At Christmas Bruce had sent Millicent a box of flowers, which she had acknowledged in a cordial little note, but he had not called on her, making the excuse to himself that he lacked time. But the real reason was a fear that he had begun to care too much for her. He must not allow himself to love her when he could never marry her; he could never ask any woman to take a name to which he had no honest right.
But if he hadn’t seen Millicent he heard of her frequently. He was established as a welcome visitor at all times at the Freemans’ and the Hendersons’. The belated social recognition of the Hardens, in spite of the adroitness with which Mills had inspired it, had not gone unremarked.
There was, Bud said, always some reason for everything Mills did; and Maybelle, who knew everything that was said and done in town, had remarked in Bruce’s hearing that the Hardens’ social promotion was merely an item in Mills’s courtship of Millicent.
“I’ll wager he doesn’t make it! Millicent will never do it,” was Maybelle’s opinion, expressed one evening at dinner.
“Why not?” Bruce asked, trying to conceal his suspicion that the remark was made for his own encouragement.
“Oh, Millie’s not going to throw herself away on an old bird like Frank Mills. She values her youth too much for that.”
“Oh, you never can tell,” said Bud provokingly. “Girls have done it before this.”
“But not girls like Millicent!” Maybelle flung back.
“That’s easy,” Bud acquiesced. “There never was a girl like Millie—not even you, Maybelle, much as I love you. But all that mazuma and that long line of noble ancestors; not a spot on the whole bloomin’ scutcheon! I wonder if Mills is really teasing himself with the idea that he has even a look-in!”
“What you ought to do, Bruce, is to sail in and marry Millie yourself,” said Maybelle. “Dale and I are strong for you!”
“Thanks for the compliment!” exclaimed Bruce. “You and Dale want me to enter the race in the hope of seeing Mills knocked out! No particular interest in me! You don’t want me to win half as much as you want the great Mills to lose. Alas! And this is friendship!”
“The idea warms my sporting blood,” said Bud. “Once the struggle begins we’ll post the bets on the club bulletin. I’ll start with two to one on you, old top!”
“I’m surprised at Connie—she seems to be helping on the boosting of the Hardens,” said Maybelle. “It must occur to her that it wouldn’t help her own fortunes to have a healthy young stepmother-in-law prance into the sketch. When Frank Mills passes on some day Connie’s going to be all set to spend a lot of his money. Connie’s one of the born spenders.”
“That’s all well enough,” remarked Bud. “But just now Connie’s only too glad to have Mills’s attention directed away from her own little diversions. She and George Whitford——”
“Bud!” Maybelle tapped her water glass sharply. “Remember, boys, these people are our friends!”
“Not so up-stage, darling!” said Bud. “I’m sure we’ve been talking only in a spirit of loving kindness!”
“Honorable men and women—one and all!” said Bruce.
“Absolutely!” Bud affirmed, and the subject was dropped.
A few nights later Bruce was obliged to listen to similar talk at the Freemans’, though in a different key. Mrs. Freeman was indignant that Mills should think of marrying Millicent.
“There’s just one right man in the world for every woman,” she declared. “And the right man for Millicent is you, Bruce Storrs!”
Bruce met her gaze with mock solemnity.
“Please don’t force me into a hasty marriage! Here I am, a struggling young architect who will soon be not so young. Give me time to become self-supporting!”
“Of course Millie will marry you in the proper course of things,” said Freeman. “If that girl should throw herself away on Franklin Mills she wouldn’t be Millie. And she is very much Millie!”
“Heavens!” exclaimed his wife. “The bare thought of that girl, with her beauty, her spiritual insight, her sweetness, linking herself to that—that——”
“This talk is all bosh!” interrupted Freeman. “I doubt if Mills ever sees Millicent alone. These gossips ought to be sent to the penal farm.”
“Oh, I think they’ve seen each other in a neighborly sort of way,” said Mrs. Freeman. “Mills is a cultivated man and Millicent’s music and modeling no doubt really interest him. I ran in to see her the other morning and she’s been doing a bust of Mills—she laughed when I asked her about it and said she had hard work getting sitters and Mr. Mills is ever so patient.”
