The Lovely Lady

The knowledge suited him like his own garment, as if it had been lying ready for him to put on when the occasion required it, and now became him admirably. He perceived it to be a proper male function to produce easily and with precision whatever utterly charming young ladies might reasonably require. He appreciated Miss Goodward's acceptance of it as she came down from the house bewilderingly tied into soft veils for the afternoon's drive, as a part of her hall-marked fineness. If she couldn't help knowing, taking in the car's glittering newness from point to point, that its magnificence had materialized out of her simple wish for it, she at least didn't allow him to think it was any more than she would have expected of him. So completely did he yield himself to this new sense of the fitness of things that it came as a shock to have her, as soon as they had joined themselves to the holiday-coloured crowd that streamed and shifted under the bright boughs of Maplemont, reft from him by friendly, compelling voices, and particularly by Burton Henderson, who played singles and went about bareheaded and singularly self-possessed. It was unthinkable to Peter that, in view of her recently discovered importance in putting him at rights with himself, that he hadn't arranged with her that they were to be more together. For the moment it was almost a derogation of her charm that she shouldn't herself have recognized by some overt act her extraordinary opportunity. And then in a moment more he perceived that she had recognized it. He had only to wait, as he saw, and he would find himself pleasantly beside her, and at each renewal of the excluding companionship, he was more subtly aware that it was accorded not to anything he was but to what she had it in her power so beautifully to make of him.

So perfectly did she strike the key with him, when, in the intervals of the afternoon's entertainment they found themselves sitting or walking together, that he could not have imagined her to have been out of it, not even in a rather long session after tea with Burton Henderson among the rhododendrons, in which it was apparent from the young man's manner that she hadn't at least been in tune with him. It occurred just as they were leaving and served in the flutter of delay it occasioned to fix the attention of all their party on Eunice coming out of the shrubbery with young Henderson in her wake, batting aimlessly at the grass-tops with the racquet which he still carried. There was an air of sulkiness about him which caused Mrs. Lessing enigmatically to say that Eunice was altogether too good to that young man. To which Lessing's "Well, if she is, he doesn't seem to appreciate," served also to confirm Peter in the rôle which the effect she produced on himself had created for him. He at least appreciated the way in which she had made him feel himself the Distributer of Benefits, to a degree which made it almost obligatory of her to go on with it.

Successfully as Miss Goodward had kept for Peter during the day his new relation to his wealth on the one hand and society on the other, she seemed that evening quite to have abandoned him. While the family was having coffee on the terrace after dinner, she slipped away from them to reappear lower down among the rose trees, her white dress gathering all that was left of the lingering glow. The junior partner, feeling himself never so much junior, though he knew it was but a scant year or two, sat on through Lessing's inconsequential comment on business and the day's adventures, hearing not a word; now and then his chair creaked with the intensity of his preoccupation. It grew dusk and the lamps blossomed in the house behind them; presently Clarice slipped away to the children and the evening damp fell over the rose garden. Peter could endure it no longer. He believed as he rose suddenly with a stretching movement that he meant merely to relieve the tension of sitting by pacing up and down; it was unaccountable therefore that he should find himself at the edge of the terrace. He wondered why on earth Clarice couldn't have helped him a little, and then as if in response to his deep instinctive demand upon her, he heard her call softly to her husband from the door of the house. At the scrape of Julian's chair on the terrace tiling, Peter cast away his cigar and hurried into the dusk of the garden.

He found her at last by the herbacious border, keeping touch with the flight of a sphinx-head moth along the tall white rockets of phlox. Peter whipped out his handkerchief and dropped it deftly over the fluttering wings. In a moment he had stilled them in his hand. Miss Goodward cried out to him:

"You've spoiled his happy evening!"

"He's not hurt...." Peter laid the moth gently on a feathery flower head, and the tiny whispering whirr began again. "I thought you wanted him."

"I did—but not to catch him," Miss Goodward explained. "I wanted just to want him."

