I
The second evening with Trenton was very like the first except that after dinner at the Sycamore they attended a concert given by a world-famous violinist. Again as under the spell of Bob Cummings’ playing at Miss Reynolds’, Grace was caught away into a wonder-world, where she wandered like a disembodied spirit seeking some vestige of a personality that had not survived her transition to another realm. She was assailed by new and fleeting emotions, in which she studied Trenton and tried to define her attitude toward him, conscious that the time might be close at hand when some definition would be necessary. Now and then she caught a glimpse of his rapt look and saw the lines about his mouth tighten. Once he clasped his hands as though, in response to some inner prompting, he were attempting by a physical act to arrest some disturbing trend of his thoughts.
There was a fineness in his face that she had not before fully appreciated, and it was his fineness and nobility, Grace assured herself, that appealed to her. Then there were moments when she was undecided whether she loved or hated him, not knowing that this is a curious phase which women of highly sensitive natures often experience at the first consciousness of a man’s power over them. She saw man as the hunter and woman as his prey. Then with a quick revulsion she freed herself of the thought and drifted happily with the tide of harmony.
When they left the theatre Trenton asked whether she felt like walking. The night was clear and the air keen and stimulating.
“Of course; it would be a shame to ride! That music would carry me a thousand miles,” she answered.
As soon as they were free of the crowd he began to talk of music, its emotional appeal, its power to dissociate the hearer from material things.
“I never felt it so much before,” he said. “I’m afraid there’s not much poetry in me. I’m not much affected by things that I can’t reduce to a formula, and I’m a little suspicious of anything that lifts me off the earth as that fiddle did. If I exposed myself to music very often it would ruin me for business.”
“Oh, never that! I feel music tremendously; everybody must! It wakes up all manner of hopes and ambitions even if they don’t live very long. That violin really made me want to climb!”
“Yes; I can understand that. For a few minutes I was conscious myself of reaching up the ladder for a higher round. It’s dangerous to feel so keenly. I wonder if there ever comes a time when we don’t feel any more—really feel a desire to bump against the stars; when the spirit goes dead and for the rest of our days we just settle into a rut with no hope of ever pulling out? I have a dread of that. It’s ghastly to think of. Marking time! Going through the motions of being alive when you’re really dead!”
“Oh, don’t even think of it! You could never be like that!”
“Maybe I’m like that now!”
“You’re clear off the key!” she cried. “Of course you’re not at the end of things. It’s wicked to talk that way.”
“Do you really think that?” he asked eagerly. “Do you see any hope ahead for me?”
“You know you see it yourself! We wouldn’t any of us go on living if we didn’t see some hope ahead.” Then with greater animation she added:
“You’re not a man to sit down at the roadside and burst into tears because things don’t go to suit you! I don’t believe you’re that kind at all. If you are—well, I’m disappointed!”
“Now you’ve got me with my back to the wall!” he laughed. “No man ever wants a woman to think him a coward. I’ll keep away from all music hereafter except the snappiest jazz. But give music the benefit of the doubt; it may not have been the fiddle at all!”
“More likely you ate too much dinner!”
“Impossible! The ostrich has nothing on me when it comes to digestion. Maybe you’re the cause of my depression! Please consider that for a moment!”
“Oh, that’s terribly unkind! If I depress you this must be our last meeting.”
“You know I didn’t mean that, it’s because——”
“Don’t begin becausing! You know you’re in a tight corner; you hint that I’ve given you a bad evening just by sitting beside you at a concert—and a very beautiful concert at that.”
“The mistake is mine! You haven’t the slightest respect for my feelings. I show you the wounds in my very soul and you laugh at them.”
“I certainly am not going to weep my eyes out merely because you let a few bars of music throw you. I had a fit of the blues too; several times I thought I was going to cry. How embarrassed you’d have been!”
“No; I should have held your hand until you regained your composure!”
“Then we’d both have been led out by the ushers!”
He joined with her in playing whimsically upon all the possibilities of their ejection. They would have been arrested for disturbing a public gathering and their names would have figured in the police reports, probably with pictorial embellishments. This sort of fooling was safe; she thought perhaps he meant to maintain the talk on an impersonal plane but in a moment he said:
“I’m going away tomorrow, first home to Pittsburgh for about a week; then to New York. I may not get back here for two or three weeks; I’m mixed up in some things that I can’t neglect. I’d like to think you’ll miss me!”
“Oh, I always miss my friends when they go away,” she replied. Then realizing the banality of this she laughed and added: “How silly that sounded!”
“Then you mean you wouldn’t miss me?”
“Of course I didn’t mean that!”
