CHAPTER XVIII
THE SNOW-STORM AT ROSEDALE
“YOU haven’t seen the country yet; we will take a run for the hills,” he said when he had picked her up. “I might have brought my little racer, but this machine is more dignified. Besides, with the tonneau curtains drawn we look like a large party.”
They rode in silence at first but their spirits rose with the rapid flight and the joy of freedom. They skirted Stanwixley and were soon speeding over the hills. She wore a pretty fur toque and when the wind began to whip her free hair, he begged her not to tie on the veil she had brought, lest it spoil the jaunty effect of the cap, in which, he assured her, she looked only seventeen. Their flight into the open took colour from this thought of their youth, dancing alluringly before them over unreckoned miles to a goal where all was possible and all unknown. It had been unseasonably warm at noon, but the wind blew more coldly as the afternoon advanced. Dark clouds were massing in the West; the storm spirit, having ranged the plains and prairies of the farther West, was now preparing to pile its snow in the Appalachian valleys.
“How would a snow-storm strike you? We’re likely to catch one before the day’s over.”
They were climbing a hill and as the heavy machine gained the windy top and a long, clear stretch of highway spread before them he looked at her and asked:
“This road leads round the world—why should we ever go back?”
“Because we are not utterly silly, and we are not going to lose our minds, I hope.” But she laughed, as much as to say that nothing really mattered. “I’m hungry. It seems to me you promised sandwiches. If you did, I’m dying for food; if you didn’t bring them, then I’m not hungry!”
“I like your philosophy. You’d be a good girl to seek the happy isles with—you wouldn’t cry if you got your feet wet, or were lost on a desert island, or anything like that.”
“I hope not—but you never can tell. I mustn’t get the crying habit—nothing ages one so fast.”
“I think we’d better turn round unless we really expect to be gone forever—I’m willing if you are. As to the sandwiches, I have a little surprise in store for you. It’s too cold to picnic out-of-doors—how would a fire and something hot strike you?”
“Tea—most delightful of thoughts! But these farmhouses don’t look inviting.”
“That’s where the surprise comes in. We’ll run into the Rosedale Country Club and maybe we can get a fire to take the chill off before we go home. You’ve never seen Rosedale; it’s the best thing we do in country clubs.”
They were soon speeding over a private road that led through a heavy woodland, skirting a ravine. The woodland yielded at once to a golf course at their left, stretching across a gray upland. Its targets suggested the lost banners of a deserted battlefield, and a long bunker midway of the slope the desolate grave of defeated battalions. They climbed a hill with the vale deepening at their right hand and an abrupt turn brought the club-house into view, its white-pillared façade greeting the eye with suggestions of domestic taste and comfort. A man appeared instantly as though he were expecting them, and flung open the door of a large lounging room where a great log fire crackled cheerily. A table had been set for two directly before the hearth, and while they were throwing off their wraps the man brought a tea tray with sandwiches and cakes.
“You see,” said Wayne, rubbing his hands before the flames, “all the comforts of home were to be had for the trouble of a telephone message. Ah, look at that!”
A snow-storm had sprung into being without the snow’s usual tentative experiments, and the wind was driving a feathery cloud across the landscape. At the ravine’s edge below the veranda a few scarlet leaves clung bravely to the sumac bushes, their colour flaming in the whirling snow. Mrs. Craighill turned with a contented little sigh from the windows to the room’s comfort and cheer. Their adventure, too, gained fresh quality from the sense of security communicated by the handsome room. Rosedale was a small and exclusive organization which, even at its busiest season, gave its members almost the seclusion of a private house. Mrs. Craighill left the fire to inspect some of the etchings on the walls and came back to the seat Wayne placed for her at the table, shivering from her plunge into the arctic circle that lay beyond the reach of the fire.
“There doesn’t seem to be anybody else here; is it really all our very own?”
“Do you want me to answer yes or no?” he laughed. “You saw the caretaker; he’s always here and he has a wife around somewhere. We are chaperoned, if that’s what you mean.”
“But other people might come at any time. Do you think anybody else is as perfectly deliciously crazy as we are?”
She surveyed the table with satisfaction and began filling the tea-pot from the kettle that hummed over the alcohol flames.
