CHAPTER XIX
In the morning Mrs. Brokenshire was difficult again, but I got her into a neat little country inn in Massachusetts by the middle of the afternoon. I had to be like a jailer dragging along a prisoner, but that could not be helped.
On leaving Providence she insisted on spending a few days in Boston, where, so she said, she had friends whom she wished to see. Knowing that Stacy Grainger would be at one of the few hotels of which we had the choice, I couldn't risk a meeting. Her predominating shame, a shame she had no hesitation in confessing, was for having failed him. He would never forgive her, she moaned; he wouldn't love her any more. Not to be loved by him, not to be forgiven, was like death. All she demanded during the early hours of that day was to find him, wherever he had gone, and fling herself at his feet.
Because I didn't allow her to remain in Boston we had what was almost a quarrel, as we jolted over the cobblestones from the southern station to the northern. She was now an outraged queen and now a fiery little termagant. Sparing me neither tears nor reproaches, neither scoldings nor denunciations, she nevertheless followed me obediently. Sitting opposite me in the parlor-car, ignoring the papers and fashion magazines I spread beneath her eyes, she lifted on me the piteous face of an angel whom I had beaten and trampled and enslaved. For this kind of sacrilege I had ceased, however, to be contrite. I was so tired, and had grown so grim, that I could have led her along in handcuffs.
But once out in the fresh, green, northern country the joy of a budding and blossoming world stole into us in spite of all our cares. We couldn't help getting out of our own little round of thought when we saw fields that were carpets of green velvet, or copses of hazelnut and alder coming into leaf, or a farmer sowing the plowed earth with the swing and the stride of the Semeur. We couldn't help seeing wider and farther and more hopefully when the sky was an arch of silvery blue overhead, and white clouds drifted across it, and the north into which we were traveling began to fling up masses of rolling hills.
She caught me by the arm.
"Oh, do look at the lambs! The darlings!"
There they were, three or four helpless creatures, shivering in the sharp May wind and apparently struck by the futility of a life which would end in nothing but making chops. The ewes watched them maternally, or stood patiently to be tugged by the full woolly breasts. After that we kept our eyes open for other living things: for horses and cows and calves, for Corots and Constables—with a difference!—on the uplands of farms or in village highways. Once when a foal galloped madly away from the train, kicking up its slender hind legs, my companion actually laughed.
When we got out at the station a robin was singing, the first bird we had heard that year. The note was so full and pure and Eden-like that it caught one's breath. It went with the bronze-green of maples and elms, with the golden westering sunshine, and with the air that was like the distillation of air and yet had a sharp northern tang in it. Driving in the motor of the inn, through the main street of the town, we saw that most of the white houses had a roomy Colonial dignity, and that orchards of apple, cherry, and plum, with acres of small fruit, surrounded them all. Having learned on the train that jam was the staple of the little town's prosperity, we could see jam everywhere. Jam was in the cherry-trees covered with dainty white blossoms, in the plum-trees showing but a flower or two, and in the apple-trees scarcely in bud. Jam was in the long straight lines which we were told represented strawberries, and in the shrubberies of currant. Jam was along the roadsides where the raspberry was clothing its sprawling bines with leaves, and wherever the blueberry gladdened the waste places with its millions of modest bells. Jam is a toothsome, homey thing to which no woman with a housekeeping heart can be insensible. The thought of it did something to bring Mrs. Brokenshire's thoughts back to the simple natural ways she had forsworn, even before reaching the hotel.
The hotel was no more than a farm-house that had expanded itself half a dozen times. We traversed all sorts of narrow halls and climbed all sorts of narrow staircases, till at last we emerged on a corner suite, where the view led us straight to the balcony.
Not that it was an extraordinary view; it was only a peaceful and a noble one. An undulating country held in its folds a scattering of lakes, working up to the lines of the southern New Hampshire hills which closed the horizon to the north. Green was, of course, the note of the landscape, melting into mauve in the mountains and saffron in the sky. Spacing out the perspective a mauve mist rose between the ridges, and a mauve light rested on the three white steeples of the town. The town was perhaps two hundred feet below us and a mile away, nestling in a feathery bower of verdure.
When I joined Mrs. Brokenshire she was grasping the balcony rail, emitting little "Ohs!" and "Ahs!" of ecstasy. She drew long breaths, like a thirsty person drinking. She listened to the calling and answering of birds with face illumined and upturned. It was a bath of the spirit to us both. It was cleansing and healing; it was soothing and restful and corrective, setting what was sane within us free.
