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Side of the Angels

<h2>CHAPTER XIX</h2> By the time Thor and Lois had returned from their honeymoon in early May the line of battle in Claude's soul had been extended. The Claude who might be was fighting hard to get the better of the Claude who was. It was, nevertheless, the Claude who was that spoke in response to the elder brother's timid inquiry concerning the situation as it affected Rosie Fay. Hardly knowing how to frame his question, Thor had put it awkwardly. "Done anything yet?" "No." In the little smoking-room that had been Len's and was now Thor's—Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby having retired already to their petit trou pas cher—they puffed at their cigars in silence. It had been the wish of both bride and bridegroom that Claude should dine with them on their second evening at home. Thor had man[oe]uvered for these few minutes alone with his brother in order to get the information he was now seeking. For his own assurance there were things he needed to know. He wanted to feel convinced that he hadn't acted hastily, that in marrying he had made no mistake. There would be proof of that when he saw that Claude and Rosie had found their happiness in each other, and that in what he himself had done—there had been no other way! He wished that Uncle Sim's pietistic refrain wouldn't hum so persistently in his memory: "Oh, tarry thou the Lord's leisure!" He didn't believe in a Lord's leisure; but neither did he want to be afraid of his own haste. He had grown so self-conscious on the subject that it took courage for him to say: "Isn't it getting to be about time?" Claude drew the cigar from his lips and stared obliquely. "Look here, old chap; I thought I was to put this thing through in my own way?" "Oh, quite so; quite so." Claude's thrust went home when he said, "I don't see why you should be in such a hurry about it." He followed this by a question that Thor found equally pertinent: "Why the devil are you?" "Because I thought you were." "Well, even if I am, I don't see any reason for rushing things." "Oh, would you call it—rushing?" He threw off, carelessly, "I hear you go a good deal to the Darlings'!" "Not any oftener than they ask me." "Well, then, they ask you pretty often, don't they?" "I suppose they do it when they feel inclined. I haven't counted the number of occasions." "No; but I dare say Rosie has." "I'm not a fool, Thor. I don't talk to Rosie about the Darlings." "Nor to the Darlings about her. That's the point. At least, it's one of the two points; and both are important. It's no more unjust for Rosie Fay to know nothing of Elsie Darling than it is for Elsie Darling to know nothing of Rosie Fay." "Oh, rot, Thor!" Claude sprang to his feet, knocking off the ash of his cigar into the fireplace. "What do you think I'm up to?" "I don't know. And what I'm afraid of is that you don't know." "If you think I mean to leave Rosie in the lurch—" "I don't think you mean it—no!" "Then, if you think I'd do it—" "The surest way not to do it is to—do the other thing." "I'll do the other thing when I'm ready—not before." "Humph! That's just what I thought would happen." "And this is just what I thought would happen—that because you'd put up that confounded money you'd try to make me feel I was bought. Well, I'm not bought. See? Rather than be bribed into doing what I mean to do anyhow I'll not do it at all." "Oh, if you mean to do it anyhow—" Claude rounded on his brother indignantly. "Say, Thor, do you think I'm going to be a damn scoundrel?" "Do you think you'd be a damn scoundrel if you didn't put it through?" "I should be worse. Even a damn scoundrel can be called a man, and I should have forfeited the name. There! Does that satisfy you?" "Up to a point—yes." Claude sniffed. "You're such a queer chap, Thor, that if I've satisfied you up to a point I ought to be content." "Oh, I'm all right, Claude. I only hoped that you'd be able to go on with it for some better reason than just—just not to be a scoundrel." "Good Lord, old chap! I'm crazy about it. If Rosie wouldn't hum and haw I'd be the happiest man alive." "Oh? So Rosie hums and haws, does she? What about?" "About that confounded family of hers. Must do this for the father, and that for the mother, and something else for the beastly cub that's in jail. You can see the position that puts me in." "But if you're really in love with her—" "I'm really in love with her, I'm not with them. I never pretended to be. But if I have to marry the bunch, the cub and all—" Thor couldn't help thinking of the opening he would have had here for his own favorite kinds of activity. "Then that'll give you a chance to help them." "Not so stuck on helping people as you, old chap. Want help myself." "But you've got help, whereas they've got no one. You'll be a godsend to them." "That's just what I'm afraid of. Who wants to be a godsend to people?" "I should think any one would." "If I'm a godsend to them, it shows what they must be." "Mustn't undervalue yourself. Besides, you knew what they were when you began—" "Oh, hang it all, Thor! I didn't begin. It—it happened." Thor's eyes followed his brother as the latter began moving restlessly about the room. "Well, you're glad it happened, aren't you?" Claude stopped abruptly. "Of course I am. But what stumps me is why you should be. See here; would you be as keen on it if I were going to marry some one else?" Before so leading a question Thor had to choose his words. "I'd be just as keen on it; only if you were going to marry some one else, some one in circumstances more like your own, you wouldn't require so much of my—of my sympathy." "Well, it beats me," Claude admitted, starting for the door. "I know you're a good chap at heart—top-hole, of course!