The Brightener Part 24

He looked somewhat startled.

"I always was a procrastinator," he said. "Come into my study, won't you?"

Still holding me by the hand he led me like a child into the room out of which he had shot--an adorable room, with a beamed ceiling and diamond-paned windows looking under trees to the river. In front of his desk--where he could glance up for inspiration as he wrote--was a life-sized portrait of June, by Sargent; June in the gray dress and hat she had worn the day she promised--no, _offered_--to marry Robert.

"You see!" he said, with a slight gesture toward the picture, with its bunched red-bronze hair and brilliant eyes of blue, "this is where I sit and work."

"And where used Joyce Arnold to sit and work?" something in me blurted out.

The man winced--just visibly--no more. His eyes flashed to mine a kind of challenge. There was sudden anger in it, and pleading as well. Then, of course, I _knew_--all I had come to find out. And he must have known that I knew!

But I'd come for a great deal more than finding out.

I don't think I'm a coward, yet I was dreadfully frightened--in a blue funk of doing or saying the wrong thing at a moment when it might be "now or never." My knees felt like badly poached eggs with no toast to repose upon. I lost my head a little, and what I did I didn't do really, because it did itself.

I looked as scared as I felt, and gasped: "Oh, _Robert_!" (I'd never called him "Robert" to his face before; only behind his back.)

My face of fright deflected his rage. You can't be furious with a quivering jelly! But he didn't speak. The challenge in his eyes softened to reproach. Then he looked at the portrait.

"Miss Arnold sat where she, too, could see June," he answered quietly.

"Poor, poor Joyce!" I said. "And poor you!"

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Why, I mean--and I, too, can see June while I say it!--I mean that you are making a terrible mistake. Oh, Robert Lorillard, don't pretend not to understand. We're not two strangers fencing! I'm not just a bold creature rus.h.i.+ng in where angels fear to tread. I know!--I _have_ rushed in, but I'm not bold. I'm frightened to death. Only--I had to come.

Every day I see that glorious girl breaking her heart. She hasn't said a word, or looked a look, or wept a weep. She's a _soldier_. But she's like a lost soul turned out of Paradise. The more I got to know of her the more I felt you _couldn't_ have sent her away and found another place for her because you were bored. So I came to see you. And you needn't mind my knowing the real reason you sent her out of your house.

I won't tell her. If any one does that it must be you. And it _ought_ to be you. You love each other. You belong to each other. You'd be divinely happy together. You're wretched apart."

"_You_ say that?" Robert exclaimed, when by sheer force of lungs I'd made him hear me through. "You--June's friend!"

"Yes. It's because I was her friend, and knew her so well, that I want you to listen to your own heart; for if you don't, you'll break Joyce Arnold's. June wouldn't want you to sacrifice your two lives on the shrine of her memory. She loved happiness, herself. And she liked other people to be happy."

Robert's eyes lit, whether with joy or anger I couldn't tell.

"You think June would be willing to have me marry another woman?" he said.

"Yes, I do, if you loved the woman. And you do love her. It would be useless to tell me you don't."

"I'm not going to tell you I don't. I've tried not to. I hoped she didn't care."

"She does. Desperately, frightfully. I do believe it's killing her."

"G.o.d! And she saved my life. Elizabeth, I'd give mine for her, a dozen times over, but----"

"What she needs is for you to give it _to_ her, not for her: give it once and for all, to have and to hold while your heart's in your body."

I fired advice at him like bullets from a Maxim gun, and every bullet reached its billet. I was so carried away by my wish for joy to rise from tragedy that I hardly knew what I said, yet I felt that I had caught Lorillard and carried him with me. The next thing I definitely knew with my mere brain, I was sitting down with elbows on Robert's desk, facing him as he leaned toward me. My whole self was a listening Ear, while he told--as a man hypnotized might tell the hypnotizer--the tale of his acquaintance with Joyce Arnold.

I'd already learned from his letter and from words she had let drop that Joyce had nursed him in a hospital in France, when she was "doing her bit" as a V. A. D. But she had been silent about the life-saving episode, which had won for her a decoration and Robert Lorillard's deep admiration and grat.i.tude.

