The Purple Heights Part 33

Her feeling toward that unknown husband was one of stark terror, a sick dislike that had grown stronger with the years. In her mind he remained unchanged. She saw him as the gawky, shrinking boy, his lips apart, his eyes looking at her with uncontrollable aversion.

Oh, no! Life with Peter Champneys was unthinkable! There remained, then, Berkeley Hayden. It wasn't unpleasant to think of Berkeley Hayden. It made one feel safe, and a.s.sured; there was a glamour of gratified pride about it,--Nancy Simms,--Mrs. Peter Champneys,--Mrs.

Berkeley Hayden. A little smile touched her lips.

Into these not unpleasant musings Mr. Jason Vandervelde irrupted himself, with the astounding request that she come with him now, immediately, to a hospital where a girl unknown to her prayed to see her. Hoichi had turned the lights on upon Mr. Vandervelde's entrance, and Anne looked at her visitor wonderingly.

"I do sound wild," admitted Jason, "but if you could have seen the poor thing's face when she asked to see you--Anne, she'll be dead before morning." The big man's glance was full of entreaty.

"But if she doesn't know me, why on earth should she wish to see me,--at such a time?" asked Anne, still more astonished.

Flounderingly Vandervelde tried to tell her. A questionable girl, to whom Peter Champneys had been kind,--she couldn't exactly gather how. Dying in a hospital, and before she went wishing to see Peter Champneys's wife.

Peter Champneys's wife, fortunately for herself, was still too near and close to the plain people to consider such a request an outrageous impertinence, to be refused as a matter of course. The terrible power of money had not come to her soon enough to make her consider herself of different and better clay than her fellow mortals. She wasn't haughty. The heart she was not supposed to possess stirred uncomfortably. She looked at Vandervelde questioningly.

"You wish me to go?"

"I leave that to you entirely," said he, uncomfortably. "But," he blurted, "I think it would be mighty decent of you."

"I will go," she said.

When they reached the hospital, the blonde person was with Gracie.

The blonde person had been crying, and it had not improved her appearance. Her nose looked like a pink wedge driven into the white triangle of her face. Screens had been placed around the bed. A priest with a rosy, good-humored face was just leaving.

Gracie turned her too-large eyes upon Peter Champneys's wife with a sort of unearthly intensity, and Anne Champneys looked down at her with a certain compa.s.sion. Anne had a bourgeois sense of respectability, and she had involuntarily stiffened at sight of the blonde drab sitting by the bedside, staring at her with sodden eyes. She hadn't expected the blonde. She ignored her and looked, instead, at Gracie. One could be decently sorry for Gracie.

A faint frown puckered Gracie's brows. Her hand in the blonde person's tightened its grasp. After a moment she said gravely:

"You came?"

"Yes," said Anne, mechanically. "I came. You wished to see me?" Her tone was inquiring.

"I wanted to see if you was good enough--for _him_," said the gutter-candle, as if she were throwing a light into the secret places of Anne Champneys's soul. "You ain't. But you could be."

Vandervelde had the horrid sensation as of walking in a nightmare.

He wished somebody in mercy would wake him up.

Anne's brows came together. She bent upon Gracie one of her long, straight, searching looks.

"Thank you--for comin'," murmured Gracie. "You got a heart." Her eyelids flickered.

"I am glad I came, if it pleases you to see me," said Anne. "Is that all you wished to say to me!"

"I wanted to see--if you was good enough for _him_," murmured Gracie again. "You ain't. But remember what I'm tellin' you: you could be." Her eyes closed. She fell into a light slumber, holding the blonde person's hand. Vandervelde touched Anne on the arm, and they went out.

As they drove home Vandervelde told her, as well as he could, all that the little wrecked vessel which was now nearing its last harbor had told him. He was deeply moved. He said, patting her hand.

"It was decent of you to come. You're a little sport, Anne."

For a while she was silent. Peter Champneys, then, was capable of kindness. He could do a gentle and generous deed. And perhaps he also was finding the heavy chain of his promise to his uncle, of his marriage to herself, galling and wearisome. She reached a woman's swift decision.