Under a street lamp she saw in his face once more the grave troubled look that she had observed at intervals during the concert. It was foolish to question now that his interest in her was something more than a passing fancy. Her thoughts flew to the other woman, the wife of whom he had spoken at The Shack only to apologize for it in his letter from St. Louis. He was thinking of her of course; it was impossible for him to ignore the fact that he had a wife. And again as so many times before she speculated as to whether he might not still love this woman and be seeking diversion elsewhere out of sheer loneliness. But as they passed into the shadows again, her hand resting lightly on his arm, she experienced suddenly a strong desire to be kind to him. She was profoundly moved by the thought that it was in her power to pour out to him in great measure the affection and comradeship which he had confessed he hungered for.
They had crossed the canal bridge and were nearing the Durland house. Trenton was accommodating himself perforce to her rapid pace. The tonic air kept her pulses throbbing. She was sure that she loved this man; that the difference in their years was as nothing weighed against his need for her. Tonight, she knew, marked a crisis in their relationship. If she parted from him without making it clear that she wished never to see him again she would be putting herself wholly at the mercy of a fate that might bear her up or down. With only a block more to traverse she battled with herself, summoned all her courage to resist him, only to find that her will was unequal to the contest.
Deep in her heart she did not want to send him away with no hope of seeing him again. He was her one link with the great world beyond the city in which, without his visits to look forward to, she was doomed to lead a colorless, monotonous existence. She was moved by a compassion for him, poignantly tender, that swept away all sense of reality and transcended the bounds of time and space. The very thought of losing him, of not knowing where he would be in the endless tomorrows, only that she would never see him again, was like a pain in her heart. The need in him spoke to the need in her—for companionship, help, affection.
They seemed vastly isolated in the quiet street, as though the world had gone away and left them to settle their affairs with only the stars for witnesses. It had been easy to parry Bob Cummings’s attempts to assume a lover-like attitude toward her. But with Trenton this would be impossible. With him it would be necessary to state in the plainest terms that their acquaintance must end.
Nothing had been said since her last remark and if she meant to thrust him away from her she must act quickly. In a winning fashion of his own he was frank and forthright. She found it difficult to anticipate him and prepare her replies. There was no leer in him and he did not take refuge in timid gallantries; he addressed her as a man who felt that he had a right to a hearing. And this, in her confused, bewildered senses, gave dignity to the situation. He loved her and she loved him—she was sure she loved him—and her heart was in a wild tumult. She was afraid to speak lest the merest commonplace might betray her eagerness to confess her love for him.
He stepped in front of her and clasped the hand that lay lightly on his arm.
“I’ve got to say it; I must say it now,” he said in grave even tones. “No woman ever meant to me what you mean. The first night I met you I knew it had come—the thing I had hoped for—and sometimes had dreaded,—a woman I could know as I’ve never known any woman, not my wife or any other! After I left you I couldn’t get you out of my mind.” He paused for an instant, then went on hurriedly with undisguised intensity of feeling. “You may think me mad when I’ve seen you so little; and I know I have no right to love you at all! But I do love you! I want you to belong to me!”
A gust of wind caught up a mass of leaves from the gutter and flung them about their feet as though to remind them of the mutability of all things. He had said that he loved her; almost savagely he had demanded that she give herself to him. It was incredible that he cared so much, that his desire for her could be so great.
He released her hand as though in sign that he wanted her to speak without compulsion. He waited quietly, his shoulders thrown a little forward, and in the dim starlight she saw his eyes, bright and eager, searching her own.
“You know I care,” she said softly.
The words fell from her lips inevitably; no other reply was possible, and it seemed that a great weight had lifted from her heart and that in entrusting herself to him she had found security and peace. She questioned nothing, feeling his arms about her, his kiss warm on her lips. All her doubts were lost in the joy of the moment in which he had confessed his love for her. It was a strange place for the pledging of love and the moment was not to be prolonged.
“We must go on, dear,” she said laying her cheek against his for an instant. The touch of her face caused him to clasp her again.
“Oh, my dearest one!” he cried hoarsely.
As they went on, loitering to delay the moment of parting, they caught hands like happy children.
“I don’t see how you can love me,” she said with the anxiety of new love for confirmations and assurances. “I don’t belong to your world.”
“There’s the strangest thing of all!” he exclaimed. “We are born into a new world that is all ours. We have inherited all the kingdoms tonight.”
“And the stars up there—do they shine just for us?” she asked, bringing herself closer to him. “And can we keep every one else out of our world? I want it all to be our very own. Oh, it’s so sweet, so wonderful!”
“It’s a miracle beyond any words,” he said, “to know that you care. It’s easy for me to love you; I loved you in that very first hour we spent together. We don’t account for things like that, that come so suddenly and without warning; we merely accept them. I’ve fought this; I want you to know that I’ve fought it.”
“Oh, so have I! But—why did you fight it?”
Her voice betrayed her confused emotions. Her sense of right was as nothing against the belief that he loved her and that she loved him. A masterful tide had caught them up and borne them far, leaving them islanded on territory remote and touched with a mystical light that souls had never known before.