—but I shouldn't have supposed you were as good as all that. I'll be darned if I should!" Thor thought it best not to inquire too precisely into the suggestions implied by "all that," contenting himself with asking, "When may I tell Lois?" Claude answered over his shoulder as he passed into the hall. "Tell her myself—perhaps now." He joined his sister-in-law in the drawing-room, though he didn't tell her. He was on the point of doing so once or twice, but sheered off to something else. "Awful queer fellow, Thor. Can you make him out?" Lois was doing something with white silk or thread which she hooked in and out with a crocheting implement. The action, as she held the work up, showed the beauty of her hands. On her lips there was a dim, happy smile. "Making Thor out is a good deal like reading in a language you're just beginning to learn; you only see some of the beauties yet—but you know you'll find plenty more when you get on a bit. In the mean while the idioms may bother you." Claude, who was leaning forward limply, his elbows on his knees, made a circular, protesting movement of his neck and head, as though his collar fitted him uncomfortably. "Well, he's all Greek to me." "But they say Greek richly repays those who study it." "Humph! 'Fraid I'm not built that way. Do you know why he's got such a bee in his bonnet about—?" He was going to say, in order to lead up to his announcement, "about Fay, the gardener"; but he couldn't. The words wouldn't come out. The prospect of telling any one that he was going to marry little Rosie Fay terrified him. He hardly understood now how he could have told his father and mother. He would never have done it if Thor hadn't been behind him. As it was, both his parents were so discreet concerning his confidence that neither had mentioned it since that night—which made his situation endurable. So he changed the form of his question to—"bee in his bonnet about—helping people?" "Oh, it isn't a bee in his bonnet. It's just—himself. He can't do anything else." He said, moodily, "Perhaps he doesn't help them as much as he thinks." "He doesn't—as much as he wants to. I know that." "Well, why not?" She dropped her work to her lap and looked vaguely toward the dying fire. Her air was that of a person who had already considered the question, though to little purpose. "I don't know. Sometimes I think he doesn't go the right way to work. And yet it can hardly be that. Certainly no one could go to work with a better heart." Claude was referring inwardly to Rosie's five thousand a year, and perceiving that it created as many difficulties as it did away with, when he said, "Thinks everything a matter of dollars and cents." She received this pensively. "Perhaps." <hr style='width: 45%;' /> And yet Thor's warning sent Claude to see Rosie on the following afternoon. It was not his regular day for coming, so that his appearance was a matter of happy terror tempered only by the fact that he caught her in her working-dress. His regular days were those on which Jasper Fay took his garden-truck to town. Fay rarely returned then before six or seven, so that with the early twilights there was time for an enchanted hour in the gloaming. The gloaming and the blossoms and the languorous heat and the heavy scents continued to act on Claude's senses as a love-philter might in his veins. It was the kind of meeting to be clandestine. Secrecy was a necessary ingredient in its deliciousness. The charm of the whole relation was in its being kept sub rosa. Sub rosa was the term. It should remain under the rose where it had had its origin. It should be a stolen bliss in a man's life and not a daily staple. That was something Thor would never understand, that a man's life needed a stolen bliss to give it piquancy. There was a kind of bliss which when it ceased to be hidden ceased to be exquisite. Mysteries were seductive because they were mysteries, not because they were proclaimed and expounded in the market-place. Rosie in her working-dress among the fern-trees and the great white Easter lilies was Rosie as a mystery, as a bliss. It was the pity of pities that she couldn't be left so, where she belonged—in the state in which she met so beautifully all the requirements of taste. To drag her out, and put her into spheres she wasn't meant for, and endow her with five thousand dollars a year, was like exposing a mermaid, the glory of her own element, by pulling her from the water. He grew conscious of this, as he always did the minute they touched on the practical. In general he avoided the practical in order to keep within the range of topics of which his love was not afraid. But at times it was necessary to speak of the future, and when they did the poor mermaid showed her fins and tail. She could neither walk nor dance nor fly; she could only flounder. There was no denying the fact that poor little Rosie floundered. She floundered because she was obliged to deal with life on a scale of which she had no experience, but as to which Claude had keenly developed social sensibilities. Not that she was pretentious; she was only what he called pathetic, with a pathos that would have made him grieve for her if he hadn't been grieving for himself. He had asked her idea of their married life, since she had again expressed her inability to fall in with his. "Oh, Rosie, let us go and live in Paris!" he had exclaimed, to which she had replied, as she had replied so many times already: "Claude, darling, how can I? How can I leave them, when they've no one else?" "Then if we get