“Louis, I might as well tell you at once that I have no sympathy for her. I wrote to her, out of sheer kindness, for her own good — and she replied so insolently that — that I am not yet perfectly recovered—”
“What did you write?”
Mrs. Collis remained disdainfully silent, but her eyes sparkled.
“Won’t you tell me,” he asked, patiently, “what it was you wrote to
Valerie West?”
“Yes, I’ll tell you if you insist on knowing! — even if you do misconstrue it! I wrote to her — for her own sake — and to avoid ill-natured comment, — suggesting that she be seen less frequently with you in public. I wrote as nicely, as kindly, as delicately as I knew how. And her reply was a practical request that I mind my business!… Which was vulgar and outrageous, considering that she had given me her promise—” Mrs. Collis checked herself in her headlong and indignant complaint; then she coloured painfully, but her mouth settled into tight, uncompromising lines.
“What promise had Valerie West made you?” he asked, resolutely subduing his amazement and irritation.
For a moment Mrs. Collis hesitated; then, realising that matters had gone too far for concealment, she answered almost violently:
“She promised me not to marry you, — if you must know! I can’t help what you think about it; I realised that you were infatuated — that you were making a fatal and terrible mistake — ruining life for yourself and for your family — and I went to her and told her so! I’ve done all I could to save you. I suppose I have gained your enmity by doing it. She promised me not to marry you — but she’ll probably break her word. If you mean to marry her you’ll do so, no doubt. But, Louis, if you do, such a step will sever all social relations between you and your family. Because I will not receive her! Nor will my friends — nor yours — nor father’s and mother’s friends! And that settles it.”
He spoke with great care, hesitating, picking and choosing his words:
“Is it — possible that you did — such a thing — as to write to Valerie
West — threatening her with my family’s displeasure if she married me?”
“I did not write her at first. The first time I went to see her. And I told her kindly but plainly what I had to tell her! It was my duty to do it and I didn’t flinch.”
Lily was breathing fast; her eyes narrowed unpleasantly.
He managed to master his astonishment and anger; but it was a heavy draught on his reserve of self-discipline, good temper, and common sense to pass over this thing that had been done to him and to concentrate himself upon the main issue. When he was able to speak again, calmly and without resentment, he said:
“The first thing for us to do, as a family, is to eliminate all personal bitterness from this discussion. There must be no question of our affection for one another; no question but what we wish to do the best by each other. I accept that as granted. If you took the step which you did take it was because you really believed it necessary for my happiness—”
“I still believe it!” she insisted; and her lips became a thin, hard line.
“Then we won’t discuss it. But I want to ask you one thing; have you talked with mother about it?”
“Yes — naturally.”
“Has she told you all that I told her this afternoon?”
“I suppose so. It does not alter my opinion one particle,” she replied, her pretty head obstinately lowered.
He said: “Valerie West will not marry me if my family continues hostile to her.”
Lily slowly lifted her eyes:
“Then will you tell me why she permits herself to be seen so constantly with you? If she is not going to marry you what is she going to do? Does she care what people are saying about her? — and about you?”
“No decent people are likely to say anything unpleasant about either of us,” he said, keeping a tight rein on himself — but the curb was biting deeply now. “Mother will stand by me, Lily. Will you?”
His sister’s face reddened: “Louis,” she said, “I am married; I have children, friends, a certain position to maintain. You are unmarried, careless of conventions, uninterested in the kind of life that I and my friends have led, and will always lead. The life, the society, the formalities, the conventional observances are all part of our lives, and make for our happiness and self-respect; but they mean absolutely nothing to you. And you propose to invade our respectable and inoffensive seclusion with a conspicuous wife who has been a notorious professional model; and you demand of your family that they receive her as one of them! Louis, I ask you, is this fair to us?”
He said very gravely: “You have met Valerie West. Do you really believe that either the dignity or the morals of the family circle would suffer by her introduction to it?”
“I know nothing about her morals!” said his sister, excitedly.
“Then why condemn them?”
“I did not; I merely reminded you that she is a celebrated professional model.”
“It is not necessary to remind me. My mother knows it and will stand by her. Will you do less for your own brother?”
“Louis! You are cruel, selfish, utterly heartless—”
“I am trying to think of everybody in the family who is concerned; but, when a man’s in love he can’t help thinking a little of the woman he loves — especially if nobody else does.” He turned his head and looked out of the window. Stars were shining faintly in a luminous sky. His face seemed to have grown old and gray and haggard:
“I don’t know what to do,” he said, as though speaking to himself;— “I don’t know where to turn. She would marry me if you’d let her; she will never marry me if my family is unkind to her—”
“What will she do, then?” asked Lily, coolly.
For a moment he let her words pass, then, turned around. The expression of his sister’s brightly curious eyes perplexed him.
“What do you mean?” he asked, disturbed.
“What I say, Louis. I asked you what Miss West means to do if she does not marry you? Discontinue her indiscreet intimacy with you?”
“Why should she?”
Lily said, sharply: “I would not have to put that question to a modest girl.”