The intimacy implied in this kindled Bruce’s jealousy anew. Dale Freeman, whose prescience was keen, saw a look in his face that gave her instant pause.
“Mr. Mills and Leila are leaving in a few days,” she remarked quickly. “I don’t believe he’s much of a success as a matchmaker. It’s been in the air for several years that Leila must marry Arthur Carroll, but he doesn’t appear to be making any headway.”
“Leila will do as she pleases,” said Freeman, who was satisfied with a very little gossip. “Bruce, how do you feel about tackling that Laconia war memorial?”
Bruce’s native town was to build a museum as a memorial to the soldiers in all her wars, from the Revolutionary patriots who had settled the county to the veterans of the Great War. Freeman had encouraged Bruce to submit plans, which were to be passed on by a jury of the highest distinction. Freeman kept strictly to domestic architecture; but Bruce’s ideas about the memorial had impressed him by their novelty. His young associate had, he saw, a natural bent for monumental structures that had been increased by the contemplation of the famous memorials in Europe. They went into the Freemans’ study to talk over the specifications and terms of the competition, and by midnight Bruce was so reassured by his senior’s confidence that it was decided he should go to work immediately on his plans.
“It would be splendid, Bruce!” said Dale, who had sewed during the discussion, throwing in an occasional apt comment and suggestion. “The people of Laconia would have all the more pride in their heroes if one of them designed the memorial. It’s not big enough to tempt the top-notchers in the profession, but if you land it it will push you a long way up!”
“Yes; it would be a big thing for you,” Freeman added. “You’d better drop your work in the office and concentrate on it....”
Undeterred by the cold, Bruce drove daily into the country, left his car and walked—walked with a new energy begotten of definite ambition and faith in his power of achievement. To create beautiful things: this had been his mother’s prayer for him. He would do this for her; he would create a thing of beauty that should look down forever upon the earth that held her dust.
The site of the proposed building was on the crest of a hill on the outskirts of Laconia and within sight of its main street. Bruce had known the spot all his life and had no trouble in visualizing its pictorial possibilities. The forest trees that crowned the hill would afford a picturesque background for an open colonnade that he meant to incorporate in his plans.
Walking on clear, cold nights he fancied that he saw on every hilltop the structure as it would be, with the winds playing through its arches and wistful young moons coming through countless years to bless it anew with the hope and courage of youth.
On Shep’s account rather than because of any interest he felt in Constance, Bruce had twice looked in at the Shepherd Mills’s on Constance’s day at home.
Constance made much of the informality of her “days,” but they were, Bruce thought, rather dull. The girls and the young matrons he met there gave Mrs. Shep the adoration her nature demanded; the few men who dropped in were either her admirers or they went in the hope of meeting other young women in whom they were interested. On the first of these occasions Bruce had found Leila and Fred Thomas there, and both times George Whitford was prominent in the picture.
Thomas was not without his attractions. His cherubic countenance and the infantile expression of his large myopic blue eyes made him appear younger than his years. The men around the University Club said he had a shrewd head for business; the women of the younger set pronounced him very droll, a likely rival of Bud Henderson for humor. It was easy to understand why he was called Freddy; he had the look of a Freddy. And Bruce thought it quite natural that Leila Mills should fancy him.
Constance’s attempts to attract the artistic and intellectual on her Thursdays had been a melancholy failure; such persons were much too busy, and it had occurred to the musicians, literary aspirants and struggling artists in town that there was something a little patronizing in her overtures. Her house was too big; it was not half so agreeable as the Freemans’, and of course Freeman was an artist himself and Dale was intelligently sympathetic with everyone who had an idea to offer. As Bud Henderson put it, Dale could mix money and social position with art and nobody thought of its being a mixture, whereas at Constance’s you were always conscious of being either a sheep or a goat. Connie’s upholstery was too expensive, Bud thought, and her sandwiches were too elaborate for the plebeian palates of goats inured to hot ham in a bun in one-arm lunch rooms.
