CHAPTER XX
VARNEY, HAVING EMBARKED UPON A CRIME, FINDS OUT THAT THERE IS A PRICE TO PAY
There was a fine old hedge of box bordering the Carstairs lawn, old rosebushes inside it and many flowering shrubs. Splendid oaks curtained the big white house on either side, shading the expanse of close-clipped turf. At the left, a fountain-sprayer now whirled a mist of water over the trim grass, and far to the rear a man in rubber boots was hosing off a phaeton before a carriage house. On the back porch, an elderly cook was peeling potatoes and gently crooning some old ballad of Erin.
It was a serene and reassuring scene. Yet upon the spacious piazza, which undeniably contributed to the pervading air of all's well, the stunning information came to Varney that the lady of his quest was not at home. Nor could the maid at the door say where her young mistress had gone, or with whom, or when she would return. Possibly Mrs. Carstairs knew, but Mrs. Carstairs was unwell and could not be disturbed. Miss Carstairs would be sorry to miss him, the kind-hearted girl opined, and would he please leave his name?
The young man descended the steps in a state of the flattest depression. Disappointment, he reflected bitterly, crowded upon the heels of disappointment on this anticlimactic afternoon which yet should have been, in a bigger sense, so gloriously climactic. He had missed his train, and with it his honorable confession to Mr. Carstairs; missed Higginson; last and worst of all—it seemed to him now that this was all that mattered in the least—he had missed Miss Carstairs. In sooth, the world was all awry.
But at the gate, a thought came to him, radiant as a heavenly messenger. Miss Carstairs was at her seamstress's on the Remsen road. Had she not told him with her own lips that she was to be there at this hour?
He made a Te Deum of the click of the gate, and turned northward a face which bore record of an inner splendor.
He had set out to see Miss Carstairs in order to ask of her if she knew the whereabouts, in Hunston or New York, of the fair-spoken yet elusive Higginson. But with every step he found the force of this errand weakening within him. The memory of that gentleman's villany, so burning a moment since, grew steadily fainter and more inconsequential. Failing to locate him, he would of course make a precautionary round of the newspaper offices in New York that night. At the worst, he told himself with the swift fading of his anger, there was only a remote risk of any unpleasant aftermath. Why, the thing was over and done with—let by-gones be by-gones. As for those other matters supposed to be upon his mind—hints of approaching trouble for himself, and the knowledge of Mr. Carstairs's bitter disappointment over the collapse of his all but triumphant scheme—he could not for the life of him give them any attention whatever.
A far nearer and more vital matter was pressing upon his mind and heart.
To tell her everything at the moment when the yacht had swung back and he had thrown up his commission forever had been his first strong impulse. He had crushed it down only because he saw that to speak then was to take her at an ungenerous disadvantage. Now Fortune had sent him this new meeting, to be untrammeled by any such restraints. No grim duty governed his movements now; no consciousness of secret chicanery any longer enfolded him like a pall. Already the thought of what he had meant to do came back to him hazily, like the plot of a half-forgotten play. The hobgoblins in a nightmare seemed not more unreal to him now. His heart sang with the knowledge that he was to see her again, this time with no shadow between.
Two nights' rain had left the road dustless: it was silent and empty. All about him fell the pleasant evening noises of the wood, but he did not hear them. As he walked, his mind was rehearsing the whole story of his coming to Hunston, as he was now free to confess it to Uncle Elbert's daughter. That she would forgive him he never entertained a doubt. For he would throw himself wholly on her mercy—telling her everything, painting himself as blackly as he could—and suing for pardon only because he had failed.
But when suddenly he saw her, sooner than he had expected, his polished and elaborate phrases dropped from his mind as cleanly as had the recollection of the roguery of Higginson.
It was at that hour when the skies remember the set sun in a gold and pink glow. A little kink in the road straightened out under his swift feet, and a small cottage in a fair-sized lawn jumped out of the woods into vision, almost upon him. On the small square porch, her back to the road, stood Miss Carstairs, talking through the open window to some one in the room beyond.
Varney, having stopped short at the first sudden sight of her, walked on very slowly. Her voice came to him distinctly, and now and then he caught scattering words of what she was saying. She wore her blue dress of the luncheon and the hat which Mrs. Marne, and others, had so admired; and she gave him the odd impression of being somehow older than she had ever seemed before…. Yet she was ten years his junior and three days ago, at this very hour, he had never so much as laid eyes upon her.
"I'll come Saturday morning, then," she was saying, "and you'll certainly have them ready for me, won't you? Good-bye."
She turned from the window, came towards the steps. At the top of them, she saw Varney standing at the gate, not twenty yards away, and stopped dead. Then she came on down the stairs, down the graveled walk towards him.
"I'm going away at eight o'clock," he began without greeting, striving to make his voice casual. "I went to your house first—and—"
"You—followed me here?"