“I have to put it to you!” he retorted, beginning to lose his self-command. “Why should Valerie West discontinue her friendship with me because my family’s stupid attitude toward her makes it impossible for a generous and proud girl to marry me?”
Lily, pale, infuriated, leaned forward in her chair.
“Because,” she retorted violently, “if that intimacy continues much longer a stupid world and your stupid family will believe that the girl is your mistress! But in that event, thank God, the infamy will rest where it belongs — not on us!”
A cold rage paralysed his speech; she saw its ghastly reflection on his white and haggard face — saw him quiver under the shock; rose involuntarily, terrified at the lengths to which passion had scourged her:
“Louis,” she faltered— “I — I didn’t mean that! — I was beside myself; forgive me, please! Don’t look like that; you are frightening me—”
She caught his arm as he passed her, clung to it, pallid, fearful, imploring,— “W-what are you going to do, Louis! Don’t go, dear, please. I’m sorry, I’m very, very humble. Won’t you speak to me? I said too much; I was wrong; — I — I will try to be different — try to reconcile myself to — to what — you — wish—”
He looked down at her where she hung to him, tearful face lifted to his:
“I didn’t know women could feel that way about another woman,” he said, in a dull voice. “There’s no use — no use—”
“But — but I love you dearly, Louis! I couldn’t endure it to have anything come between us — disrupt the family—”
“Nothing will, Lily…. I must go now.”
“Don’t you believe I love you?”
He drew a deep, unconscious breath.
“I suppose so. Different people exp
ress love differently. There’s no use in asking you to be different—”
She said, piteously: “I’m trying. Don’t you see I’m trying? Give me time, Louis! Make allowances. You can’t utterly change people in a few hours.”
He gazed at her intently for a moment.
“You mean that you are trying to be fair to — her?”
“I — if you call it that; — yes! But a family can not adapt itself, instantaneously, to such a cataclysm as threatens — I mean — I mean — oh, Louis! Try to understand us and sympathise a little with us!”
His arms closed around her shoulders:
“Little sister, we both have the family temper — and beneath it, the family instinct for cohesion. If we are also selfish it is not individual but family selfishness. It is the family which has always said to the world, ‘Noli me tangere!’ while we, individually, are really inclined to be kinder, more sympathetic, more curious about the neighbours outside our gate. Let it be so now. Once inside the family, what can harm Valerie?”
“Dearest, dearest brother,” she murmured, “you talk like a foolish man. Women understand better. And if it is a part of your program that this girl is to be accepted by an old-fashioned society, now almost obsolete, but in which this family is merely a single superannuated unit, that program can never be carried out.”
“I think you are mistaken,” he said.
“I know I am not. It is inevitable that if you marry this girl she will be more or less ignored, isolated, humiliated, overlooked outside our own little family circle. Even in that limited mob which the newspapers call New York Society — in that modern, wealthy, hard-witted, over-jewelled, self-sufficient league which is yet too eternally uncertain of its own status to assume any authority or any responsibility for a stranger without credentials, — it would not be possible to make Valerie West acceptable in the slightest sense of the word. Because she is too well known; her beauty is celebrated; she has become famous. Her only chance there — or with us — would have been in her absolute anonymity. Then lies might have done the rest. But lying is now useless in regard to her.”
“Perfectly,” he said. “She would not permit it.”
In his vacant gaze there was something changed — a fixedness born of a slow and hopeless enlightenment.
“If that is the case, there is no chance,” he said thoughtfully. “I had not considered that aspect.”
“I had.”
He shook his head slightly, gazing through the window at the starry lustre overhead.
“I wouldn’t care,” he said, “if she would only marry me. If she’d do that I’d never bother anybody — nor embarrass the family—”
“Louis!”
“I mean make any social demands on you…. And, as for the world—” He slowly shook his head again: “We could make our own friends and our own way — if she would only consent to do it. But she never will.”
“Do you mean to say she will not marry you if you ask her?” began Lily incredulously.
“Absolutely.”
“Why?”
“For your sakes — yours, and mother’s, and father’s — and for mine.”
There was a long silence, then Lily said unsteadily:
“There — there seems to be a certain — nobility — about her…. It is a pity — a tragedy — that she is what she is!”
“It is a tragedy that the world is what it is,” he said. “Good night.”
* * * * *
His father sent for him in the morning; Louis found him reading the Tribune in his room and sipping a bowl of hot milk and toast.
[Illustration: “‘What have you been saying to your mother?’ he asked.”]
“What have you been saying to your mother?” he asked, looking up through his gold-rimmed spectacles and munching toast.
“Has she not told you, father?”
“Yes, she has…. I think you had better make a trip around the world.”
“That would not alter matters.”
“I differ with you,” observed his father, leisurely employing his napkin.
“There is no use considering it,” said his son patiently.
“Then what do you propose to do?”
“There is nothing to do.”
“By that somewhat indefinite expression I suppose that you intend to pursue a waiting policy?”
