O Genteel Lady!/Chapter 5
The snow was still deep on the frozen ground when Anthony Jones came back.
Old Mr. Bigley must go South for his health, and his formidable daughter, who prided herself on being a woman first, flung down her editorial duties with a martyr's frantic haste. Mr. Fox must understand that dearly as she loved 'Hearth and Home,' she must always think first of her venerable parent, and hers and Papa's own hearth and home. For days she worked twenty out of the twenty-four hours and became so irascible that no one dared speak to her. Almost in a collapse she got herself and the ancient gentleman off for the South, and doubtfully left Mr. Fox and Lanice to struggle with the April issue of 'Hearth and Home.' Mr. Fox, whose agreeable motto was 'Work with pleasure, for yourself, Miss Bardeen, the office force, and the public,' was very little interested in this profitable magazine's April number. It seemed to offer him great opportunities for remarks about the fair sex in general and for various absurd misunderstanding of their social and sartorial problems. He wandered about Lanice's small office restlessly and occasionally offered her hard candies as well as literary advice and wit.
Captain Jones, his lecture tour over, wrote that he intended to stay in Boston long enough to read the proofs of his first volume, complete the manuscript of his second, make up indexes, give captions to the illustrations, and superintend the map-making. Would Mr. Fox find him a small house? What could be more opportune than Miss Bigley's evacuation of her estimable dwelling! Mr. Jones must have for part time at least a trained amanuensis, and Mr. Fox, knowing Lanice's scholarly achievements for Captain Poggy, volunteered her services. She protested. Miss Bigley was gone. What now would happen to 'Hearth and Home'? Every day there were scores of letters to write, letters about fashions, needlework, etiquette. 'Oh, Trelawney and I will start some new style. We will say that, due to Anthony Jones's triumph, all clothes this spring shall be Arabic. Why, before you and Miss Bigley are back, we'll get the ladies in face veils and bloomers. And as for social usage, we'll introduce polygamy. But it won't take you more than a couple of hours a day to help him out.'
Realizing that he had perhaps overstepped his rights in offering her services to Jones, he reconsidered the matter a few days later. Lanice's prejudice against Jones was absurd, but, after all, if she didn't want to work for him, she should not.
'I just met that pair of pretty Scollays trotting down the Tremont Mall, cheek by cheek like two little prize ponies. They can talk of nothing but the adorable Captain Jones's return, and are languishing, in fact Miss Lydia said "yearning," to be his private secretary, and...'
'Oh, I've decided I'll have time to do it, Mr. Fox.' Her voice had a slight edge to it. She assumed an almost sullen manner to cover her excitement.
They met daily in the office, Lanice with averted eyes, Anthony scarcely glancing at her. She decided that she had never admired his type, and that his hesitating, gentle speech was, indeed, an affectation. But as she began to read his manuscript, she came to admire him as a workman. He wrote glowing, ringing pages, smelling strongly of camels, sann and musk. There was a vigorous saplike push to his work unlike anything else she had ever read. His drawings, about which she had heard nothing, impressed her trained eye more than they had Mr. Fox. He drew exquisitely in lead pencil and only in outline. His odd technique was self-taught and his sense of proportion so perfect he could draw in complete figures beginning with the head and working down without once lifting his pencil or making a correction. When he found that his drawing pleased Lanice, he was grateful for her praise, and often worked at her desk and used her fastidious pencils.
She told herself now, with assurance, that of course she did not love him, and whatever had flamed up so violently in Miss Bigley's small parlor had been some other emotion. Behind his back she criticized him rather curtly, arguing with Mr. Fox about his genius, telling Mr. Trelawney that she doubted if he had been in Arabia more than four years. Oh, no, he was hardly handsome, his short drooping mouth was stubborn rather than strong; but once when she tried to tell Ripley that Captain Jones was not a man to appeal to the affections of elegant young American females, her voice broke suddenly. Mr. Jones himself seemed to have completely forgotten the odd incident of the earrings. He was often reported playing a guitar in the Scollays' drawing-room.
