V
All the days on the steamer she had misdoubted the return to college after two years' absence, and the surprise and foreboding that sprang up when her closest gaze at the dock failed to show her Sydney Lodge, increased the mistrust. There was nothing for which to stay over in New York since Sydney, according to the friends who did show up to greet her, was still twenty miles off at the seashore, and since Esther had cabled to engage the graduate suite of rooms for themselves at college there was a place prepared and probably a letter awaiting her there. Tired with the bustle of the custom house, she scarcely noticed the sunburnt country north of Philadelphia, but from the moment of pulling out from the city westward, found vague forgotten recollections stirring like indistinguishable odours.
Strong enough at last even to satisfy her was the sense of a glad home-coming and the sudden contraction of her throat at particular perceptions: the first glimpses of the bell-tower above the trees, the stillness of the wind-swept air, the fresh and quiet beauty of the grey buildings and green turf.
As a simple mood she welcomed the feeling, prompt of course to pass, but equally prompt to return and supplant in time inevitable regrets for the other life now finally renounced.
It looked very gay, soft, desirable, that other life, while she surveyed the ungarnished and spotless emptiness of the bare study. On one table lay a pile of letters, the topmost directed in Sydney's hand so oddly like her own: a letter puzzling for the first sheet, then plain enough in its shamefaced announcement that the writer was engaged to be married—had been, indeed, for a month past but for some inexplicable reason had not wished Esther to learn before sailing. "H'm," thought Esther, "pity I didn't know this!" She looked around at the two study-tables, two lamps and two armchairs, almost the whole furniture of the room, and began to laugh. The stupid chair butting its nose against the table as maids always will leave study chairs, taunted her with the unnecessary assurance that Sydney would never occupy it.
The man in question, curiously enough, Esther had once known rather well. Her brother had been in the same class at Harvard, since whose death some years before she had scarcely seen him. But she had not heard of his meeting Sydney. He was a politician by trade, a lawyer by profession. He belonged in the Middle West.
Esther felt rather sick and very angry; Sydney at least needn't have made a fool of her! Still, she could see the comedy.
"Hello!" rang up a fine, strong voice below, and turning in the window-seat she saw on the grass brown sturdy Hilda Railton springing off her bicycle, rather warm and very pleased to see her. "I'm coming up. My room is down the hall. Let's have some tea!"
When the kettle had boiled Hilda remarked, as she shovelled in the tea: "So you're going in for the Ph. D. after all? I had dreamed you were strong-minded enough to resist the prevailing superstition. O Ichabod, Ichabod!"
Esther, laughing, echoed the Ichabod so sincerely that Hilda was prompted to change her ground and while she cut cool odorous slices of lemon to ask:
"So Sydney came back after one winter? I knew she would."
Esther answered rather dryly: "Yes, her family couldn't spare her."
"Sydney's family!" laughed Hilda, recognizing the object of hostility. "We all know it. 'Twas a pretty good year, wasn't it?"
"Ah, a golden year!"
"I had a notion from your letters last spring you were staying over there indefinitely. Then wasn't there a plan about Sydney's going back?"
"Yes. I needed more time. Last year my eyes played me a horrid trick and I couldn't work at all. Not even write letters," said Esther grimly. She had fancied it was because of her inability to answer that Sydney had written so seldom. "I had in another way almost as good a year idling about Berlin and Paris. My dear girl, you've no notion of the possibilities of idleness! So I quite thought of staying at the British Museum this winter, even alone, and finishing what I was at."
"Assyrian cylinders still?"
"Always cylinders." This with a sudden sense of coldness. "The Deluge, and others. But I changed my mind." Never should any one, her former roommate least of all, know what had changed her mind. Actually this was a letter from Sydney Lodge, written in July and saying in effect, "I need you rather badly. How soon are you coming?" She had explained on a post-card that certain bricks and cylinders ought first to be deciphered and in the meantime had cabled for the rooms. She knew—it was one of the discoveries of this extraordinary afternoon—she knew Sydney's ways even to the point of prediction; that if she should say: "But my dear child I wrote you I had engaged the suite for us both," the young lady would answer with a brilliant smile of privilege and a new note—was it the sentimental?—in her voice: "Did you really? Well, I must have been thinking of something else when I read the letter." It was impossible not to laugh, but Esther covered the laughter with a sudden inspiration:
"Oh, I say, don't you want to share my study?"
"But Sydney?" cried poor Hilda, setting down her flowered teacup.
"Sydney's engaged. One Lewis Mason."
"Oh, dear!" Hilda answered flatly. "I'm rather sorry. I always believed in her, you know. She might have done things."
"Presumably one can do things with a husband. He is supposed to help," replied Esther, throwing forward her general convictions in the grotesque struggle for loyalty.
"Ah, she can't. And," added the girl, conclusively, "he won't."
"How's that?"
Hilda returned violently: "I know the beggar. She stayed a Sunday with Helen when I was there this summer and—he called in the evening. He's in politics, but quite respectable. I don't know why I shouldn't come, if you really want me: I'm taking my Ph. D., too, you know. Think it over. He's what they called," said Hilda with an explicit vagueness, "'le parfait gentleman.'"