Keith Morrell tried to explain how necessary it was that he get back to New York at once, but Evelyn overcame all his arguments. He simply must help her out, and she would see that he got the midnight train from the city if that was absolutely necessary.
They had reached the agent's house by this time, and the young man, made to feel exceedingly selfish if he did not yield, gave reluctant consent.
"I'm not dressed for a formal dinner," he said as he got out, brightening at the thought of a real excuse at last. "You know, I didn't bring a suitcase with me."
"Oh, we're not formal," laughed Evelyn. "Anything goes in this town this time of year. Besides, I'll tell them I grabbed you from the train and compelled you to come in. Or, if you don't like that, my brother Bronson will lend you something. He has dinner coats galore. Though you're quite all right as you are."
"All right, I'll come!" he said as gracefully as he could.
"I'll wait for you," beamed Evelyn. "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush!"
And no protest could stir her from this decision.
He went into the agent's house feeling that he was caught in a trap, and it was all his own fault.
The agent had a buyer and he was anxious to finalize the sale at once, but strangely enough, although he had come down from New York expecting to sell, and anxious to finish the matter up as soon as possible, Keith found a sudden reluctance upon him. A dim vision of a little boy in pajamas and bare feet kneeling at his mother's knee beside an open fire seemed to come between himself and any possible buyer. It was as if the old house had suddenly become a holy place with which he had no right to part lightly.
The agent painted the sale in glowing terms. The buyer wanted to take possession at once and was willing to pay cash. He was planning to pull down a portion of the present house and make radical changes, modernize the whole thing, make an apartment house out of it, and then cut up the rest of the land into small building lots and make snappy little bungalow homes out of them. He might even go a thousand or two higher if Mr. Morrell didn't feel he was getting enough.
Keith Morrell thought of the little white house behind the hedge where the white picket gate hung, with an old-fashioned latch. He thought of children at its back window watching out toward the old house to see a little boy who was their hero, and a lovely mother walking in the garden at evening with her arm around her boy. Something clutched his heart!
What was the matter with him? Modernize the house? Break up the lovely grounds into a block of cheap little houses? Well, what was the matter with that? It was the sensible thing for the new owner to do if he could put it over. Why should he care? If he sold it--and he had expected to sell it, of course--why should he care what became of it?
He sat there staring at the agent, a cool mask upon his face, while he struggled with emotions he did not quite understand. Why was it that something stood in his way when he thought of assenting to a program like this?
At last he arose and faced the agent: "I will give you my answer day after tomorrow," he said. "I shall have to think it over."
"Well, but I understood you were anxious to sell!" said the agent, anxiously following him toward the door and seeing his fat commission vanishing into dim uncertainty.
"Yes, I was," said Keith Morrell thoughtfully. "But something has--come up--" He hesitated for the right word and ended lamely, "I shall have to think it over."
"You mean the price is not enough?" asked the agent eagerly. "I'm quite sure the man would pay more if he had to."
"No, it is not a matter of money," said the young man, more as if he were arguing with himself.
"You mean you are considering coming back to live there?"
The agent's mouth drooped with anticipated disappointment.
"No, I hadn't thought of that, exactly."
"Well, you mean you might withdraw the house from the market?"
"I don't know really what I mean," said Keith. "I shall have to think it over. Perhaps I shall have to go over the house again."
And suddenly it came to him that that was just what he must do. He would have to go over the house and find it bleak and empty, in order to wipe out that vision of the little boy praying at his mother's knee beside the fire, before he could ever hand over that house to be metamorphosed and obliterated from life and history.
The agent followed him almost out to the car, talking eagerly, suggesting the buyer might take another place instead if he kept him waiting, persuading him that it was a great offer, cash, in these hard times. But Keith only looked down gravely at the path as he walked and reiterated pleasantly, "I will give you my answer day after tomorrow. Possibly I will telephone you from New York."
He had not really been listening to what the agent said. He had been wondering why he was suddenly so unsettled about selling the house.
The agent watched the car drive away with a disappointed sag to his shoulders. He had been planning what he would do with that nice fat commission that had seemed so surely coming his way. And Evelyn Avery gushed noisily in her triumph as she drove her quarry home, openly exulting in her success. But Keith Morrell was silent, almost absent-minded, suffering her conversation but giving little heed to the news she was pouring forth. He was still wondering why he was so undecided. What would he do with the house, supposing he should keep it? He had no intention of coming back alone to live in it, even supposing he could arrange his business connections to make that possible. And certainly Anne Casper, provided the breach in their friendship should be healed, would never be willing to live there. She would call it an old-fashioned barracks, perhaps, or maybe even a dump. It seemed ridiculous to allow himself even for an instant to think of such a thing as keeping the house. It would only fall into ruin if it were left standing idle, an expense for caretakers and taxes. Why couldn't he make up his mind to sell it and have it over with at once?
