CHAPTER XXXV
LESS than two weeks later that note of Reba's, redirected by the San Francisco mail-clerk, lay inside the warm pocket of a soldier in uniform. Now and then it left the pocket, and rustled in the breeze that swept a lake beside which the soldier was walking. He was a tall, well-built fellow. There was no stoop to his shoulders now. There was no looseness to his clothes. There was a clean-cutness, a fine chiseling about every curve and angle of him now that, as compared to his shapelessness four years ago, was like the finished statue as compared to the rough-hewn block of marble merely suggesting form. Massive he still was, but lean now and firm of muscle. Erect and square-shouldered, feet firmly planted upon ground, there was something self-reliant, dauntless in the very way he stood. One didn't expect a tear from the eyes of such a military figure to splash down upon the letter which he held.
He had received that letter an hour and a half ago, but it had been opened only a short twenty minutes. Not until he had left far behind him the encampment and escaped all danger of interruption from his comrades had Nathaniel Cawthorne opened Rebecca's letter. He surmised from the date upon the envelope that the letter was an answer to the message he had left behind in San Francisco, to be sent her in July. He wanted to be unobserved when he read that answer, and placing the unopened envelope in his pocket he walked away as fast as he could from the crowded little city, in the outskirts of which he had been in training for so many weeks.
Alone on a high grassy bank, above the rippling waters of the lake, squaring his shoulders a little first, in preparation for the stab which he felt sure the innocent envelope contained, he finally drew forth Reba's note. He opened it. For five long minutes he stood motionless staring down at the page before him. The only thing that stirred about him was the soft wide brim of his hat, and a corner of the note itself, as the breeze played with it. At the end of the five minutes the hand that held the note dropped to the soldier's side, and the eyes that had gazed so intently at Reba's summons sought with the same fixed attention the faraway green hills of Vermont.
But they did not see those hills. They saw only that row of Please come's. There were three of them, and each one had gone through Nathan like a sweet sharp caress. Each one had been like that last kiss of Rebecca's in the station—only not so shy, not so fleeting and soon over. "Please come," she had said three times over. And she had underlined the last "Please come." There was entreaty in that. Surely she would not underline her words out of pity. Oh, did she at last a little want him, who had always wanted her so much?
There was little sleep for the soldier that night, lying in his cot beneath his army blanket. He was not used to so many good things happening to him all in one week. The commission that had been awarded him after the long weeks of intensive training, and nerve-racking uncertainty, had kept him awake the night before. A commission would add a little decoration to the name of Nathaniel Cawthorne; and to wrest that name from absolute indistinction for the sake of the girl who bore it had become a burning passion with him weeks before the commissions were awarded. On top of that triumph, to receive summons, underlined summons, from the girl herself, to come—please to come—well, it took hold of him right in the throat somehow.
If at first he had been in doubt about responding in person to Rebecca's summons, by dawn he had decided to go to her as soon as he could arrange a leave-of-absence. He would carry his captaincy to her himself, and lay it before her. But she wasn't to think that he expected anything in return. In spite of her letter, she wasn't to be afraid that he would take advantage of the impulse that prompted it. He would be so kind, so tender, so patient. If she cared for him, even a little—it seemed impossible, but if she did—oh, how he would court her all over again, as a girl of her class should be courted—slowly, painstakingly, as if there had been no exchange of plain gold rings, and with the possibility of failure always before him, so that he would be neither precipitous nor demanding.
The note Reba received from Nathan in answer to hers was mailed in Boston. It had no word of love in it. It was brief, almost formal. It told her that he had just arrived in the city, and that he would be very glad to meet her there somewhere and talk things over, at any time that was convenient to her during the next two or three days. If she preferred, he could come to Ridgefield, but he thought there would be less chance of interruption, perhaps, under that old horse-chestnut tree in the public gardens than anywhere else. What did she think? A line dropped to him, care of the Y.M.C.A., Boston, Mass., would reach him all right, and whatever she decided, would be agreeable to him.
Two days later, at the appointed hour, three o'clock in the afternoon, Reba approached the bench under the horse-chestnut tree. Her face bore the tranquil expression of a martyr ready for the great ordeal. The bench, she observed as she caught a glimpse of it from afar, was occupied by a soldier. Unfortunate. Well, she was fifteen minutes early. She would walk around the block. Perhaps the soldier would be gone by the time she returned.