Gossip, like death, loves a shining mark, and Mrs. Shepherd Mills was too conspicuous to escape the attention of the manufacturers and purveyors of rumor and scandal. The parochial habit of mind dies hard in towns that leap to cityhood, and the delights of the old time cosy gossip over the back fence are not lightly relinquished. Bruce was appalled by the malicious stories he heard about people he was beginning to know and like. He had heard George Whitford’s name mentioned frequently in connection with Connie’s, but he thought little of it. He had, nevertheless, given due weight to Helen Torrence’s warning to beware of becoming one of Connie’s victims.
There was a good deal of flirting going on among young married people, Bruce found, but it was of a harmless sort. Towns of two and three hundred thousand are too small for flirtations that pass the heavily mined frontiers of discretion. Even though he had weakly yielded to an impulse and kissed Connie the night he drove her from the Freemans’ to Deer Trail, he took it for granted that it had meant no more to her than it had to him. And he assumed that on the earlier afternoon, when he met Connie and Whitford on the road, Whitford had probably been making love to Connie and Connie had not been unwilling to be made love to. There were women like that, he knew, not infrequently young married women who, when the first ardor of marriage has passed, seek to prolong their youth by re-testing their charm for men. Shepherd Mills was hardly a man to inspire a deep love in a woman of Connie’s temperament; it was inevitable that Connie should have her little fling.
On his way home from one of his afternoon tramps Bruce was moved to make his third call at the Shepherd Mills’s. It was not Connie’s day at home, but she had asked him to dinner a few nights earlier when it was impossible for him to go and he hadn’t been sure that she had accepted his refusal in good part. He was cold and tired—happily tired, for the afternoon spent in the wintry air had brought the solution of several difficult questions touching the Laconia memorial. His spirit had won the elation which workers in all the arts experience when hazy ideas begin to emerge into the foreground of consciousness and invite consideration in terms of the tangible and concrete.
He would have stopped at the Hardens’ if he had dared; lights shone invitingly from the windows as he passed, but the Mills house, with its less genial façade, deterred him. The thought of Millicent was inseparable from the thought of Mills....
He hadn’t realized that it was so late until he had rung the bell and looked at his watch under the entry light. The maid surveyed him doubtfully, and sounds of lively talk from within gave him pause. He was about to turn away when Constance came into the hall.
“Oh, pleasantest of surprises!” she exclaimed. “Certainly you’re coming in! There’s no one here but old friends—and you’ll make another!”
“If it’s a party, I’m on my way,” he said hesitatingly.
“Oh, it’s just Nellie Burton and George Whitford—nothing at all to be afraid of!”
At this moment Mrs. Burton and Whitford exhibited themselves at the living-room door in proof of her statement.
“Bully!” cried Whitford. “Of course Connie knew you were coming!”
“I swear I didn’t!” Constance declared.
“No matter if you did!” Whitford retorted.
Mrs. Burton clasped her hands devoutly as Bruce divested himself of his overcoat. “We were just praying for another man to come in—and here you are!”
“And a man who’s terribly hard to get, if you ask me!” said Constance. “Come in to the fire. George, don’t let Mr. Storrs perish for a drink!”
“He shall have gallons!” replied Whitford, turning to a stand on which the materials for cocktail making were assembled. “We needed a fresh thirst in the party to give us a new excuse. ‘Stay me with flagons’!”
“Now, Bruce,” drawled Constance. “Did I ever call you Bruce before? Well, you won’t mind—say you don’t mind! Shep calls you by your first name, why not I?”
“This one is to dear old Shep—absent treatment!” said Mrs. Burton as she took her glass.
“Shep’s in Cincinnati,” Constance was explaining. “He went down on business yesterday and expected to be home for dinner tonight—but he wired this forenoon that he has to stay over. So first comes Nellie and then old George blows in, and we were wishing for another man to share our broth and porridge.”
“My beloved hubby’s in New York; won’t you be my beau, Mr. Storrs?” asked Mrs. Burton.
“Bruce!” Constance corrected her.
