The Beloved Stranger (13 page)

“What for? And have them demand a list of our guests and insult every one of them? No emeralds are worth the losing of friends! Besides, nobody can do anything about it tonight anyway. Now get to bed. Scat!”

Sherrill broke into a little hysterical laugh and, rushing up to her aunt, threw her arms around her neck and gave her a tender kiss.

“You are just wonderful!” she whispered into her ear, and then hurried back to her room.

Before her mirror she stood again, looking sternly into her own eyes. Such sorrowful tired eyes as looked back at her, such a chastened little face, utterly humble.

Somehow as she stood facing her present situation, it seemed weeks, almost years, since she had stood there in wedding satin facing married life like an unknown country through which she had to travel. If she had known when she stood there smiling with her wedding bouquet in her arms, and her wedding veil, blossom-wreathed, on her head, that all this was to be, how would the laughter have died on her lips! How trivial would have seemed her faint fears! Had those fears been a sort of premonition of what was to happen in a few minutes? she wondered. She had read of such things, and perhaps they were in the air like radio waves waiting to be picked up!

Oh, what a night! What an ending to all that lovely preparation! The tears welled suddenly into her eyes, and a great feeling of being overwhelmed came over her anew. Dust and ashes! How had all the beauty of her life faded in a few short minutes! And how was she to face the long desert of the future?

Ah! To have lifted the goblet of Life to her lips, and suddenly to have had it snatched from her without even a single sip! How was she going to bear it all?

It was like coming up to a great stone wall and not being able to scale it, a stone wall on every side, and not even a desire left to try to get over it. All that she really wanted just now was to drop down and sleep and forget.

Well, that was just what she had promised Aunt Pat she would do, but even the effort seemed too much.

She turned from the mirror, too tired even to cry, and saw that Gemmie had laid out one of her plain simple nightgowns, nothing new and smart, just an old, soft, well-worn gown out of her pleasant thoughtless past. Gratefully she crept into it and got into her bed.

She was too tired to think, too burdened to toss and weep. All she wanted was to sink down into oblivion; and that was just what happened. Tired nature pulled a curtain about her, and she drifted away into deep sleep.

But it was not a peaceful sleep. There were troublesome times and buffetings. She was having to drive her car very fast over a rough wild road in a storm, and her wedding veil kept blowing over her eyes and getting tangled in her steering wheel. Carter seemed to be standing somewhere ahead in the darkness, waiting for her with a terrible frown on his handsome face, the frown he had worn when he first saw Arla enter that door. She was late for her wedding and out of breath. She seemed to be lost on a wild prairie, and was afraid, terribly afraid!

Over and over she dreamed this with variations. Sometimes it was snowing, and the sleet stung her cheeks and shriveled the lilies of the bouquet in her lap, but she had to go on until she finally arrived at a strange dark rendezvous in an unknown country, and plunged out of her car, letting it run away into the darkness without her. She groped about in the night to find her wedding, but there was only a closed and darkened church. She was filled with despair till a stranger, whom yet she seemed to have known all her life, came out of the shadows and helped her home. A stranger who kissed her gently when he left her at her door.

Chapter 8

A
great gust of perfume from many flowers wafted out into the passageway as the steward threw open the door and ushered in Arla and Carter McArthur. Flowers everywhere! Sherrill’s flowers!

