CHAPTER XXIII
THE END OF A SLEIGH-RIDE
IT PLEASED Mrs. Craighill to breakfast in her sitting room the following morning. Wayne, finding himself deserted, drank his coffee alone in the dining room, with the newspapers for company. His father’s chauffeur sent word to the house that Joe was sick and Wayne ordered a doctor summoned before going to his office.
Mrs. Craighill had spent a bad night and no very pleasant thoughts had visited her pillow. The preceding day had been the most disagreeable of her life. She felt herself shut in and trammelled in a thousand ways. The snowy vesture of the urban landscape disclosed by her windows, the renewed and purified world that lay bright in the full glare of the winter sun, awoke no response in her heart. In her prettiest of morning gowns she seemed to Jean Morley the loveliest and most fortunate of beings; but to her the girl was only a reminder of yesterday’s untoward events. Jean’s steady, grave eyes, tranquil from restful slumber and her freshness—the glow of her skin from the bath, her appearance of zest for the new day’s business—only irritated Mrs. Craighill as they sat at the tiny table that had been improvised before the sitting room fire.
One thing must be done and done quickly: Mrs. Blair must be advised of her presence in town. She must plead illness as her excuse for not having gone to Boston. Before the breakfast was finished she went to the extension telephone in her bedroom and called the Blair house.
“Mrs. Blair is not at home. She went South last night with Mr. Blair. His mother is ill in Georgia and they left in a hurry. They didn’t know when they’d be back.”
This information, conveyed by Mrs. Blair’s maid, was only half a relief. Here was still Jean Morley to reckon with; and it flashed upon her at once that the girl was now essential to her. She returned to the sitting room and concluded her breakfast. Her manner was decidedly more friendly. When Jean rose to go she protested cordially.
“Oh, you have been very good to me! I have enjoyed this visit more than I can tell you, Mrs. Craighill. And I am sorry to put you to so much trouble. I was very silly yesterday and made a lot of fuss that wasn’t at all necessary. I usually do better than that. I hope you won’t think the worse of me for what happened.”
“You dear child, of course I shan’t,” cried Mrs. Craighill, seizing her hands. Her spirits lifted as she saw that Jean was intent on her own plight; that probably she had been thinking wholly of the strange figure she had made in her flight to the club-house, and that the fact of there being anything unusual in the presence there of another woman and a man had not occurred to her.
“Such a thing is likely to happen to any of us,” declared Mrs. Craighill, laughing. “And there we were—Mr. Craighill and I—just as lost and forlorn as you were! It was so silly of us all to get lost in the storm that I think we’d better not tell anyone about it—don’t you?”
“You may be sure I’m not proud of my part in it,” declared Jean; “but I must send back the housekeeper’s shoes, and get my own.”
“Oh, don’t think of it!” exclaimed Mrs. Craighill, to whom, in the new confidence established between them, a mere item of shoes seemed the most negligible thing in the world. “I’m going to get you to accept—please!—a pair of shoes from me—a souvenir of the occasion—and I’ll see that the borrowed ones get back to Rosedale.”
“Well——” began Jean, taken aback by Mrs. Craighill’s animation.
“Of course these shoes must go back; and we’ll have the shop send up a lot for you to choose from this afternoon. And now I’m going to ask a great favour of you, Miss Morley. I don’t like being alone, and I wish you would come and dine with me again to-night; I shall very likely be all alone—you know my husband is in Boston, and Mr. Wayne is very uncertain. We can have a fine, long evening together. You know I’m just a little bit jealous that Mrs. Blair has a share in your work, and here am I, quite on the outside!”
“I shall be very glad to come,” said Jean; “only, it will spoil me, so much splendour! I’ll have to go down to my boarding house from school, but I’ll come here late in the afternoon.”