"Ah, I'm afraid I'm one of those people with whom to want a thing is to go after it," Peter justified himself.

"So one gathers from what one hears." She brushed him as lightly with the compliment as with the wings of a moth. "I wasn't really wanting him so much as I was wanting to be him for a while. Just to pass from one lovely hour to another and nothing to pay! But we humans have always to pay something."

"Or some one pays for us."

"Well, isn't that worse … taking it out of somebody else?"

"I'm not so sure; some people enjoy paying. It's not a bad feeling, I assure you: being able to pay. Haven't you found that out yet?"

"Not in Trethgarten Square." Mrs. Lessing had managed to let him know during the day that her guest had been reared within the sacred pale of those first families in whom the choice stock of humanness is refined by being maintained at precisely the same level for at least three generations.

"In Trethgarten Square," Peter reminded her, "we are told that you settle your account just by being; that you manage somehow to become something so superior and delectable that the rest of us are willing to pay for the privilege of having you about." He would have liked to add that recently, no later in fact than the evening before, he had come to think that this was so, but as she hesitated in her walk beside him, he saw that she was concerned in putting the case to herself quite as much as to him.

"It's not that exactly; more perhaps that our whole thought about life is to live it so that there won't be anything to pay. We have to manage to add things up like a column of figures with nothing to carry. Perhaps that's why we get so little out of it."

"Don't you?"—he was genuinely surprised, "get anything out of it, I mean."

"Oh, but I'm a selfish beast, I suppose! I want more—more!" They swung as she spoke into a broad beam of yellow light raying out from the library window, and he saw by it that with the word she flung out her arms with a lovely upward motion that lifted his mood to the crest of audacity.

"If you keep on looking like that," Peter assured her, "you'll get it." He was struck dumb immediately after with apprehension. It sounded daring, like a thing said in a book; but she took it as it came lightly off the tip of his impulse, laughing. "Yes … the great difficulty is choosing which of so many things one really wants." They walked on then in silence, the air darkling after the sudden shaft of illumination, the light folds of her scarf brushing his sleeve. Peter was considering how he might say, without precipitation, how suddenly she had limited and defined all the things that he wanted by expressing them so perfectly in herself, when she interrupted him.

"There's our moth again," she pointed; "he settles it by taking all of them. It's a possibility denied to us."

"Even he," Peter insisted, "has to reckon with such incidents as my dropping on him just now. I might have wanted him for a collection."

"Oh, if he takes us into account it must be as men used to think of the gods walking." Suddenly the familiar beds and hedges widened for Peter; they stretched warm and tender to the borders of youth and the unmatched Wonder.... It was so they had talked when they walked together in the Garden which was about the House....

For some time after Miss Goodward left him Peter remained walking up and down, thinking of many things and unable to think of them clearly because of a pleasant blur of excitement in his brain. As he came finally back to the house he heard the Lessings talking from behind one of the open windows.

"My word, that car was never out of the shop before," Julian was saying. "He's a goner!"

"And that lovely, dusty, brown colour that goes so well with her hair! Who would have thought Peter would be so noticing."

"It couldn't have cost him a cent under seven thousand." Julian was certain, "and carrying it off with me the way he did—bought the six cylinder after all, he had.... I'll bet old Peter don't know a cylinder from a stomach pump."

Clarice was evidently going on with her own line of thought. "It will be the best thing that ever happened to Eunice if she can only be got to see it."

"Well, if she don't her mother will see it for her." Lessing's voice died into a subdued chuckle as Peter passed under it on the dew-damp lawn, but there was no revelation in it for the junior partner. He had already found out what was the matter with him and what he meant to do about it.

III

Whatever the process of becoming engaged to Eunice Goodward lacked of dramatic interest, it made up to Peter by being such a tremendous adventure for him to become engaged to anybody.

He had gone through life much as his unfriended youth had strayed through the city streets, aching for the walled-up splendour—all the world's chivalries, tendernesses, passions—known to him only by glimmers and reflections on the plain glass of duty. Now at a word the glass dissolved and he was free to wander through the rooms crammed with imperishable poets' wares. He walked there not only as one who has the price to buy, but himself made one of the splendid things of earth by this same word which her mere being pronounced to him.

