“We can’t allow it! It’s a long walk to the station and we have the big motor with lots of room and to spare.”
“It was the oddest chance that brought us here,” Mrs. Craighill went on to say, as she held the girl’s cloak. “Mr. Craighill had taken me to call on some friends who are spending the winter at their farm beyond here. It was later than I thought when we started and we ran in here to telephone home that we should be late for dinner.”
It was a sufficient explanation, blithely uttered; Wayne, bringing his stepmother’s things to the fire, hoped she would not protest too much. The matter of the whiskey bottle, for one thing, was a part of the res gestæ which it seemed best to leave to the mercy of the trial judge.
Night had fallen when they left the club-house and the forward lamps of the car cut a broad path of light over the snow. Wayne adjusted one of the movable seats in the tonneau so that he faced the two women, and turned on the electric light. The thing had its ridiculous side; the pains Mrs. Craighill was taking to be polite to the girl struck him as funny; but by the time the car reached the highway more serious reflections engaged him. Jean Morley’s account of her walk afield was plausible enough and he did not question it; he wondered whether Mrs. Craighill’s story had carried equal conviction. An effort to assure himself that it was not important what the girl thought, found him looking straight into her eyes, whose gray-blue depths and sorrowful wistfulness seemed more fathomless than at any of their previous meetings. Her knowing Joe, the ball player and chauffeur—the man who now guided them home—added a puzzling factor; they were utterly irreconcilable characters. His glance rested first on one woman and then the other as he unconsciously compared them—Mrs. Craighill, trim and smart, with the girl, whose shabby, discoloured gloves, her plain little hat with its rumpled feather, her cheap coat, were vesture of a different world. Only an hour before he had kissed the one; he had held her unresisting in his arms; she was pretty, charming amusing, but the glow of the afternoon had paled; their adventure had ended on a frightened, smothered half-note.
He had been checked in the course he had marked for himself; whirled out of the straight current into the labouring waters of indecision. He had resolved upon an evil thing; he had hoisted sail and steered for the rocks, but the plunging depths might not be so attainable after all! That potential superstition, latent in us all, and to which strong men are often susceptible, teased him with questions as to why this girl had walked into his life. There, too, was Paddock, the clerical sentimentalist. Only a little while before Paddock had crossed the threshold of his office and struck down, in effect, the cup with which he was about to consecrate his life to evil things. It is the way of the guilty to take counsel of omens; the knocking at the gate in Macbeth is the loud beating of every conscience-struck heart. Wayne’s imagination played upon the figure of Jean Morley, drifting through the storm to the remote house where a woman, weak as he was weak, yielded herself to a kiss he had calculated in coldest reason.
The occasional glances that Mrs. Craighill vouchsafed him meant his dismissal, for the time at least. It was plain from her conduct that the ground here lost might not easily be regained; but he was surprised to find in his brooding that he cared so little. Addie’s pique was absurd; but he had kissed women before and they were prone to magnify the gravity of their indiscretions, and to sulk afterward. His thoughts traversed a circular track, but the fire had gone out in his blood. Rousing from his absorption suddenly he found Jean’s eyes bent upon him, wondering, pitiful and sad. He had not heeded what the women were saying to each other, but now Mrs. Craighill asked him where they were and he looked out upon the lights of the city.
“Shall we take Miss Morley home first?” he asked.
“Dear me, no! She must stop and have dinner with us. Better than that, won’t you stay all night with me, Miss Morley? It’s still snowing and it will be hard getting about town to-night. You see, your knowing Mrs. Blair makes it seem that we all know you.”
CHAPTER XIX
MR. WINGFIELD CALLS ON MR. WALSH
WAYNE not appearing at luncheon, Wingfield ate alone and then watched the street traffic from the Club window with listless interest. Across the street rose the grimy façade of Memorial Church, its spires piercing the fuliginous cloud the wind was blowing across the city. A battery of automobiles discharged a party of young people bent upon a wedding rehearsal, and Wingfield sighed softly as the girls fluttered out of sight through the church doors. Shortly afterward he left the Club and walked slowly in the direction of the warehouse of the Wayne-Craighill Company. Wingfield was given to roaming and frequently sauntered through the jobbing district, dodging the clattering trucks, noting the destination of merchandise and dropping in upon friends in their counting rooms to exchange anecdotes and question them as to the state of trade.