This was indeed a new light upon what Hobart had been masculine enough to think a mere example of woman’s rudeness to woman; and in that light the speechless flight of the unfortunate Mildred now bore the colour of true pathos. Moreover, following his awakened doubts of Julietta, his wife’s view of his conduct began to be uncomfortably convincing. He feared that he was going to be remorseful.
“Of course you don’t dream I’m not fond of Mildred,” he said. “I’ve always been very—”
“You show it strangely,” Anne interrupted. She spoke with no softening of her resentment, though what she felt for her sister brought to her eyes the tears she had been withholding, and he saw them as a street light flashed through the glass of the window beside her. “Mildred’s the kind of woman people do hurt, I suppose. She’s so gentle and harmless herself, it must be a temptation! She’s always been so lovely to you, I suppose you couldn’t resist it.”
“Oh, look here!” he protested, and his fears were realized; he was already remorseful. “You know I wouldn’t have hurt—”
“Then why did you?”
“Well, if I did,” he said, desperately; “and, confound it, I’m afraid maybe I did — I suppose it was because jealousy is the kind of suffering that onlookers always have the least sympathy with. I’ll beg her pardon, and, if I caused her pain, I’ll try to make it up to her.”
“How can you do that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, regretfully. “I’ll just have to try to find some way.”
“That wouldn’t be very easy,” his wife said-
“Could you get her husband back for her, if this girl gets him away?”
“But that is nonsense,” he protested. “Julietta Voss couldn’t get that far with old John — not if she had all eternity to try in!”
This was the position he took, and he maintained it during the rest of their drive, and at intervals during the rather stately dinner for two people that was the evening custom of their big country house. After dinner, however, as he sat down to coffee with his wife in the library, he was forced to adopt another view. His sister-in-law came in suddenly and dramatically, the fur cloak she had thrown about her for a hasty drive falling to the floor as she entered the door.
Anne sprang up from her easy chair. “Mildred! What’s happened?”
For Mildred’s pallor, and her visible struggle for composure, as she stood with both hands upon the back of a chair to steady herself, left no doubt that she came because of some definite happening.
Hobart moved to withdraw. “I imagine you and Anne might like to have a talk together, Mildred. I’ll just—”
“No,” Mildred said in a strained and plaintive voice, “I’ve come for help. You’ve both got to help me somehow, because I can’t stand it. I really can’t.”
He was distressed for her. “Anything — anything in the world—”
“I hope you mean it,” Mildred said, staring at him with wide and desperate eyes. “If any one can do anything to help me it’s you, Hobart, because you’ve always been able to do everything you’ve ever wanted to do. Maybe you won’t want to help me.”
“What?” he cried. “My dear girl!”
“No,” she said, pathetically; “maybe you won’t want to. After the way you treated me before them at the club, I shouldn’t be sure you’d want to.”
“My dear sister, don’t think that,” he begged. “I see I did hurt you, and I only ask a chance to make up to you for it. What can I do?”
“Nothing!” his wife said, taking the reply into her own mouth, as she put an arm about her sister and stood facing him scornfully. “Nothing that will make up to her for what you did. That’s something you can never do, because even you can’t recall and do again what has passed.”
Troubled, admiring Anne for the proud anger of her attitude, and secretly pleased with her “even you,” he gave her a queer look in which there was a gleam of doggedness. “I’ll try, at any rate,” he said; and then, more casually, he addressed his sister-in-law: “You drove over alone, Mildred?”
“As soon as John left the house after dinner,” she said. “I kept up till he went, and then I found I couldn’t bear it any longer — I had to ask for help. After he put her into the car with me at the club, he asked me why I was so quiet, and I said I had a bad headache; — it was true enough, too. She said that was ‘too bad’ and immediately proposed that we should all three’ drive into town after dinner to a cabaret vaudeville and dance and late supper!”
“She did?” Hobart asked. “Not just after you’d told them your head ached?”
