CHAPTER II
John Taylor was so absorbed that he did not hear the motor car come up the drive and stop at the side of the house. Philip Rowe was just leaving, light coat over his arm, when the headlights swung in from the street and blinded him. He stood on the step until the car stopped.
"Hello, Phil." It was a girl's voice, crisp and clear.
"Marcia?" He stepped forward and put out his hand.
"Is John here?" she asked, and added, "I have an engagement with him."
The interval before Rowe replied was long enough to imply disappointment.
"He's in the house now—unfortunately!"
"Flatterer! Tonight I—"
"You what?"
"Came for John—"
"And what else? What were you going to say?"
He moved nearer so he could see her face, dimly revealed by the dash light. She drew back, showing her very white teeth.
"Nothing at all," she laughed lowly, and when he gave a breath of only half-pretended dejection, she whispered: "I came for John—tonight!"
Rowe looked quickly into the house, then made as if to open the car door, but the girl's hand flew out to hold the latch fast.
"Please, Phil!"
Their gazes held a moment, bright with insinuating lights. Then Rowe bowed.
"Very well," he said, and entered the house to summon young Taylor.
When John appeared Rowe was walking out the drive toward the street, very erect, with confidence in the sway of his shoulders. The girl had been watching him.
Taylor spoke slowly to Marcia Murray and smiled and slouched down beside her, showing an ease that was something more than familiarity with this one girl. There are men who never can be comfortable in the presence of any woman, who must always be self-conscious even before the mothers of their children; these are the men who are failures with women and who are secretly afraid and consciously inferior. On the other extreme are the men whose glances at women are always penetrating and never very curious; they have the assurance which makes for easy acquaintanceships that they take lightly and which thrill their gentler parties; they are at once fond and scornful of women, and know that the one does not live who can blind them to her weaknesses; they like to see this deception tried simply to give them justification for bringing some presumptuous female to humiliation. The chief difference between these two types of men is that now and again the former is surprised by having a triumph forced on him; quite often the latter is bewildered by a defeat. John Taylor belonged to the second group.
The car swung out to the street.
"Where away?" John asked.
She did not respond to his smile.
"You are worried," she said.
"Not much."
"But some!"
"Yes."
"Want to talk?"
"More than anything else."
She turned along the car tracks, reached a small foot for the accelerator and they leaped ahead.
"Now talk to me," she said.
"I'd rather just look at you."
She lifted her chin. "An unfair advantage! My eyes are on the road."
"So's your mind. When we're somewhere else, I'll talk."
She dropped one hand from the wheel to pat his knee swiftly and flashed a smile at him. Then she kept busy with driving, while Taylor took his unfair advantage.
Marcia Murray was small and very trim. Her hair, even in the cold light of the arc under which they swept, was a glorious yellow. Luke had called her a wisp of goldenrod and John knew the old man had been half contemptuous; now the words came back to him and his throat contracted. She was just that; a stalk of goldenrod, fragile, slight, lovely. Her little features were sharp, eyes large and heavy-lashed. The silken legs stretching for clutch and brake were as gently moulded as her fine hands on the wheel.
They left town and swept along the paved drive through scattered yellow pines where the moonlight bathed the girl and made John's heart leap—She was so like a cameo! He could conjure all manner of delightful things to say of her—And then they slowed where the road swung to the right and she let the car roll from pavement to turf beneath great oaks that dripped moss with the river again before them spattered by the superwhite moonlight. The engine stopped and upon them burst the cries of millions of night bodies, a shrill, sustained chorus, a metallic trill. A wind rippled the stream and moonbeams flashed from it, like rays from mirrors. A bunch of coots, sleeping on the water, showed black not fifty yards from them.
Marcia leaned forward and switched off the dash light; her slim, very cool hand found Taylor's.
"Now what?" she said gravely—and Taylor told what had taken place with his father; told it, mostly, looking straight into her eyes, which looked back at him, wide, understanding and patient, but when he finished his narrative of what had happened and turned his gaze out on the river, the girl's eyes narrowed ever so slightly, and a look that was not patience showed there.
"My father's a queer old bird," he went on. "He's never understood me. He's never seemed to have much interest in me, especially since I went away to college; never stinted me in allowance and never crabbed because I didn't settle down, but there hasn't been much in common—except that we're father and son. I hadn't intended to put it up to him quite this way, but he forced my hand. He doesn't like the notion of any one getting anything without sweating for it, he doesn't like to have any one have opinions of his own—Logs are worth a lot of money, I know, but this isn't a marker to what I'd expected he would do for me. He knows, as well as I know, that it won't fill the bill and give me any sort of a start. I've thought it over and the only answer I can find is that he wants to see what I am wound on."
"And if you make good on this—?"
"Then he might come across properly."
The girl put a hand to his shoulder and shook him.
"Then you will, John! You have everything to gain, nothing to lose."
He nodded. "That's about the size of it. I don't want that sort of start, I've had my share of roughing it in the army; but it's only for a few weeks and it's a good gamble—if I make good."
"Of course you will," Marcia said.
Taylor turned toward her impulsively and put both arms around her small body, looking down into her moonlit face.
"Will you go with me, Marcia?" he asked.
"Go with you? You mean—?"
He nodded. "Marry me now. Let's start together. Let's begin as though this really were the beginning, and we were going to make a fortune by the strength of my back—Marcia, will you?"
His voice was unsteady with eagerness and he drew her closer, struggling to hold her face to the moonlight, but she ducked it out of his sight, buried it against his shoulder and he felt a shudder travel her body.
