The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster (pdf to ebook reader txt) 📕

reading-lamp and drew down the blinds.

"Rose," he said presently, "what are we going to do?"

She knew she was not answering the true intent of his question when she said:

"Well, for one thing we can get a little supper. I don't know what we've got to eat, but we won't care--to-night."

There was a ring of decision in his voice that startled her a little when he said:

"No, we won't do that to-night. We'll go out somewhere to a restaurant."

Their eyes met--unwavering.

"Yes," she said, "that's what we'll do."

They didn't talk much across the table in the deserted little Italian restaurant they went to. Neither of them afterward could remember anything they'd said. They ate their meal in a sort of grave contented happiness that was reaching down deeper and deeper into them every minute, and they walked back to the gray brick building in Thirteenth Street, arm in arm, hand in hand, in silence. But when she stopped there, he said:

"Let's walk a little farther, Rose. There are things we've got to decide, and--and I'm not going in with you again to-night."

She caught her breath at that, and her hand tightened its hold on his. But she walked on with him.

He said, presently, "You understand, don't you?"

She answered, "Oh, my dear!--yes." But she added, a little shakily, "I wish we had a magic-carpet right here, that we could fly home on."

Then they walked a while in silence.

At last he said: "There's this we can do. I can go back to my hotel to-night, and tell them that I'm expecting you--that I'm expecting my wife to join me there. To-morrow? And then I can come and get you and bring you there. It's not home, and it's not the place I'd choose for--for a honeymoon, but ..."

The way she echoed the word set him thinking. But before his thoughts had got to their destination she said:

"Shall we make it a real honeymoon, Roddy--make it as complete as we can? Forget everything and let all the world be ..."

He supplied a word for her, "Rose-color?"

She accepted it with a caressing little laugh, "... for a while?"

"That's what I was fumbling for," he said, "but I can't think very straight to-night. I've got it now, though. That cottage we had--before the twins were born--down on the Cape. There won't be a soul there this time of the year. We'd have the world to ourselves."

"Yes," she said, "for a little while, we'd want it like that. But after a while--after a day or two, could we have the babies? Could the nurse bring them on to me and then go straight back, so that I could have them--and you, altogether?"

He said, "You darling!" But he couldn't manage more than that.

A little later he suggested that they could get the place by telegraph and could set out for it to-morrow.

She laughed and asked, "Will you let me be as silly as I like for once? Will you give me a week--well, till Saturday; that would do--to get ready in?"

"Get ready?" he echoed.

"Clothes and thinks," she said. "A--trousseau, don't you see? I've been so busy making clothes for other people that I've got just about nothing myself. And I'd like ... But I don't really care, Roddy. I'll go with you to-morrow, 'as is,' if you want me to."

"No," he said. "We'll do it the other way."

And then he took her back to the gray brick entrance and, just out of range of the elevator man, kissed her good night.

"But will you telephone to me as soon as you wake up in the morning, so that I'll know it's true?"

She nodded. Then her eyes went wide and she clung to him.

"_Is_ it true, Roddy? Is it possible for a thing to come back like that? Are we really the old Rodney and Rose, planning our honeymoon again? It wasn't quite three years ago. Three years next month. Will it be like that?"

"Not like that, perhaps," he said, "exactly. It will be better by all we've learned and suffered since."


CHAPTER V

THE BEGINNING

There was a sense in which this prediction of Rodney's about their honeymoon was altogether true, They had great hours--hours of an emotional intensity greater than any they had known during that former honeymoon, greater by all they had learned and suffered since--hours that repaid all that suffering, and could not have been captured at any smaller price. There were hours when the whole of their two selves literally seemed transfused into one essence; when there was nothing of either of them that was not the other; when all their thoughts, impulses, desires, flowered spontaneously out of a common mind. There was no precalculating these experiences. They came upon them, seized them, carried them off.

One of these, that neither of them will ever forget, came at the end of a long tramp through the dawn of their second day. They had been swinging along in almost unbroken silence through the gray mist, had mounted a little hillock and halted, hand in hand, as the first lance of sunlight transfixed and flushed the still vaporous air, and it had seemed to them, as they watched, breathless, while the sun mounted, that the whole of the life that lay before them was a track of gold like that which blazed across the sea, leading to an intolerable glory.

And there were other hours of equally memorable transfiguration, which their surroundings had nothing whatever to do with--hours lighted only by the flame that flared up from their two selves.

But life, of course, can not be made up of hours like that. No sane person can even want to live in a perpetual ecstasy. What makes a mountain peak is the fall away into the surrounding valleys.