“Yes. She said the way to cure a headache was to ‘be gay and forget it.’”
“What did you tell her, Mildred?”
“I said I couldn’t and that John couldn’t go either, because he had to be in his office early to-morrow morning. He said no; he didn’t need more than three or four hours’ sleep, and he would be only too glad to escort Julietta, since if I had a headache, I’d probably go to bed, and he’d have nothing to do. At dinner I asked him please not to go; please to stay with me, instead. He said in his kindest way that he’d be glad to, any other night, but it was impossible this evening since he’d ‘promised Julietta,’ and couldn’t possibly break a promise. So he went — and I found I couldn’t stay in the house and think it over any longer. Hobart, you mustn’t go out there and help them pretend to play golf to-morrow.”
“Very well,” he said, gravely. “I’ll do whatever you wish. But isn’t it just possible you’d rather have me with them? If Julietta really is the designing person you believe she is—”
“H!” Mildred cried with sudden loudness. “‘If she is! You don’t understand, Hobart. This is what happened in the car just before we reached her house to-night; — it happens all the time. She made a gesture — she always talks with gestures — and her hand smashed against the door-frame and broke the crystal of her wrist-watch. She said she was sure the works were broken, too. It was a plain gold watch, old and not very valuable, but she made a great lamentation over it. John took it from her, put it in his pocket, and said that since it was broken in our car it was our place to restore it; she should have a new one as near like it as possible to-morrow; — it would be the ‘greatest privilege’ to obtain it for her! She knew that was just what he’d do, and she broke it on purpose, of course.”
“Mildred, you really believe—”
She stopped him. “You don’t understand. It goes on all the time. And if she does this much under my very eyes, what doesn’t she get out of him when they’re alone together?”
“There might be something reassuring in that,” Hobart suggested. “If she spends her energies getting these trifles from him — because of course that’s all they are to a man in old John’s position — doesn’t that look as if her designs might be limited to—”
“No, it does not,” Mrs. Simms interrupted, promptly.
“But—”
“No,” his wife repeated. “Don’t you see that the very fact of her wanting the trifles would make her want something a great deal more important, and that’s to be in a position where she wouldn’t have to work for them?”
“Well, then,” her husband returned; “if she expects to reach that position by supplanting Mildred, she has a ridiculous ambition!”
“Is it?” Mildred asked, unhappily. “If John were any other kind of man, it might be ridiculous.” Tears came into her eyes that had been dry until now; but she struggled with herself and kept more from coming. “Isn’t it ironical?” she said. “The very goodness of such a man as John, his simple kindness, his idealizing — the very things I’ve cared for most in him — that they should be his weakness and just what leaves him open to the easy cajoling of a crude trespasser like Julietta Voss! Don’t you understand, Hobart? I know you didn’t understand this afternoon, but don’t you now? You thought I was jealous of him, I know. Perhaps I am; perhaps I do want to keep him for myself; but I’m his wife; why shouldn’t I? And I know
I’m better for him than she’d be. Oh, don’t you understand? I want to ‘protect him!”
Hobart came to her and took her hand. “Mildred, old John hasn’t the remotest idea you’re suffering like this. You’ve got to tell him about it.”
“But I can’t” she cried. “I can’t let him think I’m just a jealous woman, and what else would he think of me if I told him the truth about her? That’s why I don’t want you to go out there with them to-morrow, Hobart.”
“Of course I won’t, since you ask it,” he said, mystified. “Yet I don’t see—”
“You don’t?” his wife asked, sharply; and, in obvious pity for a poor understanding, characteristically manlike, she explained what she had instantly divined — her unhappy sister’s reason for coming to ask him to help her. “Julietta counts on your being with them as the answer to the talk about them. She intends to have a defence against the talk — an answer that will help to keep people on her side — and if you break your engagement without any explanation she’ll wonder what it means, and if we haven’t ashed you to do it; and she’ll get John to find out. He’ll ask you why you didn’t come. Then you can tell him you stayed away because you’re troubled about what Mildred may think. It’s all you need say, and he’ll speak to Mildred about it. That will give her a chance to talk to him.”