“All right, then, Bruce! I’m Nellie to all the good comrades.”
“Yes, Nellie,” said Bruce with affected shyness. He regarded them amiably as they peppered him with a brisk fire of questions as to where he had been and why he made himself so inaccessible.
Mrs. Burton he knew but slightly. She was tall, an extreme blonde and of about Constance’s age. Like Constance, she was not of the older order of the local nobility. Her father had been a manufacturer of horsedrawn vehicles, and when the arrival of the gasoline age destroyed his business he passed through bankruptcy into commercial oblivion. However, the law of compensations operated benevolently in Nellie’s favor. She married Dick Burton, thereby acquiring both social standing and a sound financial rating. She was less intelligent than Constance, but more daring in her social adventures outside the old conservative stockade.
“George brought his own liquor,” said Constance. “We have him to thank for this soothing mixture. Shep’s terribly law-abiding; he won’t have the stuff on the place. Bruce, you’re not going to boast of other engagements; you’ll dine right here!”
“That’s all settled!” remarked Whitford cheerfully.
“If Bruce goes he takes me with him!” declared Mrs. Burton. “I’m not going to be left here to watch you two spoon. I’m some little spooner myself!”
“You couldn’t drive me from this house,” protested Bruce.
“There spoke a real man!” cried Constance, and she rang for the maid to order the table set for four.
Mrs. Burton, whom Bruce had met only once before, became confidential when Constance and Whitford went to the piano in the reception parlor, where Whitford began improvising an air to some verses he had written.
“Constance is always so lucky! All the men fall in love with her. George has a terrible case—writes poems to Connie’s eyes and everything!”
“Every woman should have her own poet,” said Bruce. “I couldn’t make a rhyme to save my life!”
“Oh, well, do me something in free verse; you don’t need even an idea for that!”
“Ah, the reality doesn’t need metrical embellishment!”
“Thanks so much; I ought to have something clever to hand back to you. Constance always know just what to say to a man. I have the courage, but I haven’t the brains for a first-class flirt.”
“Men are timid creatures,” he said mournfully. “I haven’t the slightest initiative in these matters. You are charming and the light of your eyes was stolen from the stars. Does that have the right ring?”
“Well, hardly! You’re not intense enough! You make me feel as though I were a freak of some kind. Oh, George——”
“Yes, Nellie——” Whitford answered from the piano.
“You must teach Bruce to flirt. His education’s been neglected.”
“He’s in good hands now!” Whitford replied.
“Oh, Bruce is hopeless!” exclaimed Connie, who was seated beside Whitford at the piano. “I gave him a try-out and he refused to play!”
“Then I give up right now!” Mrs. Burton cried in mock despair.
Bruce half suspected that she and Whitford had not met at Constance’s quite as casually as they pretended. But it was not his affair, and he was not averse to making a fourth member of a party that promised at least a little gaiety.
Mrs. Burton was examining him as to the range of his acquaintance in the town, and what had prompted him to settle there, and what he thought of the place—evoking the admission (always expected of newcomers) that it was a place singularly marked by its generous hospitality—when she asked with a jerk of the head toward Constance and Whitford:
“What would you do with a case like that?”
“What would I do with it?” asked Bruce, who had been answering her questions perfunctorily, his mind elsewhere. Constance and Whitford, out of sight in the adjoining room, were talking in low tones to the fitful accompaniment of the piano. Now and then Constance laughed happily.
“It really oughtn’t to go on, you know!” continued Mrs. Burton. “Those people are serious! But—what is one to do?”
“My dear Nellie, I’m not a specialist in such matters!” said Bruce, not relishing her evident desire to discuss their hostess.
“Some of their friends—I’m one of them—are worried! I know Helen Torrence has talked to Constance. She really ought to catch herself up. Shep’s so blind—poor boy! It’s a weakness of his to think everyone perfectly all right!”
“It’s a noble quality,” remarked Bruce dryly. “You don’t think Shep would object to this party?”
