Captivating Mary Carstairs Part 40

Her eyes went past him over the gate, out into the wood beyond. Dusk was falling about them; it shaded her face, intangibly altered it, made it for the moment almost as he had known it before. She looked very young, and tired. This was the picture of her, and he knew it then as he looked at her, that he would carry with him to the longest day he lived.

"Is it nothing to you," he cried in a rush, "that when the time came I couldn't do it? The yacht's breaking down had nothing in the world to do with it. I had already decided to turn back, to break my promise. That the--accident happened just then was only a wretched chance. I was going to put about at that moment."

She hesitated almost imperceptibly, seemed for a brief second to waver.

But perhaps she dared not let herself believe him now: perhaps the strongest wish of her heart was to hurt him as deeply as she could.

"To say the least," she said with a little deliberate movement of distaste, "your coincidences are unfortunate. You--won't mind if I go on being grateful to the--_gear_?"

Under that crowning taunt, his self-restraint snapped like an overstretched bow-string.

"You shall not say that. You shall not. Miss Carstairs, you _know_ I could have kept you on the yacht if I had wanted to. You _know_ how I gave the order to put about and bring you back to Hunston. Did I look in the least then like a man whose hopes and plans had been ruined? You know I did not. You know I said to you that I--I was the happiest man in America. Will you tell me what on earth that could mean--except that I had decided to give up a thing that has been a millstone around my neck ever since--I met you?"

She made no reply, did not look at him. The dusk shadowed her eyes; and whether her silence meant good or ill he could not tell.

"You cannot answer, you see. We both know why. You will not be fair to me, Miss Carstairs. It is that night in the Academy box-office over again. Because I _had_ to deceive you once--not for my own sake--you will not look at the plain facts. But in your heart--just like that other night--_I know you believe me."_

Of course she could not let that pa.s.s now. "I do not!" she said. "I do not. I must ask you, please, not to keep me here any longer."

Varney's face went a shade paler. Arguing about his own veracity was even less bearable than he had thought; his manner all at once became singularly quiet.

"The merest moment, if you will. I can prove what I say," he answered slowly, "but of course I won't do that. You must believe what _I_ say, believe _me_. Nothing else matters but that.... Don't you know that it took a very strong reason to make me break faith with my old friend, your father--to make me stand here begging to be believed, like this?

You have only to look at me, I think. Don't you know that I couldn't possibly deceive you now ... after what has happened to me?"

"I don't know what you mean. I don't understand. Don't tell me. Nothing has happened ..."

"Everything has happened," he said still more quietly. "I've fallen crazily in love with you."

She did not lift her eyes; neither moved nor spoke; gave no sign that she had heard. He went on slowly:

"This--might be hard to believe, except that it must be so easy to see.

I've known you less than three days, and I never wanted to--even like you. My one idea was to think of you as my enemy. That was what Maginnis and I agreed--plotting together like a pair of nihilists. It all seems so preposterous now. Everything was against me from the beginning. I wouldn't face it till to-day, this afternoon. Then it all came over me in a rush, and, of course, your happiness became a great deal more to me than your father's. So we turned around, and it was then that I told you how happy I was. Didn't you know then what I meant? Of course it was because I had just found out ... how you were the one person in the world who mattered to me."

There was a long silence. It deepened, grew harder to break. Little Jenny Thurston, watching these two through an upstairs shutter, marveled what adults found to say to each other in these interminable colloquies.

A young c.o.c.k-sparrow, piqued by their stillness, alighted on the fence near by and studied them, eye c.o.c.ked inquisitively.

"Of course, I'm not--asking anything," said Varney. "About this, I mean.

I am answered, and over-answered, already. But ... do you believe now that I--voluntarily gave it up?"

"Oh," said Mary, "you--you must not ask me that. You must not talk to me like this. I did trust you once--fully--when you were almost a stranger; last night--and then this afternoon--"

"Do you believe me," said Varney, "or do you not?"

