The Second Generation Part 39

which, raging westward, had seized upon all the women of Saint X with incomes, or with husbands or fathers to support them in idleness--the craze for thinking, reading, and talking cloudily or muddily on cloudy or muddy subjects. Henrietta and Adelaide jeered; yet they were themselves the victims of another, and, if possible, more poisonous, bacillus of the same sluggard family.

One morning Adelaide, in graceful ease in her favorite nook in the small northwest portico of the club house, was reading a most imposingly bound and ill.u.s.trated work on Italian architecture written by a smatterer for smatterers. She did a great deal of reading in this direction because it was also the direction of her talent, and so she could make herself think she was getting ready to join in Dory's work when he returned. She heard footsteps just round the corner, and looked up. She and Ross Whitney were face to face.

There was no chance for evasion. He, with heightened color, lifted his hat; she, with a nonchalance that made her proud of herself, smiled and stretched out her hand. "h.e.l.lo, Ross," said she, languidly friendly.

"When did _you_ come to town?" And she congratulated herself that her hair had gone up so well that morning and that her dress was one of her most becoming--from Paris, from Paquin--a year old, it is true, but later than the latest in Saint X and fas.h.i.+onable even for Sherry's at lunch time.

Ross, the expert, got himself together and made cover without any seeming of scramble; but his not quite easy eyes betrayed him to her.

"About two hours ago," replied he.

"Is Theresa with you?" She gazed tranquilly at him as she fired this center shot. She admired the coolness with which he received it.

"No; she's up at her father's place--on the lake sh.o.r.e," he answered. He, too, was looking particularly well, fresh yet experienced, and in dress a model, with his serge of a strange, beautiful shade of blue, his red tie and socks, and his ruby-set cuff-links. "Mr. Howland is ill, and she's nursing him. I'm taking a few days off--came down to try to sell father's place for him."

"You're going to sell Point Helen?" said Adelaide, politely regretful.

"Then I suppose we shan't see your people here any more. Your mother'll no doubt spend most of her time abroad, now that Janet is married there."

Ross did not answer immediately. He was looking into the distance, his expression melancholy. His abstraction gave Adelaide a chance to verify the impression she had got from a swift but femininely penetrating first glance. Yes, he did look older; no, not exactly older--sad, rather.

Evidently he was unhappy, distinctly unhappy. And as handsome and as tasteful as ever--the band of his straw hat, the flower in his b.u.t.tonhole, his tie, his socks--all in harmony; no ostentation, just the unerring, quiet taste of a gentleman. What a satisfactory person to look at! To be sure, his character--However, character has nothing to do with the eye-pleasures, and they are undeniably agreeable. Then there were his manners, and his mind--such a man of the world! Of course he wasn't for one instant to be compared with Dory--who was? Still, it was a pity that Dory had a prejudice against showing all that he really was, a pity he had to be known to be appreciated--that is, appreciated by the "right sort" of people. Of course, the observant few could see him in his face, which was certainly distinguished--yes, far more distinguished than Ross's, if not so regularly handsome.

"I've been looking over the old place," Ross was saying, "and I've decided to ask father to keep it. Theresa doesn't like it here; but I do, and I can't bring myself to cut the last cords. As I wandered over the place I found myself getting so sad and sentimental that I hurried away to escape a fit of the blues."

"We're accustomed to that sort of talk," said Adelaide with a mocking smile in her delightful eyes. "People who used to live here and come back on business occasionally always tell us how much more beautiful Saint X is than any other place on earth. But they take the first train for Chicago or Cincinnati or anywhere at all."

"So you find it dull here?"

"I?" Adelaide shrugged her charming shoulders slightly. "Not so very. My life is here--the people, the things I'm used to. I've a sense of peace that I don't have anywhere else." She gazed dreamily away. "And peace is the greatest a.s.set."

"The greatest a.s.set," repeated Ross absently. "You are to be envied."

"_I_ think so," a.s.sented she, a curious undertone of defiance in her voice. She had a paniclike impulse to begin to talk of Dory; but, though she cast about diligently, she could find no way of introducing him that would not have seemed awkward--pointed and provincially prudish.

"What are you reading?" he asked presently.

She turned the book so that he could see the t.i.tle. His eyes wandered from it to linger on her slender white fingers--on the one where a plain band of gold shone eloquently. It fascinated and angered him; and she saw it, and was delighted. Her voice had a note of triumph in it as she said, putting the book on the table beside her, "Foolish, isn't it, to be reading how to build beautiful houses"--she was going to say, "when one will probably never build any house at all." She bethought her that this might sound like a sigh over Dory's poverty and over the might-have-been.

So she ended, "when the weather is so deliciously lazy."

"I know the chap who wrote it," said Ross, "Clever--really unusual talent. But the fas.h.i.+onable women took him up, made him a toady and a sn.o.b, like the rest of the men of their set. How that sort of thing eats out manhood and womanhood!"