Yet somehow it seemed as if the spirit of his mother were softly protesting. The idea of making the lovely old rooms into apartments was abhorrent to him, and the influx of people that the building of cheap houses would surely bring, a disrespect to the lovely old estate where his childhood had been spent.
On the other hand, equally unpleasant was the thought of a tenant, that is, some tenants, going about familiarly in his mother's home! It was unthinkable! Almost he would rather see it torn down than that! A fool he was, of course, and probably only very tired from the heat of the day. Perhaps tomorrow would bring clearer thoughts and a firmer determination. It had been a mistake to come down amid the old association again. It had upset him, brought back his sorrow and loss. Better to have stayed in New York and had it out with Anne Casper. After all, she belonged to the modern age, and he had to live his life in the present, not the past. He must shake off this strange sentimentality that had him in its grasp. It must be that girl, Daphne, who had reminded him so much of his mother! The girl, and her talk of other days!
He was almost glad to get out of the car and enter the ornate Avery mansion, with its air of sophistication, its ostentatious luxury, and rouse to the immediate present.
Back he was at once in the world he was learning to know as his life now--cocktails and free, careless conversation, daring attire and startling makeup.
They welcomed him noisily, the guests who had already arrived; they claimed an intimacy he had never felt with any of them and plied him with jokes that were not to his taste. He had been out in the modern world for several years, both at home and abroad, and had grown quite used to its life, quite a part of it at times, but somehow he had not expected to find it here in his old hometown. Suddenly it seemed an impertinence here so near to the old home. It almost seemed as if he were seeing it with his mother's disapproving eyes.
He stood a little apart from the rest, holding a glass from which he had not tasted, which somehow he was strangely reluctant to taste. He watched his former schoolmates as they flocked in now, boisterously, each one with a noisy greeting. They were the same people. He co
uld recognize them, in spite of their disguises of modern garments. Yet they seemed to have changed indefinably, to have coarsened and cheapened themselves, to have grown brazen and hard. It wasn't just that they were older--the makeup of the girls had hidden age to a certain extent--it was that they seemed to have lost illusions, to be without that eager look of youth with its natural hopefulness. They were not old enough to have lost those things. It was almost as if they had lost joy or all hope of it. He had seen that look on men and women of the world, but these who had lived in the hometown and grown up with him, these ought not to have it, not yet anyway--not so soon. Why, in some cases it almost seemed as if they were wildly unhappy and were trying to keep the world from finding it out, as if their very laughter were hollow with pain!
And yet, they were Anne Casper's kind! He could not deny that! And Anne Casper was very lovely. Was it possible that under her beautiful veneer Anne Casper was hard like this and disappointed and selfish, and he had not seen it?
That girl on the grandstand that afternoon had not had that look! How was it?
Yet all these would laugh at her, despise her, perhaps. Certainly Evelyn had.
The evening was hilarious and Keith Morrell was weary. This was just the thing he had run away from in New York. At least, he had run away from the thought of Anne Casper, slim and willowy with her sleek black hair, long curly lashes, and her great dark eyes that could intrigue at one time and be so hard at another. Anne Casper, who had laughingly but utterly refused to comply with his request, and who had, moreover, insisted that he ought to give up his lifework, which had been planned for him through the years by his father and mother and himself, and go into some gigantic financial speculation with her father, be rich and independent, and be free most of the time to play around the earth with her and her friends and give himself up to amusing her. Those were the conditions she had made for continuing their friendship, an ultimatum, in fact, though she hadn't exactly put it in so many words. He had been very angry when he went away, but he had not let her see how angry he was. He had only been stern and white and had rejected her suggestions gravely, quietly, and gone.
He had thought when he left her that his heart was probably broken. That he would never believe in women again. For he hadn't been able to think, until she made a point of it, that she was really as money-minded as this. He could not believe it even yet when he recalled her loveliness. Surely in a day or two she would recall him. Of course, he had not yet actually asked her in so many words to marry him, but it had been well understood between them that such was his intention, his desire. Her beauty and her grace, her professions of interest in him, all that marvelous startling experience of meeting her and being drawn into her friendship in spite of the environment that surrounded her, an environment that was not natural to him; it could not be that that had not been real! All the way down on the train he had reasoned thus, had stared unseeing out of the window and told himself that if she did not retract what she had said, life was done for him, happiness was no more!
But now as he sat at the long-drawn-out dinner that reminded him of many he had attended with Anne Casper, he suddenly realized that, notwithstanding his supposed unhappiness, he had not thought of her once all the afternoon. He stared at the thought with startled interest while he listened to Evelyn's empty drawl of old times and really heard very little of what she said.
The thought puzzled him. He did not like to think of himself as vacillating, as easily throwing off and forgetting a love of which he had fully persuaded himself. No, he wasn't like that. If there was ever one thing his mother had drilled into him, it was to be serious about falling in love, not to be impetuous but deliberate, to be entirely sure he had chosen the right one and then to abide by it, be loyal to it, come what might.
