The Letter of the Contract Part 8

He looked relieved. "Well, that's just it. That's just what I thought."

He colored more deeply, with a hectic spot in each cheek. "Life isn't all beer and skittles to me, don't you know--and you'd be the kind of thing I haven't got, don't you know?" He leaned toward her beseechingly.

"Do you see now?"

"I think I do. You mean that we'd mutually take care of each other."

"Well, that's what it would amount to--not to say any more about my being so awfully fond of you. You won't forget that."

She smiled through her tears. "Oh no; I'm not likely to forget it. I wish I could tell you--"

But she broke off because she could say no more, struggling to her feet.

He agreed to her request that she should have time to think his proposal over, and also that he should let her return alone to the hotel, remaining in the shelter with the crooning child long after she had gone away.

But once she was out in the wind again she found it difficult to give the matter concentrated thought. Much as she had been moved while he talked to her, the emotion seemed to be blown away by the strong air of reality. It was like the crying in which she had sometimes indulged herself at a play, and which left no aftermath of sadness. She could hardly tell what aftermath had been left by Noel Ordway's words; but as far as she could judge it had everything in it to touch her and appeal to her, except the possible. And yet so much that was impossible had happened to her already, who knew but that the next incredible thing would be that she should become mistress of Foljambe Park? Why not?

Since the haven was open to her, and Chip had left the poor little craft of her life to toss in a sea too strong for it, why not creep into any refuge that would receive her? She would certainly be driven sooner or later into some such port--then why not into this?

She hurried homeward between the thundering breakers on the one hand and the tossing palms on the other, her mind in a state of storm. In the garden, as she pa.s.sed toward the hotel, she saw Miss Chesley with the children, but she couldn't stop and speak to them. She hurried. She wanted the protection of her room, of quiet, of the accessories to mental peace. Perhaps when she got these she should be able to think--and decide; so she hurried on.

To avoid the main hall, where people might speak to her, she took the short cut through the sun-pavilion, which would bring her nearer to the stairs. But on throwing open the door she stood still on the threshold with a little soundless gasp. "Oh!"

He came toward her sedately, the glimmer of a smile on the stamped gravity of his face. "I took the liberty of waiting for you. I couldn't bring myself to go back to Cap d'Ail without knowing how you were."

As he held her hand he seemed to bend over her with what she had already described to herself as a brooding concern. She knew she was blushing foolishly and that her knees were trembling under her; and yet, curiously enough, the little craft of her life seemed suddenly to find itself in quiet waters, ranged round by protecting hills. She was confused and sorry and glad and afraid all in one instant. Nothing but the habit of the hostess, which was so strong in her, enabled her to capture a conventional tone and say the obvious thing:

"I'm so glad you waited. Won't you sit down, and let me ring for tea?"

III

REPROACH

Chip had never really noticed her until on that Sunday morning in June it suddenly struck him that she was trying to get a word with him alone.

He had seen her, of course. She had been at Mountain Brook--which was the name of Emery Bland's place in New Hampshire--every time he had gone there; but, her quality being un.o.btrusive, he had paid her no attention.

Furthermore, both Bland and Mrs. Bland, being emphatic in personality and talkative, he had been the more easily led to ignore this reticent girl, whose function was apparently limited to seeing her aunt provided with a shawl, or her uncle with a cigar, at the right opportunities. If he thought of her at all, it was as of the living spirit of the furniture. The tables and chairs became animate in her, and articulate; but her claim to recognition had never gone beyond the necessity for a hand-shake or a smile. When he did take her hand--on arriving, or on coming down-stairs in the morning--he received an impression of something soft and slim and tender; but the moment of pleasure was always too fleeting for conscious registration. Similarly, when, from a polite instinct to include her in the conversation, he smiled vaguely in her direction, he received a look gentle and beaming and almost apologetic in return; but it was never more to him than if the dimly l.u.s.trous surfaces of Mrs. Bland's nice Sheraton had suddenly become responsive. She made no demand; and he offered no more than she asked.

Perhaps the fact that the girl was not really the niece of either Mr. or Mrs. Bland had something to do with his tendency to treat her as a negligible quant.i.ty. Mrs. Bland had explained the situation to him during his first visit to Mountain Brook.

"Lily isn't our niece at all," she had said, in a tone which seemed to reproach Lily with an inadvertance. "She's no relation to us whatever.

We don't know who she is. She doesn't even know herself. Since you insist," she continued, as though Chip had been pressing for information, "we got her out of an orphanage, the year we built this house. Mr. Bland seemed to think the house ought to have something young in it; and so--"

"You might have had a dog," Chip said, dryly.

"You needn't laugh. It wasn't _my_ desire to adopt a child. I simply yielded to Mr. Bland, as I do in everything. The only stipulation I made was that she should call us uncle and aunt. I couldn't bear to be called mother by a child who wasn't my own; but Mr. Bland is so odd that he wouldn't have cared. I dare say you've noticed how odd he is."

Chip could see that Bland might be odd from his wife's point of view. He was the self-made man who had shed the traces of self-making. Mrs. Bland was fond of describing herself as a self-made woman; but the stages of the process by which she had "turned herself out" were visible. She would have been disappointed had it not been so. Having confessed from youth upward that her ambition was "to make the most of herself," there had never, in her case, been any question of the _ars celare artem_. She belonged to a number of women's clubs of which the avowed object was "self-improvement," and attended such cla.s.ses on "current events" as would keep her posted on the problems of the day without the bore of reading the papers. As a self-made woman she also looked the part, dressing for breakfast as she would like to be found in the afternoon, with but slight variation for dinner. In her full panoply of plum or dove color she suggested one of those knights eternally in armor who decorate baronial halls. Chip considered it probable that Emery Bland would never have chosen her as the life-long complement to himself had he not taken that step while he was still an obscure "up-state" country lawyer, and she the dignified young school-teacher who stood for "cultivation" in their little town. Cultivation had always been to Mrs.