It was easy to work for Jones, as easy as for Captain Poggy or the gallant and sweet-tempered Mr. Fox. She suggested rearrangement of material. The great traveller was entirely amenable. She copied, in her neat, fine-lady hand, chapter after chapter of his green-growing, living narrative, and indicated where she thought his illustrations should be placed. He humbly, even gratefully, agreed to everything, and told her again how little he knew of books. It seemed he had read but little. That was why, perhaps, his style was so undecorated with the elegant words and fastidious euphemisms that Lanice herself so much affected. The story of his five years in Arabia grew up out of the sun-baked country itself. There was the mark of Eastern magic upon it and ever the Jinn and the houri in his talk. This rather ignorant young man, as he always seemed to Lanice, was an authority on such things as the Thousand and One Nights, and the poems of Antar, Khayyam, and Yazid Ebn Moamia.
It was more convenient that Lanice should spend her mornings in the West Cedar Street house. The first time she went, a respectable cleaning woman fulfilled the duties of chaperon, but after that no pretence was made. It did not seem strange to the girl who had worked so many hours with Captain Poggy. The sunlight filled the second-story morning room which Captain Jones had selected for his study. There were always fresh flowers from the Scollay conservatory and an easy, exotic atmosphere.
The third time she rang the bell she heard the shuffling bare feet of the Hindoo servant. Jones himself, lazily puffing his cigarette, met her at the head of the stairs. He looked sleepy and tumbled, yawned often, and once scratched his head so hard as to embarrass his well-bred amanuensis. In private life there was hardly a trace of Captain Jones the lecturer. In spite of his wandering wits they managed to work for an hour.
'I can't get anything done.'
He lay in the sunlight on a small chaise-longue that was quiet beneath his weight, although Lanice had often heard it creak beneath Miss Bigley. He flung out his arms, arched his chest, and looked at the girl speculatively as if wondering what she could do to relieve his boredom, then fell to playing with his seals and looked away. Lanice in her turn studied him slyly. The sunlight gilded Mr. Jones, and she noticed how it coarsened the skin of his face and showed every pore on his nose. It gilded his hair, too, which was like dark, half-pulled molasses. The two inches of beard before either ear was rough and metallic in comparison. Towards the eyes beyond the sweep of the razor was a delicate fruit-like down, almost white. This carnal discovery shocked her, and she blushed at her own powers of observation. Surely no woman before had ever examined a man with such morbid care. Evidently, however, his own observations of her had been of an even less delicate nature.
'Miss Bardeen, I don't know whether or not we can work this into the book, but I must admit that women's clothes in this country and Europe really shock me.'
'Shock you?'
'Why the emphasis? Surely. It is true...just immorality can hurt me...no more....I am not afraid of passion, even in women, but unnatural things in action or clothing depress me, and, yes, shock me.'
'You find our clothes unnatural?'
'Oh, very. Now the Arab costume, which you think merely a shapeless sack, still gives more the impression of...a real woman than does your elegant armor of plain taffeta and whalebone. Don't you see, as I look at you...I've no idea what is you and what is...corsets and, pardon the word...bustles. The figure of a civilized woman fascinates me only from the point of view of a guessing game. Frankly, it would be more decent to come out in the open and wear no clothes.'
'Captain Jones!'
'Or just wrappings like the Arab women.' He got restlessly to his feet and pulled a chair up to her table.
'Take even their veiled faces. At least you really see their eyes, while, pardon my rudeness, I find among American and English women such ridiculous bonnets and claptrap. I cannot see even the eyes. The Arab obliterates her charms, but they're there all the same, fairly burning holes through the clothes. European women disfigure...or even...deform them. Now frankly, as two grown people...two artists, let us consider the divine form. Look.'
He took up a pencil and began to sketch in his exquisite way the nude figure of a woman. Lanice, fascinated and incredulous, watched his quick fingers moving confidently over the beautiful little creature to whom they gave existence.
'There! That might "launch a thousand ships." See what civilization does!'
His pencil took large bites out of the waist, converting it into the customary hour-glass. 'But this substantial flesh must go somewhere. Of course, the hoops conceal the distortion of hips and abdomen, but the corset pushes up the breast, which is ugly for the slender and hideous for the stout.'