"I'm going to be a better sport," said she. "I'm going to reward Peter Champneys by setting him free. I shall have our marriage annulled."

CHAPTER XVIII

KISMET!

Peter Champneys was packing up for a summer's work on the coast when he received Vandervelde's letter, advising him that Mrs. Champneys had inst.i.tuted proceedings to have her marriage annulled. The attorney added that by this action on Anne's part the entire Champneys estate reverted to him, Peter Champneys, with the exception of fifty thousand dollars especially allotted to Anne by Chadwick Champneys's will. Vandervelde took it for granted there would be no opposition from Peter. He hoped his client would find it possible to visit America shortly, there being certain details he should see to in person.

Opposition? Peter's sensation was one of overwhelming relief. This was lifting from his spirit the weight of an intolerable burden: he felt profoundly grateful to that red-haired woman who had had the courage to take her fate in her own hands, forego great wealth, and sever a bond that threatened to become an iron yoke. He couldn't but respect her for that; he determined that she shouldn't be too great a loser. He thought she should have half the estate, at the very least.

He had never had the commercial mind. He had never asked that the allowance settled upon him by his uncle should be increased. As his own earnings far outstripped his modest needs, that allowance had been used to allay those desperate cases of want always confronting the kindly in a great city. The Champneys estate back there in America had bulked rather negligently in his mind, obscured and darkened by the formidable figure of the wife who went with it. She had loomed so hugely in the foreground that other considerations had been eclipsed. And now this ogress, moved thereto G.o.d knew why, had of a sudden opened her hand and set him free!

That strenuous and struggling childhood of his, whose inner life and aspirations had been so secret and so isolated, had taken the edge off his gregariousness. He did not continuously feel the herd-necessity to rub shoulders with others. The creative mind is essentially isolated. Peter loved his fellows with a quiet, tolerant affection, but he remained as it were to himself, standing a little apart. His heart was like a deep, still, hidden pool, in which a few stars only have room to shine.

A successful man, he had been romantically adored by many idle women and angled for by many an interested one. At times he had lightly lent himself to those amiable French arrangements of good comradeship which end naturally and without bitterness, leaving both parties with a satisfied sense of having received very good measure.

He had never been able to deceive himself that he loved. He had loved Denise, but there had been in his affection for her more of compa.s.sion than pa.s.sion, as Denise herself had known. She remained in his memory like a perfume. That had been his one serious liaison.

But the woman he could really love with his fullest powers, and to whom he could give his best, had not yet appeared.

Mrs. Hemingway had been troubled by his celibacy. She had persisted in her desire to have him marry young, his wife being some one of her girl friends. She wished to see Peter set up an establishment, which would presently center around a nursery full of adorable babies who would bring with them that tender and innocent happiness young children alone are able to confer. To dispel these pleasant day-dreams of hers, Peter had found it necessary to tell her of his American marriage.

Mrs. Hemingway was astonished, a little chagrined, but not hopeless.

He should bring his young wife to Paris. To make her understand _that_ marriage as it really was, to explain his own att.i.tude toward it, Peter made a swift and frightfully accurate little sketch of Nancy Simms as she had appeared to him that memorable morning.

His friend was appalled. It took Peter some time to explain his uncle to Mrs. Hemingway. At the best, she thought, he had been insane. Not even the fact that Peter was co-heir to the Champneys fortune consoled her for what she considered a block to his happiness, a blight upon his life. The more she thought about that marriage, the more she disliked it; and as the time approached for Peter literally to sacrifice himself upon the altar, Mrs. Hemingway grew more and more perturbed, though she wasn't so troubled about it as Emma Campbell was. Emma's terror of "dat gal" had grown with the years. Neither of them ventured to question Peter, but Emma Campbell began to have frequent spells of "wrastlin' wid de sperit," and her long, lugubrious "speretuals" were dismal enough to set one's teeth on edge. She would howl piercingly:

"Befo' dis time anothuh yeah, I ma-ay be gone, Een some ole lone-some graveyahd, O Lawd, ho-ow long?"

