Testimony Of Two Men (76 page)

“Jon is bitter because his friends believe he killed Mavis,” said Jenny. “No one told me, but I know. Otherwise, he is jaunty, if you don’t like the word ‘light-minded.’ You don’t, do you? Oh, he was never afraid of anything. He despises everything, and he was that way before Mavis died. He never took anyone seriously.”

For the first time it came to Robert disagreeably that their only real conversation so far, on this gorgeous day, had been of Jonathan Ferrier. He could not remember that he had instigated this conversation, but he did not like it. He preferred to talk about himself to Jenny, and he wanted to inspire her regard. So far, she had shown no open interest in him, though at least she was now talking and not merely answering “yes.” That indicated trust, and the young man’s heart rose as light as a bird.

Unfortunately, a surrey was approaching them on the narrow road, filled with four young women. They had just come round a bend, and now the air echoed with their gay laughter, their little squeals and their high and girlish voices. The horse trotted along briskly, the fringe on the surrey swayed, and the girls held their hats. Robert cautiously guided his horse to the extreme right of the road to let the equipage pass with its pretty burden. Then, as it was beside him, the driver halted it, and he saw the pink dimpled face and auburn hair and sparkling eyes of Maude Kitchener. Her mouth was like
a
plump rosebud, but it stopped smiling when she saw his companion.

“Oh, Dr. Morgan!” she trilled. “How are you today? Oh, and do you know Betty Gibson, Susie Harris, Emiline Wilson? Girls, this is Dr. Morgan—the gentleman I have been telling you about—” She stopped and blushed furiously. The girls eyed Robert with animated curiosity and some sly smiles, and it was evident, even to the young man, that perhaps Maude had been somewhat too confiding about him to her friends. In their turn the girls openly admired his magnificent apparel and his face, but when they glanced at Jenny, nasty smirks appeared on their young mouths, and Robert saw that, too. He had taken off his hat, and it lay on his knees.

“A pleasant ride, ladies?” he asked.

“We’ve been to lunch at Emiline’s aunt’s,” said Maude. Her sweet voice was subdued. She regarded Jenny with trouble. “How are you, Jenny?”

Jenny had become stiff and remote again. Her nod was jerky. “Very well, thank you,” she replied, and the stammering note was back in her voice.

The other girls said nothing at all to Jenny but averted their eyes from her and talked in a lively fashion with the young doctor, of whom they had heard so much, particularly from Maude, who had hardly stopped talking of him all through lunch. They did not know whether to pity her or to be a little happy that the young man, whom she had hinted was “much taken” by her and practically ready to propose, had found that unspeakable Jenny Heger more to his liking than Maude Kitchener, at least for this day. But, then, everyone knew what that hussy was, and gentlemen will be gentlemen, even such a nice, handsome young man like this.

Robert was not so obtuse that he did not observe the snub given Jenny, and so it was he who put on his hat and lifted the reins and said good-day to the young ladies. He was the one who drove off first. The surrey moved off behind him with less vigor, he thought with some satisfaction. The only nice girl among them had been Maude Kitchener, and he felt warm toward her. Women!

“Really, that creature!” said Emiline Wilson. “Whatever in the world does he see in her?”

“Guess!” said Susie Harris, with a naughty giggle. Betty Gibson hit her on the shoulder coyly and said, “Don’t be lewd, Susie.”

“If I had any interest in him at all,” said Emiline in a meaning tone, “I’d tell him all about her, that I would. It’s disgraceful. He probably believes she’s respectable. Poor man.”

“He hasn’t been here long,” said Maude. Then she added, “But, of course Jenny is respectable! You mustn’t be mean, girls. You know as well as I do that it is all lies, that people say of Jenny.
We
went to school with her. If—if Dr. Morgan likes her, it’s no wonder. She’s so very beautiful.”

The girls chorused “No!” with loyal emphasis, and Maude was pleased.

“This is really a very stupid town,” said Emiline. “I don’t suppose anyone has invited Dr. Morgan to dinner except the Ferriers. Have they?”

