Part 5

"I am leaving it to you to decide whether you will show her this. I want her to see it, because it seems to me that she has a right to decide between the life that I can offer her and the life she must live if she marries Anthony Peak. But it all involves a point of honor which I feel that I am not unprejudiced enough to decide. So to-morrow I shall go away. I shall sail far in the two months that I shall give myself before I come back. And when I come, you will let me know whether I am to turn once more to the trackless seas, or stay to find my happiness."

This letter when I had first read it had stirred me profoundly, as I think it must have stirred any man or woman who has yearned amid the complexities of modern existence to find some land of dreams. Even to my island, comparatively untouched by the problems of existence in crowded centers, come the echoes of discord, of social unrest, of political upheavals, of commercial greed. In this hidden land of Olaf's would be life stripped of its sordidness, love free from the blight of cynicism and disillusion--faith, firm in its nearness to God and the wonder of His works. I envied Olaf his hidden land as I envied Nancy her opportunity. My blood is the same as Nancy's, and I love the sea. And as we grow older our souls adventure!

When Nancy came in to me, she had put on her white _peignoir_, and she had Olaf's letter in her hand.

"Ducky," she said, and her voice shook, "I have read it twice--and--I shouldn't dare to think he was in earnest."

"Why not?"

"I should want to go, Elizabeth."

"And leave the world behind you?"

"Oh, I haven't any world. It might be different if mother were alive, or daddy. There'd be only you, Ducky, my dear, dear Ducky." She caught my hand and held it.

"And Anthony--"

"Anthony would get over it"--sharply. "Wouldn't he, Elizabeth? You know he would."

"My dear, I don't know."

"But I know. If I hadn't been in his life, Mimi Sears would have been, just as Bob Needham would have been in my life if it hadn't been for Anthony. There isn't any question between Anthony and me of--one woman for one man. You know that, Elizabeth. But with Olaf--if he doesn't have me, there will be no one else--ever. He--he will go sailing on--alone--"

"My dear, how do you know?"

She flung herself down beside me, a white rose, all fragrance. "I don't know"--she began to cry. "How silly I am," she sobbed against my shoulder. "I--I don't know anything about him, do I, Elizabeth--? But it would be wonderful to be loved--like that."

All through the night she slept on my arm, with her hand curled in the hollow of my neck as she had slept as a child. But I did not sleep. My mind leaped forward into the future, and I saw my world without her.

* * * * *

Nancy stayed with me through September. Anthony's holiday was up the day after the garden party, and he went back to Boston, keeping touch with Nancy in the modern way by wire, special delivery, and long-distance telephone.

It was on a stormy night with wind and beating rain that Nancy told me Anthony was insisting that she marry him in December.

"But I can't, Elizabeth. I am going to write to him to-night."

"When will it be?"

"Who knows? I--I'm not ready. If he can't wait--he can let me go."

She did not stay to listen to my comment on her mutiny--she swept out of the library and sat down at the piano in the other room, making a picture of herself between the tall white candles which illumined the dark mahogany and the mulberry brocades.

I leaned back in my chair and watched her, her white fingers straying over the keys, her thin blue sleeves flowing back from her white arms. Now and then I caught a familiar melody among the chords, and once I was aware of the beat and the swing of the waves in the song which Olaf had once sung.

She did not finish it. She rose and wandered to the window, parting the curtain and looking out into the streaming night.

"It's an awful storm, Ducky."

"Yes, my dear. On nights like this I always think of the old days when the men were on the sea, and the women waited."

"I'd rather think of my man on the sea, even if I had to wait for him, Ducky, than shut up in office, stagnating."

The door-bell rang suddenly. It was a dreadful night for any one to be out, but Anita, undisturbed and crisp in her white apron and cap, came through the hall. A voice asked a question, and the blood began to pound in my body. Things were blurred for a bit, and when my vision cleared--I saw Olaf in the shine of the candles in the room beyond, with Nancy crushed to him, his bright head bent, the sheer blue of her frock infolding him--the archway of the door framing them like the figures of saints in the stained glass of a church window!

I knew then that I had lost her. But she did not yield at once.

"I love him, of course. But a woman couldn't do a thing like that," was the way she put it to me the next morning.

I felt, however, that Olaf would master her. Will was set against will, mind against mind. And at last she showed him the way. "A thousand years ago you would have carried me off."

I can see him now as he caught the idea and laughed at her. "Whether you go of your own accord or I carry you, you will be happy." He lifted her in his strong hands as if she were a feather, held her, kissed her, and flashed a glance at me. "You see how easy it would be, and there's a chaplain on board."

