The Wishing-Ring Man Part 39

Ten minutes earlier the note of affection and pride in his voice would have made Joy so deliriously happy that she wouldn't have known what to do. But ... Gail knew ... Gail knew all about it all! ... How could men! And she had said she was going to give a tea.

That probably meant that she was going to tell everybody everything, and laugh about it.

She _was_ tired, and the shock of Gail's words had taken all the capacity for action out of her. She knew that if she'd had any proper feelings she would have moved coldly away from John, and accused him of betraying her to Gail, and demanded why he had done it. Evidently she had no proper feelings. You can't have, if you love people hard. She merely lay against John's strong, broad shoulder that felt so alive and comforting, and thought that this was the last time she would ever lean against it, or feel, as she always did when he touched her, as if there was some one who would look after her, and stand between her and every one else. She could not talk.

When they reached the Harrington house Allan took the car around to the garage at the back, himself, and Phyllis said she would stay in the car with him while he locked the garage. The men began to tease her for the idea she had offered, but Joy, hearing Phyllis laughingly defend herself, and explain what she really meant, knew that it was Phyllis' way of giving John a chance to say good-night to her alone.

"Dear Phyllis!" she thought, with a gush of grat.i.tude in her heart that there was one person in the world so unfailingly thoughtful and honest and dependable. The world did not quite go down in ruins while Phyllis stood her friend.

"Dear Phyllis!" she heard John's gay voice say, as if in echo of her own thoughts. "She knew I'd want a chance to see you alone a minute.... What an awful amount of people too many there are in the world, aren't there, kiddie? I'm beginning to think with yearning of Crusoe's isle, and a barbed-wire fence around that."

He drew her into the shadow of the vines on the porch, and took her in his arms. ... And he had told Gail ... oh, how _could_ men?

For a moment she stood, pa.s.sive. Then the nearness of him, and the cruel last-timeness of it all, swept over her again, and she threw her arms around his neck convulsively, and kissed him over and over again. She wanted it to remember.

"Good-by, my dearest!" she whispered.

"Not good-by, dear--good-night!" he answered her. "It's a long time till tomorrow, but thank goodness, it's coming. And all the tomorrows after that."

"No--" she started to say, when she heard footsteps, and John released her.

"It's a very dark night," said Allan sadly. "I couldn't see my best friend, even if he were on my own porch. Coming in, John?"

"Allan, you have the tact of Talleyrand, or whoever it was they used to kick," responded John amiably. "No, I can't come in. It's at least four o'clock, and I have to be up at seven tomorrow. I'll drop in some time in the morning--you won't have a chance to miss me."

He said good-night to them all, and went down from the porch. They could hear him whistling "With Strephon for Your Foe" joyously down the path, and, more dimly, down the road that led to his house.

"There goes, I should say, a fairly happy man," remarked Allan to the world at large. "Now, Joy, if any one asked you, what would you say made him so contented with life?"

Joy liked Allan's brotherly teasing as a rule, but tonight it seemed as if she could not answer him, or anybody. She did, not feel as if she could talk any more, and looked appealingly at Phyllis.

"She's dead to the world, Allan," Phyllis interposed. "And if we stay down here talking those imps of ours are going to wake up and demand tribute."

"Great Scott, they are!" said Allan, "and the buns and stuff you held Mrs. Hewitt up for are in the bottom of the car, locked up in the garage--where _you_ wanted to be."

"Which is providential," said the children's mother thankfully.

"It's an alibi. They can't get any till tomorrow, no matter how much we want to give them any."

So they tiptoed up the stairs. Joy turned off into her own room, but she heard enough to know that no soft-footedness had availed. She heard Philip's clear, deliberate little voice demanding, "How much party did you bring me home, Mother?" and the hopeful patter of Angela's feet.

She shut her door tight before she knew how it turned out. She had a good deal to do, because she was going to have to take a train that got her away from Wallraven before John found time from his rounds to come back next morning. Gail might have told Mrs. Hewitt--any number of people--by this time. She did not want to see any of them again. And she loved them all very much.

She took off her frock with slow, careful fingers, and put on a kimono to pack in. Her trunk was against the wall. As she worked steadily over the tissue-paper and hangers and things to be folded, she thought she was beyond feeling anything at all, till she felt something wet on her face, and found that she was crying silently, without having known it in the least.