Just what Dory often said! "My husband says," she answered, "that whenever the world has got a fair start toward becoming civilized, along have come wealth and luxury to smother and kill. It's very interesting to read history from that standpoint, instead of taking the usual view--that luxury produces the arts and graces."

"Dory is a remarkable man," said Ross with enthusiasm. "He's amazingly modest; but there are some men so big that they can't hide, no matter how hard they try. He's one of them."

Adelaide was in a glow, so happy did this sincere and just tribute make her, so relieved did she feel. She was talking to one of Dory's friends and admirers, not with an old sweetheart of hers about whom her heart, perhaps, might be--well, a little sore, and from whom radiated a respectful, and therefore subtle, suggestion that the past was very much the present for him. She hastened to expand upon Dory, upon his work; and, as she talked of the university, she found she had a pride in it, and an interest, and a knowledge, too, which astonished her. And Ross listened, made appreciative comments. And so, on and on. When Henrietta came they were laughing and talking like the best of old friends; and at Ross's invitation the three lunched at the club and spent the afternoon together.

"I think marriage has improved Ross," said Henrietta, as she and Adelaide were driving home together after tea--tea with Ross.

"Theresa is a very sweet woman," said Adelaide dutifully.

"Oh, I don't mean that--any more than you do," replied Henrietta. "I mean marriage has chastened him--the only way it ever improves anybody."

"No doubt he and Theresa are happy together," said Adelaide, clinging to her pretense with a persistence that might have given her interesting and valuable light upon herself had she noted it.

"Happy?" Henrietta Hastings laughed. "Only stupid people are happy, my dear. Theresa may be happy, but not Ross. He's far too intelligent. And Theresa isn't capable of giving him even those moments of happiness that repay the intelligent for their routine of the other sort of thing."

"Marriage doesn't mean much in a man's life," said Adelaide. "He has his business or profession. He is married only part of each day, and that the least important part to him."

"Yes," replied Henrietta, "marriage is for a man simply a peg in his shoe--in place or, as with Ross Whitney, out of place. One look at his face was enough to show me that he was limping and aching and groaning."

Adelaide found this pleasantry amusing far beyond its merits. "You can't tell," said she. "Theresa doesn't seem the same to him that she does to--to us."

"Worse," replied Henrietta, "worse. It's fortunate they're rich. If the better cla.s.s of people hadn't the money that enables them to put buffers round themselves, wife-beating wouldn't be confined to the slums. Think of life in one of two small rooms with a Theresa Howland!"

Adelaide had fallen, as far as could one of her generous and tolerant disposition, into Henrietta's most infectious habit of girding at everyone humorously--the favorite pastime of the idle who are profoundly discontented with themselves. By the time Mrs. Hastings left her at the lofty imported gates of Villa d'Orsay, they had done the subject of Theresa full justice, and Adelaide entered the house with that sense of self-contempt which cannot but come to any decent person after meting out untempered justice to a fellow-mortal. This did not last, however; the pleasure in the realization that Ross did not care for Theresa and did care for herself was too keen. As the feminine test of feminine success is the impression a woman makes upon men, Adelaide would have been neither human nor woman had she not been pleased with Ross's discreet and sincerely respectful, and by no means deliberate or designing disclosure.

It was not the proof of her power to charm the male that had made her indignant at herself. "How weak we women are!" she said to herself, trying to a.s.sume a penitence she could not make herself feel. "We really ought to be locked away in harems. No doubt Dory trusts me absolutely--that's because other women are no temptation to him--that is, I suppose they aren't. If he were different, he'd be afraid I had his weakness--we all think everybody has at least a touch of our infirmities.

Of course I can be trusted; I've sense enough not to have my head turned by what may have been a mere clever attempt to smooth over the past."

Then she remembered Ross's look at her hand, at her wedding ring, and Henrietta's confirmation of her own diagnosis. "But why should _that_ interest _me_," she thought, impatient with herself for lingering where her ideal of self-respect forbade. "I don't love Ross Whitney. He pleases me, as he pleases any woman he wishes to make an agreeable impression upon. And, naturally, I like to know that he really did care for me and is ashamed and repentant of the baseness that made him act as he did. But beyond that, I care nothing about him--nothing. I may not care for Dory exactly as I should; but at least knowing him has made it impossible for me to go back to the Ross sort of man."

That seemed clear and satisfactory. But, strangely, her mind jumped to the somewhat unexpected conclusion, "And I'll not see him again."

She wrote Dory that night a long, long letter, the nearest to a love letter she had ever written him. She brought Ross in quite casually; yet--What is the mystery of the telltale penumbra round the written word?