Reba walked three times around the block, but still the soldier remained upon the bench, or near it. He was standing beside it after her first journey; he was pacing up and down in front of it after her second (she was watching him from behind); he was seated upon it again with folded arms after her third. She decided, soldier or no soldier, she must keep her appointment with Nathan. She recalled how shy he used to be. He was probably lurking nearby, in hiding somewhere, waiting for her appearance beneath the horse-chestnut tree. There was no resemblance in the tall straight figure of the soldier to the slouchy sailor whom Reba had met there before.
As she approached the bench it was with absolutely no premonition of the nature of the experience before her. Silently she stole over the soft grass behind the bench, and as quietly and casually as possible slipped on to its extreme end, not even glancing in the soldier's direction as she seated herself. There were empty benches enough nearby. It looked odd, she supposed, her sharing his. Immediately she opened her shopping-bag, drew out a letter—any old letter—and appeared to become engrossed.
Nathan had been expecting Reba to approach the bench by way of the little stone bridge, as on the previous occasions. He had been watching the bridge closely for the last ten minutes. The slight rustle of skirts behind him, the silent possession of the other end of his bench took him by surprise. When he glanced up and saw Rebecca sitting there, three feet away from him, head bent, eyes downcast, rummaging busily in her shopping-bag, his first emotion was one of amazement, his second of mystification. He stared at her without moving a muscle. What did she mean? What did she imply? Did she dread his greeting? Wish to postpone for a moment or two the first awkward words of recognition? Ah, he understood. She was right. Silence was best after all. The moment was too significant for words. He doubted if he could speak anyhow. The moment was too significant even for the encounter of their eyes. Was it fear of her, or doubt of her, or love of her that choked him so?
She was in gray to-day as she had been that last time. But her costume was not so gala. There were no draperies, no billows to-day. She looked like some little gray furry animal in her close tailored gown, smooth and soft and sleek. One could see the curves of her. If one dared, one could stroke her, and feel the curves! Yes, she was like one of the little gray captive fawns Nathan used to like to stroke when he was a boy. A neighboring farmer had caught a couple of them once and kept them for pets. There was something white at Rebecca's throat. It fluttered in the breeze and buried her chin in snowy froth as she bent over her letter. It pressed an edge of transparent lace close against her cheek. As Nathan sat and stared at the lace he thought he saw the color of her cheek beneath it deepen.
Reba was fearfully afraid her color was deepening. She didn't want to blush just because a stranger stared at her. She could feel him staring, not stirring an eyelash, concentrating his whole attention upon her. Rude of him! Crude of him! she thought to herself. Wouldn't it be wiser if she corrected his erroneous impression, explained her presence, asked him if he had seen any one waiting for her here? She was on the verge of folding up her letter, preparatory to making some such speech when the soldier addressed her.
It was Nathan who spoke first. He didn't mean to. Her name came out all by itself. "Rebecca!" he exclaimed suddenly. He couldn't wait any longer. "Rebecca!" he repeated in a low voice, leaning toward her.
He wouldn't have frightened her for anything in the world, and he knew the moment she glanced up at him that he had frightened her. There was a startled, unprepared expression on her face. Moreover, she was evidently unable to speak. She just sat and looked at him and looked at him, as if he were the last person in the world she had expected to see seated beside her on the bench underneath the horse-chestnut tree.
He didn't realize how changed he was in her eyes. During his absence, whenever she had thought of him, it was never eyes, nose, mouth, features she saw, but just outline. Was it he? Was it Nathan? This man? No. Yes. No.
"You don't know me!" he exclaimed.
"I don't think I do," said Reba, in a jerky dazed voice, still staring.
He took off his hat. "Now do you?" he inquired, smiling.
Her eyes swept the contour of his close-cropped head, bared forehead, sensitive temples.
"No, I don't think I do," she repeated again in the same queer little frightened voice.
She sought his eyes. They were bluish gray eyes. She had never been quite sure of their color till this moment. They always used to waver and slip away from her, but now Nathan's gaze was taut and steady like the muscles of his body.
"I don't understand," Reba murmured, and she could feel one of her knees, the left one, trembling ridiculously; "I don't understand."
Nathan tried to laugh. It wasn't very successful. She looked so troubled and perplexed, and he wanted so to lay bare his whole soul to her; tell her how hard he had worked to make himself desirable, ask her, straight out if he was desirable, if she wanted him; listen to the music of her "well done." He believed she was lovelier than the image of her he had been carrying about with him all these long years. He had never dared, she had never allowed him, to look straight into her eyes like that before. They were the soft, dark-brown shade of the deep secluded pools hidden away in the little winding brooks up in the woods where he used to fish for trout. They lured him like those pools. They were full of hidden treasures. But he gave no voice to such sentiments.
