The Common Law

"What did you write?"

Mrs. Collis remained disdainfully silent, but her eyes sparkled.

"Won't you tell me," he asked, patiently, "what it was you wrote to Valerie West?"

"Yes, I'll tell you if you insist on knowing!—even if you do misconstrue it! I wrote to her—for her own sake—and to avoid ill-natured comment,—suggesting that she be seen less frequently with you in public. I wrote as nicely, as kindly, as delicately as I knew how. And her reply was a practical request that I mind my business!… Which was vulgar and outrageous, considering that she had given me her promise—" Mrs. Collis checked herself in her headlong and indignant complaint; then she coloured painfully, but her mouth settled into tight, uncompromising lines.

"What promise had Valerie West made you?" he asked, resolutely subduing his amazement and irritation.

For a moment Mrs. Collis hesitated; then, realising that matters had gone too far for concealment, she answered almost violently:

"She promised me not to marry you,—if you must know! I can't help what you think about it; I realised that you were infatuated—that you were making a fatal and terrible mistake—ruining life for yourself and for your family—and I went to her and told her so! I've done all I could to save you. I suppose I have gained your enmity by doing it. She promised me not to marry you—but she'll probably break her word. If you mean to marry her you'll do so, no doubt. But, Louis, if you do, such a step will sever all social relations between you and your family. Because I will not receive her! Nor will my friends—nor yours—nor father's and mother's friends! And that settles it."

He spoke with great care, hesitating, picking and choosing his words:

"Is it—possible that you did—such a thing—as to write to Valerie West—threatening her with my family's displeasure if she married me?"

"I did not write her at first. The first time I went to see her. And I told her kindly but plainly what I had to tell her! It was my duty to do it and I didn't flinch."

Lily was breathing fast; her eyes narrowed unpleasantly.

He managed to master his astonishment and anger; but it was a heavy draught on his reserve of self-discipline, good temper, and common sense to pass over this thing that had been done to him and to concentrate himself upon the main issue. When he was able to speak again, calmly and without resentment, he said:

"The first thing for us to do, as a family, is to eliminate all personal bitterness from this discussion. There must be no question of our affection for one another; no question but what we wish to do the best by each other. I accept that as granted. If you took the step which you did take it was because you really believed it necessary for my happiness—"

"I still believe it!" she insisted; and her lips became a thin, hard line.

"Then we won't discuss it. But I want to ask you one thing; have you talked with mother about it?"

"Yes—naturally."

"Has she told you all that I told her this afternoon?"

"I suppose so. It does not alter my opinion one particle," she replied, her pretty head obstinately lowered.

He said: "Valerie West will not marry me if my family continues hostile to her."

Lily slowly lifted her eyes:

"Then will you tell me why she permits herself to be seen so constantly with you? If she is not going to marry you what is she going to do? Does she care what people are saying about her?—and about you?"

"No decent people are likely to say anything unpleasant about either of us," he said, keeping a tight rein on himself—but the curb was biting deeply now. "Mother will stand by me, Lily. Will you?"

His sister's face reddened: "Louis," she said, "I am married; I have children, friends, a certain position to maintain. You are unmarried, careless of conventions, uninterested in the kind of life that I and my friends have led, and will always lead. The life, the society, the formalities, the conventional observances are all part of our lives, and make for our happiness and self-respect; but they mean absolutely nothing to you. And you propose to invade our respectable and inoffensive seclusion with a conspicuous wife who has been a notorious professional model; and you demand of your family that they receive her as one of them! Louis, I ask you, is this fair to us?"

He said very gravely: "You have met Valerie West. Do you really believe that either the dignity or the morals of the family circle would suffer by her introduction to it?"

"I know nothing about her morals!" said his sister, excitedly.

"Then why condemn them?"

"I did not; I merely reminded you that she is a celebrated professional model."

"It is not necessary to remind me. My mother knows it and will stand by her. Will you do less for your own brother?"