"Yes," he said, unsmiling. "I had to see you before I went—on matters of business—and—"
She was nearer to him now: for the first time he could see her eyes. In them lay a faint shadowiness like the memory of shed tears; but sweeping over that and blotting it out he saw a look which struck him like a blow.
"There is nothing for you to see me about, I think—any more," she said with a little laugh. "The game is up—isn't that what they say in melodrama? My mother has told me all about it."
"Your mother has told you!" he echoed stupidly, as one to whom the words conveyed no meaning.
"She had not expected to see me so soon again, when I went off to lunch on my father's yacht. The surprise was a little too much for her. You must try to forgive her," said Mary, and punctuated the observation with a small, final bow. "Will you open the gate for me?"
"No," said Varney, pulling himself sharply together. "Not like that."
The shock of her voice and look, even more than her words, had been stunning in their first unexpectedness. But now he remembered, with infinite relief, that of course she did not understand the matter at all; of course she would speak and look very differently when he had made his explanation.
"You think," Varney said, "that I mind your knowing about our poor little plot—that I am found out and my plans are all upset? How on earth could you think that? Why, that's all like something in another life. Don't you know what my being here at this moment means? The thing is all over, Miss Carstairs—all past and done with an hour before you ever saw your mother. I gave it up voluntarily. When the time came, just now on the yacht, I found out that it was impossible—unthinkable—I couldn't do it. The game was up then. That is one thing that your mother could not tell you, and it was to tell you this, and all the rest of it, that I followed you here."
She stood on the other side of the gate, hardly an arm's length from him, looking at him; a figure so pretty, so dainty, so extremely decorative that she seemed incapable of giving anything but pleasure. But in the eyes that met his own so unwaveringly, he read at once the contradiction of this.
"Yes, I suppose that would always be the way, wouldn't it?—that whenever I found out, you were just going to tell me?"
If she had searched her mind for a way to strangle his headlong self-defence, she could not possibly have done it more effectually. There followed a horrible pause.
"You mean … that you do not believe me?"
"In the little while that I have known you, have you given me much reason to?"
"Can't you see that that is exactly the reason I wanted to tell you all the truth now?"
"Why did you wait till now? Weren't there chances to tell me this afternoon on my father's yacht? But—there's no use to speak of all this. It is enough that I know it now."
He was aware that her voice had lost that hard and polished lightness with which she had first struck at him; on this last sentence, he thought that it trembled a little; and in a flash, he saw the whole matter from her side of it, and for the moment ceased to think about himself.
He leaned his arms upon the green panel of the gate and looked down at her.
"Don't think that I blame you for not taking my word. Probably I couldn't expect it. We can't very well argue about that…. And of course I have known all along—how you would feel about me, when you found out what I came here to do. I was ready for that—ready for you to be angry. But I don't seem to have taken it in that you would be … hurt. That makes it a good deal worse."
She made no reply. She had lowered her heavy-fringed eyes; her slim, gloved hands were busily furling and unfurling her white parasol.
"There is nothing in this that need hurt you. Believe me in this, at any rate. Only three people are concerned in it. You will have no doubt of your mother. That she told you shows how impossible it was to her, even with Uncle Elbert wanting you so much. You will not mind about your father—not in any personal way. He is a stranger to you. That leaves only me."
Still she said nothing. It seemed to him that he had never looked at so still a face.
"For me, I might make you angry as any—acquaintance might—any stranger. But that is all. It is not … as if we had been friends."
She raised her eyes, and the look in them seemed to give the lie to every word he had said.
"What do you call a friend? Did I not trust you—put myself in your power—fall confidingly in with your hateful plot—after I had been plainly warned not to? Oh, if I had only listened to Mr. Higginson, I should not have the humiliation of remembering that—hour on the yacht!"
The name stung him into instant recollection. He stood staring at her, and his face darkened.
In the first staggering revelation of her look, his sub-conscious mind had leapt instantly to the conclusion that his cunning enemy, having found out his secret, had betrayed it to Miss. Carstairs. Her first words had disposed of that. It was the tortured mother, not the professional sneak, who had been before him with his explanation. But now it rushed over him that he had an infinitely deeper grudge against the vanished spy. For it was Higginson, with his bribe-money, who had broken down the yacht; Higginson who would, in any case, have forced the return to Hunston; Higginson who had given this girl the right to think, as she did think, that she owed her escape wholly to an "accident" to the machinery.
He had thought that he had saved Uncle Elbert's daughter from himself, and lo, his enemy had plucked the honor from him. The world should not be big enough for this man to elude his vengeance.
"You mention Mr. Higginson. Where is he?"
She glanced at him, impersonally, struck by the unconscious sternness of his voice.