“Well, if anyone comes we won’t let them in—that’s all! Possession is ten points of the law in this case. I thought of it first and anybody else will be treated as an intruder.”
“But at the rate it’s snowing we may never get home!”
“Well,” he said, nibbling a sandwich, “why should we?”
“There is that question, of course! You will have tea, won’t you?”
The man now brought cups of hot bouillon which, Mrs. Craighill declared, lifted their luncheon out of the plane of commonplace teas into the realm of banquets.
“Will you have something to drink, sir?” asked the servant.
Wayne glanced quickly at Mrs. Craighill.
“You can have champagne, buttermilk—anything. The cellar is excellent. I stocked it myself.”
“No; we will have nothing,” she answered with decision, and when they had dismissed the man, Wayne looked at her and smiled as he stirred his tea.
“I haven’t tasted a drop since you came. Do you know why?”
“No; I really haven’t an idea,” she replied with an assumption of careless interest. She knew what he wished to say; she entertained no delusions as to his sincerity; but she wished him to say it. There was tenderness in his manner and tone as he bent toward her.
“I did it for you, Addie. It was because you came back into my life. I had been going a wicked gait; in another year I should have been all in. But the night father showed me your picture and I knew it was you he was going to marry, I made a resolution never to drink again. I have been doing pretty well, haven’t I?”
“It has been fine of you; I appreciate it; I thank you for it.”
“I realized perfectly why it was that you were coming—why you were going to marry my father. I had known that there must come a time when your relations with your mother would become intolerable. I knew that you had to escape from her. If you had to be sacrificed I was glad chance was sending you my way that I might make it all easier for you. Your plight—the thought of a girl like you being hawked about—was hideous. I ought to have seen that, that summer we first knew each other; but I punished myself and I hope you felt it too, when I thought it was your mother that I was revenging myself on. And now, Addie,” he concluded spaciously, “I want you to be happy.”
“You are a dear boy,” she murmured.
She did not interrupt him with the hundred questions that thronged into her mind. He was giving his own twist to the facts of their earlier relationship and his own escape from her mother’s net; but she correctly surmised that he was deceiving himself and she was in a mood to aid and abet deception. She had drunk her tea and rested her arms on the table, urging him on with her eyes. The flame had warmed her cheeks to a bright colour and was finding and brightening the bronze in her hair.
“You deserve the best; you have a right to happiness,” he went on. “I mean to stand between you and unhappiness.”
“You are very good to me, Wayne!”
He placed his hand lightly on hers that lay near—and removed it instantly, afraid to risk too much. “That first afternoon, when I went home just to see you, it was because my old feeling for you had risen in me strong at the sight of you again. When you begged me to let you alone that day, I obeyed you. You had come with fine ideals of your duty and an ambition to fill your place in my father’s house worthily. You wanted to live up to his own dignity. I saw all that.”
She nodded her head once or twice at the soothing combination of praise and sympathy. She waited for what further he had to say with confidence that it would be agreeable to hear. It was apparent that he had deliberately made this opportunity; he had planned their ride with this bright, glowing hearth as its goal; and she experienced the pleasurable sense of being a figure in a little drama, herself its chief character, with a setting of the stage at once adequate and satisfying.
He had always been plausible with women and he was playing the situation for what it was worth. He could almost believe in his own sincerity. He was conscious that he was managing the affair well; he even enjoyed his own speeches which he uttered so glibly that he wondered at his fluency.
“The appeal you made to me that first afternoon did you credit; it was like you. A man of iron could not have failed to be touched by what you said to me. I knew as no one else in town ever could know what you were trying to escape, and how you had set up my father as a splendid big god to worship. He was to be your strength and your refuge, and you were horror-struck at the thought of our going back to our old basis. I wanted to make love to you and you would not have it. I felt the scorn you heaped on me—it burned me like hot coals, but I waited; I waited because I knew the time would come when you would want and need me. I knew how it would be because I, too, had knelt before the same glittering god. I’m going to be honest about all this: at first I thought it was your mother who had cheated him, and I was glad of it; then I saw that it was the other way around—that you had been deceived and cheated, and that you would have to pay for it. When I saw that that was the way of it, and that you were trusting him to end your long campaign against the world, my sympathy went out to you, and all my old feeling for you came back. You were never so precious to me as you are to-day—no one ever meant to me what you mean. You are dear to me, dearer and more precious than any words can tell you, Addie.”