"Marcia!"
"Don't, John!"
"Marcia, what is it?" He forced her chin upward and called her name again when he saw tears in her eyes.
"What is it?"
She shook her head and pressed knuckles against her lips, looking away. "It's the same thing you tried to explain to your father," she whispered, voice husky, words rapid. "Don't you see, that, John? Don't you see that to begin that way is asking something of me that you have tried to avoid yourself?" He murmured contritely as she went on. "I'm no more fitted to begin life as a poor man's wife than you are to—to work with your back! It isn't in me, dear. I feel small, mean and inferior. You've been so big and fine to me; I know you need me, but I'm thinking of the future. I don't want to mar our happiness by a bad beginning. I want to be with you. I'd give anything if I could marry you now and go into the woods with you. But what is a girl to do?" She held out a hand in query, which disengaged his close embrace. "I can't break away from the environment of my whole life, can I? After I've been schooled to tastes for beautiful things, after I've been taught to think that nothing is worth while, which is ugly, I'm not wholly to blame if I find my ideas fixed, am I?"
"Don't, Marcia! It's all such nonsense to be miserable over this."
"But I am! Don't you see that the two strongest impulses in my life are coming into conflict tonight? On one side is my love for you, on the other my unfitness to live a life that is cramped by the lack of money. I've been on the ragged edge of want ever since I can remember! Here I was with girls for friends who knew no scrimping, no ugliness, being taught to devote my whole soul to things that they thought were worth while, and, of course, things that only money could buy. And I lived in a home—Why, John, you and I never would have been here tonight if we hadn't established the practice of renting the apartment winters. Papa takes a room and mama and I come up here. We couldn't do it unless we leased the place we live in most of the year. We're here now because we had to rent until the middle of April this time! I have a car at the cost of a thousand little privations. I have clothes while my mother darns my father's underwear!"
"Oh, it's been awful! But what could I do? I was not trained to work; I was not trained to undergo humiliation and hardships. I was—"
"And you won't have to!" he broke in savagely. "I was a fool to ask this of you tonight. I was carried away; that's all! I'll go out and do things for you, Marcia. I can pioneer as well as my father pioneered, for a little while. I will show him that I can work, as he worked, if necessary. I'll make him regret what he said to me and when I do that, I'll bring comfort to you, sweetheart! You're right! Your training has been right! Money and what it will bring is all that matters. How you get it, even, doesn't count any more, unless you're a downright thief. It's dog eat dog and the weak man lose! I hate to grub. I hate to make a mean, slow beginning, but it's my father's way. He doesn't care about money, but he doesn't care about me particularly, either. If I can make him like me by taking up this offer—it won't be long, Marcia, it won't be long!"
She yielded to his embrace again, and lifted her tear-wet face to his. One arm crept about his shoulders and lay there—like the caressing tendril of a flower—or the binding tendril of a creeper; and her eyes, on a distant star, narrowed again, though they were still wet, as she drew his face into the hollow of her soft throat.
"I feel like a rotter," he said. "I've come up short against the collar, when I thought there was no limit to the leash. I've been doing you an injustice, been wasting our youth, when we should have every hour together. I've been keeping you in this damned uncomfortable situation you have at home, while I dawdled. Now I'm through!"
"I knew I could trust you," she breathed, and though the voice was very gentle and sweet it possessed a quality which indicated that she had arrived at that trust only after difficulties—and perhaps she was not yet sure. It made the man start and repeat his promise, lips against her cheek, determination hot and not to be questioned.
Their hands met in a clasp of good will, and Taylor again pressed his kisses upon her lips and throat, and all the time her eyes were open, fixed on space, as though she listened for some word, waited for some thought—unshaken by his burst of passion.
They drove home slowly, John at the wheel, Marcia snuggled against him, her arm over his shoulder. Halfway in she said:
"John, don't you sometimes think Phil Rowe is awfully close to your father? Almost dangerously close?"
"Dangerously?" he asked with an idle laugh. "I think Phil's safe enough."
"I don't mean that—Dangerously for you. He seems to have a better grasp on your father's affairs than any one."
"Oh, I see—Of course, father leaves all the details to him, and Phil's a mighty competent chap for an underling."
"He doesn't strike me as an underling."
John chuckled. "He calls himself father's secretary, which of course he is. Father—insists on calling him his bookkeeper."
Marcia's laugh was most perfunctory. "He's the sort of chap who would take a lot of ridicule and wait for the last laugh. He—seems so tenacious."
"That's the sort father needs."
"Perhaps." A pause. "When you are away, he even answers your letters, doesn't he? He has told me that."
"Father never writes to me."
"But he spoke as if your father didn't even dictate them; as though he had even the responsibility of giving answers to his employer's son."
The motor speeded as John's foot unconsciously pressed the accelerator.
"He does have a good deal of authority—"
Two hours later, John Taylor walked thoughtfully up the drive and let himself in the carriage door. His father and mother were sitting in the library, his mother reading the newspaper aloud to Luke. She took off her glasses when John came in.
After a moment old Luke looked up and it struck the boy that his eye was cold, not at all as it usually appeared when he talked to Philip Rowe.
"Father, I've decided to go north right away," John said almost casually. "The sooner I am on the job, the sooner I'll make my start. I want to thank you again."
His mother made a little flutter of pleasure, but Luke did not stir.
He spat in the general direction of the fire and rolled a skeptical eye at his wife.
"Son, when you get on the job, think about thanks."
There was something subtly derisive in his manner.