She was now fully persuaded that henceforth her life was to be bound up with his; that until death took one or the other they would never face separation. Space and distance were as nothing; if he went to far and waste places there would be still the strong spiritual tie which it pleased her to think was the real bond between them—something which, in her absolute surrender, she felt to be above all laws of men and of kinship with heavenly things. It struck her as odd that she was able so thoroughly to analyze her sensations, seeking and finding explanation and justification cleansed of all passion.
“I know I have no right to your love; none whatever,” he said steadily. “There are people who would call me a scoundrel for saying what I have just said to you. But every man in my plight feels that his case is different. I’ve thought of all this in the plainest terms, not sparing myself.”
“It would be like you to do that,” she replied.
Now that she had taken him for her lover she saw him as a paragon of generosity and nobility. He would not spare himself; she was anxious to apply balm to his conscience, to make him understand that her happiness was so complete that nothing else mattered.
“Just so you love me!” she said gently. “Nothing could be so dear as just knowing that you care. Oh, do I mean so much to you?”
“Everything,” he exclaimed and lifted her hand and kissed it.
“That’s the way it has to be—everything or nothing. I never loved any one before.”
“I’m so glad! I was afraid to ask you that. I had even thought there might be some one else—some younger man——”
“Stop! We’re not going to talk of ages,” she laughed, with a quick gesture laying her hand for a moment against his lips. “It must be understood right now that you’re not a day over twenty-five.”
“You’re going to spoil me! And you don’t know how much I want to be spoiled.”
“You poor dear! I’m going to love petting and spoiling you!”
Instantly it occurred to her that the other woman, the unknown wife of her frequent conjecture, had neither petted nor spoiled him and that this accounted for his eagerness for a new experience. A cloud crossed the bright heaven of her happiness. His wife was not to be relegated to oblivion merely because he had found another object for his affections. The wife had a very real existence in Grace’s imagination; to Trenton’s lightly limned sketch the girl had added a line here and there until she fancied she possessed a very true portrait of Mrs. Trenton. Somewhere there existed a Mrs. Ward Trenton, who wrote books and lectured and otherwise advertised herself as a vital being.
“Dear little girl!” said Trenton tenderly. “You are all the world to me. Do you understand?”
“I must believe that,” she said.
“There’s nothing I can offer you now—neither a home nor the protection of my name. It’s got to be just love that’s our tie. I’m not going to deceive you about that.”
“Yes, I understand what it means,” she answered.
“You must believe that I’ll do the best I can to make you happy. Love that doesn’t bring happiness is an empty and worthless thing. You don’t know how much I count on you. I’m laying a burden on you; I’m clutching at you for all the things I’ve missed out of my life.”
“Yes; I know dear.”
“There’s something not fair about it—about casting myself upon you as I’m doing,” he said doggedly.
“I’m proud that you want me! I want to fill your heart and your life.”
“You can; you do even now! But first of all I want you to be sure—sure of yourself, dear. There must be no regrets afterward. I can’t see you again before I go, but I’ll write.”
“I shall miss you so! You will write to me!” she cried, feeling already the loneliness of the days of his impending absence. His calmness was disconcerting but she readily forgave this as she would have forgiven him anything. He was thinking of the long future no doubt, planning ways of seeing her.
“Promise me you’ll consider everything.”
“It’s enough that we love each other!” she replied softly.
“You’re not a child but a woman, able to see it all in every light. You must be very sure that you care; that you do love me.”
“I’m very sure, dear,” she said, not a little disturbed by his solicitude, fearing that he himself might now be a prey to misgivings.
“You can write to me at the addresses I’ll send. And then wire me when you’re quite sure—not till then!”
“Yes; I’ll do as you say. But tell me again that you love me! I shall be so lonely without you!”
“With all my heart I love you. I wish we need never part again. Some day that will be. Some day I can have you with me always! But now——”
The sentence died on his lips. What could be now he did not say, shrank from saying perhaps. It was not for her to express in words what could be now. She felt a sudden strong impulse to speak of his wife; to ask him whether he did not still care for her. But it was in her heart, the battleground of many and confused emotions, to give him the benefit of every doubt. Her forces of defense had mutinied and left her powerless even to question him. The joy of the knowledge that he loved her and that she returned his love thrilled her like the song of triumphant bugles.
Her heart was throbbing as they passed through the Durland gate. At the door he took her in his arms.
“My dearest! I wouldn’t lie to you; I love you with all my heart. You will write me; and don’t forget the telegram. I shall come flying at the first possible moment after I get that. And don’t trouble about anything. I want you to say you trust me and are sure of me.”
His kisses smothered her replies.
“Promise to be careful of yourself, dear. I should die without you!”
There were tears in her eyes as she fumbled for her latch key. She watched him as he struck out with a long stride toward the city. She thought that he looked back and waved his hand out of the shadows just as she opened the door.