In their valleys of commonplace, every-day existence--and these occurred even in their first days together--they were stiff, shy, self-conscious with each other. And their attempt to ignore this fact only made the self-consciousness the worse. It troubled and bewildered both of them.

Rose's misgiving had been justified. They weren't the old Rodney and Rose. Those two splendid careless savages, who had lived for a fortnight on an island in the midst of Martin Whitney's carefully preserved solitude in Northern Wisconsin, accepting the gifts of the gods with such joyous confidence that none of them could ever turn bitter, those two zestful children, had ceased to exist.

John Galbraith had spoken truth when he said there was no such thing as a fresh start. For good or evil, you were the product of your yesterdays. The nightmare tour on the road with _The Girl Up-stairs_ company was a part of Rose; the day in Centropolis, the night when Galbraith had made love to her. The hour in the University Club, when Rodney's heart had first shrunk from an unacknowledged fear; the days and weeks of humiliation and distress that had succeeded it, were a part of him--an ineffaceable part.

So it was natural enough--though not, therefore, the less distressing--that Rose should note, with wonder, a tendency in him to revert to the manner which had characterized his first call on her in New York; a tendency to be--of all things--polite. He didn't swear any more, nor contradict. He chose his words, got up when she did, picked up things she dropped. And when she was quite sure she was safe from discovery, she sometimes wept forlornly, for the rough, outrageous, absent-minded, imperious lover of the old days.

She did not know that she was different too--as remote from the girl she had been during the first six months of their marriage--the girl who, "all eyes," had held her breath while Doctor Randolph told her things; the girl who had smiled over Bertie Willis' love-making, because she didn't know that such things happened except in books--as he was from the old Rodney. Even Violet had seen, in the glimpse she'd caught across two taxicabs, that her smile was somehow different, and James Randolph had come back from his tea with her in the Knickerbocker, saying that she was a thousand years old.

So it was not wonderful that Rodney should have found a new mystery in her; nor that, seeing in her look, sometimes--especially when it was not meeting his own--the reflections of a thousand experiences he had not shared with her, he should have felt that she was a long way off. And his heart ached for the old Rose, whom he had so completely "surrounded"--the Rose who had consulted him about the menus for her dinners, who had brought him all her little troubles; who had tried--bless her!--to study law, and had stolen into court to hear his argument, so that she could talk with him. Whatever the future might have for him, it would never bring that Rose back.

The arrival of the twins, in the convoy of a badly flustered--and, to tell the truth, a somewhat scandalized--Miss French, simplified the situation a little--by complicating it! They absolutely enforced a routine. They had needs that must be met on the minute. And they gave Rose and Rodney so many occupations that the contemplation of their complicated states of mind was much abridged.

But even her babies brought Rose a disappointment along with them. From the time of the receipt of Miss French's telegram acknowledging Rodney's and telling them what train she and the twins would take, Rose had been telling off the hours in mounting excitement. The two utterly adorable little creatures, as the pictures of them in Rodney's pocketbook showed them to be, who were, miraculously--incredibly--hers, were coming to bring motherhood to her; a long-deferred payment for the labor and the agony with which she had borne them; the realization of half-forgotten hopes that had, during the period of her pregnancy, been the mainstay of her life. There was now no Mrs. Ruston, no Harriet, no plausible physician to keep them away from her. Rose had a smile of tender pity for the memory of the girl who had struggled so ineffectually and yet with such heart-breaking earnestness to break the filaments of the web they'd spun around her.

No, it wouldn't be like that now. Rodney had agreed explicitly that Miss French was to be allowed to stay only as long as Rose wanted her; only for the few days--or hours--she would need for making herself mistress of their regime. Then the nurse was to be sent away on a vacation and Rose should have her children to herself.

She didn't go to Boston with Rodney to meet them; nor even to the station; stayed in the cottage, ostensibly to see to it, up to the very last minute, that the fires were right (June had come in cold and rainy) and in general to be ready on the moment to produce anything that their rather unforeseeable needs might call for. Her real reason was a shrinking from having her first meeting with them in the confusion of arrival on a station platform, under the eyes of the world, amid the distractions of things like luggage.

Rodney understood this well enough, and arriving at the cottage, he clambered out of the wagon with them and carried them both straight in to Rose, leaving the nurse and the bewildering paraphernalia of travel for a second trip.

Rose, in the passionate surge of gratified desire that came with the sight of them, caught them from him, crushed them up tight against her breast--and frightened them half