SHE changed into a thick skirt and heavy sweater and discarded the fur coat in favor of a dark warm cape she had bought the year before to wear when she prowled in her woods at night. At five minutes to ten she walked swiftly but alertly down the avenue, feeling less romantic than conspiratorial.
As she approached the gates she saw Geoffrey standing before his car in the full moonlight.
“Be careful,” she called out. “Polly and Elsie went to a movie and may be back any minute.”
“They won’t be home for two hours yet—later probably. Elsie came in to ask me to go with them and I made her promise to say I was out. Then Polly came in and called up two of her admirers and they were all to meet on the Boardwalk—go to supper after the movie. Getting into the house without running into them may be the problem——”
“I left the library window open.”
She stole a glance at him as he sat beside her in the car. The set grimness had returned to his face and his eyes looked more gray than blue. No doubt he regretted proposing anything so ridiculous; also, his conscience hurt him, probably. Wonder he hadn’t telephoned off.
They reached the edge of the broadest expanse of the salt-water marsh lands. It was as cold and desolate as the moon that silvered it, and looked as remote from Atlantic City, blaring and flashing a few miles away, as if it had swung off into space.
Geoffrey removed his ulster and locked it with his cap in the car. He wore a white woolen sweater and an old pair of corduroy breeches.
“I used to know these meadows like a map,” he said, as he rowed with sure strokes through one of the winding narrow channels. “I’d come here to think out my problems, and generally at night.”
Gita drew her cape about her and looked out over the marsh, sniffing the salt air. A sensation of peace descended upon her. She loved color and movement and brilliance, but she also loved cold austere beauty, low tones, hard outlines, white landscapes in winter. This marsh was starkly beautiful. Far in the distance was the black mass of a pine wood. As quiet as death. Only once a train roared over a bridge.
She looked at Pelham. He was smiling; his face was as boyish as when he had flown into a temper, but charmingly pleasant. “I shouldn’t have asked you to come,” he said frankly. “But we’re here, and I’ll leave remorse for tomorrow. You may tell Eustace if you like——”
“I certainly shall not. I may fly to the moon with a man if I choose. If he were still in danger I shouldn’t have come, of course—you wouldn’t have proposed it. But I came out to enjoy myself and I don’t intend to split hairs.”
“You’re rather a pagan, you know.”
“Perhaps. Seems to me we’re all pagans these days. Except you. You’re rather old-fashioned.”
“I expect to remain so. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be anywhere else. We needn’t talk at all, if you’d rather not. It is enough for me——”
“You asked me out to ‘have a talk,’ ” she said mischievously.
“I’m only too ready to listen to anything you may have to tell me.”
But Gita had no intention of telling anything. She had once obeyed an egotistical impulse and the present mess was the result.
But something must happen to make the night memorable. No hope of anything fortuitous. Impossible to turn over, and be rescued, in these narrow channels. Not a soul on the meadows but themselves. . . . She wasn’t cold, after all—rarely was, for that matter. That fur coat was a wedding-present from Mrs. Pleyden . . . well, let her thoughts scatter.
Their eyes met with that quick spontaneous smile of youth to youth, which may mean all or nothing. If Geoffrey were experiencing the pangs of unsatisfied love it was evident he had no intention of betraying himself. He was a young man indulging in a picturesque hour with a beautiful girl and it was a part of his part to be duly appreciative.
But with that quick involuntary response, that smiling subtly intimate exchange, she felt a curious stir in her body. An invisible cloak seemed to envelop her under that dark ugly cape and turn mere warmth into a glow. A curious sense of unreality. . . . Reality?
“Have we been here before?” she asked abruptly.
“What I felt once or twice when we were in fancy dress? Unfortunately that sort of thing has been scientifically explained. It means nothing I’m afraid.”
“I rather like the idea of reincarnation.” Quite forgetting she had rejected it with scorn.
“So do I—as a man. But science is uncompromising.”
“Science is always finding out its mistakes. Look at anthropology. I read a lot of that last year.” She shied away from any mention of Eustace, even as tutor.
“True. Well, of course, anything is possible. We know very little after all. Certainly nothing of the Beyond.”
“I choose to believe,” said Gita clearly and looking straight at him, “that two hundred years ago I was living at that manor and you came here from Boston on a visit—political, probably—and brought letters to us. You would, of course . . . I think I knew it that night.”
“A very pretty game, if you want to play it.” She saw his eyes flash and his mouth set, simultaneously. “But this is not a romantic age, you know. Particularly since the war. I’m told that no old cliché is so heartily despised—that’s saying a good deal, isn’t it? Clichés being anathema in your set, I’m told.”
“That crowd is the merest ripple on the surface. Not hit in the solar plexus by the war like the young English writers, but taking their cue, although they’d hate to admit it. We’re all exactly the same as we always have been.”
