CHAPTER XXIII
REBA didn't know just when the fraternal attitude of Dr. Booth toward her changed to something more significant. It was very gradual, and for a while, just as with Nathan, she wondered if she was manufacturing it, if he was conscious of any change himself. He was conscious of it, and fought it for a while. But not very persistently. It culminated one hot Saturday night at the end of a long afternoon together, when high, protecting rocks, and the long-continued, almost hypnotizing effect of a steadily-pounding surf seemed to draw them together—hide them away, and make them forget all conventionalities, all obligations outside their secluded crevice.
As frequently of late, Reba had been reading to Chadwick Booth in the early afternoon, out of a large, scientific-looking volume (Chadwick Booth was writing an article for a medical journal) and he had laughed, reached out, and squeezed her hand delightedly, two or three times, over her amusing pronunciations of unfamiliar technical words and phrases. He had, too, gently jibed her for blushing because he touched her hand.
"What if I should kiss you?" tauntingly he had flung at her once; and she, in that almost tragic voice she assumed sometimes, had exclaimed, "I wish you wouldn't talk to me like that."
"Proper little Miss New England!" he had thrust at her playfully.
"I'm not so proper as you think."
How she hated to be called proper! He knew it, and smiled teasingly up at her. He was lying flat upon his back with his hands folded beneath his head, with one knee drawn up, and perched upon it his other foot, shod in spotless white. Reba was sitting very straight beside him, with the large book resting on her lap.
"Never mind my jokes," he placated patronizingly, and patted her with one of his lean hands. "Go on, I'm listening."
They were on the safest sort of ground then. They had frolicked like this time and time again together. It wasn't then that the flimsy curtain between them was ripped down.
At about six-thirty Dr. Booth had opened before Reba's eyes a marvelous lunch-basket, equipped with plates, and cups and saucers, and shining silver; and had laid out before her, in the roseate glow of the sunset, the astonishing picnic-lunch (packed six hours earlier at his club) consisting of a roast duck, dainty rolls, and a fruit salad; and later, from out of magical thermos bottles and jars, had produced ice-cream and hot coffee, and some old French wine he had rummaged in the wine-closet for, at home, before he started.
They partook of the feast jovially, like carefree children, and afterward Reba picked up the dishes and packed them all carefully away in the basket again, still softly exclaiming over the wonder of the Aladdin-like repast, and deploring the fact that she didn't have some good, hot water to make bright and shining again the pretty, flower-sprigged china. Chadwick Booth lolled back on the rocks and watched her through the curling smoke of his cigarette, as she moved in the gloaming above him, and after she had completed her housewifely duties, he sat up and motioned to her to come and sit down beside him.
"Don't you think we'd better be starting back now?" she asked.
"Back?" he smiled lazily up at her. "Back where? Didn't you know we were shipwrecked this morning, and that this is a deserted island? Oh, come, Becky," he broke off, "sit down a little while. There's going to be a moon later."
"Well," she agreed, and accepted the place he made ready for her beside him on his rough overcoat.
"Comfortable?" he asked gently, after a minute or two of silence.
"Oh, yes," she quavered. She had caught that indescribable change in his voice that stole so frequently into it of late, and—"I ought to go," she chided herself, "I ought to." But she didn't stir; just sat very still and silent, listening to the monotonous pound-pound-pound of the waves nearby, while the steadily gathering night, gradually, minute by minute, covered their hidden retreat by a soft velvety blackness—so thick, so dense, that it blotted out even the white froth of the surf breaking not fifteen feet away.
There was not even the usual glow of Chadwick Booth's cigarette, for he had tossed it away when Reba had come to sit beside him, and, loath to prick the dark by even so small a spark, he had not lit a second one. There was something elemental about the blackness, the booming of the invisible waves, and the feeling of remoteness, that would have taken hold of Reba even if she had been alone there.
After a tense half-hour, the moon—a huge, colored, slow-moving disk, began creeping up slowly over the edge of nearby moorlands, and Reba suddenly drew in her breath very deep, and ever so softly exclaimed, "Oh, see!"
It was then that Chadwick Booth abruptly, almost roughly, threw his arm behind her and kissed her—as he had been hungry for days and days to kiss her, as Reba had never before been kissed in her life!
Afterward they groped their way back, somehow, to the waiting automobile, got into it, and drove away; and all the fifty-mile run back to Boston there passed between them only the most casual of remarks—brief, trivial little sentences, such as, "That was a close shave," from Dr. Booth when another car all but side-wiped his mud-guards. Or, from Reba, "Remember, there's a policeman-trap in this town." And his brief response, "I'll be careful."
Once back in her room at the Alliance, Reba undressed methodically enough and went to bed—but not to sleep.
He loved her! Chadwick Booth! And like that! And she loved him, too! She confessed it now without shame. She had loved him ever since that night on the marble terrace. He would ask her to marry him to-morrow, or the day after—next time they met. Think of it! She beloved, and asked in marriage by Chadwick Booth! She—Reba Jerome! Oh, the gulf between them yawned frightfully wide. It scared her a little. His women friends would make her appear awkward and raw, she feared. And how would his mother, and his sisters receive her? Had he a mother and sisters? Her knowledge of his home-life was very meager, very slight. Oh, well—she mustn't worry—not yet. Everything would be all right if he loved her.
