II
In the morning it was Gregory who was the practical one—Freda the mystic. Her mind was filled with mystery and dulled with the pervading sense of her husband. He was inconceivably more to her than he had been. She was infinitely rich with thought and revelation and too languorous to think. Gregory overwhelmed her. In his spirited tenderness, declaring her the miracle bride of the world, talking an unending poem of love to her, he was active now—she dreamy and spent. He brought her breakfast and sat beside her while she ate it. And suddenly it became clear to them that their time was slipping quickly by.
It had been the plan to return to the city that night but they found it impossible to leave each other.
“If we rose with the dawn, we could motor back,” said Gregory, “and I could take the train of abomination that is bearing me somewhere or other into a barren country and you could be rid of me for a little. Oh, my darling, the eternity of the next weeks!”
“The eternity that will come after!” she said smiling.
So they decided to spend another night in the little inn. There were several other guests there but they had a feeling of owning the place. The lean, colored waiter in the dining-room smiled at them and their absorption, and gave them the attention he usually reserved for those too drunk to tip wisely. The chambermaid found pins for a forgetful Freda and smirked at her as she gave them, with full knowledge of the honeymoon. Even the manager on being told they would stay another night, smiled.
Every one smiled. They went for a long walk in the evening and a carter gave them a ride back to the inn. What was that but the charm of luck which was upon them?
It was Sunday night but though there was no dancing, people dropped in on motoring parties, ready to be warmed by hot suppers before they took the last stretch of the ride back to the city. And it was as Freda was going upstairs, still in that rapt absorption which had held her day that one of the incomers saw her and stopped still in amazement. She was in profile before him, her head held high and she was turning the curve of the stairs, walking slowly.
The observer walked up to the desk and spoke to the manager who sat making out bills behind it. There was no visible register, though his eyes cast about for one.
“Who was the lady who was going upstairs?” he asked unwisely.
His manner did not recommend him.
“A lady who is stopping here,” said the Swedish lady with some hostility, affronted by the casual question of this young gay fellow. She had observed Freda and was unlikely to give out information to young loafers.
“I thought I knew her.” Ted Smillie tried to get on firmer ground.
His interlocutor seemed to grunt in dubiousness.
He gave it up and went into the dining-room, trying to find out more from the waiter. But the waiter was not too free. He had not been in a roadhouse inn three years without learning a kind of discretion.
“Lady and her husbun’, suh. Several couples here. Couldn’t make sure, suh.”
But Ted knew whom he had seen. He knew there had been no mistake. After all, except for a flare of jealousy, even that not too keen in his increasingly tasteless emotions, he would have felt that the man did not matter. But if she was that kind, why on earth had she turned him down? That would be his reasoning. And, flavoring the whole, that vitiated detective instinct which makes gossips of little minded men, was interested, and he was anxious to tell his story. He did not choose the two men with whom he was supping for confidants. He managed to get one of them to ask to see the register, just on the chance that it might throw light on Freda’s companion. But it did not help him. A party of young men and women had sprawled twenty or thirty names on the register last night. Ted did not know them and where that party began or ended he could not tell. There was not a recorded name familiar to him for the last three days. He went back to the city with his friends and the Roadside Inn grew quiet.
Freda and Gregory could not sleep. There seemed a million new thoughts in the mind of each of them, contending with the few hours they were to be together.
“I can’t bear to have morning come—and the end—” said Freda softly. She was more dependent now.
“Say the word and I’ll cancel the contracts.”
“You couldn’t. You know you said there’d be a forfeit. We’d be paying your bureau the rest of our lives. No—you must go. And I’ll be happy. But when you come back you’ll never go again. I’ll be no modern woman, I feel. I’ll be the sort of woman who cries when her husband goes to work.”
It was delightful nonsense.
“I don’t understand modern woman,” said Gregory, “you’re not modern. Modern is fashionable—that’s the most of it. You are eternal, darling. You only happen once in a thousand years and then only in the dream of a poet. I hate your modern woman, living by her little codebook of what she shall give and what she shall not give—what children she will bear, what income she must have—who shall earn it. One can’t measure life that way. It’s got to be measured by freedom or slavery. Either you’re free and brave, ready to sound depths of life if they’re worth sounding or you’re a slave and too cowardly to do anything but obey the rules.”
She did not answer. She was in no mood for discussion.