Of all this I need say little beyond mentioning the fact that Mrs. Brokenshire, in spite of herself, entered into a period in which her taut nerves relaxed and her over-strained emotions became rested. It was a kind of truce of God to her. She had struggled and suffered so much that she was content for a time to lie still in the everlasting arms and be rocked and comforted. We had the simplest of rooms; we ate the simplest of food; we led the simplest of lives. By day we read and walked and talked a little and thought much; at night we slept soundly. Our fellow-guests were people who did the same, varying the processes with golf and moving pictures. For the most part they were tired people from the neighboring towns, seeking like ourselves a few days' respite from their burdens. Though they came to know who Mrs. Brokenshire was, they respected her privacy, never doing worse than staring after her when she entered the dining-room or walked on the lawns or verandas. I had come to love her so much that it was a joy to me to witness the revival of her spirit, and I looked forward to seeing her restored, not too reluctantly, to her husband.
With him I had, of course, some correspondence. It was an odd correspondence, in which I made my customary gaffe. On our first evening at the inn I wrote to him in fulfilment of my promise, beginning, "Dear Mr. Brokenshire," as if I was writing to an equal. The acknowledgment came back: "Miss Alexandra Adare: Dear Madam," putting me back in my place. Accepting the rebuff, I adopted the style in sending him my daily bulletins.
As a matter of fact, my time was largely passed in writing, for I had explanations to make to so many. My acquaintance with Mrs. Brokenshire having been a secret one, I was obliged to confess it to Hugh and Mrs. Rossiter, and even to Angélique. I had, in a measure, to apologize for it, too, setting down Mrs. Brokenshire's selection of my company to an invalid's eccentricity.
So we got through May and into June, my reports to Mr. Brokenshire being each one better than the last. My patient never wrote to him herself, nor to any one. We had, in fact, been a day or two at the inn before she said:
"I wonder what Mr. Brokenshire is thinking?"
It was for me to tell her then that from the beginning I had kept him informed as to where she was, and that he knew I was with her. For a minute or two she stiffened into the grande dame, as she occasionally did.
"You'll be good enough in future not to do such things without consulting me," she said, with dignity.
That passed, and when I read to her, as I always did, the occasional notes with which her husband honored me, she listened without comment. It must have been the harder to do that since the lover's pleading ardor could be detected beneath all the cold formality in which he couched his communications.
It was this ardor, as well as something else, that began in the end to make me uneasy. The something else was that Mrs. Brokenshire was writing letters on her own account. Coming in one day from a solitary walk, I found her posting one in the hall of the hotel. A few days later one for her was handed to me at the office, with several of my own. Recognizing Stacy Grainger's writing, I put it back with the words:
"Mrs. Brokenshire will come for her letters herself."
From that time onward she was often at her desk, and I knew when she got her replies by the feverishness of her manner. The truce of God being past, the battle was now on again.
The first sign of it given to me was on a day when Mr. Brokenshire wrote in terms more definite than he had used hitherto. I read the letter aloud to her, as usual. He had been patient, he said, and considerate, which had to be admitted. Now he could deny himself no longer. As it was plain that his wife was better, he should come to her. He named the 20th as the day on which he should appear.
"No, no," she cried, excitedly. "Not till after the twenty-third."
"But why the twenty-third?" I asked, innocently.
"Because I say so. You'll see." Then fearing, apparently, that she had betrayed something she ought to have concealed, she colored and added, lamely, "It will give me a little more time."
I said nothing, but I pondered much. The 23d was no date at all that had anything to do with us. If it had significance it was in plans as to which she had not taken me into her confidence.
So, too, when I heard her making inquiries of the maid who did the rooms as to the location of the Baptist church. "What on earth does she want to know that for?" was the question I not unnaturally asked myself. That she, who never went to church at all, except as an occasional act of high ceremonial for which she took great credit to her soul, was now concerned with the doctrine of baptism by immersion I did not believe. But I hunted up the sacred edifice myself, finding it to be situated on the edge of a daisied mead, slightly out of the town, on a road that might be described as lonely and remote. I came to the conclusion that if any one wanted to carry off in an automobile a lady picking flowers—a sort of enlèvement de Proserpine—this would be as good a place as any. How the Pluto of our drama could have come to select it, Heaven only knew.
But I did as I was bid, and wrote to Mr. Brokenshire that once the 23d was passed he would be free to come. After that I watched, wondering whether or not I should have the heart or the nerve to frustrate love a second time, even if I got the chance.
I didn't get the chance precisely, but on the 22nd of June I received a mysterious note. It was typewritten and had neither date nor address nor signature. Its message was simple:
"If Miss Adare will be at the post-office at four o'clock this afternoon she will greatly oblige the writer of these lines and perhaps benefit a person who is dear to her."