He paid himself for years of denials and repressions by the discovery of being able to love in such a key. For he meant quite simply to marry Eunice Goodward if she would have him, and it was no vanity which gave him hope, but a tribute to her fineness as being able to see herself so absolutely the one thing his life waited for. He knew himself, modestly, no prize for her except as he was added to by inestimable passion. Whatever she saw in him as a man, for her not to recognize the immortal worth of what he was able to become under her hand, was to subtract something from her perfections. In her acceptance would lie the Queen's touch, redeeming him from all commonness.

He made his first venture within a week after their first meeting, in a call on Miss Goodward and her mother in Trethgarten Square, where he found their red brick, vine-masked front distinguishable among half a hundred others by being kept open as late as the middle of June. To their being marooned thus in a desert of boarded-up doors and shuttered windows, due, as Eunice had frankly and charmingly let him know, to their being poor among their kind, he doubtless owed it that no other callers came to disturb the languid afternoon. Seen against her proper background of things precious but worn, and in the style of a preceding generation, the girl showed even lovelier than before, with the rich, perfumed quality of a flower held in a chipped porcelain vase, a flower moreover secure in its own perfectness, waiting only to be worn, disdaining alike to offer or resist. Her very quietness—she left him, in fact, almost wholly to her mother—had the air of condoning his state, of understanding what he was there for and of finding it somehow an accentuation of the interest they let him see that he had for them. He found them, mother and daughter, more alike, in spite of their natural and evident difference of years, more of a degree than he was accustomed to find mother and daughters in the few houses where the business of growing rich had admitted him, as though they had been carved out of the same material, by the same distinguished artist, at different times in his career.

It contributed to the effect of his having found, not by accident, but by seeking, a frame of life kept waiting for him, kept warm and conscious. Presently Eunice poured tea for them, and the intimacy of her remembering as she did, how he took it, had its part in the freedom which he presently found for offering hospitality on his own account, not at his home, as he explained to them, his sister being away, but say a dinner at Briar Crest to which they might motor out pleasantly Saturday afternoon, returning by moonlight. He offered Briar Crest tentatively on the strength of the Lessings having once given a dinner there, and was relieved to find that he had made no mistake.

"A great many of your friends go there," Mrs. Goodward allowed; "the Van Stitarts, Eunice, you remember."

"The Gherberdings are there now, mamma; I'm sure we shall enjoy it."

Having crossed thus at one fortunate stroke the frontiers of social observance, to which Clarice had but edged her way in the right of being a Thatcher Inwood, Peter ventured on Friday to suggest by telephone that since dinner must be late, the ladies should meet him at what he had taken pains to ascertain was the correct one of huge uptown hotels, for tea before starting. It was Mrs. Goodward who answered him and she whom he met in the white, marble tessellated tea-room, explaining that Eunice had had some shopping to do—they were really leaving on Saturday—and Mr. Weatheral was to order tea without waiting. They had time, however, for the tea to be drunk and for Mrs. Goodward to become anxious in a gentle, ladylike way, before it occurred to Peter to suggest that Miss Goodward might be lurking anywhere in the potted palm and marble pillared labyrinth, waiting for them, suffering equal anxieties, and dreadful to think of in their present replete condition, languishing for tea. His proposal to go and look for her was accepted with just the shade of deprecation which admitted him to an amused tolerance of the girl's delinquencies, as if somehow Eunice wouldn't have dared to be late with him had she not had reason more than ordinary for counting on his indulgence.

"You'll find," Mrs. Goodward let him know, "that we require a deal of looking after, Eunice and I."