He had spoken rapidly, in a low vibrant voice. She made no reply, but turned her head slightly away; but when he again touched her hand she suffered him to hold it; it slipped into his palm and rested there at the table’s edge.
“I understood that whole matter of your changed decision about going to Boston. It was so perfectly plain that it was funny. Father didn’t want you to go to the Brodericks. To put it plainly, he’s the rankest kind of snob. He was a little bit afraid you weren’t quite up to their level. He had been crazy for years to be invited there, and the chance was not to be missed. He would have thrown over my own mother in the same fashion if he had played at being a great reformer in her day. I remember, when I was a child, that Fanny and I used to play with two dolls we called king and queen, and we sat them up on a throne and worshipped them; but the king sprang a leak one day and the sawdust came out and that was the end of the king business for me. I was about fifteen when I began to find out that father was stuffed with sawdust. It came about from his title of Colonel. A lot of us boys were bragging one day about what our fathers had done in the Civil War and I had silenced the other youngsters by announcing that my father was so brave that he had been made a colonel, and one of the others came back at me the next day with news he had got at home that my father had never been in the war at all—and it was true! And all this philanthropic work and these meetings he addresses so beautifully—it all comes of the cheapest kind of vanity. It isn’t the thing itself he’s interested in; it’s his own name in the newspapers, the glory of his after-dinner speeches at the Waldorf, and quiet committee meetings at Old Point Comfort about the time the shad are beginning to run, and when it’s nice and comfortable to meet the spring down there, and issue open letters to presidents and governors about any old thing, just so it’s far enough away from home. When they come round and ask father to go in for reform in Pittsburg he can’t hear them talking; he sympathizes with the work, and is annoyed when the muck-raker writes us up, but press of other affairs prevents him, and so forth. The fact is that he’s a coward when it comes to getting out on the firing line to be shot at. He wants the Indians in Wyoming to be protected and the Negro to be educated, but he’s afraid to go up against the gang at home. With cowardice and vanity as the chief elements of his character—bah! you see it all—you don’t need to go into the case any deeper. You thought you were solving all your problems by marrying a fine, chivalrous gentleman, respected and admired by all the world, but you have already got a taste of his real character. He’s begun to leak sawdust. He likes you because you are pretty and gentle and biddable, but chiefly because you listen so charmingly when he talks!”
“Wayne, Wayne, you don’t know what you are saying!”
“Yes, I know what I am saying. And I know it is blackguardly for a man like me, who has led an evil life and never done a decent thing—who has been a disgrace to his honoured father and to the city he was born in, to be talking so; and I’m only saying it to you because you have already found it out—because we’ve both got to suffer from it. Don’t imagine I’m one of those sickly asses who are always snivelling because they’re misunderstood. I’m a bad lot and everybody knows it. I’ve been understood all right enough. Fanny tried to keep me in social countenance by sticking me down the throats of the people she knows and sees in her own house; but I’m so rotten they won’t have it. The women that have to speak to me in her parlour cut me on the street. Because I was born with wild red blood in me and didn’t settle down into being a fraud like himself, father took that martyr-like tone about me with all his friends. I can hear him now mentioning me to the Brodericks and sighing softly and shaking his head dolefully to get their sympathy. You can be dead sure the Brodericks know about me; the last time I was in Boston I tore up a few trees on the common and all the papers printed our illustrious name in big red type.”
He laughed a little wildly, for he had ceased to be a lover and was a man with a grievance and in his bitterness he forgot the woman before him; and his voice rang out passionately in the room. He had clutched her hand until it hurt and she drew it away, cowering in her chair to escape the wild torrent of his words.
“Please, Wayne, no more of it! You are spoiling the afternoon! It is getting dark and we must be going home.”
He did not heed her but rang the bell and when the servant came he told him to bring whiskey, and to be quick about it. She expostulated while he was gone; she begged him not to throw away the advantage he had gained by his long abstinence; she threatened never to speak to him again if he drank a drop. The man brought a bottle and glasses, and said as he put it down, “That’s the Rosedale special, sir; you put it in yourself four years ago.”
