But when he looked at her she was so wan and pitiful that he could not be as pitiless as the wan daylight was. She was making an advance payment on her price; and she was shivering and lonely. So he kissed her icy hands and whispered to her how beautiful she was and a sorrowful "G.o.d bless you!" and sneaked back into his room, his bachelor room.

Had he paused as once before to throw her another kiss, he would have found her with her arms stretched out to him pleading for rescue from the vision she had seen and the unspoken taunt she had understood. But he did not look back, and she dared not knock at his door. The click of his lock frightened her, and she fled to her room like a ghost surprised by the morning.

CHAPTER XLIV

When Forbes shut the door upon Persis (and unwittingly shut out her little gesture of appeal to come back, be stronger than she was, and rescue her from herself in spite of herself) he looked from his room upon a world that was just the colorless color of the gla.s.s in his window.

There was a menace of rain in the sky, and the dawn was a colorless affair, neither night nor morning. The day woke like a sleeper that has not rested well.

As a mere formality Forbes took off his clothes and lay down. Life was colorless ahead of him. The woman who had fascinated him utterly had utterly disappointed him. She loved Forbes, but not his penury; she would marry Enslee's money, but not Enslee. She wanted success in life--called it her "career"!

Men, he knew, put their careers first, made everything subservient to success, asked their women to kowtow to it. Perhaps women were going to do the same thing. Perhaps they had been all these centuries hunting success and disguising the materialism of their ambition under more romantic words, aided in their deceit by the numberless gallantries of authors. Perhaps Persis was not different from millions of women, except for being frank where the others were hypocrites, more or less intentionally.

This thought softened his heart toward Persis, and he regretted it. He did not want to think softly of Persis any more. It unnerved his resolution, and uncertainty and irresolution were terrific strains on a man of action and precision. If he could renounce Persis with contempt he would be able to close that incident and resume the progress of life. But to find in every beauty of hers something of ugliness, and to find in every cruelty of hers something to respect and something to pity, was the paralysis of decision.

How could he hate her when he loved her so madly, and was so unhappy out of her sight? How was he to endure it that she should marry another man, and how was he to prevent it?

He tossed between sleeping and waking, between condemnation of Persis and acquittal, between resolutions to cut her out of his heart and his life, and resolutions to win her yet. Eventually he heard people stirring about the house, and he rose drearily.

The shower-bath gave forth a lukewarm drizzle that neither stimulated nor soothed him. Outside, rain was falling lazily in a gray air that hid the hills and gardens as if the sky, too, were a curtained shower-bath.

He began to pack his suit-cases. As he was folding one of his coats there dropped from its inside pocket a mesh of beribboned lace. It surprised him by its inappropriateness. He picked it up, and it was the nightcap that had fallen from her tousled hair as she looked from the window into that wonderful dawn of day before yesterday. What a liar that dawn had been! It was ill.u.s.trious and spendthrift of promises.

To-day's dawn was the fulfilment. That was romance, this was truth. The nightcap itself was but a snare, a broken snare.

He flung it angrily back to the floor and went on packing his bachelor things to take back into his bachelor future. The little cap lay huddled--as she had crouched when he flung her out of his arms. She had whispered, "I understand." It seemed also not to reproach him. But it was very beautiful. He could not leave it there for some servant to find. Especially not, as she had prophesied just such a result and he had promised to keep it secret. He picked it up. It was fragrant and pink and silken and lacy--as she was.

He rebuked himself for venting his spite on an inanimate object, a nightcap of all things! Thence he was led to reproach himself for condemning Persis. She, too, was knitted and bow-knotted together with the sole purpose of being exquisite. As well blame the nightcap for not being a helmet as blame Persis for not being a heroine.

He found himself caressing the cap and murmuring to it. He folded it tenderly and slipped it into the suit-case. Then he took it out and put it in the inside pocket of his waistcoat. It seemed to nestle there, and he felt a lurch in his heart, as if Persis had just crept back into it and curled up to sleep. He b.u.t.toned them in, Persis and the nightcap, and, closing his suit-cases, carried them down-stairs as one does in a hotel where there are no bell-boys.

He found Willie Enslee staring at him, rubbing his eyes. Willie had wakened only a moment before, had realized the hour with bewilderment, had tried the front door and found it still locked. He was just wondering where Forbes and Mrs. Neff had spent the night when Forbes walked down the stairs and said "Good morning!" but with a queer tone and an odd something in his eyes.

Willie drowsily answered "G'maw!" and stared harder, for Mrs. Neff came down the steps after Forbes. She was sneezing so violently that she had to cling to the banister-rail to keep from sneezing herself into s.p.a.ce.

She did not see Willie; but her appearance and her sneeze confirmed his theory. He backed out through a side door and made his way through the kitchen and up the stairway there to his own room. His mind was still fumbling with the riddle of how Forbes and Mrs. Neff got in.