Lanice began to blush slowly, furiously, until tears of mortification stood in her downcast eyes. She was suddenly, overwhelmingly conscious of Mr. Jones's physical presence. The back of his hand touched her wrist.
'Lovely hands,' he said quietly, 'and neck and face. I've never seen another face that could...at odd moments...move me more. How can the rest be only whalebone and buckram? Lanice, you could be a...beauty, and love as women loved a thousand years ago. You prefer to be a dressmaker's dummy and a lady editoress. Oh, by the eyelids of the prophet!'
He brushed the cheek that she had so carefully studied against her hair and she felt herself melt within and her arms grow heavy.
'Captain Jones!' she protested feebly.
'Yes,' he purred, and rubbed his face against her like a cat.
She stood up. 'This is not the conduct of a gentleman towards a lady whom he employs.'
'No,' said Jones, and smiled, 'but I don't employ you. Mr. Fox does, and lends you to me.'
Suddenly she felt homesick for Mr. Fox and his courtesies, and, forgetting the weakness that enveloped her at his touch, she turned on the handsome Englishman. He thrilled to see that her hands, which seemed to him delicately carved from ivory, were clenched. A smile lighted his face, and he looked at her expectantly as a dog does that hopes some one will throw him a stick.
'I shall go now and I shall never return.'
'Now I am standing in the door and you cannot go.'
'How ridiculous...' She turned from him, but as she turned she started the hoops swaying in the flower-like way that she had learned from her mother.
'By the time I have packed up my reticule and assumed my shawl and my bonnet, I shall expect to leave, and I will.' She was breathless.
'Lanice...you shall not...be so cruel to yourself and to me.'
He took her in his arms with a hardihood that precluded struggle. If he had made the little furtive advances of Augustus, she would have known how to retire modestly, but her flimsy code went down before the novelty of this situation and the onslaught of this grasping animal that a few minutes before had been what she would have described as 'one of our authors.'
The sun, intensified by the snow outside, splashed down over the chaise-longue and gleamed on the brassy yellow of Mr. Jones's tumbled hair and the sleek black of the girl's head.
'Captain Jones, don't, don't, don't!...Oh, let me go! Dear God, help me!'
'No, no,' he protested; then after a long, pregnant pause, 'never.'
That night she dreamed that the bronze boxer Mamma had sent her got out of the stereoscope and, still maintaining his exquisite and almost painful perspective, chased her over great desert spaces. She woke at dawn, feverish and aching; lay awake, cried a little, thought what clothes she would take with her to Arabia, and wondered if Captain Jones really could prefer her own sleek charm to the sweet-pea prettiness of the Scollay girls.
For two weeks she went daily to the small red house that stood on the lower side of West Cedar Street, three doors from Chestnut. She had no conventions for unconventional conduct, and came and went with greater freedom than a Paris demi-mondaine would have dared. She came to care passionately for Anthony Jones, to care so much that when he held her her veins seemed turned to thin wires pulled tight through her body. If she as much as breathed, she was afraid they might pierce her through. But if they talked, words pushed them apart, he from her, and she from him.
Once, seated before the fire in the morning room sipping their coffee and eating Eastern preserves, Jones tried futilely to tell her all he had suffered from childhood at the hands of women. He told her of the grey-eyed, lipless governess that cajoled, flouted, and obsessed him before he was ten; of health-burdened English girls with raw skins and honey hair; of the pallid wives of Anglo-Indian colonels, and of voluptuous Arab women with hips which, in the language of the poet, Anu Ebn Kultan, 'were so round and heavy that they were tired.' The Boston girl listened coldly. It seemed to her it was not Jones who had suffered, but the women. However, to hear of the undeviating devotion he had always borne for the Persian princesses of the Mughal Court, dead for centuries, quickened her blood. Her New England conscience could not be reconciled to spending in his arms the time which should be spent in writing 'Sands of Araby,' and she would insist, with a high seriousness that amused him, that the book must always come first.
'Now a ten-minute rest from Araby.'
