LOVE WITHOUT JEALOUSY
The young men entered the sitting-room. Mrs. Sage was standing almost directly under the chandelier, talking to dumpy little Mrs. Grimes; the light from above fell upon her auburn crown, flooded her magnificent shoulders and arms, and then wavered timidly, almost helplessly, as it first came in contact with resplendent opposition. The actress was a head taller than Mrs. Grimes, who nevertheless bravely stood her ground and faced comparison with all the hardihood of the righteous. Oliver’s housekeeper succeeded in disguising the astonishment occasioned by the gown of silver spangles, but she could not master the wonder and the admiration that filled her eyes as she gazed upon the smooth, alabaster arms and neck and bosom of the magnificent Josephine. Nor could she understand the soft, warm cheeks, or the dusky shadows under the sparkling eyes, or the moist black lashes that sometimes veiled them.
Mr. Sage, with a distinctly bewildered and somewhat embarrassed expression keeping company with the proud and doting smile that seemed to be stamped upon his lean visage, stood across the room with his daughter and Mrs. Sammy, his hands behind his back, his feet spread slightly apart the better to allow him the unctuous relaxation of frequently rising on his toes and then slowly settling back upon his heels again—another and simple means of indicating partnership in pulchritude.
“I can remember when there wasn’t a dinner jacket or a dress suit in Rumley,” said Josephine as the two tall young men approached. “And the only men who parted their hair in the middle were the ones who didn’t have any hair in the middle at all, at all. Most of the male member’s of Herbert’s congregation left the price tags on their Sunday suits for a whole winter so that people could tell when they were dressed up. Do you mean to tell me, Oliver, that those blighters intend to begin digging up your place to-morrow?”
The mere thought of it caused her to waft her handkerchief in front of her nose, stirring the air with the rare, pungent odor of nuit de chine.
Oliver laughed. “I think we’ll all rather enjoy the excitement, Aunt Josephine,” he said. “Besides, now that I am in politics, I want to keep as much in the limelight as possible. I suppose they’ll begin prying up the kitchen floor to-morrow, or digging trenches in the cellar, or tearing up the flower-beds. It will be worth coming miles to see.”
She looked at him narrowly. “What utter rot! Do they expect to find your father buried in the cellar or under the kitchen floor?”
“They don’t expect to find him at all,” replied Oliver, with unintentional shortness.
“There will be trouble,” said Mrs. Grimes, the light of battle in her eye, “if they make a mess around this house.”
“Aunt Serepta will fix ’em,” said Oliver, putting his arm around the little woman’s shoulders. “Won’t you, Auntie?”
“She’ll boil ’em in oil,” said Sammy, very gravely.
Oliver glanced over his shoulder at Jane. Their eyes met and their gaze held for some seconds. He detected the clouded, troubled look in hers and was suddenly conscious of what must have seemed to her a serious intensity in his own. Without a word, he left Mrs. Sage and went to Jane.
“Don’t worry,” he said to her in a low tone. “You couldn’t have said anything to Malone that—”
“It isn’t that,” she interrupted nervously. “It is the feeling that we are all being spied upon.” She hesitated a moment. “I remember one thing. He asked me what kind of a night it was.”
“Well, there wasn’t any harm in telling him, was there?” he chided. “That is, if you remembered.”
“I do remember. He said that some one had told him it was a rainy, stormy night. I assured him he had been misinformed—that it hadn’t rained for weeks. He—he seemed surprised.”
“Well, what of that?”
Her wide-set gray eyes wavered. They steadied instantly, however, and she smiled—a confident, disarming smile.
“I suppose it’s the finding out that he was a detective and that he was pumping me,” she explained.
“Anyhow, you are smiling again,” he half whispered, “and that makes me want to sing and dance for joy.” He was once more aware that his voice was throaty and unsteady.
A faint wave of color spread to her cheek and brow, but she did not look away. When she spoke again it was at the conclusion of a long, deep exhalation; the sentence ended in a fluttering, breathless murmur.
“Don’t you think mother is perfectly wonderful, Oliver?”
He nodded. He felt that he could not trust his voice. He knew now that he was in love—that he always had been in love with Jane, that he always would be in love with her. He compressed his lips and fought against the strange, mad impulse to shout that he was in love with her, that she was his—all his—and that no man should take her away from him.
