THE CHRISTMAS BRIDE (14 page)

He stood a moment looking out across the wide spaces in the dusk that was fast coming down. Little groups of people, men and women idling back to the wide low building that was beginning to brighten out with twinkling lights. Groups differentiating into other groups, climbing into cars that shot down the driveway, some of them walking down together with long, free strides, men arrayed in curious garb, sweaters and knee breaches. Fancy stockings. Gray-haired men tricked out! Oh, there was no doubt the world had been making changes in itself since he went to the wilderness. Somehow he didn’t seem to be linked up with this new world as he found it in the hometown. There was no place that his interest caught on. He had money now to play the game as others played it, but it didn’t seem worthwhile.

Oh, eventually he would go out and get him some friends, he supposed, but somehow just now he didn’t have the desire for them. He had a heart hunger that he had half expected to be satisfied by someone, something in the hometown, and it hadn’t been! Well, he was a fool, of course. But he must soon get an interest in something!

So he strode back to the Whittall House. He wondered what was the matter with him. Was it all himself? Was he unadaptable? Had he stayed too long in the wilds to conform to the world and get any enjoyment out of life?

Then he unlocked the door of his room and heard his telephone ringing wildly.

With a quick beating of his heart, he strode to the instrument and picked it up.

“Is that you, Greg?” came a strangely familiar voice thrilling over the wire. “This is Alice!”

G
reg found himself breathless. Was something really coming to him at last out of his past? Alice! That was Alice’s voice! For an instant, his mind reeled back into his boyhood and the old familiar drawl of the sweetly indolent voice played upon his senses and drew him with an irresistible power.

“Yes?” he managed to respond, trying to find his way out of the bewilderment that her call had wrought. Then she spoke again.

“Is this really you at last, Greg, after all these years of silence? I never thought you’d cut me cold like that. Don’t you know me, dolling? This is Alice. Have you forgotten your old sweetheart, Allie Blair?”

“Alice
Blair
!” For an instant, the wild thought went through his brain that perhaps it had been a mistake. Perhaps she never ran away and married Murky Powers! Perhaps the report had been false.

“Alice Blair!” he repeated dazedly, eagerly, again.

“Oh, you’ve come alive at last have you, dolling? Well, you’ve taken your time to it. Here I’ve simply been languishing at home for days expecting you to come to call on me, and at last I’ve been driven to put my pride in my pocket and call you up. I positively couldn’t stand it to wait any longer. Why haven’t you come, Greg? You haven’t forgotten me, have you, dolling?”

As a matter of fact, Alice Blair had not been languishing at home during the days that had elapsed between her reading of the news item about the memorial room and this telephone call. She had been exceedingly busy trying to find her former admirer. And Alice was resourceful. She had scoured the town among his old friends and had called up various hotels and investigated other stopping places. An old friend who was well enough off to give a memorial room to a hospital must surely be worth looking up. Although she reflected that it would be like Greg to have scraped together enough for a memorial for his mother and left nothing for himself to live on. That had always been the trouble with Greg to her mind—he thought too much of his mother. She had been always having to combat ideas and standards that his mother had given him.

But when she found that he was staying at so distinguished a place as the Whittall House, she was all the more eager to find him and secure his attentions once more. If he could afford to stay at the Whittall House, he must have
some
money at least, and Alice loved money and the things that money would buy.

So Alice had called up several times that day while Greg was out, until she finally found him. And now her voice lilted into pathos with a hint of the old-time lure as she asked pathetically whether he had forgotten her.

Greg found himself stirred by various emotions as he struggled to answer her. He was trying to think out quickly what might have happened in those ten years of his absence. Murky Powers wasn’t dead. He was sure of that. He had seen his name on the sporting page of the paper just the other day. His mother’s fears and an innate caution were battling with his delight that she had called him, his longing to find some friend.

“Why—I—thought you were
married
!” he blundered out bluntly at last.

A silvery laugh trilled over the wire and rippled in his ear, making pleasant little shivers down his back. It was as if suddenly all his disillusionment had rolled away and Alice Blair was just a little golden girl again that his mother didn’t quite understand yet but would someday.

“Married!” she lilted. “Oh, that’s precious, Greg. Are you really as innocent as that yet? Now don’t tell me you’ve been kept a babe in arms.
Married!
What’s that got to do with it? Of course I’m married. Twice married, for the matter of that. I divorced Murky, that prince of brutes, before a year was up, and I’m just back from Reno now getting rid of his successor. Safe and sane and disillusioned. But that’s neither here nor there. Once sweethearts is always sweethearts, isn’t that so, Greggie dolling? Or am I mistaken? Is it?”

Greg found himself bewildered by her chirruping. He hesitated an instant, and she went on, her tone graver now with a hint of tears behind it.

“But seriously, Greg, aren’t you coming to see me right away? I need you. I really do. I’ve been through terribly hard experiences, and I need a
real friend
As soon as I heard you were in town, I rejoiced, for I knew you were just what I needed.”

“But I don’t see how you knew I was here,” murmured Greg, still bewildered. I didn’t let anybody know I had come.”

