The Readjustment Part 21

"Oh, won't you be good to me?"

He slipped his arm about her; and suddenly he kissed her.

She suffered his kiss for only a moment; then she moved away. He let her go, and she rushed ahead to the door. When he reached the step, she had faced about.

"Consider my _feelings_, Bert Chester," she said; and the screen door slammed.

CHAPTER XIII

Just where the Santa Eliza trail commanded sight of the main travelled road, Eleanor sat on a rock watching the hill-shadows lengthen on the valley below, watching a mauve haze deepen on the dark-green tops of redwood trees. The time was approaching when she must hurry back to Mrs. Goodyear's bungalow for a dinner which she dreaded. Three weeks of perplexity had bred in her a shrinking from people. She had found excuse to wander away alone.

That lazy spring of the North woods, so like to early fall in other climates, had given her at first the healing of spirit which she needed. She wandered hither and yon as her fancy led her, following this trail, pus.h.i.+ng into that opening in the chapparal. She had come out upon the Santa Eliza trail and gained sight of the road before she realized with a kind of inner shame the way in which her feet of flesh had been tending, the direction in which she had been turning her eyes of the spirit.

Three miles away on the summit of the next ridge was the Masters ranch, and there rested the centre of her soul-storm. Bertram Chester, she knew by chance, was spending the week-end with the Masters.

She stopped by the rock, then; and immediately nature went out of her heart and the world entered. For three intolerable weeks, this heaviness had been descending upon her as by a whimsy of its own. Like the water of those cupped wheels in her little irrigation plant at the ranch, this black liquid, when it had filled its vessel to the brim, would empty automatically without touch on the spring of her will.

When this came, she would feel rested, healed, in a state of dull peace. Now the struggle of thought was on her again. As always before, it began with an arraignment of the facts in the case, a search of memory for any forgotten data which might lead to a conclusion.

The first crisis arrived on the evening when Judge Tiffany came home in a plain mood of disgust, and announced baldly:

"Well, Mattie; our young friend did everything I expected of him."

He went on quite simply with the news. Bertram Chester had left him almost without notice. But that was to be expected. The rest was the worst. Bertram had gone to Senator Northrup--as manager of his real estate interests. The name Northrup was as the name of the devil in that household. Northrup's operations included not only law and politics but latterly speculative and unprincipled ventures in business. A dying flash of his old fire woke in Judge Tiffany when he spoke as he felt about this young cub who had bitten his caressing hand.

Eleanor left the dinner table as soon as she had a fair excuse. She found herself unable to bear it. Had she remained, she must have defended him. But alone in her living room she look counsel of this treason and agreed in her heart with her uncle. The very manner in which he had done it--never a hint, never a preliminary mention of Northrup--appealed to her as the deepest treason of all.

The next evening, Bertram Chester had the superb impudence to call.

Eleanor was alone in the house that night. She hesitated when the maid brought in his name, then shook herself together and went out to face him.

He met her with an imitation of his old manner, an a.s.sumption that his change in employment would make no difference in his social relations with the Tiffanys. What words had she used to let him know her feelings? She could not remember now. But it had come hard; for the unmoral half of her perceptions was noting how big and beautiful he looked, how his blush, as of a stripling facing reproof, became him.

He pleaded, he stormed, he presumed, he pa.s.sed in and out of sulky moods, he began to defend himself against the silent attack of her look. Why hadn't he a right to do it? A man should look out for himself. But he'd have stayed and rotted with the old law office if he'd felt that she would take it that way.

"You mean more to me than success!" he said.

"No more of that, please!" she cried. After that cry, she fell into dignified silence as the only defence against the double attack from him and from the half of her that yearned for him. From her silence he himself grew silent until, with a boyish shake of his shoulders--lovable but comically inadequate--he bade her good night.

"You'll cool off!" he said at the door.

"Good bye," she responded simply.

"No, it's good night," he answered.

She woke next morning with a sense of vacancy in heart and mind.

Something was gone. She did nothing for a week but justify herself for calling that something back, or nerve herself to let it go.

On the one hand, her mind told her that he had done the ungrateful, the treasonable thing. It did not matter that he might have done it through mere lack of finer perception. That was part of his intolerability. On the other hand, her heart ran like a shuttle through a web of his smiles, his illuminations, the s.h.i.+ver, as from a weapon suddenly drawn, of his unexpected presence, even his look when he stood at the door to receive her final good bye. The woof of that web was the sense of vacancy in her--the unconquerable feeling that a thing by which she had lived was utterly lost.