He wondered what he should tell Persis when she asked him what had happened during his night-watch. He had promised her great things from his practical joke. But she never asked him, and he was so greatly relieved that he never broached the subject himself.

Breakfast was served more slipshoddily than before. Even the novelty of the experience had gone. Henceforward Winifred was converted to the vital importance of servants.

Persis was the last to appear. Mrs. Neff greeted her with:

"Persis, your eyes are all red. Have you been cry-cr-cry-ing-g-gk!" She finished with an almost decapitating sneeze. It gave Persis a hint.

"I caught cold, too," she said. "The change in the weather."

The explanation sufficed to satisfy Mrs. Neff and to convince Forbes that Persis was dangerously apt at concealments.

When the breakfast was eaten the dishes were washed and dried at Winifred's direction. But when it came to what Forbes called "policing the camp," it was unanimously voted to leave that to the gardener and his wife, or to the caretaker on his return.

The three automobiles rolled up through the rain, all shipshape for the storm, with tops hooded and side-curtains b.u.t.toned down snugly.

Forbes remembered that other rain with Persis in the taxicab. How much better the opportunity here, with the world shut out from view and two hours' cruise ahead. But he was again consigned to Mrs. Neff's car, and it was Willie Enslee who had Persis and the opportunity. Forbes could not follow even the flutter of her veil. All he could see ahead was the shoulder of Mrs. Neff's chauffeur and the windshield studded and streaked with rain.

There was no landscape to divert the mind, only his imagination of the courtship Willie would be paying to his newly announced fiancee. Forbes pictured the privileges he would exact, and Persis would not deny. And he gnashed his teeth in wrath. In the cave of Mrs. Neff's car Alice had nothing to say. She was thinking too eagerly ahead. Mrs. Neff had nothing to say. She was wondering what Alice was so cheerful about.

And so the car pushed south, with no pa.s.sing scenery to indicate progress, only the b.u.mps and teeterings, the swerves and slitherings, and the nauseating belches of noise made by the horn. Eventually the wheels ceased to run upon irregular ground and glided on asphalt. This must be New York.

At Seventy-second Street they turned off Broadway and crossed Central Park. At the eastern gate Mrs. Neff's chauffeur checked his car alongside a whale-like ma.s.s, from which Willie Enslee's voice was heard shrilly calling through the rain:

"Good-by, Mrs. Neff! Good-by Alice! Good-by Mr. Wa--er--Forbes. Awfully glad you could come. See you again. Go on to Miss Cabot's house." This last to his own driver.

Mrs. Neff and Alice cried in unison: "Good-by! Had lovely time! See you soon!"

And out of s.p.a.ce came the disembodied voice of Persis as from a grave: "Good-by, Mrs. Neff! By-by, Alice! Good-by, Mr. Forbes!"

"Good-by, P--Miss Cabot!" he called. Her voice trailed away as if it were her soul going to death, and his voice followed with an ache of despair in it. Mrs. Neff caught the pathos hovering over the cries like overtones sounding above and beyond a tone of music. She said:

"Too bad you let Willie take her away from you; it's not too late yet if you've any ambition."

Forbes smiled dully, and Alice said:

"Mother, you do say the most tactless things!"

"I had set my heart on that love-match," sighed Mrs. Neff.

"Better begin at home," said Alice, with unusual cheer.

Mrs. Neff changed the subject. "We'll get out at our house, if you don't mind, and the man can take you to your hotel."

"That's mighty kind of you," said Forbes. He helped them to alight, promised to call, and re-entered the car.

On his way to the hotel he pondered what Mrs. Neff had said. It cheered him until he realized she was still a.s.suming that he had a respectable income. If she had known the truth she would have thought him as unfit for Persis as she thought Stowe Webb unfit for Alice. She would have approved Persis' theory that such a wedding was impossible.

It is doleful travel that takes one home from an unaccomplished errand--only Forbes was not returning even to his home. His home was as shifty as a Methodist minister's. At present it was a hotel, and after that the army post.

And now those duties which he had dreaded so to resume became in his mind a refuge. He had spent a few wild days pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp of a woman's whim through a moonlit marsh, never sure which turn it would take, sure only that it would not be where he expected it to be.

After such a maddening recreation there was a kind of heaven in the thought of living according to a rigid program. At such an hour a bugle would exclaim and drums would ruffle, and the day's work would begin. At such an hour a roll-call would be due, or a sick-call, or a guard-mount call, or a headquarters call. Certain books were to be inspected and corrected; certain men were to be taught to do certain things exactly so. If there were ever a doubt, the answer was printed in a book, or in an order numbered and dated.

Everything was gloriously impersonal and objective, accurate and material.

Forbes understood the spirit of old convicts who, after cursing their penitentiaries for years, are let out into the world's turmoil, and by and by return, pleading to be let in again.

Only yesterday he had been trying to concoct schemes for postponing the date of his return to duty; now he was resolved to antic.i.p.ate it.