All but Maude answered in the negative. She knew that her parents had invited Robert on many occasions, but he had been in the hospitals or on house calls or otherwise engaged. But he had promised to dine with the Kitcheners next Monday and had expressed his gratitude to Mrs. Kitchener. So Maude said, “He’s been so busy, and he is to have dinner at our house on Monday.”

Robert found his promised spot a few minutes later. He turned his buggy up a rambling little side road, and it mounted steeply. Then at the top it was like a small and grassy knoll, with one huge oak in the very center. Below them was brush and untended shrubbery, behind them was a lonely meadow, and before them lay the river scintillating in blue lights in the sun, the mountains rising above it like a green barrier. Buttercups and wild daisies and Indian paintbrushes huddled in the thick warm grass, which was not too high, though very dense. Robert held up his hand to Jenny and this time she took it to alight, and at the first touch he had had of her Robert was struck as by lightning and turned very pale. It was a moment before he could help Jenny to the step and then down to the grass, where she stood smoothing her white skirt with her gloved hands and looking about her with shy pleasure.

“Do you like it, Jenny?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s wonderful,” she said. She took off her hat, and her hair, hastily pinned as usual, began to drop about her face. She tried to restore her attempts at a pompadour, but it was useless, so with a shrug she merely shook out her hair and let it fall on her shoulders and down her back.

Now she began to laugh uncertainly as she helped Robert anchor the checked tablecloth on the grass, for here it was breezy under the tree. She ran about, finding good stones for the anchoring, and brought them back gleefully in both hands. She showed keen interest in the food, laid the plates and the silver and polished the goblets with a napkin. Then she sat down, folding her legs like an Arab, and laughed again with pleasure.

“What fun picnics are!” she exclaimed. “Mama and I used to have them before she—married—Harald, and I was just a child. On the island, of course. We told each other lots of secrets, and the trees were so thick and the rose gardens were unbelievable. The rose gardens,” she added, and her face changed and she was not smiling any longer.

“Beautiful gardens,” said Robert. As the host, he filled Jenny’s plate first and she stared down unseeingly at the large portions he had given her. He opened the wine bottle and poured the pale golden liquid into the glasses.

“What?” said Jenny, coming back with a start.

“What? Oh, I said your rose gardens are beautiful.”

Jenny picked up a fried chicken leg, eyed it absently, then began to eat it. Her mood appeared to pass. Fresh color came up under her sunburn. The weight of her black hair fell across her ears, and her lashes gave another spiked shadow on the rose of her cheek. Robert could hardly eat for enchantment and new and deeper contentment. He had loved her for her beauty from the beginning, and for her redoubtable innocence. Now he loved her, besides, for what he had guessed about her, and her simplicity. He lifted his wineglass high, and her blue eyes followed it.

“To you, dear Jenny,” he said.

She picked up her own glass at once, smiled back at him, and said, “To you, Doctor.” He wished she had shown some coquetry, and that she had called him by his Christian name. But still he was content. He had not dreamed at first that she would be so responsive to him, and so childishly happy in this picnic. He looked at the river, which was not so blue as Jenny’s eyes. He could smell pine near him, aromatic and exciting, and the grass gave off a hot fragrance sweeter than any manufactured perfume. Jenny was part of it. She was alone in this shining silence with him. There was no one else.

She drank the wine eagerly. “Oh, this is delicious,” she said. “I don’t like it as a rule, but I do like this. Is it a French wine?”

He gave her the bottle to study its label and was gratified to see that she was impressed. “Why, it’s—1890,” she said. “Eleven years ago. What a long time!”

“To you, perhaps. You were only nine then, weren’t you, Jenny? But I was much older.”

She glanced at his young face and his luxuriant mustache, and then he saw another side of Jenny, subtle and amused. She smiled at him frankly and shook her head, and the breeze lifted her hair and tossed it. “You are really very young,” said Jenny, and he did not know whether to be pleased or displeased. “You believe the world is good, don’t you? Do you recall what Machiavelli said: ‘A man of merit who knows the world becomes less cheered, as time goes by, by the good, and less grieved by the evil, he sees in the world.’”