The post-office being a tolerably safe place in case of felonious attack, I was on the spot at five minutes before the hour. In that particular town it occupied a corner of a brick building which also gave shelter to the bank and a milliner's establishment. As the village hotel was opposite, I advertised my arrival by studying a display of hats which warranted the attention before going inside to invest in stamps. As I was the only applicant for this necessary of life, the swarthy, undersized young man who served me made kindly efforts at entertainment while "delivering the goods," as he expressed it.
"English, ain't you?"
I said, as usual, that I was a Canadian.
He smiled at his own perspicacity.
"Got your number, didn't I? All you Canucks have the same queer way o' talkin'. Two or three in the jam-factory here—only they're French."
I knew some one had entered behind me, and, turning away from the wicket, I found the person I had expected. Mr. Stacy Grainger, clad jauntily in a gray spring suit, lifted a soft felt hat.
He went to his point without introductory greeting.
"It's good of you to have come. Perhaps we could talk better if we walked up the street. There's no one to know us or to make it awkward for you."
Walking up the street he made his errand clear to me. I had partly guessed it before he said a word. I had guessed it from his pallor, from something indefinably humbled in the way he bore himself, and from the worried light in his romantic eyes. Being so much taller than I, he had to stoop toward me as he talked.
He knew, he said, what had happened on the train. Some of it he had wrung from his secretary, Strangways, and the rest had been written him by Mrs. Brokenshire. He had been so furious at first that he might have been called insane. In order to give himself the pleasure of kicking Strangways out he had refused to accept his resignation, and had I not been a woman he would have sought revenge on me. He had been the more frantic because until getting his first note from Mrs. Brokenshire he hadn't known where she was. To have the person dearest to him in the world swept off the face of the earth after she was actually under his protection was enough to drive a man mad.
Having acquiesced in this, I considered it no harm to add that if I had known the business on which I was setting out I should have hardly dared that day to take the train for Boston. Once on it, however, and in speech with Mrs. Brokenshire, it had seemed that there was no other course before me.
"Quite so," he agreed, somewhat to my surprise. "I see that now. He's not altogether an ass, that fellow Strangways. I've kept him with me, and little by little—" He broke off abruptly to say: "And now the shoe's on the other foot. That's what I wanted to tell you."
I walked on a few paces before getting the force of this figure of speech.
"You mean that Mrs. Brokenshire—"
"Quite so. I see you get what I'd like you to know." He went on, brokenly: "It isn't that I don't want it myself as much as ever. I only see, as I didn't see before, what it would mean to her. If I were to take her at her word—as I must, of course, if she insists on it—"
I had to think hard while we continued to walk on beneath the leafing elms, and the village people watched us two as city folks.
"It's for to-morrow, isn't it?" I asked at last.
He nodded.
"How did you know that?"
"Near the Baptist church?"
"How the deuce do you know? I motored up here last week to spy out the land. That seemed to me the most practicable spot, where we should be least observed—"
We were still walking on when I said, without quite knowing why I did so:
"Why shouldn't you go away at once and leave it all to me?"
"Leave it all to you? And what would you do?"
"I don't know. I should have to think. I could do—something."
"But suppose she's counting on me to come?"
"Then you would have to fail her."
"I couldn't."
"Not even if it was for her good?"
He shook his head.
"Not even if it was for her good. No one who calls himself a gentleman—"
I couldn't help flinging him a scornful smile.
"Isn't it too late to think in terms like that? We've come to a place where such words don't apply. The best we can do is to get out of a difficult situation as wisely as possible, and if you'd just go away and leave it to me—"
"She'd never forgive me. That's what I'd be afraid of."
"There's nothing to be afraid of in doing right," I declared, a little sententiously. "You'll do right in going away. The rest will take care of itself."
We came to the edge of the town, where there was a gate leading into a pasture. Over this gate we leaned and looked down on a valley of orchards and farms. He was sufficiently at ease to take out a cigarette and ask my permission to smoke.
"What would you say of a man who treated you like that?" he asked, presently.
"It wouldn't matter what I said at first, so long as I lived to thank him. That's what she'd do, and she'd do it soon."
"And in the mean time?"
"I don't see that you need think of that. If you do right—"
He groaned aloud.
"Oh, right be hanged!"
"Yes, there you go. But so long as right is hanged wrong will have it all its own way and you'll both get into trouble. Do right now—"
"And leave her in the lurch?"
"You wouldn't be leaving her in the lurch, because you'd be leaving her with me. I know her and can take care of her. If you were just failing her and nothing else—that would be another thing. But I'm here. If you'll only do what's so obviously right, Mr. Grainger, you can trust me with the rest."