And where would he go if she let him go? Ah, the inn was ready, the room was swept. He would go inevitably to Kate Waddington. That would be hard to bear. Sense of justice was strong in Eleanor; she realized the ungenerosity of this emotion while she continued to harbor it. But was there not justice in it after all? Kate Waddington could grasp, could guide, only the worst part of him. Kate Waddington had in her no guidance for the better Bertram Chester, who must be in him somewhere.

She hugged this justification to herself. Perhaps it was not right to let him go; perhaps her heart and her duty were as one.

A c.o.c.k quail came out from the chapparal, saw her, and bobbed back; the feet of his flock rustled the twigs. Now he was raising his spring call--"muchacho!" "muchacho!" Clearer and slighter came the call of his mate--"muchacho!" "muchacho!" A ground squirrel shook the laurel-bush at her side, so that its buds brushed her shoulder. The c.o.c.k quail came back into the pathway, slanted his wise head, plumed in splendor, to find whether she were friend or enemy, saw that she made no move, and fell to foraging among the leaves. She had sat so long and so quietly that the little people of the ground were accepting her as part of the landscape. She began dimly to perceive these things, to take joy in them. And then they colored her mood.

What was she but a young, female thing, a vessel of life universal?

What was her attraction toward Bertram Chester but a part of the great, holy force which made and moved hills, trees, the little people of hills and trees? What was she, to have resisted the impulse in her because of a few imperfections, a little lack of development in civilized morals?

Her perception of nature died away, but the slant which it had given her thoughts persisted.

When she felt and spoke as she had done that night in the Man Far Low, she was unwholesome, super-refined, super-civilized--she was proceeding by the hothouse morals which she had learned in books and in European studios. When she felt as she did on that first night under the bay tree, she was wholesome and eternally right.

How much greater in her, after all, if she had followed the call, had taken him for the man in him, to develop, to guide as a woman may guide! Ah, by what token could she call him back?

Her gaze of meditation had been fixed on the road below. She had been half-consciously aware for some time of a figure which lost itself behind one of the hill-turns, reappeared again, became wholly visible in a band of late afternoon suns.h.i.+ne.

It was Bertram Chester. The vision came without any shock of first surprise. He had been so much part of her thoughts that it seemed the most natural presence in the world. He was swinging along the road in her direction, heaving his ma.s.sive shoulders with every stride; he stopped, took off his cap, wiped his forehead with a motion which, seen even at that distance, conveyed all his masculinity, and strode on again.

Would he keep on along the road, or would he turn toward her up the Santa Eliza trail? And if he did keep on, would those roving eyes of his perceive her sitting there? Why not leave everything to that chance? If he looked up and saw her there on her rock, if he turned into the trail and pa.s.sed her--that was a sign. She found herself, nevertheless, humanly striving to cheat fortune and the G.o.ds by fixing all her mind and eyes upon him, as though she would hypnotize him into looking up.

But her mind and eyes had no power over him. He kept on with his even gait until he was lost behind the clump of trees which marked the branching of the trail. One chance was gone; she might not know the issue of the other until time and waiting informed her. How long before she should know? She crouched low on the rock and tried not to think.

The twigs and pebbles crunched under heavy feet; the branches shook and rustled; a blue sweater became visible in the shadows. She looked away.

"Well, I'll be--eternally blowed!" His voice came out like an explosion. Much as she expected it, she started. When, after a moment, she dared look up, he stood over her.

"Are you going to run away?" he asked. His voice, with its ripple like laughter, showed that he expected nothing of the kind.

"No," she answered, superfluously.

He seemed, then, to feel the necessity for explanation.

"I hadn't an idea--"

"Neither had I." She broke in to antic.i.p.ate his thought. Each was lying a little; and both knew it. She rushed to commonplaces.

"Uncle Edward and I are at Mrs. Goodyear's bungalow over Sunday. It's our last expedition out of town before we go down to the ranch."

"Well, I must have had a hunch! I'm at the Masters ranch over Sunday.

I got a freak idea to take a walk alone. It sure was a hunch!" Soft sentiment tinged his voice. She answered nothing.

"A hunch that you were alone here, n.o.body to interrupt--say, are you still sore on me?"

"I--I didn't run away--"

"Oh, I knew you'd get over it. I think even the Judge will get over it. I don't believe he'd care anyhow, if it wasn't for his old grouch on Senator Northrup."