married, what do you propose that we should do?" He had never come to anything so bluntly definite before. With that common sense of hers which was always looking for openings that would lead to common-sense results, Rosie took it as an opportunity. She showed that she had given some attention to the matter, though she expressed herself with hesitation. They were sitting in the most embowered recess the hothouse could afford—in a little shrine she kept free, yet secret, for the purpose of their meetings. She let him hold both her hands, though her face and most of her person were averted from him as she spoke. She spoke with an anxiety to let him see that in marrying her he wouldn't be letting himself down too low. "There's that little house in Schoolhouse Lane," she faltered. "The Lippitts used to live in it." "Well?" "If we lived there, I could manage—with a girl." She brought out the subordinate clause with some confusion, for the keeping of "a girl" was an ambition to which it was not quite easy to aspire. She thought it best, however, to be bold, and stammered on, "We could get one for about four a week." He let her go on. "And if we lived in the Lippitt house I could slip across our own yard, and across Mrs. Willert's yard—she wouldn't mind!—and keep an eye on things here. Mother's ever so much better. She's taking hold again—" "Then why couldn't we go and settle in Paris?" "Because—don't you see, Claude?—that's not the only thing. There's father and Matt and the business. I must be on hand to—to prop them up. If I were to go, everything would come down with a crash—even if your father didn't make any more trouble about the lease. I suppose if we were married he wouldn't do that?" Though he kept silence, his nervous, fastidious, super-fine soul was screaming. Why couldn't he have been allowed to keep the poignant joy of touching her, of breathing her acrid, earthy atmosphere, of kissing her lips and her eyelids, to himself? It was an intoxication—but no one wanted intoxication all the time. It was curious that a life in this delirious state should be forced on him by the brother who wished him well. It was still more curious that he should feel obliged to force it on himself in order not to be a cad. He didn't despise Rosie for the poverty of her ideals. On the contrary, her ideals were exactly suited to the little rustic thing she was. If he could have been Strephon to her Chloe it would have been perfect. But he couldn't be Strephon; he could be nothing but a neurotic twentieth-century youth, sensitive to such amenities and refinements as he had, and eager to get more. He was the type to go sporting with Amaryllis in the shade—but the shade was what made the exercise enchanting. His obscure rebellion against the power that forced him to drag his love out into the light impelled him to say, without quite knowing why, "Did Thor ever speak of you and me being married?" Because he was pressing her to him so closely he felt the shudder that ran through her frame. It seemed to run through his own as he waited for her reply. "No." Rosie never told a lie unless she thought she was obliged to. She thought it now because of Claude's jealousy. She had seen flashes of it more than once, and always at some mention of his brother. She was terror-stricken as she felt his arm relax its embrace—terror-stricken lest Thor should have already given the information that would prove she was lying. She asked, trembling, "Did he ever say he had?" "Do you think he'd say it, if he hadn't?" "N-no; I don't suppose so." "Then why should you ask me that?" She surprised him by bursting into tears. "Oh, Claude, don't be cross with me. Don't say what you said the last time you were cross—that you'd go away and never come back again. If you did that I should die. I couldn't live. I should kill myself." There followed one of the scenes of soothing in which Claude was specially adept, and which he specially enjoyed. The pleasure was so exquisite that he prolonged it, so that by the time he emerged from the hothouse Jasper Fay was standing in the yard. As the old man's back was turned, Claude endeavored to slip by, unobserved and silent. He succeeded in the silence, but not in being unobserved. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the dim figure dogging him as it had dogged him on a former occasion, with the bizarre, sinister suggestion of a beast about to spring. Claude could afford to smile at so absurd an idea in connection with poor old Fay, but his nerves were shaken by certain passionate, desperate utterances he had just heard from Rosie. She was in general so prudent, so self-controlled, that he had hardly expected to see her give way either in weeping or in words. She had broken down in both respects, while his nature was so responsive that he felt as if he had broken down himself. In the way of emotions it had been delicious, wonderful. It was a revelation of the degree to which the little creature loved him. It was a sensation in itself to be loved like that. It struck him as a strange, new discovery that in such a love there was a value not to be reckoned by money or measured by social refinements. New, strange harmonies swept through the æolian harp of his being—harmonies both tragic and exultant by which he felt himself subdued. It came to him conclusively that if in marrying Rosie there would be many things to forego, there would at least be compensation. And yet he shivered at the stealthy creeping behind him of the shadowy old man, by whom he felt instinctively that he was hated. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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