Who Cares? Part 15

She saw him look at the clock on the mantelshelf and crinkle up his forehead. Day must be stretching itself somewhere. She got up, quickly.

How could she say it? She was losing him.

"Are you angry with me, Marty?" she asked, trying to fumble her way to honesty.

"No, Joan. But it's very late. You ought to be in bed."

"Didn't you think that I should miss you while you've been away?"

"No, Joan. Look. It's half-past two. A kid like you ought to have been asleep hours ago." He went over to the door.

"I'm not a kid--I'm not" she burst out.

He was too tired to be surprised. He had not forgotten how she had hidden behind her youth. He couldn't understand her mood. "I must get to bed," he said, "if you don't mind. I must be up pretty early. Run along, Joany."

He couldn't have hurt her more awfully whatever he had said. To be treated like a naughty girl! But it served her right, and she knew it.

Her plea had come back like a boomerang.

"Well, have a good time," she said, with her chin high. "I shall see you again some day, I suppose," and she went out.

It was no use. She had lost him--she had lost him, just as she had discovered that she wanted him. There was a girl with a white face and red lips and hair that came out of a bottle. Martin watched her go and shut the door, and stood with his hands over his face.

VIII

Mr. and Mrs. George Harley had made an appointment to meet at half-past eleven sharp on the doorstep of the little house in Sixty-seventh Street. Business had interrupted their honeymoon and brought them unexpectedly to New York. Harley had come by subway from Wall Street to the Grand Central and taken a taxicab. It was twelve o'clock before he arrived. Nevertheless he wore a smile of placid ease of mind. His little wife had only to walk from the Plaza, it was true, but he knew, although a newly married man, that to be half an hour late was to be ten minutes early.

At exactly five minutes past twelve he saw her turn off the Avenue, and as he strolled along to meet her, charmed and delighted by her daintiness, proud and happy at his possession of her, he did a thing that all wise and tactful husbands do--he forced back an irresistible desire to be humorous at her expense and so won an entry of approval from the Recording Angel.

If they had both been punctual they would have seen Martin go off in his car to drive the girl who had had no luck to the trees and the wild flowers and the good green earth.

Joan's mother, all agog to see the young couple who had taken life into their own hands with the sublime faith of youth, had made it her first duty to call, however awkward and unusual the hour. Her choice of hats in which to do so had been a matter of the utmost importance.

They were told that Mr. Gray had gone out of town, that Mrs. Gray was not yet awake and followed the butler upstairs to the drawing-room with a distinct sense of disappointment. The room still quivered under the emotion of Gilbert Palgrave.

Rather awkwardly they waited to be alone. Butlers always appear to resent the untimely visitation of relations. Sunlight poured in through the windows. It was a gorgeous morning.

"Well," said George Harley, "I've seen my brokers and can do nothing more to-day. Let the child have her sleep out. I'm just as happy to be here with you, Lil, as anywhere else." And he bent over his wife as if he were her lover, as indeed he was, and kissed her pretty ear. His clothes were very new and his collar the shade of an inch too high for comfort and his patent leather shoes something on the tight side, but the spirits of the great lovers had welcomed him and were unafraid.

He won a most affectionate and grateful smile from the neat little lady whose brown hair was honestly tinged with white, and whose unlined face was innocent of make-up. Mrs. Harley had not yet recovered from her astonishment at having been swept to the altar after fifteen years of widowhood by this most simple and admirable man. Even then she was not quite sure that she was not dreaming all this. She patted his big hand and would have put her head against his chest if the brim of her hat had permitted her to do so.

"That's very sweet of you, Geordie," she said. "How good you are to me."

He echoed the word "Good!" and laughed and waved his hands. It was the gesture of a man whose choice of ready words was not large enough to describe all that he longed and tried to be to her. And then he stood back with his long legs wide apart and his large hands thrust into his pockets and his rather untidy gray head stuck on one side and studied her as if she were a picture in a gallery. He looked like a great big faithful St. Bernard dog.

Mrs. Harley didn't think so. He seemed to her to be the boy of whom she had dreamed in her first half-budding dreams and who had gone wandering and come under the hand of Time, but remained a boy in his heart. She was glad that she had made him change his tie. She loved those deep cuts in his face.

"Very well, then," she said. "Although it is twelve o'clock I'll let her sleep another half an hour." And then she stopped with a little cry of dismay, "Let her! ... I'm forgetting that it's no longer in my power to say what she's to do or not to do!"

"How's that?"

