III
Their trunks had arrived and been carried to their rooms during dinner. It was shortly after eight-thirty when Madelaine exclaimed to Nathan:
“I know what let’s do! Suppose we slip upstairs and dress in our army clothes to show mother how we looked in the field! I think it would be jolly!”
Nathan complied. It took him a quarter-hour to make the change.
“It’s not exactly what I’d wear on parade,” he apologized grimly on his return.
“I imagine Siberia was no tea party!” returned Mrs. Theddon. She was as happy as a young girl herself this night, though she had faded much through worry over her daughter. Her hair was almost iron gray now with that anxiety.
Madelaine was in the center of the veranda, turning about to show her mother a rent in her cape where a stray Bolshevik bullet had penetrated one night beyond Omsk, when old Murfins appeared in the doorway.
“Mr. Ruggles is calling, Miss Madelaine,” he announced. “Mr. Gordon Ruggles!”
Gordon!
From the Great High Noon the one slender shadow cast upon Madelaine’s happiness had been the thought of Gordon. She stood for a moment irresolute now. Then to the servant she said evenly:
“Please show him upstairs—the library. I’ll be up directly.” Madelaine turned to Nathan. “I want him to meet you. But not just yet. I must talk to him first.”
Gordon was standing before the west window, looking down on the Connecticut with his back to the room when Madelaine finally entered. It was the same apartment where she had bade him good-bye—offered him her lips—which he had not taken. He was still in his uniform and she knew when she beheld it, as well as the man inside, that he had not played at war.
“Gordon!” she cried, coming swiftly forward. She held out both hands.
He did not speak. If he was surprised at beholding her in a nurse’s outfit, he gave no sign.
War had taken its toll from Gordon. It seemed as though his fine patrician mold had been cast into the Great Furnace and when the dross had been melted away he was pure metal but hardened somehow. He was thin; he looked as though he had suffered much.
“I’m sorry to intrude to-night, Madge. But I couldn’t help it. Forgive me! Under the circumstances I had to come!”
“Oh, I’m so glad to see you! And it’s perfectly all right!”
He grasped her outstretched hand and bent above it. It was very neatly done, very much the appropriate thing—for Gordon.
It was not until he had been called to meet Nathan and Madelaine saw his peculiar gait in crossing the room that she knew he had not returned as he went away. Gordon had lost his left leg at the knee in the Argonne, but aside from a stiffness in his stride, no one might suspect.
“I’ve intruded to-night because I’m going to Chicago and thence out to Kansas at once, Madge. And I wanted to offer my best wishes. I’m glad, Madge—glad—that you—are very happy!”
“Gordon! You know?”
“Aunt Gracia told me. I was discharged from the hospital in January. Aunt Grace allowed me to read certain portions of your letters about—him! It couldn’t be, Madge—you and I. And in fairness to us both, I ought to add that I felt it the night I went away. At least I felt I couldn’t take you—with clean hands.”
“Oh, Gord!”
“You had known me so long—I had grown up with you and showed myself such a rotter before you straightened me out—that there would have been little real romance in it, between you and me, if I had been the man. I felt a little bitter over it when I first heard. But a fellow learns a lot of things in such a Big Show as we’ve just ended. He learns not to whimper if luck goes against him. But aside from that—there was yet another reason.”
For a moment they surveyed one another. Of the two, Madelaine was the most perturbed. Perturbed because after her half-year propinquity with Nathan, everything which her fiancé possessed stood forth so sharply by contrast with the man who faced her now.
Nathan had calm eyes. Gordon’s eyes were not calm. They were troubled. Nathan had hard-muscled jaws and philosophical lips. Gordon had—well, just a mouth, and it was a bit too harsh. Nathan carried himself gravely, shoulders well back, feet on the ground. Gordon had a proclivity toward a slight, slender, patrician slouch. Nathan had talon hands, a man’s hands, made to grasp, create, build, deal sledge-hammer blows. Gordon’s hands were lithe, pink, neatly manicured, made to handle a cigarette gracefully.
Yet Gordon was no less a man than Nathan. He was simply a different type of man.
Comparing the two now, however, Madelaine understood why she had never been able to abandon herself to Gordon. Being very feminine, she had hungered for the virility of Nathan’s jaws and hands and iron arms.
“You’re going to Chicago and Kansas, Gordon? Why?”
“I am going to be married, Madge.”
“Married!”
“I have told Aunt Gracia why. When I’m gone, she will explain. You think it strange perhaps—after what happened here in this room when we parted. But when I knew I had lost, with you—and then one night Over Across when I got in a pinch where I had no assurance I would live until morning, I did some vital thinking, Madge. I found there were many things in my life which, if I had the chance, I would rectify. I was spared to rectify them. I did a rotten thing by another girl once, Madge. And I choose to think I lost you because I dared approach you without my debt to another woman paid in full. At any rate, without trying to make a hero of myself in this distressing explanation, I—well—I found the girl loved me very dearly and had married another man whom she did not love because he was willing to have her after—after—well, to speak the brutal truth, in army slang—after I’d ‘made hamburg’ of her life. We’re to be married, I say, and we’re going out to Kansas. I shall try to nurse the girl back to—to—what she was when I met her. My treatment made her a nervous wreck.”