"Louis! You are cruel, selfish, utterly heartless—"

"I am trying to think of everybody in the family who is concerned; but, when a man's in love he can't help thinking a little of the woman he loves—especially if nobody else does." He turned his head and looked out of the window. Stars were shining faintly in a luminous sky. His face seemed to have grown old and gray and haggard:

"I don't know what to do," he said, as though speaking to himself;—"I don't know where to turn. She would marry me if you'd let her; she will never marry me if my family is unkind to her—"

"What will she do, then?" asked Lily, coolly.

For a moment he let her words pass, then, turned around. The expression of his sister's brightly curious eyes perplexed him.

"What do you mean?" he asked, disturbed.

"What I say, Louis. I asked you what Miss West means to do if she does not marry you? Discontinue her indiscreet intimacy with you?"

"Why should she?"

Lily said, sharply: "I would not have to put that question to a modest girl."

"I have to put it to you!" he retorted, beginning to lose his self-command. "Why should Valerie West discontinue her friendship with me because my family's stupid attitude toward her makes it impossible for a generous and proud girl to marry me?"

Lily, pale, infuriated, leaned forward in her chair.

"Because," she retorted violently, "if that intimacy continues much longer a stupid world and your stupid family will believe that the girl is your mistress! But in that event, thank God, the infamy will rest where it belongs—not on us!"

A cold rage paralysed his speech; she saw its ghastly reflection on his white and haggard face—saw him quiver under the shock; rose involuntarily, terrified at the lengths to which passion had scourged her:

"Louis," she faltered—"I—I didn't mean that!—I was beside myself; forgive me, please! Don't look like that; you are frightening me—"

She caught his arm as he passed her, clung to it, pallid, fearful, imploring,—"W-what are you going to do, Louis! Don't go, dear, please. I'm sorry, I'm very, very humble. Won't you speak to me? I said too much; I was wrong;—I—I will try to be different—try to reconcile myself to—to what—you—wish—"

He looked down at her where she hung to him, tearful face lifted to his:

"I didn't know women could feel that way about another woman," he said, in a dull voice. "There's no use—no use—"

"But—but I love you dearly, Louis! I couldn't endure it to have anything come between us—disrupt the family—"

"Nothing will, Lily…. I must go now."

"Don't you believe I love you?"

He drew a deep, unconscious breath.

"I suppose so. Different people express love differently. There's no use in asking you to be different—"

She said, piteously: "I'm trying. Don't you see I'm trying? Give me time, Louis! Make allowances. You can't utterly change people in a few hours."

He gazed at her intently for a moment.

"You mean that you are trying to be fair to—her?"

"I—if you call it that;—yes! But a family can not adapt itself, instantaneously, to such a cataclysm as threatens—I mean—I mean—oh, Louis! Try to understand us and sympathise a little with us!"

His arms closed around her shoulders:

"Little sister, we both have the family temper—and beneath it, the family instinct for cohesion. If we are also selfish it is not individual but family selfishness. It is the family which has always said to the world, 'Noli me tangere!' while we, individually, are really inclined to be kinder, more sympathetic, more curious about the neighbours outside our gate. Let it be so now. Once inside the family, what can harm Valerie?"

"Dearest, dearest brother," she murmured, "you talk like a foolish man. Women understand better. And if it is a part of your program that this girl is to be accepted by an old-fashioned society, now almost obsolete, but in which this family is merely a single superannuated unit, that program can never be carried out."

"I think you are mistaken," he said.

"I know I am not. It is inevitable that if you marry this girl she will be more or less ignored, isolated, humiliated, overlooked outside our own little family circle. Even in that limited mob which the newspapers call New York Society—in that modern, wealthy, hard-witted, over-jewelled, self-sufficient league which is yet too eternally uncertain of its own status to assume any authority or any responsibility for a stranger without credentials,—it would not be possible to make Valerie West acceptable in the slightest sense of the word. Because she is too well known; her beauty is celebrated; she has become famous. Her only chance there—or with us—would have been in her absolute anonymity. Then lies might have done the rest. But lying is now useless in regard to her."

"Perfectly," he said. "She would not permit it."

In his vacant gaze there was something changed—a fixedness born of a slow and hopeless enlightenment.

