Lews took the letter. The sheets were steady in his strong, long fingers. Dick lounged back in the chair and watched his friend with growing uneasiness; for no light dawned in Lewis’ serious dark face as he read. That face seemed, indeed, under Dick’s very eyes, to grow thin and grim with controlled emotion of a sort totally other than Dick had expected.
Chapter Nineteen
It was the seventeenth of October. It was also Petra’s birthday; and Lewis had relaxed in his practice of turning down all Mrs. Lowell Farwell’s invitations and was now driving out to Green Doors to a dinner party given in honor of the birthday. Himself, Dick and the Allens were to be the only guests. Neil McCloud had been invited but was, Lewis understood, not coming. Lewis suspected that Neil’s refusal had been the cause of Petra’s manner to-day—not a birthday manner exactly. She had moved about at her work in a spirit of recollection, but a strained, anxious recollection which no doubt she thought went unnoticed by her employer. Lewis had first been struck by it when he asked her who was coming to her party to-night, and her answer had been that Neil was not. He had laughed and said, “But it was a list of acceptances I wanted—not refusals.” She had lifted her eyes to his, at that,—she was sitting at her desk and he had stopped by it as he passed through to his own office to say good morning—and they had been blank with a kind of subdued misery. But she had answered, “Clare tells me that you are coming, Doctor Pryne. The Allens. Dick. It is nice of you to have accepted.”
“Don’t say that. I am looking forward to it very much. My dear, will you accept this present? I’ve been days finding it, and if you don’t like it I shall be terribly disconcerted.”
It was the detail from the Fra Angelico picture: angels dancing, and saints embracing in a flower-studded meadow. A very good print, framed in silver. Lewis had brought the cumbersome thing under his arm, done up in brown paper, just as it had been sent to him from the store. Lewis did not hope, of course, that Petra would ever know why he had hit upon this particular present. It seemed inappropriate, perhaps, for a twenty-year-old girl’s birthday present. But to Lewis it meant something they had once experienced together—a meeting of souls where language and explanations are no longer necessary, where all is unselfconscious joy, camaraderie and fluent communication between the saints in Paradise. That first sight of the June meadow behind Clare’s guest house, which Lewis had likened to this picture—and thought of Petra and himself as saints, without their crowns to be sure, and their presence there in the paradisiacal meadow purest accident—had remained all summer a poignant memory. He hoped that Petra would keep this picture all her life, wherever she lived, and that even not understanding anything of what it meant to him in the giving, she would remember him now and then in looking at it; and thus his memory would stay alive for her because of something which stood to him for their own one brief real meeting and recognition. Let that same quality of recognition never come again on this earth,—still it might yet come in heaven. Perhaps it only needed their crowns for the consummation of its promise.
An early frost had followed the unprecedentedly hot summer, and the trees all along the state highway to Meadowbrook had been stripped during the past few days of their flaming foliage. The fields and meadows stretched away brown and purple, barren too. But the clouds, like levitated mountain ranges, hung above the western horizon, blazing with autumn colors, red, gold, purple, buff. The day had had an Indian summer warmth over it and to-night the sky promised to be divinely clear with a full moon.
Lewis had sent Petra home from the office when she returned from her lunch. “Somehow you don’t look like a party to-day,” he had said. “Lie out in the sun on a blanket somewhere. It’s warm enough. Get rested. This has been a heavy week.” Miss Frazier was away on the vacation she had insisted on putting off until the book was actually in print and Petra really had been working up to the full capacity of her strength and ability.
If Lewis had not packed Petra off early, however, she would be beside him now in his rushing car, sharing the beauty of those levitated cloud-mountains along with him, and the bare tracery of tree branches against the mellowed fields. He had had a selfish impulse to keep her late just to make this drive together inevitable. And he would have succumbed to his selfishness, had he not a better plan. Neil was not to be there to-night. Whether Dick was absolutely out of the running or not Lewis did not actually know. But Lewis had reached his limit of passive endurance. He had accepted the invitation because in the very act of reading Clare’s note a few days ago, tending it, he had made up his mind that he would go with Petra by moonlight to the edge of that meadow (October now, not June, but in the moonlight it would still be Paradise) and tell her how he wanted her. If she was in love with Neil—and he knew, of course, that she was—it did not matter. He wanted Petra at last even if she came to him with a broken heart. It had taken Lewis weeks to reach this depth of humility. But now it was reached. He had struck bottom in his longing and suffering. If Petra in youth’s scorn of compromises said that she had nothing she could give him, let it be so. At least, he would have reached for his star. But if he did not touch the sky to-night, did not draw it down to him, he must find Petra another job at once. It was impossible to have her in his office, feeling as he felt, longer.
At its very least, Lewis’ proposal would have the advantage of making Petra see the necessity for her not going on at his office. She would understand and not be wounded. And he would find her something even better. In spite of the “depression” and Petra’s lack of business experience, he promised himself—and he would promise her—that she should not be the loser. In fact, all Lewis honestly hoped of this onrushing moonlight night was for an understanding between himself and Petra. A bitter understanding on his side—since she was going to tell him that she could not possibly marry him without loving him—but on hers illuminating. She would not go on, after to-night, so dangerously unconscious of the power of her young beauty and loveliness.