Arla stepped back and closed her eyes quickly as if she had been struck in the face. Carter frowned angrily. He stepped inside and looked at the array. Flowers, fruit, candies. A haunted look passed over his face. This all represented what he had lost in the other bride. Popularity, wealth, influence! He began to examine the cards of the friends who had sent them. Sherrill’s friends. All Sherrill’s friends. None of his represented except the big basket of fruit from his underpaid office. He looked at it contemptuously. Smelton with his six children and sick wife, Johnny Farr the errand boy with a widowed mother, Miss Gaye the assistant secretary who wore bargain-counter clothes and chewed incessant gum. Arla! Arla? Had Arla contributed to that basket of fruit, too? He cast a quick look at her, his wife, swaying there in the doorway looking white and miserable. Could it be possible that those poor wretches had asked Arla to contribute to a voyage gift for her rival? He had a passing sense of what it might have meant to her to be asked. The whiteness of her face showed she was not enjoying the festive array. Just for an instant he forgot his own annoyance and realized sharply what all this might have been to her. And yet how well she had gone through with it! So confidently, almost radiantly. It had been maddening to have her so confident, when she had dared to interfere, yet somehow it had also stirred his pride in her. After all, she was beautiful. No one could deny that! But she had gone beyond all limits in coming there to the house and precipitating this disaster. Yes, disaster! It meant destruction to his well-laid financial plans. And no matter how lovely this unsought bride might be, how well she might carry off her position as his wife, that could not offset the fact that he had in himself no position for her to carry off. It had all been a big bluff dependent on Miss Patricia Catherwood’s fortune. And what he was to do now remained to be seen. However crazy he might always have been about Arla, that did not alter the fact that he cared for money and position more than he cared for any living woman. And he had in his mind the comfortable realization that he could always get the adoration of another girl if one failed him, or became for the time unwise.

Arla rallied her self-control and quietly entered in the wake of the bags, drifting unobserved into a corner until the steward had left and they were alone.

Carter readjusted the baggage, placing his own suitcase on top impatiently. He was one who always expected those serving to anticipate his slightest unexpressed wishes. He swung savagely around to Arla, stranded pitifully by the door, her arrogance and initiative all gone now, nothing but a frightened look in her eyes. She knew his moods. She understood that her time had come to pay for what she had done.

“Well, if that’s what you wanted, there you have plenty of it!” he said, waving his hand toward the gifts. “Enjoy it while you can. It’ll probably be the last you’ll see of this sort of thing. If you could only have made up your mind to wait awhile, we might have had all this and more!”

The frightened look faded from Arla’s eyes and lightning came instead. Her lips grew thin and hard. She turned away from him haughtily and busied herself removing her gloves. She looked very handsome and angry as she stood there not listening to him. He could not but see how smart she looked, how becoming her clothes. She knew how to dress. If only he could weather this crisis somehow, things might not be so bad after all. She really knew how to wear her clothes just as well as Sherrill, could perhaps make an appearance to suit his pride. And of course she was beautiful, of much the same type as Sherrill. That was what had attracted him to Sherrill in the first place—that she had reminded him of Arla. And perhaps Arla could learn. She could get rid of her provincialism. She had learned a lot already. But the money! If he only could be sure—!

He swung around and began to fumble with the baggage, stowing one big suitcase that contained his wedding garments back under the bed. Swinging another down and shoving it after. Of course the steward would attend to all that presently, but it suited him to be stirring, throwing things around. This was an awkward moment; various emotions were striving within him.

Arla stood where she had first entered, pulling off her long gloves deliberately, finger by finger, smoothing them carefully, thoughtfully. She was struggling to keep from bursting into tears.

The steward tapped at the door, and Arla made no move to answer it, but moved away and stood staring out of the porthole at the panorama of harbor lights. Already they were moving out into the stream, and she had a strange dreadful feeling that she was heading out into the midstream of life, leaving behind all that she knew, all that she had hoped, going into a wild lonely sea of problems and perplexities and going utterly unprepared and unloved.

Carter had gone to the door. She heard the conversation vaguely, as if it had nothing to do with her. It was something about a telegram. The operator wished to speak to Mr. McArthur. Carter went out and Arla wondered idly why he was sending a telegram now, on his wedding night, but she was filled with indifference concerning it.

Carter had left the door unlatched as he went out, and the draft from the open porthole cooled her hot cheeks. She turned to fasten the door, realizing that she was alone, a brief breathing space, and looked about her again.