Reba had not forgotten Nathan. But the revelation that she loved, and was loved, in such a manner as this, made her relations to Nathaniel Cawthorne appear insignificant. She blushed in the dark to recall their shy and awkward kiss in the station. It hadn't been a real marriage, theirs. Only a couple of "I do's," and "I will's," and a sentence or two repeated after a minister—a stranger to them both. In the brilliant light of her new love, she saw her marriage to Nathaniel Cawthorne revealed as a mere bugaboo without substantial form—something you could stick your hand through, it was so unreal. She would write to the stranger-sailor and ask for her release. She could now. Heaven, unasked, unsought, had sent her an excuse. She had remained as honestly true as she knew how, to her vows to him. She hadn't as much as even conjectured a way of escape; and suddenly, unexpectedly, this new love had descended upon her like a deluge from the clouds. There would be legal things about her marriage certificate that would have to be performed probably. She winced a little in the dark at the thought of that, for divorce had always meant disgrace to Reba. She had always looked upon it askance, like every one else in Ridgefield.
"But that was narrow and provincial," she told herself now. "I'm glad I'm out from under the yoke of Ridgefield notions!"
Just what legal steps to be taken in regard to her marriage would be necessary, Reba wasn't sure, but Chadwick Booth would know. Of course she meant to tell him about her marriage, and the very next time they met. What a relief it would be to share at last with somebody else this ghost-like thing that had menaced her peace of mind so long! She would tell Dr. Booth how she was really more married to him already. He, so experienced, and worldly-wise, would know how to advise and guide her. In his world, Reba felt sure, there must be ways of escaping a rigid adherence to a hasty and ill-timed promise, at the price of a heaven-ordained love such as theirs and without publicity, perhaps. Thus Reba, the once morally-literal, single-motived Reba, like many another daughter of Eve, saw her great desire as a lofty thing beside which everything else dwindled to small proportions, and for the realization of which she could so easily ride over and trample down everything in the way of an obstacle.
She didn't, however, tell Chadwick Booth about her marriage the next time they met. There didn't seem to be just the right opportunity for it. For Dr. Booth did not ask Reba to marry him the next time he saw her after the picnic supper, as Nathan had done after that significant night in the moving-picture theater. Though it occurred to Reba to tell Dr. Booth about her marriage even before he had made his formal proposal, she feared that it might seem to him bold and forward of her, to confess to him so intimate a thing, before he considered their courtship ripe enough for a betrothal.
He would, of course, declare himself soon, for he had been just as eager to be with her, and alone with her too—more than ever before, Reba thought—on the all-day boat-trip he took her on, following close upon the picnic. Probably, she concluded, it had been rather a provincial proceeding of Nathan's to offer himself to her so quickly. Probably men of Dr. Booth's knowledge of the world were less precipitous with their proposals of marriage. When, however, two or three afternoons and evenings alone together had been passed, and still he had not spoken of marriage, Reba began searching for other causes for his silence. Was it, possibly, she wondered, because he was uncertain of her feelings for him?
She was sure that this was the explanation when, one afternoon, three or four weeks after the revelation on the rocks, he smiled down at her with a kind of hurt-boy, peevish sort of expression, and asked half seriously, half playfully, "Why are you so passive, Becky, still? What are you made of? Why don't you ever let yourself go? You let only your eyes tell me that you care a little?"
It was true, but it was only because she didn't know quite how to express herself. She reached out one of her hands, and placed it shyly, gently on his arm. He stared down at it, as if it had been a curious species of butterfly that had lit there.
"What a cool little first caress!" he exclaimed tauntingly. She flushed at that, but did not draw her hand away.
"You're so like the sun that you blind me—just at first," she told him, in way of explanation.
He took her hand at that and held it a moment in his. Then put it back in her lap again.
"I think," he said, "the sun must be careful not to burn such a shadow-grown little flower as you, Becky," and he didn't as much as look tenderly at her again the whole afternoon.
Oh, she must be bolder, braver, prove to him somehow how deeply she cared. She hadn't even replied to his remark about the sun.
"Oh, why," fiercely she asked herself later, when it was too late, "why didn't I tell him that I like his sunshine—hate and despise the cold shadowy place I've been growing in so long. Oh, why did I sit there silent and dumb, as if I agreed?"
During the long following week, when not a single one of Dr. Booth's notes fell out of the reference-book he returned to her at the close of each of his lectures, she blamed herself over and over again for her misleading reserve. When finally he did ask her "to play with him" again, relief surged consolingly through her, and the vehemence of his joy at being with her again made her so happy that she gave him back his caresses with a generosity that amazed even herself.
Still he didn't ask her to bear his name (how often she had written it of late, Rebecca Booth—she liked the alliteration of it—on scraps of paper destroyed immediately afterward), but never mind, she comforted herself. He would ask her soon. She had read somewhere the time of courtship was the happiest time of all. He was aware of that, of course, and possibly was prolonging the period. He could not know that there were certain events in her past life that made such a long courtship as theirs difficult for her; that there was a confession she longed to make to him; a confession, too, she longed to make to somebody else as soon as he gave her the right. Reba had not written to Nathan since June. She couldn't bring herself to write to him in her usual casual manner. Silence was more honest, and she wanted at least to be honest.
Reba didn't like the duplicity of her position. Oh, when would Chadwick Booth speak? Again she contemplated telling him about the sailor. But no—no. How could she now? If ever, it should have been that first time among the rocks, by the waves. Now it would be indelicate, look as if she expected him to propose marriage to her. Of course she did expect it, and he must know she did, but no—no. Women must wait.