Madelaine was very pale as Gordon made this confession. She backed against the table and whetted her parted lips.
“Gordon,” she whispered huskily, “—is it Bernie Gridley?”
“Yes,” said the man simply. “And I want you to know that even if you had not found Mr. Forge, and had returned willing to accept me, I should still have pursued the course I’m taking now.”
For a moment Madelaine surveyed him. And then she saw the clean-cut character in the thing he was doing. With her intuitive understanding of psychology, she realized that the very best side of her cousin was disclosing itself now.
“Gordon—was that—why you would not kiss me on the lips—the last time we faced each other in this room?”
“Something of the sort, Madge. Yes.”
“Gordon, this is a very manly thing you’re doing. A big thing!”
“Please don’t make it any more distressing. I’m not doing it from any hope of praise or sense of duty. I’m doing it because I found a new thrill in shooting straight, after you gave me the incentive to stop sloughing, Madge. And—I’ve learned more—in France. Miss Gridley can never be to me what you have been, Madge. But then, I don’t deserve you, and never did. I can make Miss Gridley very happy. I can nurse her back to normality and health. She has very great confidence in me. She loves me greatly. She was very tender when she heard I had returned and was confined in the hospital. She visited me every day. It will not be at all difficult to love her for that tenderness. All of us have the capacity to love, I find, Madge, when the basis of love is service. And there is usually a Great Circumstance where we eventually find we can serve—very beautifully. Please don’t weep, Madelaine. Your mother—my aunt——”
“Mother doesn’t need to tell me anything, Gordon. I understand. I cared for Bernie in her dilemma. And I know now why she would not tell me her lover’s name. You were a relative. There is much that is fine in Bernie. But, Gordon, it hasn’t had a chance. Oh, I’m so overwhelmed with everything turning out this way that I don’t know what to do or say.”
“I bothered you to-night, Madge, because I delayed my departure almost ten days now, awaiting your return. I had to see you and say this personally. I felt it would be yellow to leave it to a letter. I am leaving for Chicago at midnight. Bernice and I are going to Pittsfield, Kansas, as soon as we are married. I am going out to manage an iron works out there. If we’re unable to return east for your wedding, I want you to let me offer you all my good wishes, now—to-night. Forge is a lucky dog, with your life in his keeping. I feel sure he appreciates it. You would not love him enough to marry him if he lacked the capacity for such appreciation.”
Madelaine moved across to Gordon then. She lifted her hands to his shoulders and stood looking up into his war-hardened face.
“Gordon,” she said softly, “you’re doing a big thing. You’ll be happy because you are doing it. I can see it in your eyes already. I know you will make Bernie’s hard life very rich. But I want to say more than that. I want to tell you that I have loved you—loved you from the night you came to my room down in Boston and showed me you had taken stock of yourself and your birthright and were going to play the man. It wasn’t a romantic love, Gordon. It was the love of a sister for a very dear brother. And that love is still yours, Gordon. You may carry it away with you and retain it always. God has been very good to the homeless waif that is myself. He has given me a very dear foster-mother. More than that, he has sent two fine, virile men into my life. And they hold my heart in their powerful hands between them. What more could a girl ask?”
Gordon took both hands and kissed them again. And Madelaine, placed one arm around Gordon’s neck—drew him down—kissed him on the forehead.
The man blindly fumbled in his pocket. He pulled from it a little wine-colored box of plush.
“I want you to keep it, Madelaine. To remember me by, in the years ahead. Aunt Gracia let me have it, and I had the stone put in a slightly different setting. Please wear it—on your right hand—as a sort of personal wedding gift.”
She let him slip the ring on her right third finger.
“I want him to meet you, Gordon,” she said.
They went downstairs and across to the porch door. As she came through, she heard her mother’s voice explaining something to Nathan, who sat with his elbows on his knees, leaned forward, face thoughtful. “—and the war sent their value up scandalously and Madelaine will get almost a million that will require a good business man’s oversight——” Mrs. Theddon stopped abruptly and raised her eyes to her daughter’s crimson face. “Well, dear?” she stammered, as though she had been caught in a misdemeanor.
“I want Nathan and Gordon to meet. He’s here in the drawing-room.”
“Have him out, by all means,” declared Mrs. Theddon, arising.
Gordon’s tall figure stood outlined for a moment in the veranda door. It was Mrs. Theddon who introduced them.
Two weather-bronzed men in khaki, fresh from the wars, looked in each other’s eyes,—level and straight. Then their hands came together.
“... and there shall be neither east nor west,
Nor pride nor pain nor birth,
When two strong men meet face to face,
Tho’ they come from the ends of the earth.”