"She's no longer the young, big-eyed, watchful child who startled us by saying uncanny things. She's no longer the slip of a thing that I left with her grandparents, with her wistful eyes on the horizon. She's a married woman, Geordie, with a house of her own, and it isn't for me to 'let' her do anything or tell her or even ask her. She can do what she likes now. I've lost her, Geordie."

"Why, how's that, Lil?" There was surprise as well as sympathy in Harley's voice. He had only known other people's children.

She went on quickly, with a queer touch of emotion. "The inevitable change has come before I've had time to realize it. It's a shock. It takes my breath away. I feel as if I had been set adrift from an anchor. Instead of being my little girl she's my daughter now. I'm no longer 'mammy.' I'm mother. Isn't it,--isn't it wonderful? It's like standing under a mountain that's always seemed to be a little hill miles and miles away. From now on I shall be the one to be told to do things, I shall be the child to be kept in order. It's a queer moment in the life of a mother, Geordie."

She laughed, but she didn't catch her tears before they were halfway down her cheeks. "I'm an old lady, my dear."

Harley gave one of his hearty, incredulous laughs. "You, old. You're one of the everlasting young ones, you are, Lil," and he stood and beamed with love and admiration.

"But I've got you, Geordie," she added, and her surprised heart that had suddenly felt so empty warmed again and was soothed when he took her hand eagerly and pressed it to his lips.

Grandfather and Grandmother Ludlow, Joan and many others who had formed the habit of believing that Christopher Ludlow's widow would remain true to his memory, failed utterly to understand the reason for her sudden breakaway from a settled and steady routine, to plunge into belated matrimony with a self-made man of fifty-five who seemed to them to be not only devoid of all attractiveness but bourgeois and rather ridiculous. But why? A little sympathy, a little knowledge of human nature,--that's all that was necessary to make this romance understandable. Because it was romance, in the best sense of that much abused word. It was not the romance defined in the dictionary as an action or adventure of an unusual or wonderful character, soaring beyond the limits of fact and real life and often of probability, but the result of loneliness and middle age, and of two hearts starving for love and the expression of love, for sympathy, companionship and the natural desire for something that would feed vanity, which, if it is permitted to die, is replaced by bitterness and a very warped point of view.

Christopher Ludlow, a wild, harum-scarum fellow who had risked his life many times during his hunting trips, came to his death in a prosaic street accident. For fifteen years his widow, then twenty-five, lived in the country with his parents and his little daughter. She was at their mercy, because Christopher had left no money. He had been dependent on an allowance from his father. Either she lived with them and bore cheerfully and tactfully with their increasing crotchetiness and impatience of old age, or left them to eke out a purposely small income in a second-rate hotel or a six by six apartment barely on the edge of the map. A timid woman, all for peace, without the grit and courage that goes with self-direction, she pursued the easy policy of least resistance, sacrificed her youth on the altar of Comfort and dwindled with only a few secret pangs into middle age. From time to time, with Joan, she left the safe waters of Lethe and put an almost frightened foot into the swift main stream. As time went on and Spring went out of her and Summer ripened to maturity, she was more and more glad to return from these brief excursions to the quiet country and the safe monotonous round. Then the day came when her no longer little girl came finally out of school, urgent and rebellious, kicking against the p.r.i.c.ks, electrically alive and eager, autocrat and individualist rolled into one. Catching something of this youthfulness and shocked to wake to a realization of her lost years, she made a frantic and despairing effort to grasp at the tail-end of Summer and with a daughter far more worldly than herself escaped as frequently as possible into town to taste the pleasures that she had almost forgotten, and revive under the influence of the theater and the roar of life. It was during one of these excursions, while Joan was lunching with Alice Palgrave, that she caught an arrow shot at random by that mischievous little devil Cupid, which landed plum in the middle of a heart that had been placid so long. In getting out of a taxicab she had slipped and fallen, was raised deferentially to her feet, and looked up to catch the lonely and bewildered eyes of George Harley. They were outside their mutual hotel.

What more natural and courteous than that he should escort her into the hotel with many expressions of anxious regret, ascend with her in the elevator to their mutual floor, linger with her for a polite few minutes in the sunlight that poured through the pa.s.sage windows and leave her to hurry finally to her room thrilling under the recollection of two admiring eyes and a lingering handshake? She, even she, then, at her time of life, plump and partridge-like as she was, could inspire the interest and approval of a man. It was wonderful. It was absurd. It was ... altogether too good to be true! Later, after she had spent a half-amused, half-wistful quarter of an hour in front of her gla.s.s, seeing inescapable white hairs and an irremediable double chin, she had gone down to the dining room for lunch. All the tables being occupied, what more natural or disconcerting than for this modern Raleigh to rise and rather clumsily and eagerly beg that she would share the one just allotted to himself.

