CHAPTER XXXII
THE mother and son did share with Nathan, however, the deception he was playing upon the vague creature in the gray and lavender waiting for him back there in the east; and the device by which his letters to her should bear the postmark of foreign ports which the "Ellen T. Robinson" might likely enough visit in her wanderings. It had, in fact, been Robert Barton himself who had first put the idea into the sailor's head of remaining in San Francisco, and making of himself a fit companion for the fine young lady who had married him.
Robert Barton, during those first long days, when he lay upon the deck of the "Ellen T. Robinson," and read outloud for hours with Nathan, and talked with him for hours afterward, discovered under the crude exterior an appreciation of beauty of words, a fineness, a delicacy of feeling, that had something of the spark of divine fire in it. Robert Barton had left Boston tired, and bored, and ambitionless. He had arrived in San Francisco, refreshed, and interested, and possessed of an eager desire to see what he could make of the big sailor-boy.
The clergyman had friends in San Francisco, and an uncle and aunt were expecting him to spend some months with them. But he preferred to live closer to his new interest. He and Nathan roomed at the same place during their first months in San Francisco, ate at the same restaurants, went to many of the same places of amusement, many of the same places of improvement, and tramped together miles upon miles many of the same sidewalks in earnest conversation. It was Robert Barton who first told the sailor-boy how to hold a fork, how to use a napkin, how to approach a table in a restaurant, what to look for upon the menu, what to eat. It was Robert Barton who first outfitted him in proper civilian clothes. It was the clergyman, too, who started him into the night schools, and when his small roll of money had been exhausted and before the "Ellen T. Robinson" had returned him anything in the way of funds, saved his new young friend from feeling himself an object of charity by giving him manuscripts to copy on the typewriter—old sermons he wanted preserved and properly filed.
Later it was Robert Barton who discovered the invaluable Professor Heckelman. This was not, however, until after the clergyman had undertaken his duties in his new post in the San Francisco church, which had discovered the young Bostonian before he had been many months in the city. Robert Barton's mother had joined her son, as soon as possible after he had decided to accept the post, and it was she who then proceeded to take Nathan "under her wing," as she put it.
Robert Barton had been in doubt as to just how his mother would feel in regard to his curious young secretary, as he liked to call Nathan, who was fast becoming a valuable help to him.
"He's still pretty unused to high collars, and drawing-rooms, Mother. But he's useful to me in a hundred ways, and he needs most just now what a home could give him. How would it do to ask him to visit us for a fortnight, after we get settled?"
At the end of the first week of that fortnight, Mrs. Barton said to her son, "He's got to stay, Robert. I want him. I've taken a liking to him."
Robert Barton was not surprised. Nathan was the kind of man whom people did take a liking to. Big, slow-moving, he was like a Newfoundland dog in some ways, instinctively gentle toward soft and small creatures, and to everybody steady and confidence-inspiring.
Nathan's reticence about the pretty girl whom Mrs. Barton had seen him marry with her own eyes, and sent him off with in her own limousine afterward, was the only thing about him that did not please her. He was talkative enough about his early life—his mother, for instance, that horrible brute of a step-father, and his travels; but mention the little brown-eyed creature in the Boulangeat gown, and he became as dumb as the sphinx. It was odd, when he seemed so devoted. Well, Mrs. Barton would help him all she could, even if he wouldn't confide in her. She would surround him with the refining influences of home, as she knew so well how to do. It was in Mrs. Barton's well-appointed dining-room that Nathan first ate oranges with a pointed spoon, and drank black coffee from tiny cups with little handles; in her living-room that he learned to stand up (as Robert occasionally did) when his mother entered a room; to anticipate her wishes (as Robert seldom did) about shades to be lowered, windows to be raised, doors closed, or chairs moved.
On the February night that Nathan sat in Mrs. Barton's sitting-room before her fire, he was still a little awkward in his motions; but that was part of his fascination, Mrs. Barton thought. So thought certain of the young ladies in Robert's parish.
"Just exactly who is that great nice awkward Mr. Cawthorne of yours, Mr. Barton?" one day one of them asked Robert. "He helped us all day yesterday at the church, getting the scenery ready for our Guild play, and half of us have lost our hearts to him."
To-night Mrs. Barton was a little more impatient than usual with Nathan's silence; and in a fresh effort to break through it (the hour, the purring cat, the glowing ashes, were all conducive to confidences) she asked:
"Have you heard from the east lately, Nathan?"
He knew what she meant. He had not heard since last July. But Mrs. Barton must not know. She had once told him that she used to write to her husband every single day whenever they were separated.
"I haven't heard so very lately," he replied as lightly as he could. "But it isn't as if she thinks I'm here to get her letters when they're fresh, you know."
"I hope," Mrs. Barton went on, "they're nice letters when they do come."
"Oh, they are—they are," he murmured loyally; but as he spoke, the vision of Rebecca's brief little notes, and his studiously brief replies to match them flashed before him.
"Don't you think," pursued the persistent little Mrs. Barton, "you ought to tell her pretty soon what you've been up to since you saw her last?"
Nathan wanted to reply, "I'm beginning to think she doesn't care what I've been up to," but instead he said quietly, "I don't see that there is any hurry." He couldn't tell Rebecca that he had made himself more fit for her, without seeming to suggest his return, and she must be the one to suggest that.
"It doesn't seem a bit fair to her, to let her go on thinking of you as so different, Nathan dear, from what you really are."