But his mother would never have approved a woman who would test his love by a demand that he should go into a questionable business and throw aside all his preparations for life. And when he came to face it honestly, had he ever been quite sure that Anne Casper was the true mate of his heart? Hadn't he just been deliberately trying to make himself believe that her beauty was real and not merely of the flesh?
He had got so far in his thoughts when the general hilarity interrupted them. Some silly tale one of the men was addressing to him noisily. Keith had only toyed with his wineglass, but the others had drunk freely, and high spirits was the keynote of the hour.
Suddenly, as he saw what the outcome of the story was to be, its utter silliness and sordidness palled upon him. Was this the thing he was letting himself in for by accepting Evelyn's invitation? Just a return to the atmosphere he had so wearied of in New York? And not even Anne Casper to relieve the situation! It was not his native element. It was hers, and he had stood for it that he might have her, telling himself that when she was his he would wean her away from it. But could he do that? Wasn't it too much a part of her, and without it for a background would she have the glamour?
Somehow at this distance, he wasn't so sure of Anne Casper. And perhaps he wasn't so heartbroken as he had thought! What was it that had got him? The coming back here to his old home, where he could remember his sweet, simple life with his father and mother, his absorbing school and play, his ambitions for the future?
And suddenly he knew what it was, the picture of himself kneeling by his mother's knee, with the firelight flickering over his mother's face! It was the girl, Daphne Deane, and her story of how she had watched as a play his own life, that had got him. Foolish, of course, child's play, not a thing that should influence a man grown. But somehow a great disgust for the thing he was doing now filled his soul. He wanted to get away from this lighted room and these silly made-up, half-drunken former comrades of his, out into the coolness and darkness of the night.
"He's frightfully solemn, isn't he?" whispered Nell Harbison to Evelyn across her partner, with lifted eyes toward Keith. His head was turned toward the lady on his right, who was rallying him that he was not drinking, and he did not hear.
"Yes," assented the hostess. "It's his mother's fault. She made him that way. I always said she would, keeping him so much to himself and making him grind at his studies. But Nell, he's horribly good looking, you know."
"Yes, darling. He always was! But what a waste under a scholarly expression like that!"
When the company drifted out of the dining room at last, Keith Morrell paused at the open door and gazed out into the night. The soft splash of a fountain, the sweet tang of honeysuckle from an arbor drew him. He longed inexpressibly to get away. How could he manage it? It was only a step out there into the soft darkness where he could get his balance, get away from the eager pursuit of happiness. He could easily go and no one know where he had gone. But that wasn't exactly the courteous thing to do.
Evelyn came hastening toward him smiling. The orchestra was playing and already two couples were dancing. He didn't want to dance with Evelyn, and he could see that was what she was intending should happen. Quickly he glanced down at his watch, and then as she reached him he looked up, smiling.
"I wonder if I could make a phone call here in the village?" he said pleasantly.
"Oh, surely," she said, leading the way to the phone and showing signs of intending to linger and wait for him.
"This is something I should have attended to earlier in the afternoon," he explained as he took up the telephone book and slipped into the little booth under the stairs. "I probably shall not be long. I'll find you in the other room when I am done. Don't let me keep you."
Reluctantly she drifted away.
There had been only one person in the town whom he could think of to call up in his need of an excuse, and that was an elderly woman, a friend of his mother's, a lifelong invalid, yet a shining saint. He hadn't thought of her in years, and he had no real obligation toward her. She was just a vague part of the dim background of his childhood, but it certainly would please her if he called up to ask after her health, though he wasn't even sure she was alive now.
But there was her name, Miss Emily Lynd. Why shouldn't he go and call for a moment? It would give him an excuse to get away and really was the kind thing for him to do. She had been so fond of his mother and of course had heard nothing except the bare fact of her death. It was one of the things his mother would have liked him to be thoughtful enough to do. Well, at least he would see if she was able to see him. She had been bedridden when they went away. Perhaps she still was. Perhaps it was too late to call up an invalid, almost ten o'clock! Well, he would venture it anyway.
So he called, and almost immediately the answer came, the same sweet, fresh young voice he remembered of old. How had she managed to keep her voice young through all the years of pain she had had to endure?
"Yes? This is Miss Lynd."
"This is Keith Morrell, Aunt Emily." Everybody called her "Aunt" who knew Emily Lynd at all. "Did I call you too late? Had you retired?"
There came a flute note of laughter.
"Retired? Dear lad! How should I retire more than I am continually? Don't you know that I've been nothing else but retired for the last five years? But have I turned my light out yet? No, I hadn't, and if I had I would turn it on again to hear you talk. It's great to hear your voice after this long silence. Where are you? Can't you come and see me?"
"I'm in the village, Aunt Emily. Yes, I'll come for a few minutes, if I'm not too late."
He hung up the phone with a guilty sense that it would have been just too bad if he hadn't done this, and he probably wouldn't have thought of it if he hadn't been so bored with this dinner party.
He sought Evelyn Avery and made his excuses, pleading an urgent errand, and drew a free breath as he strode away from the house.
Daphne Dean Page 3