The green and silver frock--the white top-coat--that had burrs on it, where she had gotten out by the roadside to pick some goldenrod, and John had not gotten them all quite off--the little blue dress with the fichu that John had said made her look as if she belonged in a house instead of a story-book--the gray silk she had loved so, and worn so hard it was middle-age-looking already--the brown wool jersey suit she must travel in----

She laid this last across a chair, and tried to go on packing. That was the frock she had worn when John came to her in the woods, and was so kind, and so good, and told her he would let her have her happy month.... Well, she'd had it. And it was worth it--it was worth anything!

But she put her head down on the side of the trunk and sobbed and sobbed.

Presently she went on with her packing, and finished it by a little after four-thirty. The suitcase had to be filled. When it was done she took a bath and dressed, and lay down on the bed as she was.

There was a train at nine-ten, that got her back home late in the afternoon, and she was taking no chances.

She slept a little, always with the nine-ten train on her mind, and finally rose and locked her trunk at half-past seven. She put the key and her ticket and what money she had in her hand-bag, fastened on her cap, took her suitcase, and stole downstairs. n.o.body was astir yet but Lily-Anna, and Viola, who was giving the early-waking Angela her breakfast in an informal way in the corner of the kitchen.

"Could I have a cup of coffee in a little while now, Lily-Anna?" she asked the cook, who was making beaten biscuit in an echoing fas.h.i.+on that would have penetrated any but the thick hundred-year-old walls of the kitchen.

"Why, Miss Joy--you goin' off on a ride with Dr. Johnny this early?"

inquired Lily-Anna, thinking the natural thing. "Course you can.

I'll make it right now. An' I'll tell Mis' Harrington."

Joy had forgotten Phyllis in her wild desire for flight. But she remembered now. She would have to call Phyllis and tell her. Indeed, she would rather tell her herself than have Gail know. She couldn't go off this way, as if she was taking the silver with her.

She retraced her steps up the stairs, opened the door of Phyllis'

room softly. Phyllis' bed was near the door, and she sat up at the slight noise. Joy beckoned to her, and she slipped out of bed, flinging around her a blue kimono that lay across the footboard and setting her feet noiselessly in slippers as she came out with the swift, gliding step that was characteristic of her. She gathered back the loose ma.s.ses of her amber-colored hair and flung them over her shoulder, shut the door softly in order not to disturb Allan, and followed Joy down the hall.

"What is it, dear?" she asked. "Telephone at this unchristian hour?"

"I'm sorry to disturb you," Joy answered, "but I had to. Where can we go where I can talk to you for half an hour--or maybe ten minutes?"

There was a glowing fire in the living-room, and, of old custom, a long couch stood before it. Phyllis led the way downstairs to this, and established Joy on it, drawing a chair up to it herself.

"Now tell me all about it," she said comfortingly. "And lie down, child--you look dead."

But Joy was too nervous to lie down.

"I have to go away on the nine-ten," she said.... "No, please, Phyllis, wait till I tell you, and you'll see I do. You would, too."

Phyllis always took the least nerve-wearing way--you could count on her for that. She listened encouragingly.

"Gail said last night she--she knew my dark secret." Joy began nervously in the middle. "And you know Gail does tell anything about anybody she wants to, especially if she thinks it makes a funny story,--sometimes I think perhaps she likes making people ridiculous.... She doesn't care about feelings...."

"Why, you poor child, have you a dark secret?" asked Phyllis, smiling. "Let me hear the worst. I promise to love you still."

"Oh _please_ do!" implored Joy. She dropped her head on the couch cus.h.i.+ons and talked with her face hidden on one arm. "Phyllis, I--I never was engaged to John!"

The bombsh.e.l.l did not at all have the effect she had expected.

"I'm sorry to contradict you, but you certainly are," said Phyllis placidly.

"You don't understand," went on Joy, coming out from her shelter.

"Listen."

So she told Phyllis, with both her quivering little hands locked in one of Phyllis' strong, firm ones, the whole story--the story of the shut up, youthless life among the people who came to give her grandfather homage, and regarded her as a plaything or a stage-property, and of how she had seen the two young lovers one wet day, and been stirred into a wild rebellion for a youth of her own.

"I understand," said Phyllis here. "You were 'half-sick of shadows.'

I went through that myself. There comes a time when you'd do _anything_."

"You understand?" asked Joy with wide eyes, "you with a husband that adores the ground you walk on?"