She had left the high Montmartre cottage and had come down to keep house for Peter, his being a very simple menage. Oddly, the denizens of the Quartier didn't faze her in the least. She chuckled over them, an old negro woman's sinful chuckle. She made no slightest attempt to conquer the French language, which she didn't in the least admire. She learned the equivalents for a few phrases of her own,--"I hongry," "How much?" "Gimme dat," and "Mistuh Peter gone out," and on this slight foundation she managed to keep a fairly firm footing. The frequenters of Peter's studio were delighted with Emma Campbell; they recognized her artistic availability, and she and her black cat were borrowed liberally.

As a rule, she was willing to lend herself to art, and was a patient model, until one rash young man took it into his head, that he must have Emma Campbell as a favorite old attendant upon the _Queen of Sheba_ he proposed to paint. He was a very earnest young German, that painter, speaking fairly good English. Emma had liked him more than most; but her faith received a blow from which it never recovered. That young man wished to paint her _au naturel_--her, Emma Campbell, who had been a member in good standing of the Young Sons and Daughters of Zion, the Children of Mary Magdalen, and the Burying Society of the Sons and Daughters of the Rising Star in the Bonds of Love! In the altogether! Emma Campbell gasped like a hooked fish. She made a nozzle of her mouth and protruded her eyes. She said ominously:

"I bawn nekked, but I ain't had nuttin' to do wid dat. Dat de fust en de last time I show up wid mah rind out o' doors. I been livin'

in clo'es evuh sence, en I 'speck to die in clo'es."

The artist, who wanted Emma in his picture, tried to make her understand. He reasoned with her manfully:

"Ach, silly n.i.g.g.e.r-woman! Clothes, clothes! What are clothes! See, now: you are the Queen of Sheba's old slave. Your large black feet and legs are bare, a glittering amulet swings between your withered b.r.e.a.s.t.s of an old African, you wear heavy bracelets and anklets, around your lean flanks is a little, thin striped ap.r.o.n, and you hold in your hand the great fan of peac.o.c.k feathers! Magnificent!

You are the queen's old slave, imbecile!"

"Is I? Boy, is you evuh hear tell o' Mistuh Abe Link.u.m? Aftuh Gin'ral Sherman bun down de big house smack en smoove, en tote off all de cow en mule en hawg en t'ing, en dem Yankees tief all de fowl, en we-all run lak rabbit, Mistuh Link.u.m done sen' word we 's free. En jus' lak Mistuh Link.u.m say, hit 's so; aftuh us git shet o'

Gin'ral Sherman, we 's free. All dat time I been a-wearin' clo'es, en now you come en tarrygate me, sayin' I got to stan' up in de nekked rind en wave fedders 'cause I in slaveryment? You bes' ain't let Mistuh Peter Champneys hear you talkin' lak dat!"

The bewildered and baffled young man raved in three languages, but Emma Campbell flatly refused either to be in "slaveryment" or in the "nekked rind." Visions of herself being caught and painted bare-legged, with a trifling little dab of an ap.r.o.n tied around her waist even as one ties a bit of ribbon around the cat's neck, and of this scandal being ferreted out by the deacons, sisters, and brethren, of the Mount Zion Baptist Church in Riverton, South Carolina, haunted her and made her projeck darkly. When she ventured to voice her opinion to Mist' Peter, he clapped her on the back and grinned. Emma Campbell began to look with a jaundiced eye upon art and the votaries of art.

She was relieved when Peter decided to spend the summer on the coast; she was a coast woman herself, and she longed for the smell of the sea. And then, to add to her joy, had come this last, astonishing news: "dat gal" was going to divorce Mist' Peter! That incomprehensible marriage would be done away with, that grim, red-headed dragoness would go out of their lives! Emma's speretuals took a more hopeful trend; and Peter whistled while he worked.