convince her. There wasn't a day pa.s.sed but that she planned some form of amus.e.m.e.nt or diversion. Even Will, her husband, cooperated and spent long evenings playing rum or three-handed auction, so I might not sit idle. I tried to fall in with Lucy's plans.

"But, please, no men! I don't want to see another man for years. If any man I know finds out I'm here, tell him I won't see him, absolutely," I warned. "I want to be alone. I want to think things out undisturbed.

Sometimes I almost wish I could enter a convent."

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" Lucy would exclaim.

"You needn't be. You didn't break my engagement. For heaven's sake, Lucy, _you_ needn't take it so hard."

But she did. She simply brooded over me. She read to me, smiled for me, and initiated every sally that I made into public. In conversation she picked her way with me with the precaution of a cat walking across a table covered with delicate china. She made wide detours to avoid a reference or remark that might reflect upon my engagement. Will did likewise. I lived in daily surprise and wonder. As a family we are brutally frank. This was a new phase, and one of the indirect results, I suppose, of my broken engagement.

What I am trying to arrive at is the change of att.i.tude in me toward Lucy. Usually when I visit Lucy I do just about as I please; refuse to attend a lot of stupid student-teas and brain-f.a.gging lectures, or to exert myself to appear engrossed in the conversation of her intellectual dinner guests.

I used to scorn Lucy's dinners. They are very different from Edith's, where, when the last guest in her stunning new gown has arrived and swept into the drawing-room, followed by her husband, a maid enters, balancing on her tray a dozen little gla.s.ses, amber filled; everybody takes one, daintily, between a thumb and forefinger and drains it; puts it nonchalantly aside on shelf or table; offers or accepts an arm and floats toward the dining-room. At Edith's dinners the table is long, flower-laden, candle-lighted. Your partner's face smiles at you dimly.

His voice is almost drowned by the chatter and the laughter all about, but you hear him--just barely--and you laugh--he is immensely droll--and then reply. And he laughs, too, contagiously, and you know that you are going to get on!