I said this firmly and with an air of competence, though, as a matter of fact, I had no idea of what I should have to do. What I wanted first was to get rid of him. Once alone with her, I knew I should get some kind of inspiration.
He diverted the argument to himself—he wanted her so much, he would have to suffer so cruelly.
"There's no question as to your suffering," I said. "You'll both have to suffer. That can be taken for granted. We're only thinking of the way in which you'll suffer least."
"That's true," he admitted, but slowly and reluctantly.
"I'm not a terribly rigorous moralist," I went on. "I've a lot of sympathy with Paolo and Francesca and with Pelléas and Mélisande. But you can see for yourself that all such instances end unhappily, and when it's happiness you're primarily in search of—"
"Hers—especially," he interposed, with the same deliberation and some of the same unwillingness.
"Well, then, isn't your course clear? She'll never be happy with you if she kills the man she runs away from—"
He withdrew his cigarette and looked at me, wonderingly.
"Kills him? What in thunder do you mean?"
I explained my convictions. Howard Brokenshire wouldn't survive his wife's desertion for a month; he might not survive it for a day. He was a doomed man, even if his wife did not desert him at all. He, Stacy Grainger, was young. Mrs. Brokenshire was young. Wouldn't it be better for them both to wait on life—and on the other possibilities that I didn't care to name more explicitly?
So he wrestled with himself, and incidentally with me, turning back at last toward the village inn—and his motor. While shaking my hand to say good-by he threw off, jerkily:
"I suppose you know my secretary, Strangways, wants to marry you?"
My heart seemed to stop beating.
"He's—he's never said so to me," I managed to return, but more weakly than I could have wished.
"Well he will. He's all right. He's not a fool. I'm taking him with me into some big things; so that if it's the money you're in doubt about—"
I had recovered myself enough to say:
"Oh no; not at all. But if you're in his confidence I beg you to ask him to think no more about it. I'm engaged—or practically engaged—I may say that I'm engaged—to Hugh Brokenshire."
"I see. Then you're making a mistake."
I was moving away from him by this time so that I gave him a little smile.
"If so, the circumstances are such that—that I must go on making it."
"For God's sake don't!" he called after me.
"Oh, but I must," I returned, and so we went our ways.
On going back to our rooms I found poor, dear little Mrs. Brokenshire packing a small straw suit-case. She had selected it as the only thing she could carry in her hand to the place of the enlèvement. She was not a packer; she was not an adept in secrecy. As I entered her room she looked at me with the pleading, guilty eyes of a child detected in the act of stealing sweets, and confessing before he is accused.
I saw nothing, of course. I saw nothing that night. I saw nothing the next day. Each one of her helpless, unskilful moves was so plain to me that I could have wept; but I was turning over in my mind what I could do to let her know she was deceived. I was reproaching myself, too, for being so treacherous a confidante. All the great love-heroines had an attendant like me, who bewailed and lamented the steps their mistresses were taking, and yet lent a hand. Here I was, the nurse to this Juliet, the Brangaene to this Isolde, but acting as a counter-agent to all romantic schemes. I cannot say I admired myself; but what was I to do?
To make a long story short I decided to do nothing. You may scorn me, oh, reader, for that; but I came to a place where I saw it would be vain to interfere. Even a child must sometimes be left to fight its own battles and stand face to face with its own fate; and how much more a married woman! It became the more evident to me that this was what I could best do for Mrs. Brokenshire in proportion as I watched the leaden hands and feet with which she carried out her tasks and inferred a leaden heart. A leaden heart is bad enough, but a leaden heart offering itself in vain—what lesson could go home with more effect?
During the forenoon of the 23d each little incident cut me to the quick. It was so naïve, so useless. The poor darling thought she was outwitting me. As if she was stealing it she stowed away her jewelry, and when she could no longer hide the suit-case she murmured something about articles to be cleaned at the village cleaner's. I took this with a feeble joke as to the need of economy, and when she thought she would carry down the things herself I commended the impulse toward exercise. I knew she wouldn't drive, because she didn't want a witness to her acts. As far as I could guess the hour at which Pluto would carry off Proserpine, it would be at five o'clock.
And indeed about half past three I observed unusual signs of agitation. Her door was kept closed, and from behind it came sounds of a final opening and closing of cupboards and drawers, after which she emerged, wearing a dark-blue walking-suit and a hat of the canotière style, with a white quill feather at one side. I still made no comment, not even when the wan, wee, touching figure was ready to set forth.
