"Newport, of course. Why not? Fill the house up. I give you a free hand."
"And will you join me there, Gilbert?"
"No. I'm not in the mood."
He turned on his heel and went to the other side of the summer house, and flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the scrub below. A frog took a leap. When he spoke again it was with his back to her. "Don't you think you'd better rejoin Mrs. Jekyll? She may be impatient to get off."
But Alice took her courage in both hands. If this was to be the end she must know it. Uncertainty was not to be endured any longer. All her sleepless nights and fluctuations of hope and despair had marked her, perhaps for life. Hers was not the easily blown away infatuation of a debutante, the mere summer love of a young girl. It was the steady and devoted love of a wife, ready to make sacrifices, to forgive inconstancies, to make allowances for temporary aberrations and, when necessary, to nurse back to sanity, without one word or look of reproach, the husband who had slipped into delinquency. Not only her future and his were at stake, but there were the children for whom she prayed. They must be considered.
And so, holding back her emotion, she followed him across the pompous summer house in which, with a shudder, she recognized a horrible resemblance to a mausoleum, and laid her little hand upon his arm.
"Gilbert," she said, "tell me the truth. Be frank with me. Let me help you, dear."
Poor little wife. For the third time she had said the wrong thing. "Help"--the word angered him. Did she imagine that he was a callow youth crossed in love?
He drew his arm away sharply. There was something too domestic in all this to be borne with patience. Humiliating, also, he had to confess.
"When did I ever give you the right to delve into my private affairs?" he asked, with amazing cruelty. "We're married,--isn't that enough? I've given you everything I have except my independence. You can't ask for more than that,--from me."
He added "from me" because the expression of pain on her pretty face made him out to be a brute, and he was not that. He tried to hedge by the use of those two small words and put it to her, without explanation, that he was different from most men,--more careless and callous to the old-fashioned vows of marriage, if she liked, but different. That might be due to character or upbringing or the times to which he belonged. He wasn't going to argue about it. The fact remained. "I'll take you back," he added.
But she blocked the way. "I only want your love," she said. "If you've taken that away from me, nothing else counts."
He gave a sort of groan. Her persistence was appalling, her courage an indescribable reproach. For a moment he remained silent, with a drawn face and twitching fingers, strangely white and wasted, like a man who had been through an illness,--a caricature of the once easy- going Gilbert Palgrave, the captain of his fate and the master of his soul.
"All right then," he said, "if you must know, you shall, but do me the credit to remember that I did my best to leave things vague and blurred." He took her by the elbow and put her into a chair. With a touch of his old thoughtfulness and rather studied politeness he chose one that was untouched by the sun that came low over the dune. Then he sat down and bent forward and looked her full in the eyes.
"This is going to hurt you," he said, "but you've asked for the truth, and as everything seems to be coming to a head, you'd better have it, naked and undisguised. In any case, you're one of the women who always gets hurt and always thrives on it. You're too earnest and sincere to be able to apply eye-wash to the damn thing we call life, aren't you?"
"Yes, Gilbert," she answered, with the look of one who had been placed in front of a firing squad, without a bandage over her eyes.
There was a brief pause, filled by what he had called the everlasting drumming of the sea.
"One night, in Paris, when I was towering on the false confidence of twenty-one,"--curious how, even at that moment, he spoke with a certain self-consciousness,--"I came out of the Moulin Rouge alone and walked back to the Maurice. It was the first time I'd ever been on the other side, and I was doing it all in the usual way of the precocious undergraduate. But the 'gay Paree' stuff that was specially manufactured to catch the superfluous francs of the pornographic tourist and isn't really in the least French, bored me, almost at once. And that night, going slowly to the hotel, sickened by painted women, chypre and raw champagne I turned a mental somersault and built up a picture of what I hoped I should find in life. It contained a woman, of course--a girl, very young, the very spirit of spring, whose laugh would turn my heart and who, like an elusive wood nymph, would lead me panting and hungry through a maze of trees. I called it the Great Emotion and from that night on I tried to find the original of that boyish picture, looking everywhere with no success. At twenty-nine, coming out of what seemed to be the glamor of the impossible, I married you to oblige my mother,--you asked for this,--and imagined that I had settled into a conventional rut. Do you want me to go on with it?"