Why was it that Dory, in far-away Vienna, with the memory of her strong and of the Villa d'Orsay dim, reading the letter for the first time, thought it the best he had ever got from her; and the next morning, reading it again, could think of nothing but Ross, and what Adelaide had really thought about him deep down in that dark well of the heart where we rarely let even our own eyes look intently?

CHAPTER XXIII

A STROLL IN A BYPATH

Ross had intended to dine at the club; but Mrs. Hastings's trap was hardly clear of the grounds when he, to be free to think uninterruptedly, set out through the woods for Point Helen.

Even had he had interests more absorbing than pastimes, display, and money-making by the "brace" game of "high finance" with its small risks of losing and smaller risks of being caught, even if he had been married to a less positive and incessant irritant than Theresa was to him, he would still not have forgotten Adelaide. Forgetfulness comes with the finished episode, never with the unfinished. In the circ.u.mstances, there could be but one effect from seeing her again. His regrets blazed up into fierce remorse, became the reckless raging of a pa.s.sion to which obstacles and difficulties are as fuel to fire.

Theresa, once the matter of husband-getting was safely settled, had no restraint of prudence upon her self-complacence. She "let herself go"

completely, with results upon her character, her mind, and her personal appearance that were depressing enough to the casual beholder, but appalling to those who were in her intimacy of the home. Ross watched her deteriorate in gloomy and unreproving silence. She got herself together sufficiently for as good public appearance as a person of her wealth and position needed to make, he reasoned; what did it matter how she looked and talked at home where, after all, the only person she could hope to please was herself? He held aloof, drawn from his aloofness occasionally by her whim to indulge herself in what she regarded as proofs of his love. Her pouting, her whimpering, her abject but meaningless self-depreciation, her tears, were potent, not for the flattering reason she a.s.signed, but because he, out of pity for her and self-reproach, and dread of her developing her mother's weakness, would lash himself into the small show of tenderness sufficient to satisfy her.

And now, steeped in the gall of as bitter a draught as experience forces folly to drink anew each day to the dregs--the realization that, though the man marries the money only, he lives with the wife only--Ross had met Adelaide again. "I'll go to Chicago in the morning," was his conclusion.

"I'll do the honorable thing"--he sneered at himself--"since trying the other would only result in her laughing at me and in my being still more miserable."

But when morning came he was critical of the clothes his valet offered him, spent an hour in getting himself groomed for public appearance, then appeared at the Country Club for breakfast instead of driving to the station. And after breakfast, he put off his departure "until to-morrow or next day," and went to see Mr. and Mrs. Hastings. And what more natural then than that Henrietta should take him to the Villa d'Orsay "to show you how charmingly Del has installed herself." "And perhaps," said Henrietta, "she and Arden Wilmot will go for a drive. He has quit the bank because they objected to his resting two hours in the middle of the day." What more natural than that Adelaide should alter her resolution under the compulsion of circ.u.mstance, should spend the entire morning in the gardens, she with Ross, Henrietta with Arden? Finally, to avoid strain upon her simple domestic arrangements in that period of retrenchment, what more natural than falling in with Ross's proposal of lunch at Indian Mound? And who ever came back in a hurry from Indian Mound, with its quaint vast earthworks, its ugly, incredibly ancient potteries and flint instruments that could be uncovered anywhere with the point of a cane or parasol; its superb panorama, bounded by the far blue hills where, in days that were ancient when history began, fires were lighted by sentinels to signal the enemy's approach to a people whose very dust, whose very name has perished? It was six o'clock before they began the return drive; at seven they were pa.s.sing the Country Club, and, of course, they dined there and joined in the little informal dance afterwards; and later, supper and cooling drinks in a corner of the veranda, with the moon streaming upon them and the enchanted breath of the forest enchaining the senses.

What a day! How obligingly all unpleasant thoughts fled! How high and bright rose the mountains all round the horizon of the present, shutting out yesterday and to-morrow! "This has been _the_ happy day of my life,"

said Ross as they lingered behind the other two on the way to the last 'bus for the town. "The happiest"--in a lower tone--"thus far."

And Del was sparkling a.s.sent, encouragement even; and her eyes were gleaming defiantly at the only-too-plainly-to-be-read faces of the few hilltop people still left at the club house. "Surely a woman has the right to enjoy herself innocently in the twentieth century," she was saying to herself. "Dory wouldn't want me to sit moping alone. I am young; I'll have enough of that after I'm old--one is old so much longer than young." And she looked up at Ross, and very handsome he was in that soft moonlight, his high-blazing pa.s.sion glorifying his features. "I, too, have been happy," she said to him. Then, with a vain effort to seem and to believe herself at ease, "I wish Dory could have been along."

But Ross was not abashed by the exorcism of that name; her bringing it in was too strained, would have been amusing if pa.s.sion were not devoid of the sense of humor. "She _does_ care for me!" he was thinking dizzily.

"And I can't live without her--and _won't_!"