“A waiting policy?” His son laughed, mirthlessly. “What am I to wait for? If you all were kind to Valerie West she might, perhaps, consent to marry me. But it seems that even our own family circle has not sufficient authority to protect her from our friends’ neglect and humiliation….
“She warned me that it would be so, long ago. I did not believe it; I could not comprehend it. But, somehow, Lily has made me believe it. And so have you. I guess it must be true. And if that’s all I have to offer my wife, it’s not enough to compensate her for her loss of freedom and happiness and self-respect among those who really care for her.”
“Do you give me to understand that you renounce all intentions of marrying this girl?” asked his father, breaking more toast into his bowl of milk.
“Yes,” said his son, listlessly.
“Thank God!” said his father; “come here, my son.”
They shook hands; the son’s lifeless arm fell to his side and he stood looking at the floor in silence. The father took a spoonful of hot milk with satisfaction, and, after the younger man had left the room, he resumed his newspaper. He was particularly interested in the “Sunshine Column,” which dispensed sweetness and light under a poetic caption too beautiful to be true in a coldly humorous world.
* * * * *
That afternoon Gordon Collis said abruptly to Neville:
“You look like the devil, Louis.”
“Do I?”
“You certainly do.” And, in a lower voice: “I guess I’ve heard what’s the matter. Don’t worry. It’s a thing about which nobody ever ought to give anybody any advice — so I’ll give you some. Marry whoever you damn please. It’ll be all the same after that oak I planted this morning is half grown.”
“Gordon,” he said, surprised, “I didn’t suppose you were liberal.”
“Liberal! Why, man alive! Do you think a fellow can live out of doors as I have lived, and see germs sprout, and see mountain ranges decay, and sit on a few glaciers, and swing a pick into a mother-lode — and not be liberal? Do you suppose ten-cent laws bother me when I’m up against the blind laws that made the law-makers? — laws that made life itself before Christ lived to conform to them?… I married where I loved. It chanced that my marriage with your sister didn’t clash with the sanctified order of things in Manhattan town. But if your sister had been the maid who dresses her, and I had loved her, I’d have married her all the same and have gone about the pleasures and duties of procreation and conservation exactly as I go about ’em now…. I wonder how much the Almighty was thinking about Tenth Street when the first pair of anthropoids mated? Nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus. If you love each other — Noli pugnare duobus. … And I’m going into the woods to look for ginseng. Want to come?”
Neville went. Cameron and Stephanie, equipped with buckskin gloves, a fox terrier, and digging apparatus, joined them just where the slender meadow brook entered the woods.
“There are mosquitoes here!” exclaimed Cameron wrathfully. “All day and every day I’m being stung down town, and I’m not going to stand for it here!”
Stephanie let him aid her to the top of a fallen log, glancing back once or twice toward Neville, who was sauntering forward among the trees, pretending to look for ginseng.
“Do you notice how Louis has changed?” she said, keeping her balance on the log. “I cannot bear to see him so thin and colourless.”
Cameron now entertained a lively suspicion how matters stood, and knew that Stephanie also suspected; but he only said, carelessly: “It’s probably dissipation. You know what a terrible pace he’s been going from the cradle onward.”
She sm
iled quietly. “Yes, I know, Sandy. And I know, too, that you are the only man who has been able to keep up that devilish pace with him.”
“I’ve led a horrible life,” muttered Cameron darkly.
Stephanie laughed; he gave her his hand as she stood balanced on the big log; she laid her fingers in his confidently, looked into his honest face, still laughing, then sprang lightly to the ground.
“What a really good man you are!” she said tormentingly.
“Oh, heaven! If you call me that I’m really done for!”
“Done for?” she exclaimed in surprise. “How?”
“Done for as far as you are concerned.”
“I? Why how, and with what am I concerned, Sandy? I don’t understand you.”
But he only turned red and muttered to himself and strolled about with his hands in his pockets, kicking the dead leaves as though he expected to find something astonishing under them. And Stephanie glanced at him sideways once or twice, thoughtfully, curiously, but questioned him no further.
Gordon Collis pottered about in a neighbouring thicket; the fox terrier was chasing chipmunks. As for Neville he had already sauntered out of sight among the trees.
Stephanie, seated on a dry and mossy stump, preoccupied with her own ruminations, looked up absently as Cameron came up to her bearing floral offerings.
“Thank you, Sandy,” she said, as he handed her a cluster of wild blossoms. Then, fastening them to her waist, she glanced up mischieviously:
“How funny you are! You look and act like a little boy at a party presenting his first offering to the eternal feminine.”
“It’s my first offering,” he said coolly.
“Oh, Sandy! With your devilish record!”
“Do you know,” he said, “that I’m thirty-two years old? And that you are twenty-two? And that since you were twelve and I was twenty odd I’ve been in love with you?”
She looked at him in blank dismay for a moment, then forced a laugh:
“Of course I know it, Sandy. It’s the kind of love a girl cares most about—”
“It’s really love,” said Cameron, un-smiling— “the kind I’m afraid she doesn’t care very much about.”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 546