“That is very dear of you. If I’m not in when you come you will be expected; and do make yourself perfectly at home. That strange Mr. Walsh has asked me to drive with him in the park this afternoon—he’s a great horseman, you know, and an old friend of Mr. Craighill’s. I’m just a little afraid of him; but he really means to be kind, don’t you think so? He seemed very much interested in you last night—he told me you were very nice—there!”
“He’s very interesting and very kind, I think. He and my grandfather know each other. I’ll come, then, about five.”
Mrs. Craighill sighed heavily as she saw the girl depart; but after all, things were not so ill. The absence of Mrs. Blair was nothing short of providential; and Jean Morley seemed the least suspicious of young women. Very likely, by the time Mrs. Blair returned, the girl would have forgotten the meeting at Rosedale and what, Mrs. Craighill asked herself, with an access of virtue built upon the cheerier mood in which Jean had left her, what was there to awaken suspicion in any mind? Wayne she had ceased to consider at all; his conduct had been unpardonable, and she was well rid of him. It did not matter whether he came home to dine or not; if he appeared she would punish him by withdrawing early, with her guest, to whom his attentions had been so marked, and leave him to his own devices.
Her grievance against her husband for leaving her behind, for reasons that were in themselves an insult, hung darkly in the background. She was aware that she never could feel the same toward him; in her heart she had characterized him in harsh terms that repeated themselves over and over in her mind.
She had received a brief note from him, pencilled on the train, and a clipping from a New York paper with the programme of the Boston meeting. He had missed her, he said, and would be glad to be home again. (There was a little sigh, she knew, that accompanied such a declaration as this, implying weariness of public cares and a longing for the peace worn warriors crave at their own firesides.) The clipping she placed on his dressing-table; the note she tossed into the fire contemptuously.
She dressed before luncheon for the drive with Walsh, and found to her surprise that the thought of going with him had grown less hateful. Even if he had undertaken to watch her, it was rather interesting that one had to be watched. Her husband had sacrificed her on the altar of his own vanity without the slightest compunction. The dignity of life, the fine security and chivalrous protection which she had expected to gain by her marriage had faded into nothing.
She put on her hat and coat and waited for Walsh at her sitting room window, and punctually at half-past two his cutter whirled smartly into the grounds and round to the porte cochère. She took account of his burly figure and his sturdy arms holding the taut reins over the spirited, graceful animal he drove. His cap, drawn low on his head, made him almost grotesque.
She was about to run down, to save him the trouble of ringing, when the maid brought her an immediate delivery letter that had just been left at the door. She glanced at the superscription and clutched it in her gloved fingers for a moment before opening it, as though at truce with bad news. It was a letter of length in a woman’s hand, loose and scrawling as though by one distraught. Mrs. Craighill raised her veil and read; or rather she caught at the sentences which seemed to dart at her from the paper:
“I was never so outrageously treated in my life. The idea that my daughter’s husband should be ashamed of me! I hope you will not misjudge me—you have not always been just with me; but I only did what was entirely proper. The fact that he thought I had gone abroad after your marriage had nothing to do with it, though he seemed to think it strange you hadn’t told him of any change of plans. It was none of his business.... I mailed him my card and a line that I would like to see him. I read in the papers that he was at the Broderick’s, and your note told me that you would not be here. Why you didn’t come I still don’t understand. I sent my card to him and waited a day. Then on the afternoon of the second day I went to the house and asked for him. Oh, you needn’t curl your lip; I tell you I don’t intend to have him ignore me in that fashion. They told me he was resting, but I wasn’t to be put off. He came down and was decent enough at first; then said he had to be excused as he was to speak that night and needed rest. I held him long enough to tell him that I had got tired of waiting for an invitation to visit you and that I was coming down right away. He said that you were free to do as you liked about having visitors; that he supposed I was in Italy. I mildly suggested that I was a little short of money, and he shut up like a clam. A lady—I suppose it was the Mrs. Broderick you hear so much about—you know we saw her three years ago in Paris—passed right through the hall and he never so much as offered to introduce me. I expect to leave Sunday night and spend Monday in New York and be with you Tuesday. This gives you a day or two to bring him around——”
“Mr. Walsh is waiting,” announced the maid.