"If that is the case, there is no chance," he said thoughtfully. "I had not considered that aspect."

"I had."

He shook his head slightly, gazing through the window at the starry lustre overhead.

"I wouldn't care," he said, "if she would only marry me. If she'd do that I'd never bother anybody—nor embarrass the family—"

"Louis!"

"I mean make any social demands on you…. And, as for the world—" He slowly shook his head again: "We could make our own friends and our own way—if she would only consent to do it. But she never will."

"Do you mean to say she will not marry you if you ask her?" began Lily incredulously.

"Absolutely."

"Why?"

"For your sakes—yours, and mother's, and father's—and for mine."

There was a long silence, then Lily said unsteadily:

"There—there seems to be a certain—nobility—about her…. It is a pity—a tragedy—that she is what she is!"

"It is a tragedy that the world is what it is," he said. "Good night."

* * * * *

His father sent for him in the morning; Louis found him reading the Tribune in his room and sipping a bowl of hot milk and toast.

"What have you been saying to your mother?" he asked, looking up through his gold-rimmed spectacles and munching toast.

"Has she not told you, father?"

"Yes, she has…. I think you had better make a trip around the world."

"That would not alter matters."

"I differ with you," observed his father, leisurely employing his napkin.

"There is no use considering it," said his son patiently.

"Then what do you propose to do?"

"There is nothing to do."

"By that somewhat indefinite expression I suppose that you intend to pursue a waiting policy?"

"A waiting policy?" His son laughed, mirthlessly. "What am I to wait for? If you all were kind to Valerie West she might, perhaps, consent to marry me. But it seems that even our own family circle has not sufficient authority to protect her from our friends' neglect and humiliation….

"She warned me that it would be so, long ago. I did not believe it; I could not comprehend it. But, somehow, Lily has made me believe it. And so have you. I guess it must be true. And if that's all I have to offer my wife, it's not enough to compensate her for her loss of freedom and happiness and self-respect among those who really care for her."

"Do you give me to understand that you renounce all intentions of marrying this girl?" asked his father, breaking more toast into his bowl of milk.

"Yes," said his son, listlessly.

"Thank God!" said his father; "come here, my son."

They shook hands; the son's lifeless arm fell to his side and he stood looking at the floor in silence. The father took a spoonful of hot milk with satisfaction, and, after the younger man had left the room, he resumed his newspaper. He was particularly interested in the "Sunshine Column," which dispensed sweetness and light under a poetic caption too beautiful to be true in a coldly humorous world.

* * * * *

That afternoon Gordon Collis said abruptly to Neville:

"You look like the devil, Louis."

"Do I?"

"You certainly do." And, in a lower voice: "I guess I've heard what's the matter. Don't worry. It's a thing about which nobody ever ought to give anybody any advice—so I'll give you some. Marry whoever you damn please. It'll be all the same after that oak I planted this morning is half grown."

"Gordon," he said, surprised, "I didn't suppose you were liberal."

"Liberal! Why, man alive! Do you think a fellow can live out of doors as I have lived, and see germs sprout, and see mountain ranges decay, and sit on a few glaciers, and swing a pick into a mother-lode—and not be liberal? Do you suppose ten-cent laws bother me when I'm up against the blind laws that made the law-makers?—laws that made life itself before Christ lived to conform to them?… I married where I loved. It chanced that my marriage with your sister didn't clash with the sanctified order of things in Manhattan town. But if your sister had been the maid who dresses her, and I had loved her, I'd have married her all the same and have gone about the pleasures and duties of procreation and conservation exactly as I go about 'em now…. I wonder how much the Almighty was thinking about Tenth Street when the first pair of anthropoids mated? Nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus. If you love each other—Noli pugnare duobus. … And I'm going into the woods to look for ginseng. Want to come?"

Neville went. Cameron and Stephanie, equipped with buckskin gloves, a fox terrier, and digging apparatus, joined them just where the slender meadow brook entered the woods.

"There are mosquitoes here!" exclaimed Cameron wrathfully. "All day and every day I'm being stung down town, and I'm not going to stand for it here!"