"Ah, I only hope you'll find that I'm equal to it." Peter had answered her with so little indirection that it drew from the older woman a quick, mute flush of sympathy. For a moment the homeliness of his lean countenance was relieved with so redeeming a touch of what all women most wish for in all men that she met it with an equal simplicity. "For myself I am sure of it," but lifted next moment to a lighter key, with a smile very like her daughter's dragged a little awry by the use of years, "as for Eunice, you'll first have to lay hands on her."

With this permission he rose and made the circuit of the semi-divided rooms, coming out at last into the dim rotunda, forested with clustered porphyry columns, and there at last he caught sight of her. She had but just stepped into its shaded coolness out of the hot, bright day, and hung for a moment, in the act of furling her parasol, in which he was about to hail her, until he discovered by his stepping into range from behind one of the green pillars, that she was also in the act of saying good-bye to Burton Henderson. There was a certain finality in the way she held out her hand to him which checked Peter in the hospitable impulse to include the younger man in the afternoon's diversion. He stepped back the moment he saw that she was having trouble with her escort, defending herself by her manner from something accusing in his. Not to seem to spy upon her, Weatheral made his way back though the coatroom without disclosing himself. From the door of it he timed his return so as to meet her face to face as she came up with Mrs. Goodward and was rewarded for it by the gayety of her greeting and the unaffectedness of her attack of the fresh relay of toasted muffins and tea.

"Absolutely famished," she told them, "and the shops are so fascinating! You'd forgive me, Mr. Weatheral, if you could see the heaps and heaps of lovely things simply begging to be bought; it seemed positively unkind to come away and leave any of them." As she said nothing whatever about the young man, it seemed unlikely that she could have him much on her mind. She had a new way, very charming to Peter, of surrendering the afternoon into his hands; let him ask nothing of her she seemed to say, but to enjoy herself. She built out of their being there before her, a very delightful supposition of her mother and Mr. Weatheral, between them having made a little space for her to be gay in and simple and lovely after her own kind. If she took any account of them it was such as a dancer might who, practising a few steps for the mere joy and pride of it, finds herself unexpectedly surrounded by an interested and smiling audience.

If, however, with the memory of that afternoon upon him, Peter had gone down to Fairport in the latter part of July with the expectation of resuming the part of impresario to her charm, he suffered a sharp disappointment. He found the Goodwards, not in the expensive caravansary in which he installed himself, but in a smaller tributary house set back from the main hotel though not quite disconnected with it; for quiet, Mrs. Goodward told him, though he guessed quite as much from economy.

"It's wonderful, really, what they do with so little," Clarice, with her fine discriminations in the obligations of friendship, had generously let him know. "Eunice hasn't anything, positively not anything in comparison with what people of her class usually have. And with her taste, you know, there must be things she's just aching for, that somehow you can't give her." You couldn't, indeed. Though Peter made excuses enough for giving her the use of his car, and giving it to her shorn even of the implication of his society, there were few occasions when he could do even so much as that. He couldn't even give her his appreciations.

For at Fairport the Goodwards were quite in the heart of all that Peter himself failed to understand that he couldn't possibly be. It was not that he wasn't to the extent at least of sundry invitations given and accepted, "in" as much of the Best Society as Fairport afforded. Mrs. Goodward saw to that, and there were two or three whom he had met at the Lessings' as well as men to whom the figure of his income was the cachet of eligibility. It wasn't indeed that he wasn't liked, and that quite at his proper worth, but that he couldn't somehow manage it so that the Best Society cared in the least whether he liked it. He could see, in a way, where Clarice had been at work for him; but the poison that was dropped in his cup was the certainty that the way for him had to be "worked." The discovery that he couldn't just find his way to Eunice Goodward's side by the same qualities that had placed him beside the males of her circle in point of property and power, that he couldn't without admission to that circle, properly court her, hemmed him in bewilderingly.

Her method of eluding him, if there were method in it, left him feeling not so much avoided as prevented by the moves of a game he hadn't meant to play. So greatly it irked his natural simplicity to be banded about by the social observances of the place, that it might have led him to irrecoverable mistakes had it not been for the hand held out to him by Mrs. Goodward.

