Mary Wollaston by Henry Kitchell Webster (best story books to read txt) 📕

up then into his face, steadily, open-eyed, though she could not see much for the blur.

"This time," he said, laboriously,--"this time it isn't the song."

She shook her head.

"I couldn't have waited, like that," he told her, three breaths later, "except for being afraid that if I tried to touch you, you wouldn't be there at all. Like a fairy story;--or a dream. I have never been sure that the other time wasn't."

"It's real enough," she said. "You're sure now, aren't you?"

His answer, the one she meant him to make, was to draw her up into a deep embrace, his lips upon hers.

"What does it mean?" he asked, when they had drawn back from it.

She smiled at that. "You don't need ask. That's the Wollaston trick, to ask for meanings and reasons." She added, a moment later, "It means whatever it says to your heart."

It was at her half-humorous suggestion that he went back, presently, to work at the piano. She settled contentedly near him where with an outstretched hand she could occasionally respond to his touch. They hadn't, either of them, very much to say.

Once the work was interrupted, when he asked, rather tensely, "Do you want me to come to Ravinia?"

She found herself at a loss for a categorical reply. She'd have thought that a whole-hearted yes would have been the only thing she could say.

"I don't want you--tortured any more with unheard melodies," she answered after a moment's reflection.

His nod, decisive as it was, struck her as equivocal. But she was too happy to probe into anything this afternoon. There would be plenty of time; unstinted hours. It was with no more than a mild regret that she heard, under the windows, the return of the big car with Aunt Lucile. This inextinguishable happiness expressed itself in the touch of impudent mischief with which she slipped up close behind Anthony March and, in the last possible instant before her aunt's entrance into the room, bent down and kissed him; then flashed back to her decorously distant chair.

It was funny how calm she was. This day that was closing down over the hill behind the apple house couldn't be, it seemed, the same that had dawned over the lake at Ravinia. The whole Ravinia episode, even as she told Lucile and March about it, seemed remote, like something out of a book; but became for that very reason, rather pleasant to dwell upon. Sylvia came in pretty soon for a critical survey of what March had accomplished with the piano, volunteered to help and attempted to. But having pled some of Anthony's arrangements of loose parts, she was sacked off the job and sent back to the hay field to bring the boys in for supper.

After supper the excitement over the piano increased. They all gathered round March like people watching a conjurer's trick when he slid the action into place and proved, chromatically, that every hammer would strike and every key return.

"But it isn't tuned at all," Sylvia wailed. "It will be hours before you can play on it."

"Minutes," March corrected with a grin. And they watched, amazed,--but less so really than an ordinary piano tuner would have been,--at the way he caught octaves, fifths and fourths, sixths and thirds up and down that keyboard like a juggler keeping seven tennis balls in the air.

"There you are," he said suddenly, before it seemed that he could be half-way through and began playing a dance.

"But you can play tunes!" cried Sylvia. "I thought you only did terribly high-brow things. That's what Rush said."

"I was pianist in the best jazz orchestra in Bordeaux," March told her.

He stayed there at the piano quite contentedly for more than an hour. Some of the musical jokes he indulged in (his sense of humor expressed itself more easily and impudently in musical terms than in any other) were rather over his auditors' heads. Parodies whose originals they failed to recognize, experiments in the whole-tone scale that would have interested disciples of Debussy, but his rhythms they understood and recognized as faultless.

And Mary danced. With Graham when she must, with Rush when she could. The latter happened oftener than you would have supposed.

"Those Wollastons can certainly dance," Sylvia remarked to her brother. "I wonder they'll have anything to do with us. Let's just watch them for a minute.--Here, we'll turn the piano around so Mr. March can see, too."

It was queer, Mary reflected, how easy it was for her and also, she was sure, for her lover, to acquiesce in a spending of the hours like that; how little impatient she was of the presence of these others that kept them apart. She gave no thought to any maneuver, practicable or fantastic, for stealing away with him, not even when, as the party broke up for the night it became evident that chance was not going so to favor them.

She realized afterward that there had been something factitious about her tranquillity. What he had said in the moment before their first embrace had been on that same note. He had been afraid to touch her for fear that--as in a fairy story, or a dream,--she wouldn't be there. All that afternoon and evening, despite an ineffable security in their miracle, she had walked softly and so far as the future was concerned, avoided trying to look.