"I do not know, but I am most anxious to see him—to thank him—"
"I am told that he left town at four o'clock. Perhaps you know his address in New York?"
"I do not," she answered coldly. "No doubt he went away hurriedly … frightened of you because of his kindness to me."
She came a step forward to the gate. Instantly his thought veered back to her and his tense face softened.
"How can I blame you," he said hurriedly, "for thinking the worst of me? I've been thinking badly enough of myself, God knows. But don't you know, can't you imagine, that nothing could have held me to the miserable business a single moment after I saw you, had I not been bound by a solemn promise to your poor father?"
"My father! Oh, if he is the sort of man to plot a thing like this, and to bludgeon my mother into it, how could you endure to promise to do it for him?"
"Because he is breaking his heart for you, and you didn't know it. It seemed right that he should see you, since he wants to so much."
All her sense of the wrong he had done her flared up in anger at that. "How do you—dare say what seems right between my father and me? He is breaking his heart for me, he told you? Did he mention to you that she had broken hers for him? Don't you suppose that I have had time—and reasons—to decide which of them I belong to?"
"All this," he said, "was before I knew you."
About them hung the stillness of the country and the long empty road.
The woods stirred; a bird called; a portly hare poked his nose through
the brush over the way, and suddenly scuttled off, his white flag up. In
Mrs, Thurston's yard, the quiet was profound.
"All his life," said Mary Carstairs, "my father has thought about nothing but himself. I am sorry for him—but he must take the consequences of that now. If he is lonely, it is his own making. If my mother has been lonely till it has almost killed her, that is his doing, too. For you—there was never any place in this. As for me, I owe him nothing. He must beg my mother's forgiveness before he shall ever get mine."
She came forward another half-step and laid her hand upon the gate-latch with a movement whose definiteness did not escape him.
"You may take back that answer from me if you wish. And so, good-bye."
"Not good-bye," said Varney, instantly. "You must not say that."
"I am quite sure that I have nothing else left to say."
Her eyes went past him over the gate, out into the wood beyond. Dusk was falling about them; it shaded her face, intangibly altered it, made it for the moment almost as he had known it before. She looked very young, and tired. This was the picture of her, and he knew it then as he looked at her, that he would carry with him to the longest day he lived.
"Is it nothing to you," he cried in a rush, "that when the time came I couldn't do it? The yacht's breaking down had nothing in the world to do with it. I had already decided to turn back, to break my promise. That the—accident happened just then was only a wretched chance. I was going to put about at that moment."
She hesitated almost imperceptibly, seemed for a brief second to waver. But perhaps she dared not let herself believe him now: perhaps the strongest wish of her heart was to hurt him as deeply as she could.
"To say the least," she said with a little deliberate movement of distaste, "your coincidences are unfortunate. You—won't mind if I go on being grateful to the—gear?"
Under that crowning taunt, his self-restraint snapped like an overstretched bow-string.
"You shall not say that. You shall not. Miss Carstairs, you know I could have kept you on the yacht if I had wanted to. You know how I gave the order to put about and bring you back to Hunston. Did I look in the least then like a man whose hopes and plans had been ruined? You know I did not. You know I said to you that I—I was the happiest man in America. Will you tell me what on earth that could mean—except that I had decided to give up a thing that has been a millstone around my neck ever since—I met you?"
She made no reply, did not look at him. The dusk shadowed her eyes; and whether her silence meant good or ill he could not tell.
"You cannot answer, you see. We both know why. You will not be fair to me, Miss Carstairs. It is that night in the Academy box-office over again. Because I had to deceive you once—not for my own sake—you will not look at the plain facts. But in your heart—just like that other night—I know you believe me."
Of course she could not let that pass now. "I do not!" she said. "I do not. I must ask you, please, not to keep me here any longer."
Varney's face went a shade paler. Arguing about his own veracity was even less bearable than he had thought; his manner all at once became singularly quiet.
"The merest moment, if you will. I can prove what I say," he answered slowly, "but of course I won't do that. You must believe what I say, believe me. Nothing else matters but that…. Don't you know that it took a very strong reason to make me break faith with my old friend, your father—to make me stand here begging to be believed, like this? You have only to look at me, I think. Don't you know that I couldn't possibly deceive you now … after what has happened to me?"
"I don't know what you mean. I don't understand. Don't tell me. Nothing has happened …"
"Everything has happened," he said still more quietly. "I've fallen crazily in love with you."
She did not lift her eyes; neither moved nor spoke; gave no sign that she had heard. He went on slowly:
"This—might be hard to believe, except that it must be so easy to see. I've known you less than three days, and I never wanted to—even like you. My one idea was to think of you as my enemy. That was what Maginnis and I agreed—plotting together like a pair of nihilists. It all seems so preposterous now. Everything was against me from the beginning. I wouldn't face it till to-day, this afternoon. Then it all came over me in a rush, and, of course, your happiness became a great deal more to me than your father's. So we turned around, and it was then that I told you how happy I was. Didn't you know then what I meant? Of course it was because I had just found out … how you were the one person in the world who mattered to me."
