Fidelia/Chapter 16
THE wedding journey was to last two weeks. David had arranged business affairs so that he could be away that long but he had never discussed the time with Fidelia.
"We can stay here thirteen days more?" David asked her on their first morning in camp; and it seemed to him he hoped an incredible thing.
"Why, David, of course I can, if you can."
"I mean," he explained, "no one's expecting you?"
"Who'd expect me?" she asked.
"Or you've nothing else to do?"
"Why, what else have I to do than to be your wife, David?" she answered and kissed him, lovingly.
"That's right," said David, wonderingly and held her hand clasped in his. They had been in the lake together; they had raced on the beach; they had cooked and eaten their camp breakfast. After bathing, Fidelia had put up her hair before it was quite dried; now she shook it down and it was over her shoulders in a bronze and golden shower. They sat, side by side, in the sun on the warm, white sand with the lake rippling at their feet. They had no duty to trouble them; they could be idle for hours, if they liked, they could follow wholly their inclination.
None of this seemed strange to Fidelia; to her, it was perfectly natural and right; and David tried to feel as untroubled as she about it. He was happy; yes, he felt a happiness which he had never known before. But with it, was wonder and disquiet.
It was the hour of the day at which David Herrick was used to doing something, to be absorbed in following and recording a lecture in class, to be hard at work or to be seriously attentive to a service in church. On recent Sundays, David had not gone to church but he had never been idle when he stayed away. So this idleness, with the prospect of much more of it, was in itself strange to him; and how strange to be married, to be far away from every one with a girl who had no duty to any one else, who had nothing in the world to do but be his wife!
"I'll write to Mr. Jessop, the first time we're tramping over by the railroad," Fidelia said. "He's a dear; and Mrs. Jessop'll be awfully glad I'm married."
"I'll write father," David said. "I know I ought to do it to-day and get it off to-night. It'll be worse, if he hears from somebody else, first."
"Worse," Fidelia repeated and shivered there in the sun. She was sifting the dry, fine sand through her fingers and she gazed down at it. "Worse," she said again.
David accused himself hotly for this hurt of her; he declared, hastily, "I told you he was opposed to my marrying any one at all now. He was opposed to Alice, Fidelia!"
"Not so much as he would be to me."
"That's not so!"
"David, look at me!" she asked, gazing at him. "There!" she said, when he met her eyes but soon faltered.
He seized her and cried: "Well, what do we care?"
When he released her, she asked him, seriously: "David, why won't your father—why don't people like me—what would they want me to do?"
"People are crazy over you!" said David. "Nearly everybody."
"Lots of people hate me, David. They always have."
"You've always been pretty."
Fidelia shook her head. "That's not it."
"Why isn't it?"
She gazed at him honestly and said quietly: "Alice has always been pretty; and everybody's loved her. She hasn't a hater in the world, David."
Alice! The thought of her stabbed David; he thought of her as he had seen her last when she stepped forward on the platform at Commencement to receive her diploma and all the audience applauded and applauded. Fidelia was so sure that this was in his mind that she said: "If that had been me, how many would have cared?"
David protested: "What I did put people at the college against you."
Fidelia shook her head; she raised her hands to her hair and thrust her fingers through it. Watching her, David thrilled with realization that he possessed her.
"Come here, Fidel!" he commanded. "Fidel!" he repeated, proprietorily creating his own name for her. "Now," he said, more satisfied when she was closer, "let's you and me plan where we're going to live."
"Where do you want to?" asked Fidelia.
He said, playing with her hair and pulling a strand lightly to tease her: "I believe you've got married with no more plan than you took in town with you that day—our day. You just went to town; and you just married, didn't you?"
"You think I ought always have a definite plan, David?" she questioned him, seriously.
"No," denied David, delighted with her. "Never, if you don't want to."
"You see, I know what I'll have every month," Fidelia sought to explain herself, "but I don't know about you. I get three hundred dollars a month, David; or I can get it, if I want to."