Bland what hunting is to the rider to hounds--the zest was in the chase.

The zest was in the chase, and the quarry but an excuse for the run.

Over hedges of lectures, and ditches of "talks," and through turnip-fields of serious, ponderous women like herself, green even in winter, and after being touched by frost, Mrs. Bland kept on in full career, with "cultivation" scudding ahead like a fox she never caught a glimpse of, and which her hounds tracked only by the scent. It was splendid exercise, and helped her to feel in the movement. If she failed to notice that her husband had long ago run the fleet animal to earth, and affixed the mask as an adornment to his home, it was only because their views of life were different.

No one would now suppose that there had been a time in Emery Bland's life when it had been his aim also to "cultivate himself," and when he had actually used the phrase. Between the debonair, experienced New York lawyer, so much in demand for cases requiring discretion and so capable of dealing with them--between him and the farmer's boy he had been there was no more resemblance than between a living word and the dead root out of which it has been coined. In Emery Bland's case the word was not only living, but pliant, eloquent, and arresting to ear and eye. He was one of those men who overlook nothing that can be counted as self-expression, from their dress to the sound of their syllables.

Superficially genial, but essentially astute, he had made everything grist that came to his mill, flourishing on it not only in the financial sense, but also in that of character. It was said that he knew as many life histories as a doctor or a priest, and generally the more dramatic ones. The experience had clearly made him cynical, but tolerant also, and human, with a tendency, as far as he was personally concerned, to being morally strait-laced. He had seen so much of the picturesque side of life that he could appreciate the prosaic, which, in Chip's explanation, was why he could stand by Mrs. Bland. Other people's surfeits of champagne and ortolans had a.s.sured his own taste for plain roast beef. But he himself ordered the porcelain on which his simple fare was served, and the wines by which it was accompanied, drunk from fine old Irish or Bohemian gla.s.s.

Chip took this in by degrees. His first acquaintance with a man who was to exercise some influence on his future was purely professional. He had gone to him as an offset to Aunt Emily. If the results of this move were indirect--since Aunt Emily had won the victory--they became apparent in time. They became apparent when in Chip's bruised heart, where everything healthy seemed to have been stunned, a slight curiosity began to awaken concerning his new friend's personality.

He came to consider him a friend by accident--the accident of a club, where, finding themselves sitting down to dine at the same moment, they had taken the same table. Primarily, it was an opportunity to adjust some loose ends of Chip's domestic affairs; incidentally, they stumbled on a common hobby in Victorian English politics. There was no subject on which Emery Bland was better informed, with a learning that covered the whole long stretch from Lord Melbourne to Lord Salisbury, and which he could garnish with anecdote _ad libitum_. It was a kind of conversation of which Chip, who had been brought up partly in England, rarely got a taste in New York, and for which Bland, on his side, didn't often find an interested listener. Something like an intimacy thus sprang up, but an intimacy of the kind common among men who have little or no point of contact out of office hours or away from the neutral ground of the club.

Within these limits the meetings had already been numerous before it occurred to Chip--more or less idly--that while Bland knew too much of his sad background, he knew nothing of Bland's. An occasional reference revealed the lawyer as a married man, but beyond that basic fact their acquaintance had no more attachment to the main social structure of life than a floating island of moss and flowers has to the system of geological strata. It was Bland himself who took the first step in the direction of closer a.s.sociation.

"Well, how are you getting on?"

He asked the question while slipping into the seat opposite Chip as the latter lunched at the club, where they met most frequently.

"Oh, so so."

"H'm. So so. _That's_ what you call it."

The tone implied reproach or reproof or expostulation. Chip kept his eyes on his knife and fork.

"Well, what do _you_ call it?"

"Oh, I'm not obliged to give it a name. I hear other people do that."

"And what do other people say--since you seem to want me to ask the question?"

"I do. I think you ought to know. They say it's a pity."

Chip took on the defiant air of a bad boy. "They can say it--and go to blazes."

"They'll say it, all right. Don't you worry about that. But I rather think that you'll do the going to blazes--at this rate."

Chip raised his haggard eyes. "Well, why not? What is there any better than blazes for me to go to? Besides, it isn't so awful--when you've got nothing else."

"Oh, rot, Walker! I'm ashamed of you. I can imagine a man of your type doing almost anything else but taking to drink."

Chip shrugged his shoulders with the habit acquired in French schools.

"On fait ce que l'on peut. I had three resources left to me--wine, woman, and song. For song I've no ear; for woman--well, that's all over; so it came down to Hobson's choice."

"Hobson's choice be blowed! Walker's choice! And you've just time enough left to cast about for a set of alternatives. Why, I've seen scores of men in your fix; and of some of them it was the salvation."

"And what was it of the others?"

"h.e.l.l. But it was a h.e.l.l of their own making."

"All right. I'm willing to accept the word. It's a h.e.l.l of _my_ own making--but it's h.e.l.l, just the same."

"But, good Lord! man, even if it is h.e.l.l, you don't want to wallow in it."