'Not more than five.'
'My watch is run down.'
'There's Miss Bigley's timepiece on the mantel.'
It was strange to think that this was Miss Bigley's house, her clock, her chair, her chaise-longue, her table, her chintzes, and that through her well-scrubbed panes the radiant sun smiled in upon them. Lanice always had the feeling that the formidable editoress was but in the next room or on the stairs, and that at any moment she would look up and see her blue swimming eyes widening as they gazed upon her and the affectionate Mr. Jones.
She could not understand how Jones could brazenly continue his love-making in the presence of his servant, who came and went seemingly on velvet paws. If Anthony's words often chilled her, to an almost greater degree did hers irritate him, but still there was a piquancy in never knowing whether you held in your arms an editoress or the reincarnation of a Persian princess. He realized this affair would end when the book was completed, and he would return to England, and he was afraid that perhaps her naïveté had led her to think they were to marry. Women always thought anything, everything, led to marriage. Before he left, he would break the news to her very gently, and in the meantime he believed he was doing her good rather than harm, getting her out of her emotional shroud of New England ice. He would find another woman, and Lanice—well, she would marry Ripley. Ripley was always dropping veiled hints about this girl, and even urged him not to play 'fast and loose' with her. He wondered if he suspected how desperately involved they were. He was the only one who ever presumed so far as to call upon Anthony Jones in the morning. Once he came up and had coffee with them.
The same day, unknown to Jones, Ripley had called upon Lanice rather formally in the Poggy drawing-room and indulged in an evasive discussion of varying moral codes. So he showed how what is right in the Old Testament is not right in the New, why polygamy may be countenanced in Arabia and not in America, not even when headed by Mr. Young and Mr. Smith. He diverged into the interesting story of the Mormon westward exodus, then taking place. Lanice, always as alive as an Athenian to new wonders, drank in his description of Mr. Young and the late Mr. Smith, and tried to remember carefully so she might tell Anthony.
The conversation swung back to Arabia and the undeniable fact that Captain Jones was as much a Mohammedan as anything, but perhaps a fire-worshipper like the most primitive of Arabs.
'You mean he has several Arabian wives?'
'None, I think. I believe he has only what the Koran would sanction as concubines.'
That was something Solomon had had. She did not know that they existed at the present day, even in Arabia, nor the exact duties of a concubine. After the storm and excitement of Anthony Jones, who never cared to understand and who'e emotional power over her hurt and alarmed her, Professor Ripley seemed compassionate and comprehending. On his departure they shook hands warmly. 'Captain Jones,' he said, 'is an extraordinary man, something like Arabian literature itself, from which one may take either harm or good. I beg of you, Miss Bardeen, take only the good, but...' their eyes locked together...'if every...if anything...if this business relation' you are enjoying with Mr. Jones should...if you want advice...' He cleared his throat and amazed her after the fashion of a widowed man by assuring her he had loved his wife Prunella very dearly. Then he continued to beg her at any time to come to him for anything. She naïvely thought he referred to a possibility of the adventurous Mr. Jones leaving the country without paying off his secretary.
'It is zero weather, Cousin Lanice. Surely you will not be so foolish as to risk a lung inflammation in an open sleigh.'
'I have my mink pelisse, Cousin Poggy.'
'If you must go, do put goose-grease on your chest.'
'Oh, no.' (Had she not under her basque secreted the minute gold vial of attar of rose?)
'Surely, if you insist, you had best take Snowball and Favorite, with our sleigh. There is no reason why Captain Jones should be at the expense of a hired conveyance. I assure you these livery hacks raised out West in Ohio are never safe in the cities.'
'But he knows how to handle horses.'
'The fair sex, too, from what I hear.'
To which there could be no answer. Pauline nervously began to pick up and set down the ivory and jade ornaments on the drawing-room table; her knuckly fingers trembled.
'I had hoped so much from you, Lanice, and now you are ready to leave all and go off with this fast young man in a sleigh.'
'But why not? Of course I'll be back before it is really dark. Surely it is of no consequence.'