“There’s the point! Connie isn’t stupid, you know! She asked me to come just so she could keep George for dinner. And being a good fellow, I came! I’m ever so glad you showed up. I might be suspected of helping things along! But with you here the world might look through the window!”
“Then we haven’t a thing to worry about!” said Bruce with finality.
“It’s too bad,” she persisted, “that marriage isn’t an insurance of happiness. Now George and Constance are ideally suited to each other; but they never knew it until it was too late. I wish he’d go to Africa or some far-off place. If he doesn’t there’s going to be an earthquake one of these days.”
“Well, earthquakes in this part of the world are never serious,” Bruce remarked, uncomfortable as he found that Constance’s friend was really serious and appealing for his sympathy.
“You probably don’t know Franklin Mills—no one does, for that matter—but with his strict views of things there’d certainly be a big smash if he knew!”
“Well, of course there’s nothing for him to know,” said Bruce indifferently.
The maid came in to announce dinner and Constance and Whitford reappeared.
“George has been reciting lovely poetry to me,” said Constance. “Nellie, has Bruce kept you amused? I know he could make love beautifully if he only would!”
“He’s afraid of me—or he doesn’t like me,” said Mrs. Burton—“I don’t know which!”
“He looks guilty! He looks terribly guilty. I’m sure he’s been making love to you!” said Constance dreamily as though under the spell of happy memories. “We’ll go in to dinner just as we are. These informal parties are always the nicest.”
Whitford was one of those rare men who are equally attractive to both men and women. Any prejudice that might have been aroused in masculine minds by his dilettantism was offset by his adventures as a traveler, hunter and soldier.
“Now, heroes,” began Mrs. Burton, when they were seated, “tell us some war stories. I was brought up on my grandfather’s stories of the Civil War, but the boys we know who went overseas to fight never talk war at all!”
“No wonder!” exclaimed Whitford. “It was only a little playful diversion among the nations. That your idea, Storrs?”
“Nothing to it,” Bruce assented. “We had to go to find out that the French we learned in school was no good!”
Whitford chuckled and told a story of an encounter with a French officer of high rank he had met one wet night in a lonely road. The interview began with the greatest courtesy, became violent as neither could make himself intelligible to the other, and then, when each was satisfied of the other’s honorable intentions, they parted with a great flourish of compliments. Bruce capped this with an adventure of his own, in which his personal peril was concealed by his emphasis on the ridiculous plight into which he got himself by an unauthorized excursion through a barbed wire entanglement for a private view of the enemy.
“That’s the way they all talk!” said Connie admiringly. “You’d think the whole thing had been a huge joke!”
“You’ve got to laugh at war,” observed Whitford, “it’s the only way. It’s so silly to think anything can be proved by killing a lot of people and making a lot more miserable.”
“You laugh about it, but you might both have been killed!” Mrs. Burton expostulated.
“No odds,” said Whitford, “except—that we’d have missed this party!”
They played bridge afterward, though Whitford said it would be more fun to match dollars. The bridge was well under way when the maid passed down the hall to answer the bell.
“Just a minute, Annie!” Constance laid down her cards and deliberated.
“What’s the trouble, Connie? Is Shep slipping in on us?” asked Mrs. Burton.
“Hardly,” replied Constance, plainly disturbed by the interruption. “Oh, Annie, don’t let anyone in you don’t know.”
They waited in silence for the opening of the door.
In a moment Franklin Mills’s voice was heard asking if Mr. and Mrs. Mills were at home.
“Um!” With a shrug Constance rose hastily and met Mills at the door.
“I’d like to see you just a moment, Connie,” he said without prelude.
Whitford and Bruce had risen. Mills bowed to them and to Mrs. Burton, but behind the mask of courtesy his face wore a haggard look.
Constance followed him into the hall where their voices—Mills’s low and tense—could be heard in hurried conference. In a moment Constance went to the hall telephone and called a succession of numbers.
“The club—Freddy Thomas’s rooms——” muttered Whitford. “Wonder what’s up——”
They exchanged questioning glances. Whitford idly shuffled and reshuffled the cards.
“He’s looking for Leila. Do you suppose——” began Mrs. Burton in a whisper.