Something in his gaze when he said good night to her, gave her a momentary foreboding, though she told herself on the way up to the tent she was to share with Sylvia that this was nothing but the scare that always comes along with a too complete happiness.

But in the morning when her aunt told her that March had gone, she realized that it had been more than that.

It was in the presence of the others who had gathered in the apple house for breakfast that she heard the news, and this was perhaps a mercy; for the effort she had to make to keep from betraying herself rallied her forces and prevented a rout.

To the others his having gone like that seemed natural enough,--likably characteristic of him, at any rate. In his note to Miss Wollaston he had merely said that he realized that he must be off and wished to make the most of the cool of the morning. He hoped she would understand and pardon his not having spoken of his intention last night.

"It's the crush Sylvia had on him that accounts for that," Graham observed. "He was afraid of the row she'd make if he let on."

Sylvia's riposte to this was the speculation that Mary had scared him away, but one could see that her brother's explanation pleased her.

"Anyhow," she concluded, "he was good while he lasted."

What held Mary together was the obvious fact that none of them saw--no more than they had seen--anything. Not one curious or questioning glance was turned her way. A sense she was not until later able to find words for, that she was guarding something, his quite as much as her own, from profaning eyes, gave her the resolution it needed to carry on like that until she could be alone. Naturally,--or at all events plausibly--alone. She wouldn't run away from anybody.

Toward eleven o'clock chance befriended her. She hid herself in the old orchard, lay prone upon the warm grass, her cheek upon her folded forearms, and let herself go. She did not cry even now. Grief was not what she felt, still less resentment.

She was lonely as she had never been before, and frightened by her loneliness. All the familiar things of her life seemed far away, unreal. She wanted a hand to hold;--his--oh, one of his!--until she could find her way into a path again.

She had known, she reflected,--somewhere in the depths of her she had known--from the first moment of their meeting, that he would go away. This was why she had been so careful not to look beyond the moments as they came; not to tempt Nemesis by asking nor trying for too much.

There happened to be, rather uncannily, a genuine proof that this was true. While she had been still dazed with that first look of his, there in the oak shade at the edge of the field, she had said that it was like the first act of _Le Chemineau_. That had been speaking all but with the tongue of prophecy. Deeply as the story had impressed her when she heard it, she had spoken with no conscious sense of the likeness between that wayfarer--whom neither love nor interest nor security could tempt away from the open road which called him,--and Anthony March. It was an inner self that knew and found a chance to speak. It was that same self who had answered for her when he asked whether she wanted him to come to Ravinia.

He had come to his decision then, with just that nod of the head. And she, forlorn, was glad he had cast this temptation aside. That he was plodding now sturdily along his highway. She flushed with shame at the thought of him, ubiquitous among those egotists at Ravinia, enlisting their interest, reminding Paula how much she liked him.

Why had he not hated her for suggesting such a thing? He had loved her for it, she knew, because he understood the longing to comfort and protect him which lay behind it. But that sort of comfort was not for him. The torture of the unheard melodies, instead.

He did love her. This, utterly, she knew. His going away, even with no farewell at all, cast no flaw upon the miraculous certainty of that. Their one unreserved embrace remained the symbol of it.

She pressed her hands to her face and with a long indrawn breath surrendered to the memory of it. It was hers--for always.

The family were sitting at dinner when she came down to the apple house, and after a rather startled look at her, demanded to know where she had been.

"Asleep in the orchard," she said. "And not altogether awake yet."

But she knew she must get away from them. The look she saw in Graham's face would have decided that.


CHAPTER XVIII

A CASE OF NECESSITY

She told Rush when they left the table, that she had some shopping to do in town for Paula and meant to go on the afternoon train. She was expected back at Ravinia to-morrow anyhow. Beyond trying to persuade her to let Pete drive her in he made no protest, but she could see that he was troubled about it and she wasn't much surprised to find Wallace Hood waiting on the station platform when her train got in.

She didn't, very much, mind Wallace. There was no appearance of his being there in the role of guardian because she wasn't considered safe to leave to herself. You could always trust Wallace to do a thing like that perfectly.

It was a great piece of luck for him he told her. He had called up Hickory Hill to congratulate John upon Paula's enormous success; had learned from Rush of Mary's visit and that she was even then on the way to Chicago. He had just dropped round at the station in the hope of being able to pick her up for dinner. She had some shopping to do he understood and he wouldn't detain her now.

"Oh, nothing that matters a bit," said Mary. "It was