“Is it what you want, Mildred?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s the only thing I can think of. It gives me a chance to talk to him, that’s all. It may make him despise me, anyhow. I don’t know what he’ll say, but I’ve got to do it; — I can’t go on any longer not saying anything! Perhaps” — her breath caught in her throat, and for a moment she could not speak— “perhaps he’ll ask me for a divorce. Well, if he does, I’ll give it to him!”
“No, no!” her sister cried. “You said you wanted to protect him!”
“If he doesn’t love me any more, I couldn’t,” Mildred sobbed, for her struggle to control herself was lost now, and her weeping became convulsive. “Don’t you see I couldn’t? You can’t protect anybody that’s tired of you. If he’s tired of you, how can you protect him against someone he’s in love with?”
“My dear sister!” Hobart begged her, deeply moved. “Don’t think it. Old John isn’t in love with Julietta Voss any more than I am!”
“How do I know?” she sobbed. “He acts as if he is. What other way is there to tell? How do I know?” And, clinging to his hand, she sank down into the chair beside which she had been standing. “Oh, Hobart, you must help me; you must try your best to help me!”
“Indeed I will,” he promised, with all the earnestness that was in him. “I’ll do anything in the world, Mildred — absolutely anything!”
He meant it indeed; but over the bowed form of the unhappy lady who clung to his hand, entreating him, he looked into the denouncing and skeptical eyes of his wife. She needed no words, nor anything except those implacable eyes of hers, to tell him that his own recent behaviour was in great part responsible for the misery before them, and that he lacked the power to make up to Mildred for what he had done.
He adored his wife, and he took that look of hers as a challenge.
XXX. MRS. CROMWELL’S SON’S IN LAW
HE WAS FAR from convinced, however, that Mildred’s necessity was as tragic as she believed. If it was, he would prove to his wife that he was a man of more resources than she thought; but it still seemed to him that old John Tower could be in no danger from the simple wiles of Julietta. For Hobart had accepted the theory that Julietta was wily; he had finally gone that far unconditionally before the unhappy evening was over; and he even wondered why he had hitherto been so blind when he looked at Julietta. But as for steady old John Tower— “No,” he said to himself, as he drove into the city the next morning. “Absolutely impossible!” Yet in this emphasis there was that faint shade of doubt so often present when people buttress their convictions with “absolutely”; so he decided to buttress himself further by means of a diplomatic experimental talk with old John.
Arrived in the heart of the city at the great building that was his own, with all its thirty stories obedient to his five feet three inches, a Giant Jinn enslaved by a little master enchanter, he went, not to his own offices, but to old John’s. “I just dropped in for a morning cigar,” he explained.
His brother-in-law received him heartily.
“My dear Hobart, this is indeed a pleasure. Will you smoke one of my cigars or one of your own? I’m afraid yours are much the better.”
“No, they’re not,” Hobart laughed. “Mine are much the worse. Your taste is a lot better than mine about pretty nearly everything.” As he spoke he took a long cigar from the box that Tower was offering him, and lighted it. “You have better taste in cigars, better taste in furniture—” Here he seated himself in one of the set of seventeenth-century English chairs that helped to make the room the pleasant place it was. “You even have better taste on the golf links,” he concluded, chuckling as if reminiscently.
“How so? You play a better game. You don’t allude to my apparel for it, I imagine.”
“That, too,” Hobart said. “But I was thinking of something else.”
“Of what, my dear Hobart?”
Hobart laughed, gave him a look of friendly raillery, mixed with jocose admiration, and said: “Don’t you think I’m a good deal of a dunderhead? On your word, don’t you, old John?”
Old John, beaming genially and amused by his caller’s question, but puzzled by it, laughed with him. “On my word then, no. I haven’t the slightest conception of what you mean.”