And she? She was thinking of that dry, hot night when he came to see her after leaving his father, out of breath, his shoes covered with fresh black mud. There had been no rain for weeks. The roads were thick with dust. And Lansing too had noticed that his shoes were muddy. He had spoken to her about them, he had wondered where Oliver had been to get into mud up to his shoe tops! And she, herself, had never ceased to wonder.
Mr. Sage was speaking to Mrs. Sammy. “Yes, my dear Muriel, I can’t quite believe I am awake. It all seems like a dream.”
His wife not only overheard this remark but obviously the one that led up to it.
“Oh, I say, old dear,” she exclaimed, “you must get over the notion that you are asleep. It’s not complimentary to me to have you going about everywhere pinching yourself to see whether you’re awake or not. And the worst of it is, he pinches me every now and then to see whether I am flesh and blood or merely a hallucination.”
Sammy cleared his throat gallantly. “Permit me to say, Miss Judge, that you are a dream, and if I was Mr. Sage I’d never wake up.”
She lifted her lorgnon and regarded him with languid interest. “After that, my dear Sammy, I am sure your wife will like me much better if you call me Aunt Josephine. Even though I am old enough to be your mother, I—Why, when I look at Jane I doubt my own eyes. That I, Josephine Judge, should have a daughter as big as Jane is more than I can grasp. I am filled with wonder. I—”
“It’s more of a wonder, Josephine Sage,” broke in Mrs. Grimes tartly, “that you haven’t got any grandchildren.”
“My dear Mrs. Grimes, don’t blame me for that,” said Josephine.
“Supper’s ready,” shouted Lizzie Meggs, the “help” from the center of the dining-room. Lizzie had a strong voice and she believed in using it. It saved her many a needless step. She was nearly thirty and thought she was good enough for Oliver, or any other young man in Rumley. Her parents brought her up in just that way—with the aid of the movies.
At table the conversation quite naturally dealt with the advent of the detectives and the task that had been set for them by the universally despised Mr. Gooch.
“It’s all bally nonsense,” said Mrs. Sage, at Oliver’s right. “Your father will turn up one day and—Why, look at me. Didn’t I turn up? Didn’t I come back? Here am I as big as life, after twenty-three years, and dear old Herbert goes about the house all day long saying that nothing—absolutely nothing is impossible.”
“Well, you see, Aunt Josephine,” began Oliver, in his good-humored drawl, “Uncle Herbert did an awful lot of praying.”
“Morning and night I prayed,” said Mr. Sage earnestly. “I prayed, and then I prayed that my prayers might be answered. God saw fit to—”
“My dear Herbert, when a woman reaches my age she begins to appreciate the advantages of a husband. If she hasn’t got one, she begins desperately to look for one. I could have had a dozen or more if I’d been of a mind, but those were in the days when husbands were looking for me. I mean other women’s husbands. When it so happens, as in my case, that a perfectly good and reliable husband has been mislaid in the haste and confusion of youth, why, Fortune smiles, that’s all. It wasn’t your praying. I should have come back if you hadn’t prayed a lick.”
“Do not say that, Josephine. I have already begun to pray that you will never go away again.”
“Don’t let me catch you at it, old dear,” she warned. “I dare say I shall get jolly well fed up with Rumley, especially after Jane is married. Besides, I am living in the hope that you may get a call to Chicago or New York.”
“I shall never leave Rumley, Josephine.”
“That’s what I said about London.”
“What was that you said about Jane?” demanded Oliver.
“Jane? Oh, yes; about her getting married? She absolutely refuses to tell me who she is going to marry. I fancy I can make a fairly good guess, however.”
“So can I,” cried Mrs. Sammy. “Oh, you Jane!”
Oliver swallowed hard. “How about it, Jane? Come on! ’Fess up. You’re among friends.”
Jane smiled mischievously. “I promise, Oliver, to tell you first of all. I sha’n’t keep you in suspense any longer than I can help.”
“Before you tell your own mother,” cried Josephine.
“Much as I love you, Mother dear, I feel that I must tell Oliver first. He is my oldest and best friend.”
“I have just been thinking, Josephine,” began Mr. Sage, guiltily and irrelevantly, “that I quite forgot to take Henry the Eighth out for his walk this evening. And even worse, I fear I left him hanging by his lead from the top peg of the hatrack.”
“I really shouldn’t mind, my dear, if he were to expire before we get home,” said she. “He is a traitor. Would you believe it, Oliver, the little beast has taken such a fancy to your Uncle Herbert that he has completely turned against me. Snaps at me, growls at me, barks at me every time I try to pat him. Hanging is too good for him.”