"Please, Gilbert," said Alice.
He shrugged his shoulders as much as to say, "Well, if you enjoy the Christian martyr business it's entirely your lookout."
But he dropped his characteristic habit of phrase making and became more jerky and real. "I respected you, Alice," he went on. "I didn't love you but I hoped I might, and I played the game. I liked to see you in my house. You fitted in and made it more of a home than that barrack had ever been. I began to collect prints and first editions, adjust myself to respectability and even to look forward with pride to a young Gilbert."
Alice gave a little cry and put her hand up to her breast. But he was too much obsessed by his own pain to notice hers.
"And then,--it's always the way,--I saw the girl. Yes, by God, I saw the girl, and the Great Emotion blew me out of domestic content and the pleasant sense of responsibility and turned me into the panting hungry youth that I had always wanted to be." He stopped and got up and walked up and down that mausoleum, with his eyes burning and the color back in his face.
"And the girl is Joan?" asked Alice in a voice that had an oddly sharp note for once.
"Yes," he said. "Joan. . . . She's done it," he added, no longer choosing his words. "She's got me. She's in my blood. I'm insane about her. I follow her like a dog, leaping up at a kind word, slinking away with my tail between my legs when she orders me to heel. My God, it's hell! I'm as near madness as a poor devil of a dope fiend out of reach of his joy. I wish I'd never seen her. She's made me loathe myself. She's put me through every stage of humiliation. I'd rather be dead than endure this craving that's worse than a disease. You were right when you said that I'm ill. I am ill. I'm horribly ill. I'm . . . I'm . . ."
He stammered and his voice broke, and he covered his face with his hands.
And instantly, with the maternal spirit that goes with all true womanly love ablaze in her heart, Alice went to him and put her arms about his neck and drew his head down on her shoulder.
And he left it there, with tears.
A little later they sat down again side by side, holding hands.
As Hosack had told himself, and Gilbert had just said, things seemed to be coming to a head. At that moment Tootles was strung up to play her last card, Joan was being driven back by Harry from the cottage of "Mrs. Gray" and Martin, becalmed on the water, with an empty pipe between his teeth, was thinking about Joan.
Palgrave was comforted. The making of his confession was like having an abscess lanced. In his weakness, in his complete abandonment of affectation, he had never been so much of a man.
There was not to Alice, who had vision and sympathy, anything either strange or perverse in the fact that Gilbert had told his story and was not ashamed. Love had been and would remain the one big thing in her own life, the only thing that mattered, and so she could understand, even as she suffered, what this Great Emotion meant to Gilbert. She adopted his words in thinking it all over. They appealed to her as being exactly right.
She too was comforted, because she saw a chance that Gilbert, with the aid of the utmost tact and the most tender affection, might be drawn back to her and mended. She almost used Hosack's caustic expression "rescued." The word came into her mind but was instantly discarded because it was obvious that Joan, however impishly she had played with Gilbert, was unaffected. Angry as it made her to know that any girl could see in Gilbert merely a man with whom to fool she was supremely thankful that the complication was not as tragic as it might have been. So long as Joan held out. the ruin of her marriage was incomplete. Hope, therefore, gleamed like a distant light. Gilbert had gone back to youth. It seemed to her that she had better treat him as though he were very young and hurt.
"Dearest," she said, "I'm going to take you away."
"Are you, Alice?"
"Yes. We will go on the yacht, and you shall read and sleep and get your strength back."
He gave a queer laugh. "You talk like a mother," he said, with a catch in his voice.
She went forward and kissed him passionately.
"I love you like a mother as well as a wife, my man," she whispered. "Never forget that."
"You're,--you're a good woman, Alice; I'm not worthy of you, my dear."