“Fundamentally—I suppose we are. But luckily most of us are forced to live on the surface of our minds, at high pressure, and seldom have time to take a plunge.”
“Seldom, yes. But occasionally?”
He made no reply. She laughed at his frowning brows. Once more his eyes were almost black. She forced humor into her own eyes lest he receive a hint of that curious sensation of something rising in her veins. But her laugh was infused with that voluptuous warmth bordering on hysteria by which young girls betray themselves when indulging in prolonged attacks of giggles. “You really believe it, you know. One night after a ball, when our fine clothes were new, you begged me to slip out and row on these meadows with you, and you had a Spanish cape over your blue satin coat and white——”
“You are rather unfair, you know.”
“Not a bit of it.” Her voice rose. “We’re merely reconstructing the past, not building up any kind of future. No obstacles in those days, although my irate papa probably boxed my ears when I got back and marched you off to the library to ask your intentions——”
“I’d hardly have put him to the trouble!”
Her eyes glowed. “Of course not!” she said softly. “Of course not!”
“Do you love me?” he asked harshly.
She shrank back and pulled the hood of her cape over her face. “You are Geoffrey Dedham asking that, of course.”
“I’ll be damned if I am. What’s come over you? I thought you were above flirting?”
“I am!” Her voice was muffled by more than the hood.
“Put that hood back.”
But she covered what was still visible of her face with her hand. “I’m frightened,” she whispered. “Terribly frightened.”
“I’ve no intention of touching you. I was a fool or worse to come out here with you, but it will stop at that——”
“I’m not afraid of you. You don’t understand, of course.”
“Oh, yes, I do!”
“But you can’t—you mustn’t——Oh! What——” Gita for the first time since she was an angry child burst into strangled weeping. He had been resting on his oars. The boat suddenly shot ahead.
“Cry it out,” he said grimly. But his voice ended on an uncontrollable note of triumph.
“I feel so strange,” sobbed Gita. “I—I—don’t know what to think. I never——”
“No, never! Sap rising.”
“What do you mean by that?” She pushed back her hood and tried to stab him with her eyes. But they were full of glittering tears.
“You know quite as well as I do. And as soon as Eustace is well you’ll put it up to him squarely.”
She flung her head down on her knees, convulsive sobs wrenching her body. “I won’t! I won’t! I don’t want to marry you!”
“Oh, yes, you do. You never really wanted anything before in your life.” He rowed toward the shore.
“I’d hate you——”
“You would not!”
“I do hate you——”
“That’s all right. Hate me as much as you like. It amounts to the same thing.”
She began to tremble violently. “They say—you feel horribly when you come to after drowning,” she stammered through her chattering teeth. “I—feel—just like that.”
“Of course. You’re coming to life.”
“It’s not a—poetical feeling at all—and I must blow my nose!”
“Do. Have you a handkerchief?”
“Yes, I have.” She used it. “I wish I’d really drowned.” Her teeth were still chattering.
“It’s a submerged—hitherto—part of your ego that hurts as much as anything else. It’s undergoing birth-pangs as well as your ill-treated body.”
“I hate my body.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“Oh-h-h——” A groan of dismay. “I—I feel deathly sick.”
“Lie down flat in the boat.”
She obeyed precipitately.
“Oh, I do feel dreadfully,” she moaned. “And I’ve—never—been—ill in my life.”
“Don’t talk. I’ll give you brandy in a moment. I brought it along in case of a chill.”
“Don’t tell me it’s in your hip-pocket!” She gasped. “I couldn’t stand that!”
“It’s in the pocket of my sweater. You must be feeling better. Here, sit up and drink this.”
She raised herself warily on an elbow and drank the brandy he had poured into the silver cup of his flask—a present from a grateful patient.
She fell back again, but only for a moment. A swift wriggling movement and she was sitting erect at her end of the boat.
“More beastly materialism,” she muttered. “Why couldn’t I have come all right by myself?” She stared at him resentfully, then gave a short laugh like a bark.
“God! How romantic!”
“We don’t need romance, my dear.”
She sighed, laced her fingers, and stared at the bottom of the boat. Then she looked up at him and smiled. He caught his breath. A wavering dazed smile, that passed from her lips and melted in her eyes.
“It’s all over—the resentment,” she said shyly. “And I’m glad—very glad——”
“We land in a moment. Can you drive a car?”
“Why—yes. Pretty well. Polly—and—others—have taught me.”
“Get into mine. Throw out my ulster and cap. Leave it at the gates. Take yourself off as fast as you can.”
“But——”
“Do as I tell you. Leave it in the shade where it won’t be noticed. Here we are. Jump out.”