“Speaking of hanging,” said Sammy, “old Joe Sikes says he’s got a perfect alibi for you, Ollie, in connection with that murder up in Grand Rapids. I mean the chap who was found in a hotel room last night with his throat cut. Joe says he can prove by thirty reputable witnesses that you were not within four hundred miles of Grand Rapids last night.”
Oliver grinned. “That’s all he and Silas Link think about these days—fixing up alibis for me. They grab up the morning paper to see where the latest murder has occurred and then they hustle out and establish an alibi for me.”
“How perfectly delicious,” cried little Mrs. Sammy. “Don’t you think it is really perfectly delicious, Mr. Sage?”
“I beg your pardon?” stammered the pastor apologetically. “I am afraid I was thinking about Henry the Eighth.”
“Oh, you are so literary, Mr. Sage,” shrieked Mrs. Sammy admiringly.
Oliver was strangely restless during dinner, and immediately after the company arose from the table at its conclusion he asked Jane to come with him for a little stroll in the open air.
“I want to speak to you about something,” he urged. “Better throw something over your shoulders. The night air—”
“Ought you to go off and leave the others, Oliver?” she began, a queer little catch, as of alarm, in her voice. “Muriel and Sammy—”
“Come along,” he pleaded. “They won’t mind. I must see you alone for a few minutes, Jane.”
“I will get my wrap,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “It may be chilly outside.”
“Why, you’re shivering now, Janie,” he whispered anxiously, as he threw her wrap over her shoulders. “Are you cold?”
She did not reply. He followed her out upon the porch and down the steps. No word passed between them until they had turned the bend in the drive and were outside the radius of light shed from the windows. He was the first to speak.
“See here, Jane,” he blurted out, “I’m—I’m terribly troubled and upset.” That was as far as he got, speech seeming to fail him.
She laid her hand on his arm.
“Is it about—about the detective, Oliver?” she asked tremulously.
“No,” he answered, almost roughly. “It’s about you, Jane. You’ve just got to answer me. Are you going to be married?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice so low he could scarcely hear the monosyllable.
They walked on in silence for twenty paces or more, turning down the path that led to the swamp road.
“I—I was afraid so,” he muttered. Then fiercely: “Who are you going to marry?”
She sighed. “I am going to marry the first man who asks me,” she replied, and, having cast the die, was instantly mistress of herself. “Have you any objections?” she asked, almost mockingly.
If he heard the question he paid no heed to it. She felt the muscles of his strong forearm grow taut, and she heard the quick intake of his breath. She waited. She began to hum a vagrant little air. It seemed an age to her before he spoke.
“Jane,” he said gently and steadily, “if you were a man and in my place—I mean in my predicament—would you go so far as to ask the girl you love better than anything in all the world to marry you?”
“I don’t know just what you mean.”
“I mean, supposing they find my father out there in the swamp and there are indications that he met with foul play, and I stand the chance of being accused—”
“Don’t be silly,” she cried.
“Well—would you ask her?”
“There couldn’t be any harm in asking her. She could refuse you, you know.”
“That’s so. She could, couldn’t she. I—I hadn’t thought of that. Still you said you were going to marry the first man who asks you.”
“Yes, Oliver, I am—but, of course, I am expecting the man I love to ask me.”
“There’s the gypsy’s prophecy,” he murmured thickly. “It—it may come true, Jane.”
“It—it cannot come true,” she cried. “It cannot, Oliver.”
“Still it is something to be considered,” he said heavily and judicially. His hand closed over hers and gripped it tightly. “If you were in my place wouldn’t you hesitate about inviting her to—to become a widow?”
“Oh, I love you, Oliver, when your voice sounds as if it had a laugh in it,” she whispered.
“In a month I will be thirty,” he went on, his heart as light as air. “I might ask her to give me a thirty day option, or something like that.”
“You goose!”
He pressed her arm to his side, and was serious when he spoke again, after a moment’s pause.
“I have never asked a girl to marry me, Jane. Never in all my life. Do you know why?”
She buried her face against his shoulder. A vast, overwhelming thrill raced through him. Her warm, supple body suddenly and mysteriously became that of another woman—a strange woman so unlike Jane that his senses swam with wonder. What magic was this? This was not Jane—not the Jane he had known forever! Something incredibly feminine, sensuous, intoxicating—His arms went about her and drew her close.