There is not much more to tell. Nancy went down one morning to the beach for her bath--and the fog swallowed her up. I have often wondered whether she planned it, or whether, knowing that she would be there, he had come in his launch and had borne her away struggling, but not, I am sure, unwilling. However it happened, the cloak went with her, and I like to think that she was held in his arms, wrapped in it, when they reached the ship.

I like to think, too, of my Nancy in the glowing room with the wolfskins and the strange old tapestry--and the storms beating helpless against her happiness.

I like to think of her as safe in that hidden land, where most of us fain would follow her--the mistress of that guarded mansion, the wife of a young sea god, the mother of a new race.

But, most of all, I like to think of the children. And I have but one wish for a long life, which might otherwise weigh upon me, that the years may bring back to the world those prophets from a hidden land, those young voices crying from the wilderness--the children of Olaf and of Nancy Greer.

WHITE BIRCHES

I

A woman, who under sentence of death could plan immediately for a trip to the circus, might seem at first thought incredibly light-minded.

You had, however, to know Anne Dunbar and the ten years of her married life to understand. Her husband was fifteen years her senior, and he had few illusions. He had fallen in love with Anne because of a certain gay youth in her which had endured throughout the days of a dreadful operation and a slow convalescence. He had been her surgeon, and, propped up in bed, Anne's gray eyes had shone upon him, the red-gold curls of her cropped hair had given her a look of almost boyish beauty, and this note of boyishness had been emphasized by the straight slenderness of the figure outlined beneath the white covers.

Anne had married Ridgeley Dunbar because she loved him. And love to Anne had been all fire and flame and spirit. It did not take her long to learn that her husband looked upon love and life as matters of flesh and blood--and bones. By degrees his materialism imposed itself upon Anne. She admired Ridgeley immensely. She worshiped, in fact, the wonder of his day's work. He healed the sick, he cured the halt and blind, and he scoffed at Anne's superstitions--"I can match every one of your Bible miracles. There's nothing to it, my dear. Death is death and life is life--so make the most of it."

Anne tried to make the most of it. But she found it difficult. In the first place her husband was a very busy man. He seemed to be perfectly happy with his cutting people up, and his medical books, and the articles which he wrote about the intricate clockwork inside of us which ticks off the hours from birth to death. Now and then he went out to the theatre with his wife or to dine with friends. But, as a rule, she went alone. She had a limousine, a chauffeur, a low swung touring car--and an electric. Her red hair was still wonderful, and she dressed herself quite understanding in grays and whites and greens. If she did not wear habitually her air of gay youth, it was revived in her now and then when something pleased or excited her. And her eyes would shine as they had shone in the hospital when Ridgeley Dunbar had first bent over her bed.

They shone on Christopher Carr when he came home from the war. He was a friend of her husband. Or rather, as a student in the medical school, he had listened to the lectures of the older man, and had made up his mind to know him personally, and had thus, by sheer persistence, linked their lives together.

Anne had never met him. He had been in India When she had married Ridgeley, and then there had been a few years in Egypt where he had studied some strange germ, of which she could never remember the name. He had plenty of money, hence he was not tied to a practice. But when the war began, he had offered his services, and had made a great record. "He is one of the big men of the future," Ridgeley Dunbar had said.

But when Christopher came back with an infected arm, which might give him trouble, it was not the time to talk of futures. He was invited to spend July at the Dunbars' country home in Connecticut, and Ridgeley brought him out at the week-end.

The Connecticut estate consisted of a rambling stone house, an old-fashioned garden, and beyond the garden a grove of white birches.

"What a heavenly place," Christopher said, toward the end of dinner; "how did you happen to find it?"

"Oh, Anne did it. She motored for weeks, and she bought it because of the birches."

Anne's eyes were shining. "I'll show them to you after dinner."

She had decided at once that she liked Christopher. He still wore his uniform, and had the look of a soldier. But it wasn't that--it was the things he had been saying ever since the soup was served. No one had talked of the war as he talked of it. There had been other doctors whose minds had been on arms and legs--amputated; on wounds and shell shock--And there had been a few who had sentimentalized. But Christopher had seemed neither to resent the frightfulness nor to care about the moral or spiritual consequences. He had found in it all a certain beauty of which he spoke with enthusiasm--"A silver dawn, and a patch of Blue Devils like smoke against it--;" ... "A blood-red sunset, and a lot of airmen streaming across--"

He painted pictures, so that Anne saw battles as if a great brush had splashed them on an invisible canvas. There were just four at the table--the two men, Anne, and her second cousin, Jeanette Ware, who lived the year round in the Connecticut house, and was sixty and slightly deaf, but who wore modern clothes and had a modern mind.