“You’re keeping score, aren’t you, Storrs?” asked Whitford aloud.
They began talking with forced animation about the game to hide their perturbation over Mills’s appearance and his evident concern as to Leila’s whereabouts.
“Mr. Thomas is at the club,” they heard Constance report. “He dined there alone.”
“You’re sure Leila’s not been here—she’s not here now?” Mills demanded irritably.
“I haven’t seen Leila at all today,” Constance replied with patient deliberation. “I’m so sorry you’re troubled. She’s probably stopped somewhere for dinner and forgotten to telephone.”
“She usually calls me up. That’s what troubles me,” Mills replied, “not hearing from her. There’s no place else you’d suggest?”
“No——”
“Thank you, Connie. Shep’s still away?”
“Yes. He’ll be back tomorrow.”
Mills paused in the doorway and bowed to the trio at the card table. “I’m sorry I interrupted your game!” he said, forcing a smile. “Do pardon me!”
He turned up the collar of his fur-lined coat and fumbled for the buttons. There seemed to Bruce a curious helplessness in the slow movement of his fingers.
Constance followed him to the outer door, and as it closed upon him walked slowly back into the living room.
“That’s a pretty how-d’ye-do! Leila ought to have a whipping! It’s after eight and nothing’s been seen of her since noon. But she hasn’t eloped—that’s one satisfaction! Freddy’s at the club all right enough.”
“She’s certainly thrown a scare into her father,” remarked Mrs. Burton. “He looked positively ill.”
“It’s too bad!” ejaculated Whitford. “I hope she hasn’t got soused and smashed up her car somewhere.”
“I wish Freddy Thomas had never been born!” cried Constance impatiently. “Leila and her father have been having a nasty time over him. And she had cut drinking and was doing fine!”
“Is there anything we can do?—that’s the question,” said Whitford, taking a turn across the floor.
Bruce was thinking hard. What might Leila do in a fit of depression over her father’s hostility toward Thomas?...
“I think maybe——” he began. He did not finish, but with sudden resolution put out his hand to Constance. “Excuse me, won’t you? It’s just possible that I may be able to help.”
“Let me go with you,” said Whitford quickly.
“No, thanks; Mr. Mills may come back and need assistance. You’d better stay. If I get a clue I’ll call up.”
It was a bitter night, the coldest of the year, and he drove his car swiftly, throwing up the windshield and welcoming the rush of cold air. He thought of his drive with Shepherd to the river, and here he was setting forth again in a blind hope of rendering a service to one of Franklin Mills’s children!...
On the unlighted highway he had difficulty in finding the gate that opened into the small tract on the bluff above the boathouse where he had taken Leila and Millicent on the summer evening when he had rescued them from the sandbar. Leaving his car at the roadside, he stumbled down the steps that led to the water. He paused when he saw lights in the boathouse and moved cautiously across the veranda that ran around its land side. A vast silence hung upon the place.
He opened the door and stood blinking into the room. On a long couch that stretched under the windows lay Leila, in her fur coat, with a rug half drawn over her knees. Her hat had slipped to the floor and beside it lay a silver flask and an empty whisky bottle. He touched her cheek and found it warm; listened for a moment to her deep, uneven breathing, and gathered her up in his arms.
He reached the door just as it opened and found himself staring into Franklin Mills’s eyes—eyes in which pain, horror and submission effaced any trace of surprise.
“I—I followed your car,” Mills said, as if an explanation of his presence were necessary. “I’m sure—you are very—very kind——”
He stepped aside, and Bruce passed out, carrying the relaxed body tenderly. As he felt his way slowly up the icy steps he could hear Mills following.
The Mills limousine stood by the gate and the chauffeur jumped out and opened the door. No words were spoken. Mills got into the car slowly, unsteadily, in the manner of a decrepit old man. When he was seated Bruce placed Leila in his arms and drew the carriage robe over them. The chauffeur mounted to his place and snapped off the tonneau lights, and Bruce, not knowing what he did, raised his hand in salute as the heavy machine rolled away.