Stephanie let him aid her to the top of a fallen log, glancing back once or twice toward Neville, who was sauntering forward among the trees, pretending to look for ginseng.

"Do you notice how Louis has changed?" she said, keeping her balance on the log. "I cannot bear to see him so thin and colourless."

Cameron now entertained a lively suspicion how matters stood, and knew that Stephanie also suspected; but he only said, carelessly: "It's probably dissipation. You know what a terrible pace he's been going from the cradle onward."

She smiled quietly. "Yes, I know, Sandy. And I know, too, that you are the only man who has been able to keep up that devilish pace with him."

"I've led a horrible life," muttered Cameron darkly.

Stephanie laughed; he gave her his hand as she stood balanced on the big log; she laid her fingers in his confidently, looked into his honest face, still laughing, then sprang lightly to the ground.

"What a really good man you are!" she said tormentingly.

"Oh, heaven! If you call me that I'm really done for!"

"Done for?" she exclaimed in surprise. "How?"

"Done for as far as you are concerned."

"I? Why how, and with what am I concerned, Sandy? I don't understand you."

But he only turned red and muttered to himself and strolled about with his hands in his pockets, kicking the dead leaves as though he expected to find something astonishing under them. And Stephanie glanced at him sideways once or twice, thoughtfully, curiously, but questioned him no further.

Gordon Collis pottered about in a neighbouring thicket; the fox terrier was chasing chipmunks. As for Neville he had already sauntered out of sight among the trees.

Stephanie, seated on a dry and mossy stump, preoccupied with her own ruminations, looked up absently as Cameron came up to her bearing floral offerings.

"Thank you, Sandy," she said, as he handed her a cluster of wild blossoms. Then, fastening them to her waist, she glanced up mischieviously:

"How funny you are! You look and act like a little boy at a party presenting his first offering to the eternal feminine."

"It's my first offering," he said coolly.

"Oh, Sandy! With your devilish record!"

"Do you know," he said, "that I'm thirty-two years old? And that you are twenty-two? And that since you were twelve and I was twenty odd I've been in love with you?"

She looked at him in blank dismay for a moment, then forced a laugh:

"Of course I know it, Sandy. It's the kind of love a girl cares most about—"

"It's really love," said Cameron, un-smiling—"the kind I'm afraid she doesn't care very much about."

She hesitated, then met his gaze with a distressed smile:

"You don't really mean that, Sandy—"

"I've meant it for ten years…. But it doesn't matter—"

"Sandy!… It does matter—if—"

"No, it doesn't…. Come on and kick these leaves about and we'll make a million dollars in ginseng!"

But she remained seated, mute, her gaze a sorrowful interrogation which at length he could not pretend to ignore:

"Stephanie child, don't worry. I'm not worrying. I'm glad I told you….

Now just let me go on as I've always gone—"

"How can we?"

"Easily. Shut your eyes, breathe deeply, lifting both arms and lowering them while counting ten in German—"

"Sandy, don't be so foolish at—such a time."

"Such a time? What time is it?" pretending to consult his watch with great anxiety. Then a quick smile of relief spread over his features: "It's all right, Stephanie; it's my hour to be foolish. If you'll place a lump of sugar on my nose, and say 'when,' I'll perform."

There was no answering smile on her face.

"It's curious," she said, "how a girl can make a muddle of life without even trying."

"But just think what you might have done if you'd tried! You've much to be thankful for," he said gravely.

She raised her eyes, considering him:

"I wonder," she said, under her breath.

"Sure thing, Stephanie. You might have done worse; you might have married me. Throw away those flowers—there's a good girl—and forget what they meant."

Slowly, deliberately, blossom by blossom she drew them from her girdle and laid them on the moss beside her.

"There's one left," he said cheerfully. "Raus mit it!"

But she made no motion to detach it; appeared to be unconscious of it and of him as she turned her face and looked silently toward the place where Neville had disappeared.

An hour or two later, when Gordon was ready to return to the house, he shouted for Neville. Cameron also lifted up his voice in a series of prolonged howls.

But Neville was far beyond earshot, and still walking through woods and valleys and pleasant meadows in the general direction of the Estwich hills.