"There isn't much to understand," he said. "The poor fool you married doesn't exist any more. That's all. That's what I've come to tell you, and you're as free as if he had a tombstone at his head."
She got but a vague idea of the meaning of his words. All she could hear was the new miraculous inflection.
"I don't understand," she exclaimed again in a distressed tone, as if it hurt her physically not to understand. "I don't like surprises. I don't like jokes!"
Nathan surveyed her in amazement. She was almost savage about it. The brown pools shone mahogany red.
"Jokes?" he repeated. "Jokes?"
"I don't like things I don't understand." Her voice was beginning to tremble now, like that absurd left knee. "I don't like them, I don't like them," she said twice over.
The truth was she was afraid if she didn't keep on saying something, making her lips form words, that her teeth would begin to chatter, like the time when the little boy was run over by an automobile once before her very eyes, and picked up afterward limp and apparently lifeless. It was the shock, she supposed. She had come ready, steeled for the uncouth sailor, and instead a fine stranger in uniform—an officer, she believed, (didn't two bars mean a captain?)—spoke with Nathan's voice, smiled with Nathan's smile, but wasn't like Nathan at all. She took out a handkerchief from her bag, and pressed it up against her lips hard, holding her teeth steady.
"I didn't mean to frighten you," she heard the officer saying to her, solicitously. "I'm sorry. It isn't a joke. I didn't mean to frighten you."
"I'm not frightened," she managed to murmur through her tightly closed teeth. They mustn't chatter!
"I'm going to tell you all about it," the man beside her went on kindly, tenderly.
She knew him to be Nathan of course. But what she didn't know, what she absolutely couldn't fathom was his uncanny transformation. Even as he proceeded to relate to her the story of it, she was unable to follow him very closely, battling as she was with her unruly emotions. Still pressing her lips with her handkerchief, she could only sit and marvel, stealing frequent glances at him and listening amazedly to the altered accents.
Slowly, in detail, Nathan described to her his life in San Francisco, careful only to avoid the part she had played in it, in way of inspiration and impulse. He would not buy her with any such medium of exchange.
She listened silently at first, but after a while, gaining gradual control of her voice, she asked an occasional question or two. Nathan answered them in detail, painstakingly. For a whole hour-and-a-half he tried to tear away for her the mystery of his metamorphosis.
When he believed at last that he had succeeded, he said brightly, "So you see what I meant when I told you that you were as free as if the poor sailor-boy you married out of pity were dead and buried. I've got rid of him for you. I guess I'd do for you as much as I tried to do for my mother. I've got rid of that chap for you, Rebecca, drugged him, asphyxiated him, put him to sleep. He doesn't exist any more."
Reba murmured, "I didn't marry him out of pity."
"Well, all right. You have it your way. He isn't around any more to argue with you about it. It doesn't matter."
Reba glanced away. Her eyes followed a squirrel darting up the trunk of a tree. She had herself well under control now. She ought to, she should think. She had had time enough. It had just struck half-past four.
"I think I know what you mean," she said gravely. ("If the man I married doesn't exist for me any more, then I don't exist for him," she was thinking. "That's what he's trying to tell me as delicately as possible.")
She didn't say this outloud—not yet. And Nathan had no idea of the nature of her conclusions, as he reached for her shopping-bag, took it out of her lap (just the fact that it was hers made his hand tremble a little), opened it, and dropped into it a small white package, "The ring you gave the sailor-boy," he explained lightly, snapped the bag together, and laid it down beside her on the bench. "I figured it this way," he went on in the same forced cheerful tone. "I didn't want anything of claims on you, that belonged to some one who's dead."
Reba glanced down at the bag beside her. "Then of course you'd like your rings back, too," she said, in a little hard strained voice. "I've got only the wedding-ring here with me," she went on, drawing off her glove, "I'll have to send you the other one. I didn't wear it after what you wrote it meant." She began struggling with the heavy gold band on the third finger of her left hand.
Nathan made a little negative motion. "I don't want it. I believe a married woman usually wears her husband's ring, doesn't she, even if he's dead, as long as she bears his name. I don't want the ring he gave you."
"Very well," she acquiesced. She would still require it. That was so. "But remember you're free—as free as you tell me I am. Oh, I understand. I see," she broke off. "You're changed, not only on the outside, but all through—all through—all through."
He glanced at her sharply, suspiciously. Did she, could she mean that his love for her had changed? And the touch of her very shopping-bag had made him tremble!
"I don't blame you for not caring any more," she went on. "In fact, I think it would be strange if you did. I haven't had any part in your making-over."