To the elderly man, whose nose had been too close to the grindstone to permit of dalliance, and who now, monied and retired, found himself terribly alone in the pale sun of St. Martin's Summer, and to the little charming woman of forty, led back to life by an ardent and impetuous girl, this quite ordinary everyday incident, which seemed to them to be touched by romance, came at a moment when both were pathetically receptive. They arranged to meet again, they met again, and one fine afternoon while Joan was at a theater with Alice, he spoke and she listened. It was in the more than usually hotel-like drawing-room of their mutual hotel. People were having tea, and the band was playing. There was a jangle of voices, the jingle of a musical comedy, the movement of waiters. Under the leaves of a tame palm which once had known the gorgeous freedom of a semi-tropical forest he stumbled over a proposal, the honest, fearful, pulsating proposal of a man who conceived that he was trying hopelessly to hitch his wagon to a star, and she, tremulous, amazed, and on the verge of tears, accepted him. Hers presumably the dreadful ordeal of facing an incredulous daughter and two sarcastic parents-in-law and his of standing for judgment before them,--argument, discussion, satire, irony, abuse even,--a quiet and determined marriage and a new and beautiful life.

"What a delightful room," said Mrs. Harley. "It looks so comfortable for a drawing-room that it must have been furnished by a man."

"We'll have a house in town by October, around here, and I'll bet it won't be uncomfortable when you've finished with it."

The raucous shouts of men crying an "extra" took Harley quickly to the open window. He watched one scare-monger edge his way up one side of the street and another, whose voice was like the jagged edge of a rusty saw, bandy leg his way up the other side. "Sounds like big sea battle,"

he said, after listening carefully. "Six German warships sunk, five British. Horrible loss of life. But I may be wrong. These men do their best not to be quite understood. Only six German ships! I wish the whole fleet of those dirty dogs could be sunk to the bottom."

There was nothing neutral or blind-eyed about George Harley. He had followed all the moves that had forced the war upon the nations whose spineless and inefficient governments had so long been playing the policy of the ostrich. He had nothing but detestation for the vile and ruthless methods of the German war party and nation and nothing but contempt for the allied politicians who had made such methods possible.

He had followed the course of the war with pain, anguish and bated breath, thrilling at the supreme bravery of the Belgians and the French, and the First Hundred Thousand, thanking G.o.d for the miracle that saved Paris from desecration, and paying honest tribute to the giant effort of the British to wipe out the stain of a scandalous and criminal unpreparedness. He had squirmed with humiliation at the attempts of the little, dreadful clever people of his own country,--professors, parsons, pacifists and pro-Germans,--to prove that it was the duty of the United States to stand aloof and unmoved in the face of a menace which affected herself in no less a degree than it affected the nations then fighting for their lives, and had watched with increasing alarm the fatuous complacency of Congress which continued to deceive itself into believing that a great stretch of mere water rendered the country immune from taking its honest part in its own war. "Oh, my G.o.d," he had said in his heart, as all clear-sighted Americans had been saying, "has commercialism eaten into our very vitals? Has the good red blood of the early pioneers turned to water?

Are we without the nerve any longer to read the writing on the wall?"

And the only times that his national pride had been able to raise its head beneath the weight of shame and foreboding were those when he pa.s.sed the windows of Red Cross Depots and caught sight of a roomful of good and n.o.ble women feverishly at work on bandages; when he read of the keen and splendid training voluntarily undergone by the far-sighted men who were making Plattsburg the nucleus of an officers' training corps, when he was told how many of his young and red-blooded fellow-countrymen had taken up arms with the Canadian contingents or had slipped over to France as ambulance men. What would he not have given to be young again!

He heaved a great sigh and turned back to the precious little woman who had placed her life into his hands for love. The hoa.r.s.e alarming voices receded into the distance, leaving their curious echo behind.

"What were we talking about?" he asked. "Oh, ah, yes. The house. Lil, during the few days that I have to be in the city, let's find the house, let's nose around and choose the roof under which you and I will spend all the rest of our honeymoon. What do you say, dear?"

"I'd love it, Geordie; I'd just love it. A little house, smaller than this, with windows that catch the sun, quite near the Park, so that we can toddle across and watch the children playing. Wouldn't that be nice? And now I think I'll ring for some one to show me Joan's room and creep in and suggest that she gets up."

But there was no need. The door opened, and Joan came in, with eyes like stars.

IX