“Just think of it!” Hobart chuckled. “Here we go, afternoon after afternoon, you and I, out to the links; and every single time, when we get there, I go roving round the course virtually all by myself, while you put in the time with Julietta! You and she keep together and play the same ball — and what do I play? It seems to me I play the Lone Fisherman! Honestly, do you think it’s fair?”
“Fair?” Old John had become grave, and the other was surprised and interested to observe that a tinge of red was slowly mounting in his cheeks. “Let me understand you, Hobart,” he said. “You mean that I’ve been monopolizing Julietta?”
“Rather!” Hobart continued his rallying jocosity, though inwardly he was disturbed by the spreading of that tinge of red over his brother-in-law’s face.
“Don’t you think it’s about time I had a share of feminine camaraderie in our outdoor sports?”
“You mean, Hobart, that this afternoon you’d prefer to play the same ball with Julietta and have me play against you?”
This was not the question Hobart had desired to evoke; and his jocosity departed from him suddenly.
“Well—” he said. Then, as his shrewd eyes took note again of old John’s rosy face and of his gravity — already troubled as by some forthcoming disappointment — the Napoleonic Hobart came to one of those swift and clear resolutions, the capacity for which had made possible his prodigious business career during what was still almost his youth. Old John was indeed in danger, although old John was “too innocent” to know it, himself. And in the very instant of this realization, Hobart decided that he had found the opportunity to take up his wife’s challenge and atone in full for his fault to her sister.
“Why — why, yes,” he said, slowly. “Don’t you think it’s about time? You wouldn’t mind very much, would you?”
Old John’s large and well-favoured face grew redder than ever, though otherwise it was expressive of the most naively plain regret. “Ah — I suppose it would be fair,” he said. “Julietta is attractive, as you say. In fact, I believe she is the most attractive girl I have ever known. I value her friendship very highly, Hobart. I came into town to a cabaret with her last night, and neither of us knew anybody in the place. We danced together and had a little supper, and danced some more, and talked — altogether until about two o’clock, I think, Hobart. And in all that time I never had a dull moment — not one! She is a most a
ttractive girl, as you say, and I believe there’s perhaps some justice in your idea that you’re entitled to more of her companionship than you’ve been enjoying — for this afternoon at least. Since you put it as you do, suppose we arrange, then, that you and she play the same ball this afternoon and I play against the two of you.”
“I believe that would be fair,” Hobart said, his eyes sidelong upon old John. “It’s settled then.” He rose to go.
“I suppose so.” Tower’s gravity increased; but he brightened at a thought that came to him as his departing caller reached the door. “I suppose, Hobart, to-morrow — to-morrow—”
“To-morrow what?” Hobart inquired, staring at him.
“Ah — to-morrow—” Old John hesitated, then finished hopefully: “We might return to our former arrangement?”
“To-morrow? Oh, yes, certainly — to-morrow we’ll return to our former arrangement,” Hobart said; and as he passed through the anteroom beyond he murmured the word incredulously to himself, “‘To-morrow.’” He laughed shortly, and in his imagination continued the dialogue with old John. “Day after to-morrow, too, I suppose? And the day after that? And the next, and the next? Why, yes! Why not?” Then he became serious. “You poor dear old thing, there’s got not to be any ‘tomorrow’!”
He took the affair into his own hands for complete settlement; and at noon he went to a jeweller’s and bought the most expensive wrist-watch in the place — a trifling miracle of platinum intricately glittering with excellent white diamonds. He put the little packet in his coat pocket, and at about five o’clock that afternoon he showed it to Miss Julietta Voss.
Old John Tower, absent-minded and not playing well, had driven his ball into a thicket fifty yards away from where Hobart and Julietta had paused; — he was in the underbrush, solemnly searching, with his caddy.
“Something for you,” Hobart said, tossing the little packet up and down in his hand.
She looked surprised. “For me? From you?”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 384