He perceived on closer acquaintance, that this lady's fine serenity of manner was due largely to her never admitting to her mind the upsetting possibility. She thought her world into acceptable shape and held it there by the simple process of ignoring the eccentricities of its axis.

Peter would have admired, if his unsophistication had allowed him, the facility with which she made it revolve now about their mutual pursuit of Eunice through the rattle and cheapness of what was known as "the Burton Henderson set." As it was against just such social inconsequence that Peter felt himself strong to defend her, he fell easily into the key of crediting the girl's sudden, bewildering flight to it as a mere midsummer madness.

"It's the way with girls, I fancy," Mrs. Goodward had said to him, strolling up and down the hotel veranda where through the wide French windows they had glimpses of Eunice whirling away on the ice polished floor of the ballroom within; "they cling the more to gayety as they see the graver things of life bearing down upon them."

"You think she sees that?"

"Ah, there's much a mother sees, Mr. Weatheral–"

"You would, of course," he accepted.

"It's a woman's part, seeing; there's an instinct in us not to see too soon." She gave him the benefit of her sweet weighted smile.

Peter lived greatly on these things. He was so sure of himself, of the reality and strength of his passion; he had a feeling of its being quite enough for them to go on, an inexhaustible, fairy capital out of which almost anything that Eunice Goodward desired might be drawn. It was fortunate that he found his passion so self-sufficing, for there was little enough that Eunice afforded it by way of sustenance. For a week he no more than kept in sight of her in the inevitable summer round; he did not dance and the game of cards he could play was gauged to what Ellen could manage in an occasional quiet evening at the Lessings'.

"I suppose," Eunice had said to him on an occasion when he had known enough to decline an invitation for an afternoon's play to which Burton Henderson was carrying her away, "that the stakes we play for aren't any temptation to you."

"I think that they're out of proportion to the trouble you have to be at to win them."

"Oh, if you don't care for the game–"

"I don't." And then casting about for a phrase that explained him more happily, "Put it that I like to cut out my job and go to it." She gave him a quick, condoning flash of laughter; the phrase was Lessing's and out of her recognition of it he drew, loverlike, that assurance of common understanding so dear to lovers. "Put it," he ventured further, "that I don't like to see myself balked of the prize by the way the cards are dealt."

"Ah, but that's what makes it a game. I'd no idea you were such a—revolutionist."

"Evolutionist," he corrected, happy in having touched the subtler note behind their persiflage. "I've all science on my side for the most direct method." After all, why should he let even the Best Society deal the cards for him? Should not a man sweep the boards of whatever kept him from his natural mate?

That was on Tuesday, and the Thursday following he had asked the Goodwards to motor over to Lighthouse Reef with him. He did not know quite what he meant to bring about on this occasion; he had so much the feeling of its being an occasion, the invitation had been so pointedly given and accepted, it was with difficulty he adjusted himself to the discovery on arriving at their hotel with the car, that Eunice had gone to play tennis instead.

"The time is so short," Mrs. Goodward apologized; "she felt she must make the most of it." She had to leave it there, not being able to make a game of tennis in the hot sun seem more of a diversion than the steady pacing of the luxurious car along the road which laced the forest to the singing beaches. She had to let her sidewise smile do what it could toward making the girl's bald evasion of her engagement seem the mere flutter and hesitancy of besieged femininity. For the moment she was as much "outside" so far as her daughter was concerned as Peter was of the select bright circle in which she moved.

The way opened before them, beautiful in late bloom and heavy fern, above which the sea wind kept a perpetual movement of aliveness.

"Eunice will miss it," Mrs. Goodward rallied; "such a perfect afternoon!" She gave him the oblique smile again, weighted this time with the knowledge of all that Peter hadn't been able or hadn't tried to keep from her. "It isn't easy, is it," she went on addressing her speech to whatever, at the mention of her daughter's name, hung in the air between them, "to stand by and see other people's great moments hover over them. One would like so to lend a hand. And one is sure of nothing so much as that if they are really to be big, one mustn't."