CHAPTER VI

Speaking of cards, Jim was like a gambler with a new pack of them and n.o.body to play with.

He darted hither and yon in his racer, childishly happy in its paces, childishly lonely for somebody to show off before. As he ran along the almost deserted sea road he pa.s.sed the Noxon home.

He knew that Charity was visiting there. He wondered which of the lighted windows was hers. After much backing and filling he turned in and ran up to the steps. He got out and was about to ring the bell when he heard a piano. He went along the piazza to a window, and, peering in, saw Charity playing. She was alone in the music-room and very sadly beautiful.

He tapped on the window. She was startled, rose to leave the room. He tapped again, remembering an old signal they had had as boy and girl lovers. She paused. He could see her smile tenderly. She came forward to the window and stared out. He stared in. Only a pane of gla.s.s parted the tips of their flattened noses. It was a sort of sterilized Eskimo kiss.

The window was a door. Charity opened it and invited Jim in, wondering but strangely comforted. He invited her out. He explained about his gorgeous new car and his loneliness and begged her to take the air.

She put back her hands to indicate her inappropriate costume, a flimsy evening gown of brilliant color.

"Mrs. Noxon has gone out to dinner. I was to go with her, but I begged off. I'm going to New York to-morrow, and I was blue and--"

"And so am I. I've got an extra coat in my car, and the night is mild."

"No, I'd better not."

"Aw, come along!"

"No-o--"

"Yes!"

"All right. I'll get a veil for my hair."

She closed the French window and hurried away. She reappeared at the front door and shut it stealthily after her.

"n.o.body saw me go. You must get me back before Mrs. Noxon comes home, or there'll be a scandal."

"Depend on me!" said Jim.

m.u.f.fling their laughter like two runaways, they stole down the steps.

Her high-heeled slippers slipped and she toppled against him. She caught him off his balance, and his arms went about her to save her and himself. If he had been Irish, he would have said that he destroyed himself, for she was so unexpectedly warm and silken and lithe that she became instantly something other than the Charity he had adored as a sad, sweet deity.

He realized that she was terribly a woman.

They were no longer boy and girl out on a gay little lark. They were a man unhappily married and a woman unhappily unmarried, setting forth on a wild steed for a wild ride through the reluctant autumn air. The neighboring sea gave out the stored-up warmth of summer, and the moon with the tilted face of a haloed nun yearned over them.

When Jim helped Charity into the car her arm seemed to burn in his palm.

He hesitated a moment, and a thought fluttered through his mind that he ought not to hazard the adventure. But another thought chased it away, a thought of the idiocy of being afraid, and another thought of how impossible it was to ask her to get out and go back.

He found the coat, a heavy, short coat, and held it for her, saw her ensconced comfortably, stepped in and closed the door softly. The car went forward as smoothly as a skiff on a swift, smooth water.

Charity was not so solemn as Jim. She was excited and flattered by such an unforeseen diversion breaking in on her doleful solitude.

"It's been so long since a man asked me to go buggy-riding," she said, "that I've forgotten how to behave. I'm getting to be a regular old maid, Jim."

"Huh!" was all that Jim could think of.

It was capable of many interpretations--reproof, anger at fate, polite disbelief, deprecation.

Jim tried to run away from his peculiar and most annoying emotions. But Charity went with him. She looked back and said:

"Funny how the moon rides after us in her white limousine."

"Huh!" said Jim.

"Is that Mexican you're speaking?" she chided.

"I was just thinking," Jim growled.

"What?"

"Oh, nothing much--except what a ghastly shame it is that so--so--well, I don't know what to call you--but well, a woman like you--that you should be living alone with nothing better to do than run the gantlet of those G.o.d-awful submarines and probably get blown up and drowned, or, worse yet, spend your days breaking your heart nursing a lot of poor mangled, groaning Frenchmen that get shot to pieces or poisoned with gas or--Oh, it's rotten! That's all it is: it's rotten!"

"Somebody has to take care of them."

"Oh, I know; but it oughtn't to be you. If there was any manhood in this country, you'd have Americans to nurse."

"There are Americans over there, droves of them."

"Yes, but they're not wearing our uniform. We ought to be over there under our own flag. I ought to be over there."

"Maybe you will be. I'll go on ahead and be waiting for you."

There is nothing more pitiful than sorrow that tries to smile, and Jim groaned:

"Oh, Charity Coe! Charity Coe!"

He gripped the wheel to keep from putting his hand out to hers. And they went in silence, thinking in the epic elegy of their time.

Jim drove his car up to the end of Rhode Island and across to Tiverton; then he left the highway for the lonelier roads. The car charged the dark hills and galloped the levels, a black stallion with silent hoofs and dreadful haste. There was so much death, so much death in the world!

The youth and strength and genius of all Europe were going over the brink eternally in a Niagara of blood.

And the sea that Charity was about to venture on, the sea whose estuaries lapped this sidelong sh.o.r.e so innocently with such tender l.u.s.ter under the gentle moon, was drawing down every day and every night ships and ships and ships with their treasures of labor and their brave crews till it seemed that the floor of the ocean must be populous with the dead.

Charity felt quite close to death. A very solemn tenderness of farewell endeared the beautiful world and all its doomed creatures. But most dear of all was this big, simple man at her side, the man she ought to have married. It was all her fault that she had not. She owed him a profound eternal apology, and she had not the right to pay the debt--that is, so long as she lived she had not the right. But if they were never to meet again--then she was already dying to him.

It was important that she should not depart this life without making rest.i.tution of what she owed. She had owed Jim Dyckman the love he had pleaded for from her and would not get from anyone else.

He had a right to love, and it was to be eternally denied to him. He would go on bitterly grieved and shamed to think that n.o.body could love him, for Charity had repulsed him, and some day he would learn that Kedzie had deceived him.

Lacking the courage to warn him against his wife, Charity felt that she must have at least the courage to say;