Mrs. Craighill rose as the door closed, and made a motion as though to seize the bottle.
“Just let it alone,” he said: “I want to show you something.”
He filled the whiskey glasses full, and brimmed the water glasses with the liquor, whose odour nipped the air keenly. Then he set the bottle down and folded his arms.
“Addie, every drop of blood in me calls for that stuff; I know every sensation it would give me and three months ago I would have given my immortal soul for a spoonful; but I’m just as safe from it as though it were locked up behind steel doors. No power on earth could make me touch a drop.”
So long as he made love to her she understood; this bit of bravado disturbed and baffled her. But here at least was something that required prompt commendation, and while she had been better satisfied by the first direction of his talk, here was a zone of safety in which they might stand together in security. She rose and placed her hands on his shoulders.
“You are splendid; you are fine and brave and I am proud of you, Wayne, dear!”
His manner changed instantly and he caught her hands and clasped them tight. He was still breathing deeply from his long harangue, but in a moment he spoke quietly, with a return of the tenderness with which he had begun.
“I’m a beast to frighten you that way; and I must have hurt this poor little hand.”
He kissed it and swung her hands lightly, looking into her face tenderly.
“What a terrible big bear you are! And everything was peaceable and cosy and you let your temper get the better of you.”
The snow, still falling densely, had hastened the twilight and night was near. “We must go—at once—at once! What if the car wouldn’t run in the snow?”
“What if it wouldn’t! They can give us dinner here—right here on the hearth. They can always put up something—it’s the rule of the Club, and there’s no end of wood for the fire.”
“We are going straight home—just as straight as we can go. Please!”
She tried to free herself, but he held her hands fast, laughing into her eyes, and suddenly he put his arms around her and drew her close and kissed her full upon the lips. The firelight danced fitfully about them as they stood thus. He had raised his head to repeat the kiss, when steps sounded upon the veranda. Someone cried aloud once, twice, and beat upon the door, and when Wayne flung it open Jean Morley, frightened and sobbing, stumbled across the threshold.
Wayne plunged through the snow-filled dusk after a man who had turned away from the veranda steps and was running swiftly down the road. To his surprise the fugitive, who had at once widened the distance between them, stopped short and wheeled round.
“I meant no harm! I meant no harm!” cried a voice.
“Good God, Joe! What are you doing here?”
“Is it you, Mr. Wayne? I guess I’m crazy, that’s all. I meant no harm. She’ll tell you herself I meant no harm.”
“We’ll see about that. I told you to stay at the house. I’m surprised and disappointed in you. I’ll see you about this to-night. Now go to the car—back there under the shed—and bring it out right away and take us in. And you needn’t try to smash it on the way home; go in by the Red Oak road and take your time.”
Wayne was not more surprised to find that his man Joe had been Jean Morley’s pursuer than by the young fellow’s evident distress, so markedly in contrast to his usual amiable cocksureness. It was no time for inquiry and debate. The snow was already ankle-deep and it was imperative that they start home at once.
Wayne, returning to the club-house, found Jean Morley, sitting by the fire, with Mrs. Craighill ministering to her. She had not yet recovered from her fright; her clothes were wet and her dark hair had shaken loose about her face. Mrs. Craighill appealed to Wayne for an account of what had happened, and her surprise was manifest when Wayne addressed the crumpled refugee quietly by name.
“Mrs. Craighill, this is Miss Morley.” Whereat Mrs. Craighill’s “Oh!” expressed rather more than surprise. “Miss Morley is an acquaintance of mine; we met”—and he smiled at the girl—“at the parish house at Ironstead where she is one of Mr. Paddock’s assistants.”
Jean rose, and aware that an explanation was necessary she offered it immediately, standing forlornly on the hearth.
“I had gone for a walk in the country; I have been in the habit of taking an afternoon once a week, and it was so fine at noon that I ventured on a longer excursion than usual. I took the train to Rosedale Heights, and struck off across the fields. I turned back when it began to snow, but lost my way and it was not till then that I saw that someone had followed me.”