It pained her exquisitely to see him so humble. . . . Wait until she met Joan. She should be made to pay the price for this! "Who cares?" had been her cry. How many others had she made to care?
"I'll go back to Mrs. Jekyll now," she went on, almost afraid that things were running too well to be true, "and stay at Southampton to-night. To-morrow I'll return to New York and have everything packed and ready by the time you join me there. And I'll send a telegram to Captain Stewart to expect us on Friday. Then we'll go to sea and be alone and get refreshment from the wide spaces and the clean air."
"Just as you say," he said, patting her hand. He was terribly like a boy who had slipped and fallen.
Then she got up, nearer to a breakdown than ever before. It was such a queer reversal of their old positions. And in order that he shouldn't rise she put her hands on his shoulders and stood close to him so that his head was against her breast.
"God bless you, dearest boy," she said softly. "Trust in me. Give all your troubles to me. I'm your wife, and I need them. They belong to me. They're mine. I took them all over when you gave me my ring." She lifted his face that was worn as from a consuming fire and kissed his unresponsive lips. "Stay here," she added, "and I'll go back. To-morrow then, in New York."
He echoed her. "To-morrow then, in New York," and held her hand against his forehead.
Just once she looked back, saw him bent double and stopped. A prophetic feeling that she was never to hear his voice again seized her in a cold grip,--but she shook it off and put a smile on her face with which to stand before the scandal-mongers.
And there stood Joan, looking as though she had seen a ghost.
XV
Alice marched up to her, blazing with anger and indignation. She was not, at that moment, the gentle Alice, as everybody called her, Alice-sit-by-the-fire, equable and pacific, believing the best of people. She was the mother-woman eager to revenge the hurt that had been done to one who had all her love.
"Ah," she said, "you're just in time for me to tell you what I think of you."
"Whatever you may think of me," replied Joan, "is nothing to what I think of myself."
But Alice was not to be diverted by that characteristic way of evading hard words, as she thought it. She had seen Joan dodge the issues like that before, many times, at school. They were still screened from the veranda by a scrub-supported dune. She could let herself go.
"You're a thief," she blurted out, trembling and out of all control for once. "Not a full-blown thief because you don't steal to keep. But a kleptomaniac who can't resist laying hands on other women's men. You ought not to be allowed about loose. You're a danger, a trap. You have no respect for yourself and none for friendship. Loyalty? You don't know the meaning of the word. You're not to be trusted out of sight. I despise you and never want to see you again."
Could this be Alice,--this little fury, white and tense, with clenched hands and glinting eyes, animal-like in her fierce protectiveness?
Joan looked at her in amazement. Hadn't she already been hit hard enough? But before she could speak Alice was in breath again. "You can't answer me back,--even you, clever as you are. You've nothing to say. That night at my house, when we had it out before, you said that you were not interested in Gilbert. If that wasn't a cold- blooded lie what was it? Your interest has been so great that you've never let him alone since. You may not have called him deliberately, but when he came you flaunted your sex in his face and teased him just to see him suffer. You were flattered, of course, and your vanity swelled to see him dogging your heels. There's a pretty expressive word for you and your type, and you know it as well as I do. Let me pass, please."
Joan moved off the narrow board-walk without a word.
And Alice passed, but piqued by this unexpected silence, turned and went for her once most intimate friend again. If she was callous and still in her "Who Cares?" mood words should be said that could never be forgotten.
"I am Mrs. Gray. My husband won't be back for several days," These were the only words that rang in Joan's ears now. Alice might as well have been talking to a stone.
"Things are coming to a head," Alice went on, unconsciously using Gilbert's expression and Hosack's.
"And all the seeds that you've carelessly sown have grown into great rank weeds. Ask Mrs. Jekyll what you've driven Martin into doing if you're curious to know. She can tell you. Many people have seen. But if you still don't care, don't trouble, because it's too late. Go a few yards down there and look at that man bent double in the summer house. If you do that and can still cry out 'Who Cares?' go on to the hour when everything will combine to make you care. It can't be far away."