"You mean you don't always draw it?" he asked, somewhat surprised.
"No. Mr. Jessop keeps the extra for me, if ever I need it."
"I see," said David. "Well, we'll have out of the business, if sales keep on as they've started, about five or six hundred a month. But I've a personal debt of ten thousand dollars, Fidelia; it's all right for it's capital investment but it was put up for me by a man named Fuller, who lives in Itanaca; and of course I've got to pay interest on that first of all. And I must keep on sending money to my mother."
"Oh, David, can't we send more?"
"More!" said David, pleased and amused. "You don't know how much we send now, do you?"
"No; but I saw that dress—your mother's dress which your sister sent up, don't you remember? Somebody'd given it to her and she'd worn it until—" Fidelia's eyes filled. "I couldn't forget that dress, David. I'm so glad we're married and I can talk to you about her. She's so thin, David; I'd like to see that she has delicious things which she'd like."
"Oh, she gets enough food," David objected.
"But she is so thin! Couldn't we hire a maid for her?"
"Mother," exclaimed David, "with a maid!"
"I mean to cook for her and do the housework. I love her already, David; and I want her so to love me!"
"I want her to!" muttered David and his throat felt choked. He gazed away from his wife and then, looking at her, he bade, suddenly: "Put up your hair."
She obeyed him and he could see that he had puzzled her by his tone; for his father and mother, and the thought of bringing his wife to his home, were in his mind and had made him order an end to abandon. He could not explain this; he suggested: "Shall we go out in the canoe now?"
She arose, giving him her hands, warmly clasping his.
When they were upon the water, there fled from Fidelia's mind all concern over what his father would want her to do; but David did not dismiss it so easily. He thought how he had discussed this identical matter with Alice, when he had explained to her his father's idea that man and woman ought not to marry for the gratifying of desire for each other but only for the purpose of together working the pleasure of God. He thought how Alice had comprehended this idea; and he thought, as he watched his wife drawing her hand through the warm water beside the canoe, how bewildered she would look if he started to tell her that he should not want, first of all, to please her and she should not live to gratify him.
He thought how different she was, not only from his mother, but from Alice. On the beach, a few minutes ago, he had told Fidelia for the first time of the ten thousand dollars he had borrowed from Mr. Fuller and she had completely ignored it; what she had talked about, the next moment after, was sending his mother some food. How tremendously serious a matter that debt had been to Alice! How she had debated it with him and had entered into the responsibility of it! He thought of her as having felt it almost as much as he, himself.
He drove from him, by deliberate effort, his images of his close companionship with Alice; but, in going, they stirred in him connected thoughts. He gazed at his wife and wondered who was he who had been to her what Alice had been to himself? Who was the man who had been her companion on the occasion when she had to beat wind and water to live and who had been in the party about the campfire where Fidelia had shared "the best supper ever," although it was burnt black in places.
David thought, as he looked at his lovely wife: "You meant you cared for him." David knew that the man was dead; for Fidelia had told him so during the night they drifted on the ice off Alice's home; but since then, she had never mentioned him and David had found no good opportunity to ask more.
This was not the time to ask, when he would put his question out of nothing more than his own thoughts. How little he knew about this beautiful, loving girl who was off here alone with him, away from the rest of the world, and who was his wife! Everywhere she had been, men must have sought her; and one, at least, had made her care for him.
What memories of that man were coming, bidden or unbidden to her thoughts, as images of Alice came to his own?
David wondered about this so much that he dared not ask, without some excuse which would make his question casual. So he put it off during the day; and then, at night, asked it abruptly, after all.
They were in camp and cooking their supper when David suddenly said: "What was his name?"
"Sam's name?" asked Fidelia.
"I didn't know even that his name was Sam," said David, quivering with realization this Sam was, at the same moment, in his wife's mind.
"It was," Fidelia told him.
"What was the rest of his name?"
"Bolton."
"You were engaged to him once?"
"Yes, David."
"When he died, you were?"
"What?"
"Engaged to him?"