There was a long silence. It deepened, grew harder to break. Little Jenny Thurston, watching these two through an upstairs shutter, marveled what adults found to say to each other in these interminable colloquies. A young cock-sparrow, piqued by their stillness, alighted on the fence near by and studied them, eye cocked inquisitively.
"Of course, I'm not—asking anything," said Varney. "About this, I mean. I am answered, and over-answered, already. But … do you believe now that I—voluntarily gave it up?"
"Oh," said Mary, "you—you must not ask me that. You must not talk to me like this. I did trust you once—fully—when you were almost a stranger; last night—and then this afternoon—"
"Do you believe me," said Varney, "or do you not?"
Her lower lip was trembling very slightly, and she set her white teeth upon it. The sudden knowledge that she was near to tears terrified her, goaded her to lengths. She gathered all her pride of opinion and young sense of wrong and frightened feminine instinct, for a final desperate stand; and so flung at him more passionately than she knew: "How many times must I tell you? I do not! I do not!"
Varney gave her a last look, stamping her face upon his mind, and took a step backward from the gate.
"Then," said he … "this is good-bye, indeed."
Presently Mary raised her eyes. He had turned southward, toward the town, but at a pace so swift that he was already far down the road. A jutting curve came soon, and he vanished behind it, out of her sight.
Dusk was falling fast on the wood now. The green of the trees deepened and blackened, turning into a crooked smudge upon the sky-line. The road fell between them like a long gray ribbon. Nothing was to be seen upon it; nothing was to be heard but the rustle of the early night wind and the pleasant sounds of the open road.
Varney's mind as he walked, was a blank white wall. He had forgotten Elbert Carstairs, forgotten the train he was to take, forgotten even the unendurable injury that Higginson had put upon him. His one blind instinct had been to get away as quickly and completely as possible. But now, slowly, it was borne in upon him that he knew this road, that he had walked it once before like this, at the end of the day. His first night in Hunston—he remembered it all very well. It must have been just here—or here—that the rain had caught him, and he had gone on to meet her.
The cottage which had sheltered them that night must be close at hand. His eyes, which had been upon the ground, lifted and went off down the road. They fell upon the dark figure of a man, shuffling slowly along in the gloom, not twenty yards ahead of him.
He was an old man, shambling and gray-whiskered, and stooped as he walked. If he was aware that another wayfarer followed close behind, he gave no sign. Suddenly he stopped short with a feeble exclamation, and began peering about the ground at his feet. The young man was up with him directly, and his vague impression of recognition suddenly became fitted to a name.
"Orrick?"
The bowed form straightened and turned. Through the thickening twilight the two men looked at each other.
"You were not by any chance waiting for me?"
The darkness hid old Orrick's eyes; he shook his head slowly a number of times. "I passed you when you was at Miz Thurston's, sir. I can' walk fas' like you can." And he bent down over the road again.
"What's the matter with you?" asked Varney. "Have you lost something?"
"Los' my luck-piece," said the other, slowly, not looking up. "I was carryin' it in my hand 's I come along an' it jounced out. A 1812 penny it was an' vallyble."
He cut rather a pitiful figure, squatting down in the dirt and squinting about with short-sighted old eyes; and Varney felt unaccountably sorry for him.
"I wouldn' los' my luck-piece for nothin'," he added, dropping to his knees. "I'm a kind of a stoop'sitious man, an' I allus was."
"Perhaps I can help you; my eyes are good."
He went back a step or two, bending down and scrutinizing the brown earth. Orrick, presently announcing that the coin might have rolled, made a slow way across the road on his knees, patting the ground with his hand as he moved. Near the edge of it, half in the woods, lay a thick piece of split firewood, long as a man's arm and stouter. The knotted old fingers stealthily closed on it.
"It could n't have rolled far on this soft road," said Varney presently.
"Just where do you think you dropped it?"
Sam Orrick rose behind his stooping figure with upraised club, a blaze of triumph in his sodden old eyes.
"There!" he cried with a senseless laugh. "It's there, Stanhope!"
The club fell with a thud; and Varney, meeting it as he straightened up, toppled over like a log, face downward.
Old Orrick stared down at the prostrate figure, and presently touched it with his tattered foot. It did not stir. His fierce joy died. He looked about him apprehensively, and his eye fell at once upon a dim-lit cottage off the road just back of him. His cottage—how had he forgotten that? Was that dark thing—a man—standing there at the gate? Suddenly a great terror seized the old man. He threw his stick into the woods and slunk away, toward the town. A loud yell from behind brought his heart to his throat, and he broke into a wild, lumbering run.