Her lower lip was trembling very slightly, and she set her white teeth upon it. The sudden knowledge that she was near to tears terrified her, goaded her to lengths. She gathered all her pride of opinion and young sense of wrong and frightened feminine instinct, for a final desperate stand; and so flung at him more pa.s.sionately than she knew: "How many times must I tell you? _I do not! I do not_!"

Varney gave her a last look, stamping her face upon his mind, and took a step backward from the gate.

"Then," said he ... "this is good-bye, indeed."

Presently Mary raised her eyes. He had turned southward, toward the town, but at a pace so swift that he was already far down the road. A jutting curve came soon, and he vanished behind it, out of her sight.

Dusk was falling fast on the wood now. The green of the trees deepened and blackened, turning into a crooked smudge upon the sky-line. The road fell between them like a long gray ribbon. Nothing was to be seen upon it; nothing was to be heard but the rustle of the early night wind and the pleasant sounds of the open road.

Varney's mind as he walked, was a blank white wall. He had forgotten Elbert Carstairs, forgotten the train he was to take, forgotten even the unendurable injury that Higginson had put upon him. His one blind instinct had been to get away as quickly and completely as possible. But now, slowly, it was borne in upon him that he knew this road, that he had walked it once before like this, at the end of the day. His first night in Hunston--he remembered it all very well. It must have been just here--or here--that the rain had caught him, and he had gone on to meet _her_.

The cottage which had sheltered them that night must be close at hand.

His eyes, which had been upon the ground, lifted and went off down the road. They fell upon the dark figure of a man, shuffling slowly along in the gloom, not twenty yards ahead of him.

He was an old man, shambling and gray-whiskered, and stooped as he walked. If he was aware that another wayfarer followed close behind, he gave no sign. Suddenly he stopped short with a feeble exclamation, and began peering about the ground at his feet. The young man was up with him directly, and his vague impression of recognition suddenly became fitted to a name.

"Orrick?"

The bowed form straightened and turned. Through the thickening twilight the two men looked at each other.

"You were not by any chance waiting for me?"

The darkness hid old Orrick's eyes; he shook his head slowly a number of times. "I pa.s.sed you when you was at Miz Thurston's, sir. I can' walk fas' like you can." And he bent down over the road again.

"What's the matter with you?" asked Varney. "Have you lost something?"

"Los' my luck-piece," said the other, slowly, not looking up. "I was carryin' it in my hand 's I come along an' it jounced out. A 1812 penny it was an' vallyble."

He cut rather a pitiful figure, squatting down in the dirt and squinting about with short-sighted old eyes; and Varney felt unaccountably sorry for him.

"I wouldn' los' my luck-piece for nothin'," he added, dropping to his knees. "I'm a kind of a stoop'sitious man, an' I allus was."

"Perhaps I can help you; my eyes are good."

He went back a step or two, bending down and scrutinizing the brown earth. Orrick, presently announcing that the coin might have rolled, made a slow way across the road on his knees, patting the ground with his hand as he moved. Near the edge of it, half in the woods, lay a thick piece of split firewood, long as a man's arm and stouter. The knotted old fingers stealthily closed on it.

"It could n't have rolled far on this soft road," said Varney presently.

"Just where do you think you dropped it?"

Sam Orrick rose behind his stooping figure with upraised club, a blaze of triumph in his sodden old eyes.

"There!" he cried with a senseless laugh. "It's _there_, Stanhope!"

The club fell with a thud; and Varney, meeting it as he straightened up, toppled over like a log, face downward.

Old Orrick stared down at the prostrate figure, and presently touched it with his tattered foot. It did not stir. His fierce joy died. He looked about him apprehensively, and his eye fell at once upon a dim-lit cottage off the road just back of him. _His_ cottage--how had he forgotten that? Was that dark thing--a man--standing there at the gate?

Suddenly a great terror seized the old man. He threw his stick into the woods and slunk away, toward the town. A loud yell from behind brought his heart to his throat, and he broke into a wild, lumbering run.

CHAPTER XXI

MR. FERRIS STANHOPE MEETS HIS DOUBLE; AND LETS THE DOUBLE MEET EVERYTHING ELSE