It seemed that during an air raid, when German machines were bombing the hospital, Joyce had in her ward three officers just operated upon, and too weak to walk. A bomb fell and killed one of these as Joyce and another nurse were about to move his cot into the next ward. Then, in a sudden horror of darkness and noise of destroying aeroplanes, she had carried Robert in her arms to a place of comparative safety. After that she had returned to her own ward and got the other man who lay in his cot, though her fellow nurse had been struck down, wounded or dead.

"How she did it I've never known, or she either," said Lorillard, dreaming back into the past. "She's tall and strong, of course, and at that time I was reduced to a living skeleton. Still, even in my bones I'm a good deal bigger than she is. The weight must have been enough to crush her, yet she carried me from one ward to another, in the dark, when the light had been struck out. And the wound in my side never bled a drop. It was like a miracle."

"'Spect she loved you lots already, without quite knowing it," I told him. "There've been miracles going on in the world ever since Christ, and they always will go on, because love works them, and _only_ love. At least, that's _my_ idea! And I don't believe G.o.d would have let Joyce work that one, the way she did, if He hadn't meant her love to wake love in you."

"If I could think so," said Robert, "it would make all the difference; for I've been fighting my own heart with the whole strength of my soul, and it's been a hard struggle. I felt it would be such a hideous treachery to June--my beautiful June, who gave herself to me as a G.o.ddess might to a mortal!--the meanest ingrat.i.tude to let another woman take her place when her back is turned--even such a splendid woman as Joyce Arnold."

"I know just how you feel," I humoured him. "You remember, I was with June when she threw herself into your arms and offered to marry you. You were in love with her, and you'd never dreamed till that minute there was any hope. But that was a different love from this, I'm sure, because no two girls could be more different, one from another, than June Dana and Joyce Arnold. Your love for June was just glorious romance. Perhaps, if she'd lived, and you and she had pa.s.sed years together as husband and wife, the wonderful colours of the glory would have faded a little. She tired so of every-day things. But Joyce is born to be the companion of a man she loves, and she would never tire or let him tire. You and June hardly had enough time together to realize that you were married. And it's over three years and a half since she--since the G.o.ds who loved her let her die young. She can't come to this world again. She basked in joy herself; and she won't grudge it to you, if she knows. And for you, joy and Joyce are one, for the rest of both your lives."

Lorillard sprang up suddenly and seized my hands.

"Portia come back to life and judgment--I believe you're right!" he cried. "Take me to town with you. Take me to Joyce!"

As we stood, thrilled, hand in hand, the door opened. The same servant who had let me in announced acidly: "_Another_ lady to see you, sir."

The lady in question had come so near the door that she must have seen us before we could start apart.

I knew her at first glance: Opal Fawcett.

CHAPTER III

THE CHAIR AT THE SAVOY

It was five years since I'd seen Opal Fawcett--for the first and last time, that day I went to her house with June.

Then she had gleamed wraithlike in the purple dusk of her purple room, with its purple-shaded lamps. Now she stood in full daylight, against the frank background of a country cottage wall. Yet she was still a mere film of a woman. She seemed to carry her own eerie effect with her wherever she went, as the heroines of operas are accompanied by their special spot-light and _leitmotif_.

Whether the servant was untrained, or spiteful because a long-standing rule had been broken in my favour, I can't tell. But I'm sure that, if he'd been given half a chance, Robert would have made some excuse not to see Opal. There she was, however, on the threshold, and looking like one of those "Dwellers on the Threshold" you read of in psychic books.

As he had no invisible cloak, and couldn't crawl under a sofa, poor Robert was obliged to say pleasantly, "How do you do?"

Standing back a little, trying to look about two inches tall instead of five foot ten, I watched the greeting. I wanted to judge from it, if I could, to what extent the old acquaintance had been kept up. But I might have saved myself waste of brain tissue. Robert was anxious to leave no mystery.

"Princess," he said, hastily, when he had taken his guest's slim hand in its gray glove, "Princess, I think you must have heard of Miss Opal Fawcett."

"Oh, yes. And we have met--once," I replied.

Opal's narrow gray eyes turned to me--not without reluctance I thought.

"I remember well," she murmured, in her plaintive voice. "I never forget a face. You were Miss Courtenaye then. Lately I've been hearing of you from Miss Arnold, who used to be my secretary, and is now yours."

I was thankful she didn't bring in _June's_ name!