She tried to speak lightly, but her voice vibrated. Pauline muttered something about a symbol. The silence in the Poggy drawing-room became ominous. Lanice went to the grate and mended the fire. Pauline hunched over the table like a moulting bird, stopped her exploration of its objets de virtu, and fumbled about her face.
'Lanice,' she said coldly, 'I am in a sense your natural protector. It is my right to know whether you intend matrimony with this young man.'
Instantly realizing that it was not her right and that she was approaching the subject clumsily, she changed her style and swooped over to Lanice, patting one pale hand and murmuring, 'I think I know just what you are going through, my love. Now let us talk things over perfectly calmly and sensibly. Jones is so fascinating. Sometimes men who have sown their wild oats make the steadiest husbands. There, there, I did not mean to upset you.'
'Pauline,' gasped Lanice, 'he's going away next week...England. I don't know whether or not I am supposed to go with him. I know he loves me...'
'You have not, I hope, Lanice, ever let him so much as lay the weight of his hand upon you?'
Gathering affirmation from the girl's lovesick, tear-filled eyes and parted lips, she again abruptly changed her rôle from mentor to confidante. 'Why, of course, I understand, dear.' She almost winked at Lanice, as if she too could tell tales of embraces and feverish stolen kisses, as if Jones had often held her close to him on Miss Bigley's sun-drenched chaise-longue.
'But you see, Pauline, to-day I must go with him and find out what he intends of me.'
'Perhaps,' sighed Pauline almost hopefully, 'he is a wanton destroyer of female virtue.'
The younger girl went quite white. She gave a whimpering sigh like the ghost of a lost lady in a haunted chamber, and looked at Pauline in a way that would have wrung the heart of Sears Ripley.
'Let us talk calmly together.'
'No, no, not now. He'll be here in half an hour.' She wanted to get away from Pauline and her almost contagious ugliness. With her lace-edged handkerchief fluttering in her fingers, she fled the room.
Pauline, half hidden by the crimson curtains of the bow window, lay in wait for Jones. He came at last in a great glitter and jingle. Red Russian sleigh, silver bells, black satin horses. She drew a dirty fascinator over her head and hurried to the door.
'She will be out in a minute, Captain,' she said, and looked with more curiosity than distaste at the great Mr. Jones's ruddy face, innocent grey eyes and black bear coat.
The horses pawed impatiently and snuffed the air. No livery stable hacks these flashing cat-like creatures. Then she remembered hearing her father say that Mr. Scollay had recently bought a pair of black Morgans, the handsomest horses ever seen in Boston. So this lost and wanton man had borrowed from the family of one young lady the wherewithal to dazzle another—sly dog! And these unfeeling, sinful, even lustful brutes are not only our equals but our masters, forsooth. Would, under different circumstances, dear little Miss Spence effect a like perfidy? Would Miss Gatherall stoop to borrow the horses of one man that she might play fast and loose with another? The jet buttons strained at their moorings.
Lanice came belling down the stairs, her fetching new brown velvet frock filling the narrow hall. With it she wore her mink pelisse, furred Russian boots of green leather, a cinnamon-brown bonnet with coral-colored roses to match her coral breastpin, earrings, and bracelet. The girl was hardly an heiress. Sinful to care so deeply what one puts on one's back, and the heathen running naked!
'Good-bye, dear Pauline.' She kissed her with a new-learned fervor which left Pauline shaking her head, rubbing her chin, and squinting between the heavy curtains at the red sleigh glistening on the blinding snow, at silver bells shaking on satin horses.
'Lanice, we shall go for miles...far out in the country. I wish it were still before Christmas and we'd get evergreens for wreaths.'
He gentled and soothed his plunging pair, forcing them to take the bridge to Cambridge at a walk lest they exhaust their first freshness pulling the sleigh over the boards, which had already blown bare. Below, the tide was full and blocks of gray salt ice heaved on black water. The sunlight on the new-fallen snow was dazzling, the smell of cold like wine to the heart. The heavy folds of the Buffalo robes and Mr. Jones's own bodily heat flooded his guest with languorous warmth.
