The Long Lane's Turning Part 6

His voice had subtly altered and he drew closer to her where she stood, moveless and straight against the dark foliage, her gaze averted.

"Then--I met you! I have known many women, but they have been nothing, less than nothing, to me! Business has been the only thing that really counted. But since I met you, the whole world has been changing for me. Even my work isn't the main thing to me any more. The main thing is _you_!"

She lifted her eyes, wide with the swift sense of the unexpected--touched now with an odd, disquieting prescience. His voice was no longer the cold, even voice of the Cameron Craig she had known.

There was pa.s.sion in it. She saw his big hand tremble.

"There has never been a day or hour since then when I have not wanted you! You have entered into my blood and my brain, and the want of you has coloured all I have thought and done! If this is love, then I love you--Echo, Echo!"

She shrank perceptibly at the name on his lips. "Stop!" she said.

"The love you talk of must be mutual. I do not--care for you in that way. I never could!"

"That makes no difference to me!" he protested. "I know what I want--I always have. And I want you."

"No," she said. "It is not the real _me_ that you want, but we can pa.s.s that by. The important fact is that you have offered your last price and the bid is declined."

He looked at her with a sudden flash in his eyes. "Do I deserve that?"

He had grown pale to the lips.

"Yes, you do. I have told you that I should never love you. Yet that means less than nothing to you. You have apparently not considered my possible love as a requisite in the case. It is 'breeding' you want, and beauty--and for that you make your offer. You propose purchase, not exchange, Mr. Craig. Well, I am not for sale!"

He flushed to his hair a dark, heavy red. He appeared to be controlling himself by a fierce effort. "Don't answer me now," he said. "Let me speak to you again later."

"I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all. You will please consider it final."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all.

You will please consider it final"]

A whirl of what seemed almost rage shook him; with a single stride he reached her and seized both her hands. "Is there--another man?" There was what startled her now in the harsh, hard voice.

She stiffened. "Well," she said, "--and if there is?"

At the chill quiet of her voice all the vicious strength and intolerance of the man blazed out. "You are right!" he said savagely.

"It could make no difference to me! I will not take your answer--do you understand? In time you will give me a different one. I have waited for other things and I have had them in the end. I can wait for you!"

He released her hands--so violently that she fell back a step. Then, while she stood regarding him in shocked and indignant amaze, summoning all her forces to meet this fury that had both astonished and repelled her, his face swiftly changed. The flush of anger ebbed, the flash died in his eyes.

Once again his accustomed self, with the steady, confident eyes and swing of shoulder, he drew aside to let her pa.s.s and followed her along the box-bordered path to the piazza.

As they entered the blue-parlour, a lady very smart in black-and-white, and a sailor-hat whose girlish brim youthened her mature beauty, rose from her seat with Mrs. Allen and Nancy Langham, Echo's house-guest, a slight, glowing girl of nineteen, with eyes like marigolds in shade.

"Well, Echo," she said, "I thought you never _would_ appear. I just ran in to remind you that you and Nancy promised to come to my dinner to-night at the 'Farm.' I've asked some of the youngsters out for a little dance afterward." She smiled a brilliant recognition to the heavy figure behind her.

"Mr. Craig!" she exclaimed. "So you are in town! How nice it would be of you to come too. Or do you find country-club gaieties too stale and unprofitable?"

He bowed over her hand. "My dear Mrs. Spottiswoode!" he said. "This is my lucky day! I shall be more than delighted!"

CHAPTER VIII

THE THRUST

The "Farm," as the Country-Club was popularly known to its habitues, was a long, three-storied structure of red brick on the selvedge of the southern suburb, set in a grove of maple trees facing a lake whose still depths were stirred by budding water-lilies, like the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of young girls. With its golf-links, and tennis-courts and its ball-room which formed an L at one side, its white, bal.u.s.traded verandahs, it was the favoured resort of both the frivolous and athletic; its monthly dances were the gayest of the season's informal functions and on Sat.u.r.day evenings its row of little dining-rooms, that looked out on a gentle slope of shrubbery and gravelled walks p.r.i.c.ked out with paper lanterns, were favourite resorts for small dinner-parties.

Mrs. Spottiswoode's dinners were apt to have a pleasurable sprinkling of youth and sobriety and to-night the dozen of the younger set found sufficient foil in the fashionable rector of St. Andrews in clerical dress relieved only by the tiny amethyst cross that swung upon his waistcoat--in Senator Peyton, party-whip at Washington and one of the state's distinguished citizens, with piercing sword-grey eyes under brows as black as midnight--and finally in Cameron Craig.

As Echo Allen had said to her father, the latter was not "one of them."

The phrase to her had been an instinctive expression of that subtle sense of caste that had been born in her, springing from long lines of gentle ancestors that linked back beyond the days of the Old Dominion.

