“If we are going to walk back to the House of the Five Pines,” I finished more amiably, “we had better start, or we shall miss the afternoon train.”
We left the luggage, the new suit-case that Jasper had invested in and the typewriter that he had carried for three hundred miles, and walked off up the street. He told me then about his play that he had been working over, and I tried to renew my interest in New York. Myrtle had been dropped unconditionally and ignominiously, much to her chagrin. She had attempted to get an interview with my husband for the purpose of being reinstated by him over the expressed wishes of the manager, but he had succeeded in avoiding her devices and had at last left the city without seeing her at all. (“And I am dragging him back there!” I said to myself.) Gaya Jones had persuaded Burton to try a young friend of hers in the part of ingénue, and the two were doing such excellent team-work that the play was swinging in triumph through its difficult first six weeks and was billed to last all winter.
“I’m glad I’m through with it,” finished Jasper. “It’s funny how sick you get of a thing, even a good thing, before you finish grinding it out. I had no idea plays were so difficult. Writing them is all right, but it’s a life job to get rid of them. I’m going to settle down here and write a long novel. I’ve got it all worked out.” He began to tell me the beginning. “It will take me all winter, and I’m not going back to New York at all. I’m tired of that crowd. Quiet is what a person needs. Christmas on the cape! How will that be?”
I stared at him mutely.
“What is the matter with you, my dear?” he asked. “You’ve told me what is the matter with the house, but that’s nothing. If you think anything is wrong with me—anything has happened,” he went on lamely, “that would make any difference between us—why, you are wasting your worries. Everything is just as I have told you, my darling, and everything is all right. I want to be with you, and I am glad you found this place. We can afford to live anywhere we please as long as ‘The Shoals of Yesterday’ lasts. Why do you try and create obstacles?”
And I, who had been struggling for this very opportunity, who had withstood the city and endured the country to this end, that we might have a home together where we wanted it, was now the one to refuse what I had longed for when it lay in the palm of my hand.
“I’m sorry, Jasper,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry. I know I was the one to bring you up here, and now I won’t stay. But all I can say is that I am sorry, and that I won’t stay. You take a look at the house yourself.”
He took one long look inside the kitchen door and stopped short. Then with an exclamation of horror, he dove out of sight. By the time I stood where he had been standing, no one was there.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MRS. DOVE
A YAWNING hole was in the center of the kitchen floor.