From the bank before them, from the bank that they had left, the elfin music of sleigh bells tinkled in the bright metallic air. A countryman with a sweating tandem, the leader of which carried a cow bell, passed them on the bridge. Jones pursed his lips, craned his neck about to be sure they were not observed, then turned his head quickly and brushed the girl's cold cheek with the teasing promise of a kiss. Both laughed and looked at each other with brightening color. The cold lashed their faces. Cheeks and noses reddened and Lanice's breath froze upon her lace veil.
The bridge crossed, the runners gave no resistance to the packed snow. The black Morgans pointed their dainty ears, held their tails high, and flashed into a twelve-mile trot. Other runners creaked on the hard snow, but the red Russian sleigh skimmed along with a swishing sound. The horses grew a little warm and the not unpleasant scent of their sweat mingled in the icy air with the faint attar of rose in the girl's breast, the tobacco of the man, and the pungent warm smell of the buffalo robe.
Neither cared to talk. Evidently Jones was finding great pleasure in merely handling the beautiful Vermont horses. The girl was sunk in the consciousness of her lover's nearness, the intoxicating backward rush of snow beneath the runners, and the oncoming and disappearing snow-burdened landscape. Through the length of Cambridge professors stopped to gaze with admiration at this elegant equipage. Tired intellectual ladies seated in bow windows put down their books and raised their glasses. Children making snowmen cried, 'Look-it, look-it.' A royal progress! Some recognized Sir Anthony Jones. At least two knew the girl to be one of Mr. Fox's female assistants.
Out on a willow-bordered road, flashing up and down endless hills. Hoofs and snow flying before, the world in its whitening slipping past. Blood racing within, and feet, thanks to Russian boots, buffalo robes, and a stove-like quality in Mr. Jones, deliciously warm. So into Weston, and beyond. So into Wayland, passed before realized. The Morgans had found their perfect stride. Jones exclaimed over them as all but equal in speed and quality to the desert horses, although he believed them inferior in beauty and courage. Lanice, swimming in delight, no longer worried about Mr. Jones's intentions, disengaged her mind from the pleasant process of merely living and asked him more about these famous steeds. He drew the Morgans to a restless walk and told her about the Arab horse, how it has one less vertebra than the European, and therefore an extraordinarily short back and high tail. He told her that its muzzle is so delicate it can drink out of a china teacup, and then laughed and said he had never seen one do so. He told her that the cruel Arab bit can break a horse's jaw and how the animals live in terror of it. This gives them a characteristic mincing walk, pointing their noses, rearing and arching back their necks in constant fear of its punishment, and he described the beautiful 'listening' horses and a lovely war-mare who had died under him in battle and whose death he had cruelly avenged. Recalling Professor Ripley's lecture on moral codes throughout the world, she tentatively drew the conversation from horses to manners. And from manners Mr. Jones himself led to morals. It took him less than half an hour to show the girl that morals, as she understood the word, he had none.
Was the man she was pledged to marry...if she were so pledged...?
But why did he only tell her that he loved and wanted her? Why did he not ask her to marry him? Mr. Fox, even Professor Ripley, could have told her why.
Surely no man could be so sinful as to declare himself to a woman and then go off...forget...
Yet what else was he trying to tell her but that love came and went and came again and went again. That love, as she cherished the word in her maidenly heart, did not exist. There was only, so said Mr. Jones, something brief and explosive that gripped you one moment, bent you to its uses, then left you to snap back, if you could, to your original state. Most married people, he said, were like cats tied together by their tails and thrown over a clothes line, clawing at each other's vitals. Marriage, he said, if congenial, reduces the erstwhile lovers to a brother and sister relationship which makes desire seem incestuous. Desire, he said, goes readily towards the strange and balks at the habitual. Love, he said, 'Hearth and Home' love, mawkish love, possibly existed in New England, but it was a thing of which he knew nothing. Finding his companion's hand in the layers of furs, he pressed it.
The girl grew cold with a chill that came from within and worked out to meet the icy air whistling against the buffalo robes. What had he said? In her heart she had always known that he wanted no more of her love than this. She had always really known that he had no desire to marry her, nor any woman. 'I must go back,' she thought.