It was not yet dark, and the light of the candles in sconces and on the table met the amethyst light that came through, the wide-flung lattice. Anne's summer gown was something very thin in gray, and she wore an Indian necklace of pierced silver beads. Christopher had sent it to her as a wedding-present and she had always liked it.

When they rose from the table, Christopher said, "Now for the birches."

Somewhere in the distance the telephone rang, and a maid came in to say that Dr. Dunbar was wanted. "Don't wait for me," he said, "I'll follow you."

Jeanette Ware hated the night air, and took her book to the lamp on the screened porch, and so it happened that Anne and Christopher came alone to the grove where the white bodies of the birches shone like slender nymphs through the dusk. A little wind shook their leaves.

"No wonder," said Christopher, looking down at Anne, "that you wanted this--but tell me precisely why."

She tried to tell him, but found it difficult. "I seem to find something here that I thought I had lost."

"What things?"

"Well--guardian angels--do you believe in them?" She spoke lightly, as if it were not in the least serious, but he felt that it was serious.

"I believe in all beautiful things--"

"I used to think when I was a little girl that they were around me when I was asleep--

'Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John-- Bless the bed that I lie on--'"

her laugh was a bit breathless--"but I don't believe in them any more. Ridgeley doesn't, you know. And it does seem silly--"

"Oh, no, it isn't--"

"Ridgeley feels that it is a bit morbid--and perhaps he is right. He says that we must eat and drink and--be merry," she flung out her hands with a little gesture of protest, "but he really isn't merry--"

"I see. He just eats and drinks?" He smiled at her.

"And works. And his work is--wonderful."

They sat down on a stone bench which had been hewn out of solid gray rock. "I wish Ridgeley had time to play," Anne said; "it would be nice for both of us--"

The amethyst light had gone, and the dusk descended. Anne's gray dress was merged into the gray of the rock. She seemed just voice, and phantom outline, and faint rose fragrance. Christopher recognized the scent. He had sent her a precious vial in a sandalwood box. Nothing had seemed too good for the wife of his old friend Dunbar.

"Life for you and Ridgeley," he told her, "should be something more than work or play--it should be infinite adventure."

"Yes. But Ridgeley hasn't time for adventure."

"Oh, he thinks he hasn't--"

As Christopher talked after that, Anne was not sure that he was in earnest. He complained that romance had fallen into disrepute. "With all the modern stories--you know the formula--an ounce of sordidness, a flavor of sensationalism, a dash of sex--" One had to look back for the real thing--Aucassin and Nicolette, and all the rest. "That's why I haven't married."

"Well, I have often wondered."

"If I loved a woman, I should want to make her life all glow and color--and mine--with her--"

Anne's eyes were shining. What a big pleasant boy he was. He seemed so young. He had a way of running his fingers up through his hair. She was aware of the gesture in the dark. Yes, she liked him. And she felt suddenly gay and light-hearted, as she had felt in the days when she first met Ridgeley.

They talked until the stars shone in the tips of the birch trees. Ridgeley did not come, and when they went back to the house, they found that he had been called to New York on an urgent case. He would not return until the following Friday.

Anne and Christopher were thus left together for a week to get acquainted. With only old Jeanette Ware to play propriety.

II

It did not take Christopher long to decide that Ridgeley was no longer in love with his wife. "Of course he would call it love. But he could live just as well without her. He has made a machine of himself."

He spoke to Dunbar one night about Anne. "Do you think she is perfectly well?"

"Why not?"

"There's a touch of breathlessness when we walk. Are you sure about her heart?"

"She has never been strong--" and that had seemed to be the end of it.

But it was not the end of it for Christopher. He watched Anne closely, and once when they climbed a hill together and she gave out, he carried her to the top. He managed to get his ear against her heart, and what he heard drained the blood from his face.

As for Anne, she thought how strong he was--and how fair his hair was with the sun upon it, for he had tucked his cap in his pocket.

That night Christopher again spoke to Ridgeley. "Anne's in a bad way." He told of the walk to the top of the hill.

Ridgeley listened this time, and the next day he took Anne down into his office, and did things to her. "But I don't see why you are doing all this," she complained, as he stuck queer instruments in his ears, and made her draw long breaths while he listened.

"Christopher says you get tired when you walk."