Those flowers! How wonderful it would have been if they had been hers! If she had been a girl with friends who could send farewell greetings in such a costly style! Why, all these gifts, the wedding that had preceded them, had been but the fulfillment of her childish fairy dreamings—all the things she had most wished for in life—and now they had come, and how empty they were! How one’s heart could starve in the midst of plenty!

She went about the room stealthily examining the cards, removing them with frightened hasty fingers. She would put them out of sight before Carter returned.

Some of the names she recognized as belonging to people who had been down the line and been introduced to her such a little time ago. They had gone through the motion of friendship with her, but that would be all. She would likely never see them again. For a brief moment she had walked with the elite and been recognized by them, but she was not a part of them, never would be. They were not of her world! Her highest dreams had been realized and yet had brought her no joy. Emptiness and sawdust! How she hated it all! How she wished for the old sweet simple days when she went to high school in pretty gingham dresses and Carter carried her books for her, looked down adoringly into her eyes, told her how lovely she was!

Oh, what had she done, how had things gone wrong, that they had come to this night? She remembered the look he had given her as he waved his hand toward the flowers and told her to enjoy them while she could, that it was probably the last of that sort of thing she would see. She shivered with anguish as she felt his contempt all over again, and realized that he was not the Carter of her happy school days, not even the whimsical lover who had sent for her to be his secretary. She must face that fact and not give way to sorrow. Then her lips became set with determination, and she stepped calmly to the bell and rang for the stewardess.

When the woman presented herself, Arla waved toward the flowers.

“I would like you to take all those away,” she said coldly. “They sicken me. Take them down to the steerage, please, and give them to the old women and the little children.”

When Carter came back, the flowers were all gone. The boxes of expensive candies were gone. There was left only the basket of fruit from the office standing alone on the dresser.

“Why—where—what—?” asked Carter, looking about and sensing the emptiness.

“I told the stewardess to take them down to the steerage and give them to people who could enjoy them,” she said in a cold steady voice.

Carter looked at her half startled. He had had so many startling things flung at him already this long terrible evening that one more or less made little impression. Then his eyes swept about the room again and he noticed the fruit.

“Why not that one, too?” he asked, his lips settling into their habitual sneering curve.

“Because that one is yours!” she answered steadily. “Because
I
paid for that myself!”

“You paid for it yourself?” he exclaimed, looking at her in astonishment.

“Yes, I paid for it myself!” she answered, folding her gloves smoothly together again and laying them out on the table.

“But—
why?
Why should you pay for them? Why not the others? Who got up the idea?”

“It wasn’t gotten up. I did it all. They don’t even know about it. They hadn’t any money to put into gifts. They have all they can do to keep from starving. Johnny’s mother is likely dying tonight. He won’t be able to get any flowers for her funeral! Smelton’s wife has had a relapse, and one of his children has a broken leg; the only child who had any job at all. Miss Gaye needs all her salary for gum. Who would you think would send you fruit from the office if I didn’t?”

“But why
you?”
he asked again, a strange incredulous look in his eyes.

“Why I?” answered the girl with a flash of her tear-drowned eyes and a sudden quiver of her lovely lip. “Why
I
? Because I was a
fool
! Because I’ll always be a fool, I suppose, where you are concerned! Because I
thought
I loved you, and wanted you to have all the honor there was, even from an office like ours! It was just after you told me that I had always been—Oh, what’s the use! I won’t say those empty words over. I had a spirit of self-sacrifice. I thought I loved you enough to sacrifice myself! That was before I found out I couldn’t stand it! It was before I told your other bride that I’d go through hell to marry you. It was even before I understood what hell was like!”

“Did you tell her that?” His face was white with anger and a strange wild remorse.

“Yes, I told her that when she said she wouldn’t marry you after what she’d seen, and asked me if I would, and I said I’d go through hell to marry you! But I didn’t know what hell could be like then, even at the beginning. I thought I was in it then, but I
wasn’t.”