PART 4 - CHAPTER 3

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_ PART FOUR. IN WHICH THE LOVELY LADY MAKES A FINAL APPEARANCE

CHAPTER 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 _any_thing 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."

"If you feel that," Peter snatched at encouragement, "that it is really the big thing for her--what I'm sure you can't help knowing what I mean--what I hope."

"What _I_ feel----? After all, it's _her_ feeling, my dear Mr. Weatheral, that we have to take into account. It wouldn't be fair for me to attempt to answer to you for that!"

"And of course if I can't _make_ her feel...." He did not trust himself to a conclusion.

They found, however, when the road issued on the coast opposite the great bursting bulks of spray, that Eunice's desertion and the extenuation of it to which they had lent themselves, had put them out of the mood for the high wind and warring surf of the Reef. Accordingly they turned aside at Peter's suggestion to have tea at a little country inn farther back in the hills, where the pound of the sea was reduced to a soft, organ-booming bass to which the shrill note of the needles countered in perfect tune. The tea garden, the favourite port of call for afternoon drives from the resorts hereabouts, lay back of the hostelry in a narrow, ferny glen from which springs issued. As Peter led the way up its rocky stair, they could hear the light laughter of a party just rising from one of the round rustic tables. The group descending poured past them a summer-coloured runnel down the little glen, and left them face to face with Eunice, who had lingered, her dress caught on a point of the rustic chair.

"Mamma--you!" She looked trapped, accused, though sheer astonishment held the others dumb. "We finished the game----" she began and stopped short; after all, her manner seemed to say, why shouldn't she have tea there with her friends? She made as if to sweep past after them but Mrs. Goodward never moved from the narrow path. She was more embarrassed, Peter saw, than her daughter, and as plainly at bay.

"Now that we are here----" she began in her turn.

"Now that you have followed me here," the girl rang out, "what is it that you have to say to me?" She was white and a bright flame spot showed on either cheek.

"I--oh," the elder woman by an effort drew the remnant of the grand manner about her; "it is Mr. Weatheral, I think, who might have something to say." She caught the occasion as it were on the wing. Peter heard the quick breath behind him with which she grasped it. "Now that you are here, however, I'll tell your party that you will be driving home with us." She gathered up her draperies and was gone down the path she had come before either of the others thought to stop her. Eunice had not made a move to do so. She stood clasping the back of the chair from which she had freed her dress, and looked across it mutinously at Peter.

"And what," she quivered, "has Mr. Weatheral to say to me?"

"There is nothing," he told her, "that I would say to you, Miss Goodward, unless you wished to hear it." His magnanimity shamed her a little.

"I broke my engagement to you," she admitted, "broke it to come here with--the others. I haven't any excuse to offer you."

"And when," Peter demanded of her, "have I asked any other excuse of you for anything that you chose to do except that you chose it. There _was_ something I wished to say to you, that I hoped for a more auspicious occasion...." He hurried on with it suddenly as a thing to be got over with at all hazards. "It was to say that I hoped you might not find it utterly beyond you to think of marrying me." He saw her sway a little, holding still to her chair, and moved toward her a step, dizzy himself with the sudden onset of emotion. "But now that it is said, if it distresses you we will say no more about it." She waved him back for a moment without altering her strained, trapped attitude.

"Have you said this to mamma? And has she--has she said anything to you? About me, I mean; how I might take it, or anything?"

"She said that she couldn't answer for you; that it was your feeling that must be taken into account. She put me, so to speak, on my own feet in so far as _that_ was concerned." He waited for her answer to that, and none coming, though he saw that she grew a little easier, he went on presently. "There is, however, much that I feel ought to be said about my feeling for you, what it means to me, what I hoped----" She stopped him with a gesture; he could see her lovely manner coming back to her as quiet comes to the surface of a smitten pool.

"That--one may take for granted, may one not? Since you _have_ asked me, that the feeling that goes to it is all I have a right to ask?"

"Quite, quite," he assured her. "It may be," he managed to smile upon her here for the easing of her sweet discomposure, "it may very easily be that I was thinking too much of my pleasure in saying it."

"It would, then, be a pleasure?" She had the air of snatching at that as something concrete, graspable.

"It would, and it wouldn't. I mean if you were bothered by it. You could take everything for granted, everything."

"Even," she insisted, "to the point of taking it for granted that you would take things for granted from me: that you wouldn't expect anything--any expression, anything more than just accepting you?"

"Ah!" he cried, the wonder, the amazement of success breaking upon him. "If you accepted me what more _could_ I expect." He had clasped the hand which she held out to check him and held it against his heart firmly that she shouldn't see how he trembled.

"I haven't, you know," she reminded him, "but if I was sure--very sure that you wouldn't ask any more of me than thinking, I ... might think about it." She was trembling now, though her hand was so cold, and suddenly a tear gathered and dropped, splashing her fine wrist.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he cried, moved more than he had thought it possible to be; "you can be perfectly sure that there will never be anything between you and me that shall not be exactly as you wish." He suited his action to the word, kissing the wet splash and letting her go.

"Why, then," she recovered herself with the smile that was now strangely like her mother's, sweeter for being smiled a little awry, "the best thing you can do is to find poor mamma and let us give her a cup of tea." _

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