“The man who followed you was my chauffeur; is there any reason why he should be annoying you?” demanded Wayne.
“No, there is no reason; but I know him. I have known him a long time. I’m sure he didn’t mean to trouble me—he wouldn’t do that. I was foolish to run, but the dark was coming on and I was not sure of the way in the snow. I ran up on the veranda more for shelter and to get my bearings than in fear—I really was not afraid!”
Her hearers were struck by the fact that she seemed anxious to minimize the incident. She turned toward the door saying:
“I need not trouble you further; I can very easily walk to the station.”
“Not a bit of it!” exclaimed Mrs. Craighill. “We were just ready to start and it will be perfectly easy to take you home. Is the machine ready, Wayne?”
Mrs. Craighill was pointedly ignoring him in her attentions to the girl. She was holding her hat to the fire to dry; the caretaker’s wife, who had been sent for dry shoes and stockings, led Miss Morley to her own room to change. Mrs. Craighill had been a good deal shaken by the sudden invasion of the peaceful club fireside, but she had not lost her wits. The housekeeper had been drawn to the scene, not merely for aid, but to sustain and support the two culprits of the tea table, before the bedraggled girl who had interrupted the afternoon’s drama.
The spell had been broken; the arrested embrace, the defeated kiss might not be recovered at once. Mrs. Craighill placed a chair between herself and Wayne and from this vantage point surveyed him with severity as she touched a loosened strand of hair into place. They were now on the most formal footing; and he smiled slightly before the bristling bayonets with which she demanded explanations.
“Well, who is she?”
“Oh, don’t be so fierce about it, Addie! I couldn’t help it. She’s just what I said—a girl I met at Paddock’s mission at Ironstead. She’s an art student; Fanny is helping her; she’s one of Fanny’s enthusiasms.”
“Do you suppose—do you suppose she saw us?”
“I doubt it; she didn’t have time!” and Wayne laughed. “But it would make no difference if she did.”
“Oh, you think it wouldn’t! Well, it might make a lot of difference to me—had you thought of that?”
“Why, of course, Addie, it would be unfortunate, deplorable; but there’s no reason for worrying about it. She was running from a man—the man happened to be Joe, my chauffeur.”
“Then it is a pretty business! How do you know that Joe didn’t come here to look for us?”
“Because Joe is not that sort of fellow. I know him well; he’s devoted to me.”
“He may have thought this was another; I don’t like it. I trusted you absolutely and you have made a clumsy mess of it. And besides, you had no business to do that—what you were doing—you took advantage of my kindness and sympathy.”
“For heaven’s sake, cheer up! If the girl hadn’t broken in here just at the wrong moment it would have been all right, wouldn’t it?”
He was laughing in an effort to blunt the edge of her displeasure, but his attitude accentuated her anger.
“No, it would not! It was wrong and wicked of you! But what have you done with Joe?”
“He’s going to run the machine home—all of us—including Miss Morley.”
“Just after you caught him pursuing a helpless girl through a snow-storm in a wild place in the country! Do you mean to say you haven’t discharged him? You have certainly lost your mind!”
“You wouldn’t have me leave him here, would you, to walk in?”
“It might be interesting to know just what she was doing away out here in a storm like this, with a man following her.”
“Well, that’s about as broad as it is long. I don’t believe we’d better go into that! She’s a simple little girl from the country and our world is a big dark mystery to her; very likely she’s speculating as to what you and I are doing here in a snow-storm, with all the evidences of a quiet little party—to say nothing of the whiskey bottle and all the glasses full?”
He spread his hands over the table, which was not eloquent of abstinence.
“It looks like the merriest kind of an orgy, doesn’t it? And it’s all my fault—every bit of it. No matter what they say, it simply does not pay to be good! Here’s a whole quart of the best rye in the world, used merely to demonstrate my own powers of resistance. There isn’t a man in the whole State of Pennsylvania who would believe me if I swore I had poured out whiskey just to smell it.”