Fidelia gazed into the campfire and thought; and David wondered: "Why does she have to think? Can't she remember that?" Then she looked at him, very seriously and said: "Not exactly, David."
She replied so soberly that David explained to himself: "Bolton's dead; and of course she wants to be fair to him." Aloud he said: "You broke with him, you mean."
"No. Not exactly. We both did it, David. He went away; that's how it was. Then he died."
David was sure that she had sent him away; he was glad that her break with Sam Bolton had happened before Bolton's death and had been of her doing.
David asked: "Do you want to tell me, were you ever engaged to anybody else?"
"I wasn't David," she told him and it was a satisfying assurance which prevented him from asking more.
Fidelia wrote her letter to Mr. Jessop by the campfire that evening; she finished hers quickly; but David wrestled long with his letter to his father. He destroyed many drafts before he composed a simple statement of the fact that he had married a girl, named Fidelia Netley, who had no family, who had come to college at mid-year and who was the girl with whom he had been carried out on the ice. He added the date and place of the wedding and stated that he purposely had kept his father in ignorance of his plan.
They tramped through the woods to the rail road and mailed their letters in the morning; and they returned to their camp, singing. They moved camp on the next day, not from any discontent with the spot they had first chosen but because David required occupation.
Fidelia liked to exert herself in the packing of the camp kit; she liked the paddling of the loaded canoe and the clearing of the camp site; she liked to expend her strength. Also, she liked idleness; she could indulge in sleep and in day-dreaming indolence upon the warm sand to an extent amazing to her husband. But she never shirked any of her duties; she always arose to do them promptly and enthusiastically.
She had one daily task of which he did not learn for some time. Fidelia had brought along a new volume, bound in red leather, in which she continued her diary, writing in the mornings after David left her alone in camp. Once when he returned sooner than he had expected, he discovered her absorbed in her book; and her intentness was so great that he watched her in surprise.
When he stepped nearer and she heard him, she shut her book and arose, facing him with eyes aglow.
"David, it's our ninth day in camp!" she cried to him. "We must go back to-morrow!"
"Why?" he asked her; and added, "what was that you were doing?"
"My diary, David."
"I never knew you kept a diary."
"Oh, I have—ever since I was ten years old."
"I'd like to see that," he said; and as her fingers clasped more tightly on the book which she held closed, he amended by saying: "I'd like to see the one you kept when you were little, Fidelia."
It made him imagine her when she was a child, without a home but the schools to which she had been sent; it made him feel the loneliness of the little girl who had bought a blank book, when she was ten years old, to take the confidings of her troubles and her thoughts.
"What was that about our ninth day in camp?" he asked her.
"We ought to go back, now!"
"Why? Aren't you happy here?"
"Oh, I'm wonderfully happy, David."
"Then—"
She broke in upon him: "But we ought to go back!"
He knew her well enough to realize that this might be merely the result of some emotion which seized her without much or any reason; whatever the cause, her indolence was at an end. Of herself she set about the business of breaking camp and when she kept at it, he asked her: "See here, Fidelia; did anything happen when I was away?"
"Happen?" she said.
"Was any one here? With a letter or a message, I mean."
"Why, no, David." And, as he bent beside her, she kissed him. "We've been awfully happy here, haven't we?" she said. "Only it's hard for you to be just happy very long, isn't it?"
"Hard!" he protested.
She kissed him again, with her soft, warm tenderness. "You're good to me; I love you. Then, let's go—won't we, David?—when we're so happy, yet?"
He said, holding her: "We'll be happy always, anywhere." But when he released her, she went on packing and he helped her; and they left camp that afternoon in time to take the night train to Chicago.
That train, which rushed them southward through the dark, reminded David of the tug-boat which had rescued Fidelia and himself from the floe in the lake and which had brought him back, from the wonder of his first flight with Fidelia, to his duties and responsibilities. He had the same feeling of coming again to an accounting; and he could not keep out the idea that, in the accounting upon his return, Alice was concerned.