Then, feeling his warm body pressed against her side, a flood of heat followed the chill and she was devastated with the desire to be kissed and caressed by this man who had no morals and who did not understand love. Nor did she herself love him as she had expected some day to love a man. The bonds which held her to him were at once more primitive, more binding, and lighter.
She told herself passionately to look at him again and see for herself that he had no greater charm than other men. He did not think nor dream nor hope as she did. Why, then, did his hands and mouth, sad grey eyes and halting voice rock her senses? This cannot be love. Oh, God help me, this is not love...and she thought guiltily of Mamma and Mr. Matthews. Is there, then, something stronger, more terrible than love? Something wicked, against which clergymen had preached when she had been a sleepy child in church, against which prophets major and prophets minor had raised their voices? Augustus had feared that she might have inherited her mother's wantonness...and she thought piteously of that lovely woman. Jones's arm stole around her just as she was on the point of begging him either to love her more or less, to take her with him to Arabia or to let her go now.
The copper-pink sun rolled from the icy sky towards the horizon. A long, glittering path spilled from it to the red sleigh across the white enamel fields.
'Captain Jones, we have driven too far. You forget we yet have the return journey to make. We must have come over ten miles.'
'Twenty-odd. Look.' He pointed with the whip and the horses crouched and sprang against their collars.
'Nam, nam, nam,' he called to them in Arabic fashion, and 'Look,' he said again to Lanice. 'There's the Red Horse Inn.'
Up the slope, behind great oaks, was the portly, gambrel-roofed hostelry.
'You have never been there?'
'No, I...I thought it was not frequented by ladies.'
'Oh, to the contrary, quite correct. Washington himself stopped there. They have his great state coach in the coach house still.'
'But did Mrs. Washington stop, too?' she asked, and laughed.
'Oh, indeed, she must have. And Professor Longfellow and your Mr. Fox are habitués. In fact, Longfellow is intending to write a series of poetic legends, fancies, and such things, and the scene of the telling shall be this old inn. He calls it "The Wayside Inn." They have a living-room reserved for them here, where they tell each other stories, translate Italian and German, and discuss the nobility of so wretched a thing as life and the power of so puling an art as literature. I grow sleepy, I yawn, scratch my head, and take another drink. Frankly, I don't like most of the literary men of Boston.'
He drew the horses into the driveway.
'Captain Jones, I feel, really I believe, it is wisest not to stop.'
'My dear girl, I cannot drive the little horses all the way back without giving them any rest. Come, Lanice, I've ordered dinner, and have arranged things so cleverly we can be sure of a private dining-room. In the evening, in the moonlight, we'll drive back again, I assure you.'
The landlord bustled out to meet them, calling over his shoulder for a stable boy to care for the animals, but Jones, having left Lanice at the door, would go himself to see that the pair were rubbed down and fed and watered. A kindly woman with bobbing grey curls and robin's-egg blue eyes led the stiffened young lady to the big fire in the taproom.
'Now that's the most comfortable rocker in the house,' she volunteered. 'Get down, Toddy,' she suggested to the black cat curled on its cushions.
Lanice picked the creature up and held it purring hoarsely in her lap as she rocked and warmed herself before the fire. It looked up at her with its beautiful diabolical green eyes.
'It's a grand night for a party, Miss,' the landlady continued. 'And everything, the ducks, the wine, the puddings, and the port are just as Sir Anthony ordered.'
'A party?'
'Six guests in all, three ladies and three gentlemen. But the others, I fancy, will not arrive until later.'
Something within Lanice, perhaps a soul, a conscience, lifted its head and reported danger. Why had Anthony not told her? But it was, she believed, the last time they would ever be together, the last time...the last time.
He had divested himself of his bearskin coat and fur cap by the time he joined her before the taproom fire. The landlady brought pewter mugs of mulled cider. The barmaid frankly smirked at the sober young Englishman, who, in turn, gazed at Lanice and the fire. He leaned over and stroked the cat.