His hand touched one of the filled glasses; he raised it high and looked at it with a fierce craving in his eyes; then slowly very slowly, without taking his eyes from it, he put it down. She had watched him in silence, wondering; but he continued in his light, bantering tone. “As I was saying, it’s all my fault. I’m guilty on all counts of the indictment. You were a perfectly helpless woman in the hands of a monster. I’m sorry, Addie; I’m just as penitent as can be; and I’m going to get you out of the scrape as fast as I can. I’ll take the whole burden of it—explanations, lies, everything! Now be a good girl, won’t you, and don’t let everybody know you’re angry—though you are charming when you’re ruffled.”
He had persuaded her to a more amiable humour when Miss Morley returned, and she met the girl and led her to the fire with solicitous murmurs.
“We can go at once now, Wayne, can’t we?”
“The car awaits your pleasure, ladies!”
“But please don’t trouble about me,” cried Jean. “It’s only a little way to Rosedale Heights and I can take the train there and be home in half an hour.”
“We can’t allow it! It’s a long walk to the station and we have the big motor with lots of room and to spare.”
“It was the oddest chance that brought us here,” Mrs. Craighill went on to say, as she held the girl’s cloak. “Mr. Craighill had taken me to call on some friends who are spending the winter at their farm beyond here. It was later than I thought when we started and we ran in here to telephone home that we should be late for dinner.”
It was a sufficient explanation, blithely uttered; Wayne, bringing his stepmother’s things to the fire, hoped she would not protest too much. The matter of the whiskey bottle, for one thing, was a part of the res gestæ which it seemed best to leave to the mercy of the trial judge.
Night had fallen when they left the club-house and the forward lamps of the car cut a broad path of light over the snow. Wayne adjusted one of the movable seats in the tonneau so that he faced the two women, and turned on the electric light. The thing had its ridiculous side; the pains Mrs. Craighill was taking to be polite to the girl struck him as funny; but by the time the car reached the highway more serious reflections engaged him. Jean Morley’s account of her walk afield was plausible enough and he did not question it; he wondered whether Mrs. Craighill’s story had carried equal conviction. An effort to assure himself that it was not important what the girl thought, found him looking straight into her eyes, whose gray-blue depths and sorrowful wistfulness seemed more fathomless than at any of their previous meetings. Her knowing Joe, the ball player and chauffeur—the man who now guided them home—added a puzzling factor; they were utterly irreconcilable characters. His glance rested first on one woman and then the other as he unconsciously compared them—Mrs. Craighill, trim and smart, with the girl, whose shabby, discoloured gloves, her plain little hat with its rumpled feather, her cheap coat, were vesture of a different world. Only an hour before he had kissed the one; he had held her unresisting in his arms; she was pretty, charming amusing, but the glow of the afternoon had paled; their adventure had ended on a frightened, smothered half-note.
He had been checked in the course he had marked for himself; whirled out of the straight current into the labouring waters of indecision. He had resolved upon an evil thing; he had hoisted sail and steered for the rocks, but the plunging depths might not be so attainable after all! That potential superstition, latent in us all, and to which strong men are often susceptible, teased him with questions as to why this girl had walked into his life. There, too, was Paddock, the clerical sentimentalist. Only a little while before Paddock had crossed the threshold of his office and struck down, in effect, the cup with which he was about to consecrate his life to evil things. It is the way of the guilty to take counsel of omens; the knocking at the gate in Macbeth is the loud beating of every conscience-struck heart. Wayne’s imagination played upon the figure of Jean Morley, drifting through the storm to the remote house where a woman, weak as he was weak, yielded herself to a kiss he had calculated in coldest reason.
The occasional glances that Mrs. Craighill vouchsafed him meant his dismissal, for the time at least. It was plain from her conduct that the ground here lost might not easily be regained; but he was surprised to find in his brooding that he cared so little. Addie’s pique was absurd; but he had kissed women before and they were prone to magnify the gravity of their indiscretions, and to sulk afterward. His thoughts traversed a circular track, but the fire had gone out in his blood. Rousing from his absorption suddenly he found Jean’s eyes bent upon him, wondering, pitiful and sad. He had not heeded what the women were saying to each other, but now Mrs. Craighill asked him where they were and he looked out upon the lights of the city.
“Shall we take Miss Morley home first?” he asked.
“Dear me, no! She must stop and have dinner with us. Better than that, won’t you stay all night