The Lovely Lady Part 11

"What _I_ feel----? After all, it's _her_ feeling, my dear Mr.

Weatheral, that we have to take into account. It wouldn't be fair for me to attempt to answer to you for that!"

"And of course if I can't _make_ her feel...." He did not trust himself to a conclusion.

They found, however, when the road issued on the coast opposite the great bursting bulks of spray, that Eunice's desertion and the extenuation of it to which they had lent themselves, had put them out of the mood for the high wind and warring surf of the Reef. Accordingly they turned aside at Peter's suggestion to have tea at a little country inn farther back in the hills, where the pound of the sea was reduced to a soft, organ-booming ba.s.s to which the shrill note of the needles countered in perfect tune. The tea garden, the favourite port of call for afternoon drives from the resorts hereabouts, lay back of the hostelry in a narrow, ferny glen from which springs issued. As Peter led the way up its rocky stair, they could hear the light laughter of a party just rising from one of the round rustic tables. The group descending poured past them a summer-coloured runnel down the little glen, and left them face to face with Eunice, who had lingered, her dress caught on a point of the rustic chair.

"Mamma--you!" She looked trapped, accused, though sheer astonishment held the others dumb. "We finished the game----" she began and stopped short; after all, her manner seemed to say, why shouldn't she have tea there with her friends? She made as if to sweep past after them but Mrs.

Goodward never moved from the narrow path. She was more embarra.s.sed, Peter saw, than her daughter, and as plainly at bay.

"Now that we are here----" she began in her turn.

"Now that you have followed me here," the girl rang out, "what is it that you have to say to me?" She was white and a bright flame spot showed on either cheek.

"I--oh," the elder woman by an effort drew the remnant of the grand manner about her; "it is Mr. Weatheral, I think, who might have something to say." She caught the occasion as it were on the wing. Peter heard the quick breath behind him with which she grasped it. "Now that you are here, however, I'll tell your party that you will be driving home with us." She gathered up her draperies and was gone down the path she had come before either of the others thought to stop her. Eunice had not made a move to do so. She stood clasping the back of the chair from which she had freed her dress, and looked across it mutinously at Peter.

"And what," she quivered, "has Mr. Weatheral to say to me?"

"There is nothing," he told her, "that I would say to you, Miss Goodward, unless you wished to hear it." His magnanimity shamed her a little.

"I broke my engagement to you," she admitted, "broke it to come here with--the others. I haven't any excuse to offer you."

"And when," Peter demanded of her, "have I asked any other excuse of you for anything that you chose to do except that you chose it. There _was_ something I wished to say to you, that I hoped for a more auspicious occasion...." He hurried on with it suddenly as a thing to be got over with at all hazards. "It was to say that I hoped you might not find it utterly beyond you to think of marrying me." He saw her sway a little, holding still to her chair, and moved toward her a step, dizzy himself with the sudden onset of emotion. "But now that it is said, if it distresses you we will say no more about it." She waved him back for a moment without altering her strained, trapped att.i.tude.

"Have you said this to mamma? And has she--has she said anything to you?

About me, I mean; how I might take it, or anything?"

"She said that she couldn't answer for you; that it was your feeling that must be taken into account. She put me, so to speak, on my own feet in so far as _that_ was concerned." He waited for her answer to that, and none coming, though he saw that she grew a little easier, he went on presently. "There is, however, much that I feel ought to be said about my feeling for you, what it means to me, what I hoped----" She stopped him with a gesture; he could see her lovely manner coming back to her as quiet comes to the surface of a smitten pool.

"That--one may take for granted, may one not? Since you _have_ asked me, that the feeling that goes to it is all I have a right to ask?"

"Quite, quite," he a.s.sured her. "It may be," he managed to smile upon her here for the easing of her sweet discomposure, "it may very easily be that I was thinking too much of my pleasure in saying it."

"It would, then, be a pleasure?" She had the air of s.n.a.t.c.hing at that as something concrete, graspable.

"It would, and it wouldn't. I mean if you were bothered by it. You could take everything for granted, everything."

"Even," she insisted, "to the point of taking it for granted that you would take things for granted from me: that you wouldn't expect anything--any expression, anything more than just accepting you?"

"Ah!" he cried, the wonder, the amazement of success breaking upon him.

"If you accepted me what more _could_ I expect." He had clasped the hand which she held out to check him and held it against his heart firmly that she shouldn't see how he trembled.

"I haven't, you know," she reminded him, "but if I was sure--very sure that you wouldn't ask any more of me than thinking, I ... might think about it." She was trembling now, though her hand was so cold, and suddenly a tear gathered and dropped, splashing her fine wrist.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he cried, moved more than he had thought it possible to be; "you can be perfectly sure that there will never be anything between you and me that shall not be exactly as you wish." He suited his action to the word, kissing the wet splash and letting her go.

"Why, then," she recovered herself with the smile that was now strangely like her mother's, sweeter for being smiled a little awry, "the best thing you can do is to find poor mamma and let us give her a cup of tea."

IV

"Peter, have you any idea what I am thinking about?"

"Not in the least, Ellen," which was not strictly the truth. He supposed she must be thinking naturally of the news he had told her not an hour since, of his engagement to Eunice Goodward. It lay so close to the surface of his own mind at all times that the slightest stir of conversation, like the wind above a secret rose, seemed always about to disclose it. They were sitting on the porch at Bloombury and the pointed swallows pitched and darted about the eaves.