She thrust the letter into a drawer of her desk and went down.
Walsh was turning the cutter in the courtyard at the rear of the house and drove into the covered entrance as she opened the door. With a merry jingle of bells they were off. She was relieved to find that it was not incumbent upon her to talk. Walsh’s interest was wholly in the mare, Estabrook stock, he informed her, whose swift, even pace he watched with delight. When, after traversing one of the boulevards, they swept into the park, many other horsemen, making the most of the fine sleighing, looked twice at Walsh, who, for the first time within man’s knowledge, was driving with a woman beside him. These horsemen did not know Mrs. Craighill; and even the few acquaintances they passed seemed not to recognize her. Walsh bent toward her now and then, without taking his eyes from the mare, and shouted short sentences which she did not always hear, but he seemed to be speaking of the horses rather than of the persons who drove them. When other sleighs passed, the bells crashed discordantly in her ears for a moment; then the rhythmic, tuneless jangle from the long-striding mare floated back upon them like an echo.
The park’s undulations, agleam in the snow, the rush of the sleighs, the liveliness and cheer of the gay pageant, were a lure to the eye and a stimulus to the spirit. Their runners slipped over the close-packed snow as though the splendid mechanism of the horse might—so near they approached flight—at any moment bear them skyward.
Once Walsh asked if she were tired, but she shook her head and they flew on again. The freedom from responsibility as they sped on was in itself grateful; she was even able to forget herself at times, to be quite detached from her own thoughts.
When they reached the house, she asked him, quite perfunctorily, if he would not stop and warm himself. Much to her surprise he said he would. She summoned a servant but Walsh went himself to blanket and house the mare. When he returned she was waiting for him in the library.
“I’m afraid to offer a man tea, but you can have anything you like, Mr. Walsh.”
“Nothing, thank you, Mrs. Craighill,” he replied, rubbing his hands briskly at the fire. She rose to the need of making talk and complimented him upon the horse’s speed and endurance.
“There’s good blood in her; and they say blood tells. She could keep up that lick all afternoon. She enjoyed it as much as we did.”
The excellence of the mare having been agreed upon, she felt herself faltering upon the edge of another abyss of silence. But with only an instant’s hesitation, in which he bent the gaze of his odd little eyes upon her sharply, he said:
“I have no wish, Mrs. Craighill, to meddle in your private affairs, but it is possible that I may be in a position to serve you.”
She clasped her hands tightly on her knees; her heart beat fast.
“I am sure you mean to be kind,” she said, unresponsively. His little eyes, as she met them timorously, regarded her with something akin to pity. The lines of his mask-like face seemed softened as by some stirring of grace within. At his next words the blood poured into her heart as though to burst it.
“Please believe me, Mrs. Craighill, that I speak to you with the greatest respect, and with the best intentions. You are in distress. You have had a message to-day that annoyed you very much. It is not important just how I came to know it; the important thing is to save you from any trouble.”
“I don’t understand—I don’t know what you mean,” she faltered.
“Your mother is threatening you; she has had an unpleasant encounter with your husband, and proposes now to come here and make a scene. Please do not be troubled, madam. If it were not in my power to help you, you may be sure I should spare you the shock of hearing this from me.”
“How do you know—what can you do?” came from her in whispers. Her face was white; her tightly clasped hands were eloquent of great inner stress.
“Please do not be troubled. I want your mind to be at rest. Your mother may come to this town, but you will not know it; you need not see her. If she comes she will go again very quickly. She will not”—and he glanced about the room—“she will not honour this house with her presence.”
He rose clumsily, and turned to leave. His manner, his voice, had reassured her. She called to him softly as he moved toward the door, and he paused and faced her. She walked slowly toward him, scarcely knowing what she did, and put out her hand. Her lips quivered; tears shone in her eyes.
“I know you are a good woman,” he said simply, and left her.