Her voice caught and broke a little. Nathan heard the catch and the break. He wanted, he wanted to grasp hold of her bare hand lying so dangerously near and crush it and crush it! He wanted to show her, then and there, whether he had changed or not! But he didn't. Instead he said quietly, but in a voice that failed utterly to be calm and steady, "Listen, Rebecca, listen, listen. We're strangers, you and I. Somebody just introduced us to each other a day or two ago. We've got only as far as first names. But I want very much to get further. Oh, I do want to know you better, I want you to know me better. But I don't want to know you any faster than is proper for two people who've got only as far as we have. Don't you see? Don't you understand?"
It was Nathan's voice that caught and broke now. As he leaned toward her, Reba saw that his forehead was damp with perspiration. She could hear him breathing. His obvious emotion was like a little stab in a spot in her breast she thought was dead to feeling. She drew in her breath with a little audible sound of surprise.
Suddenly Nathan stood up. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead (his eyes, surreptitiously, too), put the handkerchief away again; drew in his breath very deep; let it out. Then, first glancing at his wrist-watch, he said in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone, "Well, I suppose I better be getting back to my quarters pretty soon. An old tentmate of mine and I are sharing a room together at the Y.M.C.A. I've no engagement for this evening. Perhaps you haven't either. If you haven't, will you have dinner with me somewhere, and go to the theater afterward? Among other things Mrs. Barton taught me, was the proper time for young ladies to be dropped at their front doors."
Reba's eyes softened. Was ever a man so gallant as this? Her face lighted. She smiled.
"I'd like to go to the theater with you very much," she said; "if you're sure it's quite proper for us to go without a chaperon," she added with droll little upward glance at him. Her eyes were sparkling with tears, but they were sparkling with something else beneath, which Nathan had never seen in their brown depths before—humor. Fisherman's luck!
Looking straight into those eyes, Nathan said, "When I was a boy I never knew what speckled prizes were hidden away in the brown pools till I fished them."
Reba gave a nervous little laugh. "Now I know it's you," she exclaimed, "talking that funny way I don't understand—like a poet."
"It's you that makes me talk that way," said Nathan gravely.
It was eleven o'clock when he left Reba that night at the door of the hotel where she had taken a room. It was eleven the next night too. But before she went to sleep it was two and three by the big clock, made of electric lights, hanging in the sky like a huge moon outside Reba's window at the end of the open train-yard space, that stretched away to the west for an uninterrupted quarter-of-a-mile.
The big face of the clock stared not only into Reba's room, but into her soul too, it seemed to her. She was well acquainted with the clock and it was well acquainted with her—Too well, oh, too well acquainted! This very clock used always to be waiting up for her when, concealed inside the closed automobile on those now flaying Saturday nights of a year ago, she came stealing speedily by it, on her way back to her room at the Alliance.
Had only twelve—eleven months passed since then?
"Oh, am I so fickle?" she asked of the clock outloud the second night after she had left Nathan downstairs. She had looked straight into his eyes for a long twenty seconds when they said good-night. She had done this to test herself. But she hadn't stood the test. She was feeling still the grip of his fingers about her arm as he grasped it after she dropped her eyes and whispered good-night. She was exulting in it still! "Oh, am I made of such common clay?" she murmured.
There were only two nights with the big clock in Boston. On the third morning, Nathan had submitted to Rebecca the hope that had been trembling in his heart ever since her summons had arrived. There was a place, he said, (somebody at camp had told him about it) way up in New Hampshire, hidden in a crevice between two mountains, where a lot of the treasures he had been fond of as a boy were stored away, waiting for rediscovery—big hemlocks and virgin pines, tiny little maiden-hair ferns, and soft springy mosses, of a fragrance more beautiful to him than the camelias of China or the wisteria of Japan. He didn't know how Rebecca would feel about it—perhaps she didn't like mountain brooks and mountain trails—but he would like, just for once, to see how the shadowy woods of his boyhood recollection became her. He had always associated her, somehow, with things in the woods—brooks, flowers, fawns. His friend had told him there was a boarding-house in the little crevice. There were two, in fact.
"Perhaps I'd be calling at the one where you were stopping, and where I wasn't, and taking you out for walks once in a while, and showing you the things I used to think were pretty when I was a boy—if you were thinking, that is, of spending a few days up in that little place, just about now."
Reba replied smiling: "I was thinking of it."
Nathan showed no surprise. "I'll buy two fishing-rods then," he said casually.
"Oh, Nathan," tremulously Reba exclaimed. "Only you could have made out of it a beautiful adventure!"