"Well, I do. But there's nothing really the matter, is there?"

There was a great deal the matter, but there was no hint of it in his manner. If she had not been his wife, he would probably have told her the truth--that she had a few months, perhaps a few years ahead of her. He was apt to be frank with his patients. But he was not frank with Anne. He had intended to tell Christopher at once. But Christopher was away for a week.

In the week that he was separated from her, Christopher learned that he loved Anne; that he had been in love with her from the moment that she had stood among the birches--like one of them in her white slenderness--and had talked to him of guardian angels;--"_Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John_!"

He did not believe in saints, nor in the angels whose wings seemed to enfold Anne, but he believed in beauty--and Anne's seemed lighted from within, like an alabaster lamp.

Yet she was very human--and the girl in her and the boy in him had met in the weeks that he had spent with her. They had found a lot of things to do--they had fished in shallow brown streams, they had ridden through miles of lovely country. They had gone forth in search of adventure, and they had found it; in cherries on a tree by the road, and he had climbed the tree and had dropped them down to her, and she had hung them over her ears--He had milked a cow in a pasture as they passed, and they had drunk it with their sandwiches, and had tied up a bill in Anne's fine handkerchief and had knotted it to the halter of the gentle, golden-eared Guernsey.

But they had found more than adventure--they had found romance--shining upon them everywhere. "If I were a gipsy to follow the road, and she could follow it with me," Christopher meditated as he sat in the train on his way back to Anne.

But there was Anne's husband, and Christopher's friend--and more than all there were all the specters of modern life--all the hideous wheels which must turn if Anne were ever to be his--treachery to Ridgeley--the divorce court--and then, himself and Anne, living the aftermath, of it all, facing, perhaps, disillusion--

"Oh, not _that_," Christopher told himself, "she'd never grow less--never anything less than she is--if she could once--care--"

For he did not know whether Anne cared or not. He might guess as he pleased--but there had not been a word between them.

Once more the thought flashed, "If I were a gipsy to follow the road--"

As his train sped through the countryside, he became aware of flaming bill-boards--a circus was showing in the towns--the fences fairly blazed with golden chariots, wild beasts, cheap gods and goddesses, clowns in frilled collars and peaked hats. He remembered a glorious day that he had spent as a boy!

"I'll take Anne," was his sudden decision.

He laughed to himself, and spent the rest of the way in seeing her at it. They would drink pink lemonade, and there would be pop-corn balls--the entrancing smell of sawdust--the beat of the band. He hoped there would be a tom-tom, and some of the dark people from the Far East.

He reached his destination at seven o'clock. Dunbar met him at the station. Anne sat with her husband, and Jeanette was in the back seat. Christopher had, therefore, a side view of Anne as she turned a little that she might talk to him. The glint of her bright hair under her gray sports hat, the light of welcome in her eyes--!

"I am going to take you to the circus to-morrow. Ridgeley, you'll go too?"

Dunbar shook his head. "I've got to get back to town in the morning. And I'm not sure that the excitement will be good for Anne."

"Why not?" quickly. "Aren't you well, Anne?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "Ridgeley seems to think I'm not. But the circus can't hurt me."

Nothing more was said about it. Christopher decided to ask Ridgeley later. But the opportunity did not come until Anne had gone up-stairs, and Dunbar and Christopher were smoking a final cigar on the porch.

"What's the matter with her?" Christopher asked.

Dunbar told him, "She can't get well."

III

Anne, getting ready for bed, on the evening of Christopher's arrival, felt unaccountably tired. His presence had been, perhaps, a bit over-stimulating. It was good to have him back. She scarcely dared admit to herself how good. After dinner she and Ridgeley and Christopher had walked down to the grove of birches. There had been a new moon, and she and Ridgeley had sat on the stone bench with Christopher at their feet. She had leaned her head against her husband's shoulder, and he had put his arm about her in the dark and had drawn her to him. He was rarely demonstrative, and his tenderness had to-night for some reason hurt her. She had learned to do without it.

She had talked very little, but Christopher had talked a great deal. She had been content to listen. He really told such wonderful things--he gave her to-night the full story of her silver beads, and how they had been filched from an ancient temple--and he had bought them from the thief. "Until I saw you wear them, I always had a feeling that they ought to go back to the temple--to the god who had perhaps worn them for a thousand years. If I had known which god, I might have carried them back. But the thief wouldn't tell me."

"It would have done no good to carry them back," Ridgeley had said, "and they are nice for Anne." His big hand had patted his wife's shoulder.