But the distinction lay deep in the mental formula of the man: it was not to be perceived in externals. To-night, in his faultless evening-dress, with his keen, strong face and a.s.sured manner, he had an air even of distinction that well became him, and the instant's painful embarra.s.sment that Echo felt as her hand touched his in their first greeting yielded quickly to an unwilling admiration of his poise and control. If that flare of pa.s.sion in the garden had left its traces, they had been successfully covered. He was once more the Cameron Craig she had known--till yesterday.

But beneath that unruffled exterior Craig's every pulse was in tumult.

At table he found himself opposite Echo. The decorations were red roses and in a ruby gown with a single rose in the coil of her tawny hair, she seemed to him an inherent part of the scheme, a ruby pendent to the rich, shimmering setting. There had been many women to whom he had been pa.s.singly attracted--his tastes had been catholic enough in that regard! But he had never seen one whom he had wished to marry.

He had spoken truly when he said that the women he had known had really meant nothing to him. His licenses had been but incidents after all.

They had not ministered to the mental side of his nature, whereas this pa.s.sion had taken swift and complete possession. As he saw her now, her cheeks flushing to the glow of the candles and her eyes like softly lighted sapphires, he felt open wide within him an abyss that thronged thick with distempered imaginings. There was another man! She had not denied it. And with the thought there grew in him a slow, cold hatred and determination.

Yet his face, as Echo glanced across the roses, betrayed no sign of disquiet. He was apparently listening amusedly to the small-talk of his partner, Nancy Langham, in a gown of pale gauze that made her look like a small, eager tiger-lily caught in a hampering cloud. In the interstices of conversation Echo could catch whiffs of her laughing nonsense:

"Isn't Dr. Custis quite _wickedly_ handsome for a rector! I've been instructed _not_ to ask him if he is related to Martha Washington. The man across from Mrs. Spottiswoode is Richard Brent, he is 'The Herald,'

and a power in the community, I believe. Our hostess is wearing the new wave; it costs a lot, but they say it's guaranteed to last six months. And to think," she sighed, "that Melissa, my maid, spends a dollar a week trying to have her wool ironed _straight_! The man with the goatee, who looks so Spanishy, is Mr. Horace Leighton, the New York artist who is doing the mural paintings for the new City Hall here."

"So there isn't any one here who isn't anybody!" Craig observed.

"Only me," she said. "The reason I'm asked is because I'm frivolous.

I'm supposed to offset the feast of reason with bubbles and froth."

"At any rate," remarked the senator, "seriousness is not to fall in arrears. Down at the other end they have actually got to politics."

Echo's glance followed his. Their hostess was holding a gla.s.s of wine between her eye and the candle-light, which splashed a bright crimson ray on her pretty face. It was the rector who was speaking:

"As for myself, I'm afraid I'm a friend to all the old, hackneyed arguments. 'If meat maketh my brother to offend,' you know." He pointed to his wine-gla.s.s, which, with the arrival of the soup, he had turned upside-down. "You see I am consistent."

"Politics?" queried Echo. "It seems to be only teetotalism."

"Ah," the senator answered, "but it's coming to be the same thing nowadays."

"One understands the individual objection on moral grounds," said Mrs.

Spottiswoode. "That's a matter of personal belief and conscience. And the Church must be above criticism--must take the sterner course. But for those of us who don't think it wrong, the other arguments seem so--so local. I suppose drinking does keep the negroes from doing as much work as they might, but it's hard on the rest of us to have to cut our cloth by the farmer's pattern! We here, for example, at this table, are to go without our sauterne because he has trouble in getting in his tobacco."

"Exactly," agreed the churchman. "The greatest good of the greatest number. And isn't that true democracy, after all? But of course the agricultural problem is the least of it--there are the figures of poverty and crime. The two are twin-brothers, of course. And drink is the father of them both. Will, character, determination--a man with these may overcome the habit. But these are just the qualities that men in the ma.s.s lack. When a weak man falls our system keeps him down.

I once heard Thomas Malcolm--every one here knows of him and his work, I presume--say that for the average drunkard to reform with a saloon on every corner is about as easy as to hoist one's-self out of h.e.l.l by one's boot-straps. I'm inclined to think he is right. And I never saw a drunkard yet--a real Simon-pure drunkard, I mean; not a mere soph.o.m.oric tippler--who wouldn't jump at the chance to reform if he could. But he has no more chance of winning out now than a gambler against loaded dice." He paused, with a little gesture. "But then,"

he added, "the modern political movement for prohibition has made every one familiar with the basic arguments."

Treadwell, spruce young corporation attorney and cotillon leader, looked up interestedly from the other end of the table; the hostess's fan had begun to flutter--a sign of agitation. For Cameron Craig's affiliations with the great Trust were well-known, though presumably not to the clergyman, who had met him for the first time that evening.

Craig, however, seemed quite unconscious of personal implications.

"Do you seriously think, sir," he asked, with the faintest trace of irony, "that the statistics of crime would be materially lowered in your state if it went 'dry' next year?"