He considered that, then nodded. “Don’t you believe the world is good, too?”

“No, I truly don’t. People think I am foolish and ignorant, but I’m not. I listen. I hear. I see. I think. I read. I walk alone by myself. I am never lonely—by myself. I watch the birds. Nothing very much surprises me.”

For some reason Robert thought of Jonathan Ferrier and did not know why. The thought came from nowhere, and it jolted him.

“No one but a fool would think you foolish and ignorant, Jenny.”

Again she gave him that amused and subtle smile. “You must chatter all the time, in this world, and be doing something in a rush, or something you call important, or going somewhere very fast, or returning from somewhere just as fast, to be thought clever and sophisticated. But if you are contented with your own self, and don’t like confusion and only your own thoughts, and the work you love to do, then you are mad, they say, or you don’t like your fellowman, and are even un-Christian.” She shook back her hair. “They forget, or never knew, what Shakespeare wrote in
As You Like It:
‘And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot.’ If they gave that a little thought, they’d stop being in such a hurry—nobodys going nowhere, and pathetically trying to be somebodys going somewhere. But very few people are ‘somebodys.’”

He had not thought her capable of making such a long statement, but as he saw the flush on her cheek and her empty glass he knew that the wine had taken her shyness from her and that Jenny was herself with him, and he blinked his eyes rapidly.

He refilled her glass and she watched him with that touching pleasure. “As for myself,” she said, “I am content to be a nobody, going nowhere. That’s the nice thing about being a nobody: You don’t feel you have to go somewhere—and there’s no somewhere, really.”

Now her face changed again, and she looked down into the wineglass with sudden melancholy. “Nowhere,” she repeated. “Nowhere at all.”

“Oh, come, Jenny. You are young and the world is open to you.”

“No,” she said. “I’m afraid it opened, once, when
I
was sixteen, for about three minutes. Three whole minutes. And then it closed again, and that was all there was to it, and all there ever will be.”

“Tell me,” he said, wanting to know more and more about this enigmatic girl.

She shook her head. “There’s nothing to tell. It was all in my imagination.”

She put down her plate from her knee, and quickly drank the wine. In a more worldly woman it would have been a theatrical gesture, for effect. In Jenny it was swift desperation. Again, for apparently no reason, Robert thought of Jonathan Ferrier.

“Jenny,” he said, “Why don’t you go away for a while, to see something of what you should see?”

“Oh, I can’t, Doctor. I couldn’t leave my island. But if Harald ever leaves permanently, which he won’t, then I could leave it for a little while myself.”

That sounded strange to Robert, and he frowned. “You see,” said Jenny with all earnestness, “I couldn’t leave the island alone to him. Could I?”

“Why not?”

“Well, when I came back, it wouldn’t be the same to me.”

He was baffled. “One day, when you are married, you will leave the island and never go back except for a visit.”

“No. I’ll never leave the island. And I’ll never get married.”

A vague dimness came over the earth for Robert and nothing was very bright any longer. He said, “You’ll change your mind, Jenny, when you find someone who loves you.”

To his horror and concern he saw her eyes fill with tears, and she shook her head. She put the empty wineglass on the cloth and it rolled from her and she watched it.

“Hasn’t anyone spoken of—well, love to you, Jenny?”

She only shook her head over and over.

The breeze grew stronger and it lifted away the leaves and the sunshine fell on Jenny’s hair in a shaft of pure light, and Robert thought, How lovely is the sunlight on a woman’s hair!

He wanted to say, “I love you, Jenny, my sweet Jenny. Let me tell you how much I love you.” But he knew it was too soon. He would only alarm her away, send her off into her silences again. There was someone else like that whom he knew. Jonathan Ferrier. The slightest extension of stronger friendship or personal concern given by anyone to him sent him off into one of his cold remarks or a ribald aphorism. He rejected the close touch as much as Jenny feared it and would reject it. Robert did not like the resemblance.