Nathan smiled.
"Was I pretty awful?"
"Not really—just the outside. You were just the same pure gold underneath, only—oh, Nathan, do let her know about you. Please write and tell her, and then let me ask her to come out here for a little visit, as I've wanted to so long."
Nathan shook his head.
"You're good to me, Mrs. Barton, but no," he said. "You see, my four years aren't up till June. Besides, I'm planning to take those college examinations first. No, I'd rather wait until next summer, if you please, Mrs. Barton."
Mrs. Barton shrugged. "Do as you please. Do as you please. But if I were in your place, Nathan, I wouldn't put a thing off until next summer that I could do now. No, sir, I wouldn't—with all this talk about the United States going into the war."
Nathan was glad of any excuse to change the subject. He laughed with relief.
"And I, just the proper fighting age, too!" he said lightly.
"Oh, don't laugh, Nathan," the little white lady shuddered. "It's too real, and too near to laugh about. It may enter our lives before we know it, and muddle things all up for us, the way it has for the people on the other side—for me, and for Robert, and for you, Nathan, and your little gray-and-lavender lady too! You never can tell."
Nathan replied, "It may straighten things out for some of us, Mrs. Barton."
"It may straighten things out for me and the little gray-and-lavender lady." That was what Nathaniel Cawthorne was thinking. That was what he said outloud to himself, a half-hour later, upstairs in his bedroom, where he stood gazing down at the plain gold wedding-ring, strung onto a long black ribbon, lying in the palm of his hand. He had to look at this wedding-ring ever so often, to assure himself that it really did exist. He had to summon before his vision, every little while, the bright image of Rebecca in her wedding-dress, sitting beside him in the wine-colored lined limousine, telling him in earnest tones that she wasn't the least bit sorry in the world that she had married him, to persuade himself that the author of the cool blue notes had actually been pronounced his wife.
They were unconvincing little notes. They left him hungry and disappointed. They aroused vague doubts in his breast. The only way he could quiet those doubts was by rehearsing over and over again every detail of the meetings with Rebecca that might go to prove that she had cared for him, concluding always with that last kiss in the railroad station.
He had not urged that kiss. She had given it to him of her own free will. What if her notes were brief and far-between? What if she had rebuffed his overbold expressions of affection, recoiled from his freedom in addressing her as his wife, in signing himself her husband? He must remember that she had kissed him once! Woman were not like men. They were shy, easily frightened creatures. They had to be persuaded, and gently led—especially a woman of Rebecca's type. She was like a lily. It had been foolish of him to attempt to burn a fire in the chalice of a lily!
Thus for a while the sailor made excuse for Reba's notes. He must be patient, he told himself, bide his time, have faith; and for a while he was patient, did bide his time, did have faith. But he possessed too keen an intuition not to be aware of the change in Rebecca's letters.
Of late, he had fallen into the way of re-reading a few of the letters she wrote just after their marriage and comparing them with a few of the last that she had written. The contrast was significant. In the early letters there had been something—some little reference, some little expression of kindly feeling toward him, to pin his faith on; but in the last one there was nothing he could pin anything on but doubts and misgivings. She never referred by any chance to their marriage in her later letters. She had jumped with eagerness at his suggestion that he postpone his return for a year. He hadn't meant to postpone it really. But evidently she didn't want him to come back. And now this disturbing silence! Oh, he didn't want to lose the sweetness out of his quest.
Every probe and inquiry from the innocent Mrs. Barton, which made clearer Rebecca's neglect of him, hurt Nathan. He wanted to close his eyes—his brain, too—to every evidence that might clinch the fast-growing conclusion that Rebecca wished to evade her marriage vows. So long as she had written something, acknowledged his existence, by even addressing envelopes to him, there was the consolation that, while there is life, there is hope. But silence—dead silence—what could he conclude?
Yesterday, when the clerk behind the general delivery window in the post-office had, as usual, replied curtly, "Nothing," to his inquiry, he had made a vow to wait a month or six weeks before subjecting himself to the sure slap of that "nothing" again. In a month the first of the three letters he had written to Rebecca ought to reach her. In six weeks, or anyway eight, he ought to receive her reply to it, if indeed she did reply, and he thought she would.
He had been very guarded in his reference to her silence in that letter, but he had mentioned it. He couldn't go on forever accepting it without explanation. All he had said was that he had received no message from her the last two times his boat had touched San Francisco.
"Perhaps you have been busy. A young lady in a position such as you are filling hasn't much time for letter-writing, I know, and I shouldn't even want you to write to me, unless you really wanted to. I shouldn't want it to become a duty. Please let me know if keeping up with me has become a little of a duty. For a wandering sailor, such as I am, can easily drop out of a girl's life."
When Mrs. Barton had mentioned the war downstairs, it had flashed across Nathan's mind for the first time as a possibility for him. The war would be an excellent way of dropping out of Rebecca's life. It would be an excellent excuse, too, to offer to the insatiable Mrs. Barton for not joining Rebecca the following summer. War! How he would hate it—fighting—roughness. He had had so much of it in his life. He smiled bitterly, as he contemplated the remote possibility, gazing down at the ring in his hand.
"Suppose I should go over to France—just suppose," he said, toying with the idea, "and suppose I never came back! Muddle things up for Rebecca? I don't think so."
He clasped his hand over the wedding-ring, clenched it tight. Oh, had she forgotten completely those dark hours in the theater?