'I like them,' he said, 'because to me they always seem baleful, the principle of evil. They are ardent and musical in their love, beastly in their killing, and their kittens smell sweet as incense.'
The landlady reported progress of the dinner, her face rosy and shining from bending over the stove.
'The others will come together, Sir Jones?' she asked.
'Yes, any time now. We'll go to the dining-room. Will you be so kind as to send the others up when they arrive?'
'Who will they be, Sir Jones?'
Lanice saw his eyes grow puzzled.
'Oh, Professor Longfellow—and—er—the two ladies and the gentleman who come with him.'
He was lying. She could not imagine that Jones would ask Professor Longfellow or that he would accept if asked. Evidently the name had a respectable sound and so he had used it. He knew the room prepared for him, and the two went upstairs and entered it. A faultless table was set for six. The heavy goblets were alive with firelight, the white wainscotting pink with it. The two young people stood with their heads close to the low beams.
'This would be considered a good inn, even in England,' said Mr. Jones enthusiastically, and shut the door into the cold hall.
'Come, Lanice, we've no time to waste.'
She felt again the now familiar, sultry upward flame of passion, and resigned herself to his devastating love-making, but part of her mind remained for at least a moment oddly aloof, and noted the fact that such conduct was evil. They heard the landlady creaking on the stair, but when she entered, followed by a maid, Captain Jones was mending the fire and the brown velvet lady was looking out of the window at the gathering darkness.
'Dear, dear, young people aren't what they used to be. Fancy being bored like that, and Sir Jones so handsome and the young lady, whoever she may be, so genteel and elegant.'
She chatted as she worked over the table, hoping to break the ice for two who obviously ought to be lovers. Then suddenly she caught the glitter in Sir Jones's eye and noticed his hard, stubborn mouth. She changed her opinion abruptly.
'My land, it's hardly respectable to feel like that in public. My land, he could fairly eat the young lady, and she so cruel and cold.'
An hour went by, and the fictitious guests did not come. Another hour, and the ducks burned and the kitchen was thrown into confusion, and Jones and the girl lingered in the candlelit, fire-bright room locked in each other's arms, conscious only of the necessities of their nature and the duty of keeping a close ear for approaching steps on the stairs. Each knew it was the last time, and in each was pain and the dull anger that only the other one could assuage. The girl was weeping silently, and the joy of love was lost in its pain. The man bit his lips and broke off occasionally to pace the room. Once she saw him standing by the fire, his eyes shut, his lips parted as if asking help from some dark god of his, Pan or Priapus. She seemed to him the most elusive woman he had ever known. To herself she seemed nothing—seaweed floating in ocean currents, or a tree bending before wind.
'Will you always love me, always, Anthony?'
He lifted her hand from the heap of brown velvet and kissed the fingers.
'No, not always.'
'Anthony!'
'Now you are flower leaves and silk, and now I love you, not ten years or twenty years when you are grey and I am palsied...darling...'
Time, he told her, had made her, had taken twenty-five years for her perfecting, but time would as surely destroy her. Her pulses throbbed. He flung himself against her, his voice broke. At that moment she was for him all the women that time had ever made only to confound. She was the symbol of the thing that had obsessed him from youth.
'Lanice,' he begged, 'don't love me too much! Don't love me too long! But for God's sake love me now!'
At last dinner was served. 'We'll wait no longer for the others.' At last the port was drunk, the candles guttered, and the big hearth log fell to embers. Then Jones left the girl and went soberly to the horses. He did not go back to the inn until they were harnessed. Then he found Lanice, white and heavy-eyed, huddled in her furs as an owl huddles in his feathers, holding the black cat in her lap. The great moon on the snow made a new and colder day. The shadow of trees lay like black lace. Mr. Jones drove with his left hand; with his right arm he clasped the long, delicate body of the sleeping girl. He hoped she would not be too hard to forget; he hoped he could some time forgive himself for his treatment of her. Nothing hurts for long, thank God.
It was still, and even colder, and in a few hours it would be morning, and in a few days he would be gone. The girl's head fell back on his arm. She smiled in her sleep, but the cheek turned away from his warmth froze in the Arctic air.