Somewhere there amid that soft rolling expanse of green was the woman who would never marry him. And it was now, at last, he decided that he would never take her on any other terms even though they were her own terms; that he must give her up to chance again as innocent as chance had given her into his brief keeping. No, she would never accept his terms and face the world with him as his wife. And so he must give her up. For he believed that, in him, the instinct of moral law had been too carefully developed ever to be deliberately ignored; he still believed marriage to be not only a rational social procedure, not only a human compromise and a divine convention, but the only possible sanctuary where love might dwell, and remain, and permanently endure inviolate.

CHAPTER XIV

The Countess Hélène had taken her maid and gone to New York on business for a day or two, leaving Valerie to amuse herself until her return.

Which was no hardship for Valerie. The only difficulty lay in there being too much to do.

In the first place she had become excellent friends with the farmer and had persuaded him to delegate to her a number of his duties. She had to collect the newly laid eggs, hunt up stolen nests, inspect and feed the clucking, quacking, gobbling personnel of the barnyard which came crowding to her clear-voiced call.

As for the cattle, she was rather timid about venturing to milk since the Ogilvy's painful and undignified début as an amateur Strephon.

However, she assisted at pasture call accompanied by a fat and lazy collie; and she petted and salted the herd to her heart's content.

Then there were books and magazines to be read, leisurely; and hammocks to lie in, while her eyes watched the sky where clouds sailed in snowy squadrons out of the breezy west.

And what happier company for her than her thoughts—what tenderer companionship than her memories; what more absorbing fellowship than the little busy intimate reflections that came swarming around her, more exciting, more impetuous, more exquisitely disturbing as the hurrying, sunny hours sped away and the first day of June drew nigh?

She spent hours alone on the hill behind the house, lying full length in the fragrant, wild grasses, looking across a green and sunlit world toward Ashuelyn.

She had told him not to attempt to come to Estwich; and, though she knew she had told him wisely, often and often there on her breezy hilltop she wished that she hadn't—wished that he would disregard her request—hoped he would—lay there, a dry grass stem between her lips, thinking how it would be if, suddenly, down there by—well, say down by that big oak, for example, a figure should stroll into view along the sheep-path…. And at first—just to prolong the tension—perhaps she wouldn't recognise him—just for a moment. Then, suddenly—

But she never got beyond that first blissful instant of recognition—the expression of his face—his quick spring forward—and she, amazed, rising to her feet and hastening forward to meet him. For she never pictured herself as standing still to await the man she loved.

When Hélène left, Valerie had the place to herself; and, without any disloyalty to the little countess, she experienced a new pleasure in the liberty of an indolence which exacted nothing of her.

She prowled around the library, luxuriously, dipping into inviting volumes; she strolled at hazard from veranda to garden, from garden to lawn, from lawn to farmyard.

About luncheon time she arrived at the house with her arms full of scented peonies, and spent a long while selecting the receptacles for them.

Luncheon was a deliciously lazy affair at which she felt at liberty to take her own time; and she did so, scanning the morning paper, which had just been delivered; making several bites of every cherry and strawberry, and being good to the three cats with asparagus ends and a saucer of chicken bouillon.

Later, reclining in the hammock, she mended a pair of brier-torn stockings; and when that thrifty and praiseworthy task was finished, she lay back and thought of Neville.

But at what moment in any day was she ever entirely unconscious of him? Besides, she could always think of him better—summon him nearer—visualise him more clearly, when she was afield, the blue sky above her, the green earth under foot, and companioned only by memory.

So she went to her room, put on her stout little shoes and her walking skirt; braided her hair and made of it a soft, light, lustrous turban; and taking her dog-whip, ran down stairs.

The fat old collie came wagging up to the whistle, capered clumsily as in duty bound; but before she had entirely traversed the chestnut woods he basely deserted her and waddled back to the kitchen door where a thoughtful cook and a succulent bone were combinations not unknown.

Valerie missed him presently, and whistled; but the fat sybarite, if within earshot, paid no attention; and she was left to swing her dog-whip and stroll on alone.