“God! Is—is this you, Jane?” he whispered. “Is it really you?”
She lifted her head. A little sob of joy broke on her lips. Gazing up into his eyes, bright even in the darkness, she murmured a bewildered question.
“Yes—you are some other girl,” he replied, dazed by ecstasy. “You can’t be Jane Sage. You don’t feel like Jane Sage. You don’t—”
She laughed softly. “Do you think you ought to be holding a strange girl in your arms—and do you think I could possibly allow you to do it if I were not Jane Sage?” A pause, then, faintly: “Oh, Oliver—dear Oliver!”
“You—you are sure there isn’t any one else, Janie? I—I am not too late? Tell me.”
“There never has been any one else, Oliver. It has always been you.”
“I never realized it, Jane—I never even thought of it till just a little while ago—but now I know that I have always loved you. That’s why I’ve never asked any one else to—to marry me. I understand now why I couldn’t possibly have asked any one else. All these years it has been you—and I never knew. It was settled long ago—ages ago, without my knowing it, that there was but one girl I could ever ask to be my wife—only one girl that I could ever really love.” He drew in a deep, long, quivering breath.
Her arm stole up about his neck, she raised her chin.
“I began calling myself your wife, Oliver, when I was a very little girl—when we first began playing house together, and you were my husband and the dolls were our children. That was twenty years ago. I have been true to you ever since—all these years I have been a true and faithful wife.” Their lips met—their first kiss of passion, of love exalted. Then, a little later on, breathlessly: “Do you realize that this is the first time you have kissed your wife since she was ten years old?”
He kissed her again, rapturously. “It—it wasn’t like this when you were ten, Janie darling—nothing like this! Oh, my God!” he burst out. “You’ll never know how miserable I have been these last few weeks—how horribly jealous I’ve been.”
She stroked his cheek—possessively. “I haven’t been very happy myself,” she sighed. “I—I wasn’t quite sure you would ever give me the chance to say I loved you, Oliver—I wasn’t sure you would ever ask me to be your wife.”
“That reminds me,” he cried boyishly. “Will you marry me, Miss Sage?”
“Of course I will. Didn’t I say I would marry the first—What was that?”
As she uttered the exclamation under her breath, she drew away from him quickly, looking over her shoulder at the thick, shadowy underbrush that lined the road below them.
“I didn’t hear anything,” said he, turning with her. “It must have been my heart trying to burst out of its—”
“I heard some one—or some thing,” she said, in a voice of dismay. “Oh, Oliver, some one saw you kiss me, some one heard what we—”
“Suppose he did,” cried he jubilantly. “Why should we care? I’d like the whole world to know how happy—how absolutely happy—I am, Jane. I’ve half a notion to start out right now and run through the streets shouting that I’m in love with you and am going to marry you. When will you marry me, Jane? When?”
The woman in her replied. “I must have time to get some clothes and—”
“You don’t need any,” he broke in. “I mean any more than you have now. I’m not marrying your clothes, dear—I’m marrying you. Sh! Listen! There is some one over there in the brush. Damn his sneaking eyes! I’ll—”
“Don’t! Don’t go down there!” she cried, clutching his arm. “You must not leave me alone. I’m—I’m afraid, Ollie. I am always afraid when I am near that awful swamp. No matter if some one did see us. Let him go. Besides, it may have been a dog or some other animal—”
“Let’s walk down the road a little way, Jane,” said he stubbornly. “Don’t be afraid. I’ll stick close beside you.”
“You won’t go down into the swamp?” she cried anxiously.
“No. Just along the road.”
They ran down the little embankment into the road. She clung tightly to his arm, feeling strangely secure in the rigid strength of it—and proud of it, as well. The night was dark, the road among the trees darker still. After fifteen or twenty paces, Oliver pressed her arm warningly and stopped to listen. Ahead of them, some distance away, they heard footfalls—the slow, regular tread of a man walking in the road.
“I will not go a step farther,” she whispered, holding back as he started to go forward.
He submitted. They stood still, listening. Suddenly the footfalls ceased.
“He knows we have stopped,” said Oliver. “He’s listening to see if we are following.”
She was silent for a moment. “You remember what I said about being spied upon, Oliver. I feel it, I feel it all about me. You are being watched all the time, Oliver. Oh, how hateful, how unfair!”