If her first steps were artless the last was more artless still. Instead of going off casually, with an implied intention to come back, she took leave of me with tears and protestations of affection. She had been harsh with me, she confessed, and seemingly indifferent to my tender care, but one day she might have a chance to show me how genuine was her gratitude. In this, too, I saw no more than the commonplace, and a little after four she tripped down the avenue, looking, with her suit-case, like a school-girl.
I allowed her just such a handicap as her speed and mine would have warranted. Even then I made no attempt to overtake her. Having previously got what is called the lay of the land, I knew how I could come to her assistance by taking a short cut. I had hardened my heart by this time, and whatever qualms I had felt before, I was resolved now to spare her no drop of the wormwood that would be for her good.
I cannot describe our respective routes without appending a map, which would scarcely be worth while. It will be enough if I say that she went round the arc of a bow and I cut across by the string. I came thus to a slight eminence, selected in advance, whence I could watch her descent of the hill by which the lower Main Street trails off into the country. I could follow her, too, when she deflected into a small cross-thoroughfare bearing the scented name of Clover Lane, in which there were no houses; and I should still be able to trace her course when she emerged on the quiet country road that would take her to her trysting-place. I had no intention to step in till I could do it at some spot on her homeward way, and thus spare her needless humiliation.
In Clover Lane she was within a few hundred yards of her destination. She had only to turn a corner and she would be in sight of the flowery mead whence she was to be carried off. It was a pretty lane, grass-grown and overhung with lilacs in full bloom, such as you would find on the edge of any New England town. The lilacs shut her in from my view for a good part of the time, but not so constantly that I couldn't be a witness to her soul's tragedy.
Her soul's tragedy came as a surprise to me. Closely as I had lived with her, I was unprepared for any such event. My first hint of it was when her pace through the lane began to slacken, till at last she stopped. That she didn't stop because she was tired I could judge by the fact that, though she stood stock-still, she held the light suit-case in her hand. I couldn't see her face, because I stood under a great elm, some five hundred yards away.
Having paused and reflected for the space of three or four minutes, she went on again, but she went on more slowly. Her light, tripping gait had become a dragging of the feet, while I divined that she was still pondering. As it was nearly five o'clock, she couldn't be afraid of being before her time.
But she stopped again, setting the suit-case down in the middle of the road. She turned then and looked back over the way by which she had come, as if regretting it. Seeing her open her small hand-bag, take out a handkerchief, and put it to her lips, I was sure she was repressing one of her baby-like sobs. My heart yearned over her, but I could only watch her breathlessly.
She went on again—twenty paces, perhaps. Here she seemed to find a seat on a roadside boulder, for she sat down on it, her back being toward me and her figure almost concealed by the wayside growth. I could only wonder at what was passing in her mind. The whole period, of about ten minutes' duration, is filled in my memory with mellow afternoon light and perfumed air and the evening song of birds. When the village clock struck five she bounded up with a start.
Again she took what might have been twenty paces, and again she came to a halt. Dropping the suit-case once more, she clasped her hands as if she was praying. As, to the best of my knowledge, her prayers were confined to a hasty evening and morning ritual in which there was nothing more than a pious, meaningless habit, I could surmise her present extremity. Stacy Grainger was like a god to her. If she renounced him now it would be an act of heroism of which I could hardly believe her capable.
But, apparently, she made up her mind that she couldn't renounce him. If there was an answer to her prayer it was one that prompted her to snatch up her burden again and hurry, with a kind of skimming motion, right to the end of the lane. It was to the end of the lane, but not to the turning into the roadway. Once in the roadway she would see—or she thought she would see—Stacy Grainger and his automobile, and her fate would be sealed.
She had still a chance before her—and from that rutted sandy juncture, with wild roses and wild raspberries in the hedgerows on each side, she reeled back as if she had been struck. I can only think of a person blinded by a flash of lightning who would recoil in just that way.
For a few minutes she was hidden from my view behind the lilacs. When I caught sight of her again she was running like a terrified bird back through Clover Lane and toward the Main Street, which would take her home.
I met her as she was dragging herself up the hill, white, breathless, exhausted. Pretending to take the situation lightly, I called as I approached:
"So you didn't leave the things."
Her answer was to drop the suit-case once again, while, regardless of curious eyes at windows and doors, she flew to throw herself into my arms.
She never explained; I never asked for explanations. I was glad enough to get her back to the hotel, put her to bed, and wait on her hand and foot. She was saved now; Stacy Grainger, too, was saved. Each had deserted the other; each had the same crime to forgive. From that day onward she never spoke his name to me.
But as, that evening, I went to her bedside to say good-night, she drew my face to hers and whispered, cryptically:
"It will be all right now between yourself and Hugh. I know how I can help."