"It was the smell of the dust that reminded me," said Ellen, "and the wild rose at the turn of the road; you can smell it as plain as plain when the air lifts a little. Do you remember a picnic that we were invited to and couldn't go? It was on account of being poor ... and I was just finding it out. I found out a good many things that summer; about my always going to be lame and what it would mean to us. It was dreadful to me that I couldn't be lame just by myself, but I had to mix up you and mother in it."

"We were glad, Ellen, to be mixed up in it if it made things easier for you."

"I know ... times I felt that way about it too, but that was when I was older ... as if it sort of held us all together; like somebody who had belonged to us all and had died. Only it was me that died, the me that would have been if I hadn't been lame.... Well, I hadn't thought it out so far that first summer; I just hated it because it kept us from doing things like other people. You were fond of Ada Brown, I remember, and it was because I was lame and we were so poor and all, that you couldn't go with her and she got engaged to Jim Harvey. I hope you don't think I have a bad heart, Peter, but I was always glad that Ada didn't turn out very well. Every time I saw her getting homelier and kind of bedraggled like, I said to myself, well, I've saved Peter from that at any rate. I couldn't have borne it if she had turned out the kind of a person you ought to have married."

"You shouldn't have worried, Ellen; very few men marry the first woman they are interested in."

"There was a girl you used to write home about--at that boarding-house.

I used to get you to write. I daresay you thought I was just curious.

But I was trying to find out something that would make me perfectly sure she wasn't good enough for you. She was a typewriter, wasn't she?"

"Something of that sort."

"Well!" Ellen took him up triumphantly, "you wouldn't have wanted to be married to a typewriter _now!"_

"I never really thought of marrying one, Ellen. I'm sure everything has turned out for the best."

"That's what I'm trying to tell you. You see I was determined it should turn out that way. I said, what was the use of being lame and being a burden to you unless there was something _meant_ by it. I'd have fretted dreadfully if I hadn't felt that there was something to come out of it.

And it has come.... Peter, you'd rather I'd saved you for this than anything that might have happened?"

"Much rather, Ellen."

It had surprised him in the telling, to see how accurately his sister had gauged the worldly advantage of his marriage. If Eunice Goodward had been a piece of furniture, Ellen couldn't have appraised her better at her obvious worth: beauty and character and family and the mysterious cachet of society. Clarice had been at work there, too, he suspected.

Miss Goodward fitted in Ellen's mind's eye into her brother's life and fortune as a picture into its frame.

"I'm very glad you feel that way about it, Ellen," he said again; he was on the point of telling her about the House of Shining Walls. The material from which he had drawn its earliest furnishings lay all about them, the receding blue of the summer sky, the aged, arching apple boughs. The scent of the wilding rose came faintly in from the country road--suddenly his sister surprised him with a flash of rare insight.

"I guess there can't anything keep us from the best except ourselves,"

she said. "Being willing to put up with the second best gives us more trouble than the Lord ever meant for us. Think of the way I've always wanted children--but if they'd been my real own, they'd have been sickly, likely, or even lame like me, or just ordinary like the only kind of man who would have married me. As it is, I've had Clarice's and now----" She broke off with a quick, old-maidish colour.

Ellen had gone so far as to name all of Peter's children in the days when nothing seemed so unlikely; now in the face of his recent engagement she would have thought it indelicate.

"_She_ would have liked you marrying so well, Peter," she finished with a backward motion of her head toward the room where the parlour set, banished long ago from the town house, symbolized for Ellen the brooding maternal presence.

"Yes, she would have liked it." There came back to him with deep satisfaction his mother's apprais.e.m.e.nt of young Mrs. Da.s.sonville, who must, as he recalled her, have been shaped by much the same frame of life as Eunice Goodward--the Lovely Lady. The long unused phrase had risen unconsciously to his lips on the day that he had brought Eunice her ring. He had spent a whole week in the city choosing it; three little flawless, oblong emeralds set with diamonds, almost encircling her finger with the mystic number seven. He had discovered on the day that she had accepted him, that it had to be emeralds to match the green lights that her eyes took on in the glen from the deep fern, the mossy bank and the green boughs overhead. On the terrace at Lessings'

under a wide June sky he had supposed them to be blue; but there was no blue stone of that sky colour of sufficient preciousness for Eunice Goodward.

She had been very sweet about the ring, touched with grateful surprise for its beauty and its taste. Something he could see of relief, of a.s.surance, flashed and fell between the two women as she showed it to her mother. They had taken him so beautifully on trust, they couldn't have known, he reflected, whether he would rise at all to the delicate, balanced observation of life among them; it was evidence, the emerald circlet, of how satisfyingly he had risen. The look that pa.s.sed between mother and daughter was like a spark that lighted as it fell, an unsuspected need of him as man merely, the male element, security, dependability, care. His first response to it was that of a swimmer who has struck earth under him; he knew in that flash where he was, by what familiar sh.o.r.es; and the whole effect, in spite of him was of the sudden shrinkage of that l.u.s.trous sea in which his soul and sense had floated. It steadied him, but it also for the moment narrowed a little the horizon of adventure. It was the occasion that Eunice took to define for him his status as an engaged man.

He kept as far as he was able his compact of expecting nothing of her, except of course that he couldn't avoid expecting that their arrangement would lead in the natural course to marriage. She had met him more than halfway in that, agreeing to an earlier date than he had thought compatible with the ritual of engagements in the Best Society. She had managed, however, that Peter should present her with her summer freedom: the engagement was not even to be announced until their return to town.