He put his arm around her. “Jane dear, I am just beginning to understand. They really suspect me. They really think I may have had a hand in—Why, curse them, they—”
“Hush, Oliver!” she cried softly. “The very worst thing you can do is to fly into a rage over this silly—”
“Oh, my Lord!” he gasped, drawing back in sheer astonishment. “You too, Jane? I’ve heard nothing for twenty years but—Hang it all, dear, I want to get mad! I want to rage like a lion and tear things to pieces. Every time I frown the whole blamed town smooths my back and says ‘Now-now!’ And Joe Sikes and Silas Link—”
“I know, I know,” she interrupted gently. “But you mustn’t, just the same. You must treat this thing as a—a sort of joke.”
Many seconds passed before he spoke. “It’s pretty difficult to see anything humorous in being suspected of—Oh, I can’t even say it! It’s too awful—too unspeakable!”
“We’d better be going back to the house, Oliver,” she began.
“See here, Jane, I’ve been thinking. It’s wrong for me to ask you to marry me till all this mess is over. It’s wrong for me to even ask you to consider yourself engaged to me. We must wait. I mean it, dear. I’m under a cloud. There’s no getting around that fact. The—”
“Nobody believes you had anything to do with—”
“My dear girl, nobody knows what to believe,” said he seriously. “That’s the worst of it. My father is gone. I was, so far as any one knows, the last to see him. As you say, no one may believe that I had anything to do with it, but—where is he? That’s the question they are all asking—and no one answers. He is somewhere, living or dead. That’s sure. He may be out there in that swamp. And, Jane, here’s the horrible part of it. If he is out there, no one will believe he committed suicide. No one will believe that he made way with himself deliberately. He may have wandered into the swamp while out of his head—but he was not contemplating suicide. If that had been his intention, why did he draw all that money out of the bank? A queer thing has just happened. You know Peter Hines—that queer old bird who has always lived in the cabin at the lower end of the swamp? You can see it from the road in the daytime. He has skipped out. Boarded up the door and windows and—”
He started violently, the words dying on his lips. Off to the south, beyond the almost impenetrable wall of night, gleamed far-off lights in the windows of Peter Hines’s shack.
“He must have returned,” he said, in an odd voice. “Those lights—”
“Let us go in, dear,” she pleaded. “I—I hear something moving among the weeds down there. It’s grisly, Oliver—creepy.”
They were at the foot of the porch steps when he kissed her tenderly. “We must wait a little while, Janie, before telling them about—us. Till all this is cleared up and I am—”
She faced him, her hands on his shoulders.
“I shall tell them to-night,” she said resolutely. “To-morrow I shall tell everybody I know. What do you think I am? A fraidy-cat?”
He laughed quietly. “Have your own way, dear. You always have had it where I am concerned. But,” and here he dropped into his dry, whimsical drawl, “if I were you I wouldn’t begin getting a trousseau together until after my birthday next month. You might be wasting a lot of time and money.”
“Oh, Oliver, don’t say such things!” she cried hotly. “I wish that old gypsy were here. I’d wring her neck!”
Mrs. Sage was holding forth in her most effective English as they entered the sitting-room. She may have eyed them narrowly for a second or two, but that was all. She had an attentive audience; the division of interest due to the return of absentees was of extremely short duration; she knew how to hold the center of the stage once she got it.
“As a matter of fact, they’re shorter in Rumley than they are in London. I’ve seen more knees since I got back to Rumley than I saw all the time I was in London. And that, my dear Mrs. Grimes, despite the fact that London has more knees than any other city in the world. My daughter has provided me with a hundred surprises since—I don’t mean that she has a hundred knees, of course—what I mean to say is that Jane merely yawns when I begin in a hushed voice to tell her of the very latest crazes and vices of London. She yawns, I say, and proceeds to inform me that they are all old in Rumley—old, mind you. It really seems that just about the time poor old London is struggling to learn a new dance, Rumley is completely fed up with it. I go about in a sort of daze. I wish—I devoutly wish—I could remember all the things I’ve learned since I got back to Rumley. Poor Herbert maintains that—”
At this juncture Sammy Parr, who had been observing Oliver very closely, got up from his chair and marched across the room, his hand extended.
“Congratulations, old man!” he shouted joyously.
And little old Mrs. Grimes, from her place on the sofa, remarked as she leaned back with a sigh of content:
“Well, goodness knows it’s about time.”
Proving that since the entrance of the lovers the great Josephine had failed signally to hold her audience spellbound.