“Oh, I heard,” triumphed the silvery voice. “Those things get around quickly in the hometown, you know. And I was
hurt
Really I was, Greg dear. I supposed, of course, you would hunt me up at once the minute you landed. And I was
terribly hurt
, hour after hour, not even
hearing
from you.”

“I didn’t know you lived here.” Greg’s voice sounded blunt again. He felt strangely embarrassed at the way this grownup Alice was taking things for granted, calling him darling and telling of her divorces. “Last I heard of you, you were living in New York.”

“Oh, but that’s ages ago. I went to Paris for two years, and then Florida for the winter. Took a trip to the little old Panama Canal incidentally. Oh, I’ve been around a bit. But now I’m home at last. For a while at least. Mother’s still living here, you know. She took a house on the West side. What’s that? No, I’m not with Mother. Her ways are not my ways, never were, you remember.” A careless little laugh rippled over to him. “No, I couldn’t be bothered living where I’m watched every move I make. I have an apartment in The Claridge. It’s really quite swell. And that brings me to the point. I want you to come over and take dinner with me—just us two, you know. Come about seven, and we can have a real talk. You better dress, because there’ll be others dropping in later in the evening, and we’ll likely get around to a night club or two before morning. We always do, so come prepared. Now, you won’t fail me, will you, Greggie dolling! It’s so nice to have you back!”

Greg turned from hanging up the receiver and looked around his room. It was the same strange room, but somehow it looked less lonesome. There was somebody in town who cared. He was going out to dinner! He was going to see Alice again! His heart was warm and eager.

Then he gave himself to the matter of garments. This would be the time for the clothes he had got in Chicago. He recalled the careful directions his brief, casual questions had elicited. He hadn’t been at all sure that he would ever need evening clothes in the new life that was before him, but at least he had prepared himself for an emergency, and here it was.

But whoever would have thought he would be going to take dinner with Alice, of all people? Alice who had been so utterly removed from him all these years by that marriage with Murky Powers! And now to find out she no longer belonged to him! It filled him with elation. And yet—he had always felt that divorces were dreadful things. His mother had left him fine high standards of clean living. He had never favored divorces. Still, there must be cases where it was justifiable. He recalled the adjectives Alice had used to describe Murky, “prince of brutes,” and his blood boiled. Anybody who could ill-treat a little, delicate golden girl like Alice must be a brute. He had never liked Murky. It had been terrible to him when Alice ran away with him. Poor little golden Alice!

Of course his mother had said, “There,
you see
, Gregory!” but he had always thought his mother just didn’t understand Alice. She hadn’t a very pleasant environment at home according to her own story. Poor Alice!

The disturbing thought came that she had married again after one sharp experience and was again divorced. He knew how his mother would have felt about that, too. He winced himself as he thought about it. Well, at least he would see her, and after he had talked with her, he would be better able to understand.

He was full of anticipation as he prepared for the evening, even whistling a wild bar or two of a nondescript song. Ten years in the wilderness had not tended to increase his repertoire.

It was odd how the wilderness had given him poise, however. When he stood at last in the ornate vestibule of Alice’s apartment waiting to be let in, his manner was cool, repressed, self-contained. The casual observer would never have dreamed that this was the first time he had ever appeared in evening clothes before except in the store where they were purchased. They sat upon his finely knit figure as well-cut clothes should do, and did not flaunt themselves as alien garments. Greg Sterling was as well turned out as though he had been living on Fifth Avenue all his life.

Only in his deep gray eyes was there a light of eagerness that a discerner of character might read how greatly he was moved. But his outward calm was perfect as the door was opened by a trim maid in uniform.

Greg entered the strangest-looking room he had ever seen. There were hangings of black velvet and silver cloth, and a lot of odd, triangular mirrors in unexpected places. There were flowers everywhere—rare hothouse flowers. It suddenly occurred to Greg that he ought to have sent her flowers.

His mind flashed back to high school commencement time and how he had taken over another fellow’s early morning milk route for several weeks to get extra money to get flowers to send up to Alice when she read her essay at commencement. A dozen little pink roses! And now he could get her as many dozens as he pleased, and he hadn’t remembered to get them!

It occurred to him to wonder who had sent her these roses. Great yellow ones with a glow of crimson in their hearts, dozens of them in a copper bowl reflected in a slab of mirror on a low table. Crimson roses in a tall crystal vase with stems almost a yard long and a perfume that was rare and beguiling. White roses in a strange black jar with silver edges. Pink roses in an alabaster urn. Did Alice buy these roses for herself? Was she rich enough now to revel in luxuries of this sort, or did other men send them to her? The uneasy question shot like a pang through his heart, and then he saw her coming and forgot everything else.

She was wearing a frail evening frock of palest petal-pink satin, whose lovely, revealing lines brought out every charm and grace and enhanced the beauty of her exquisite neck and arms, the contour of her slender back. Her face was like a lovely flower, and her pale gold hair was drawn back smooth and close around her small, symmetrical head and gathered into a knot in her neck, leaving her pretty little ears uncovered and giving her an innocent, childlike air, which the vivid dash of carmine on her small, petulant lips only half belied. If it had not been for the sweet, pitiful shadows under her great appealing blue eyes, she would not have looked a day older than when he saw her last.

A necklace glittered on the whiteness of her neck. There were jewels flashing from her small white hands and arms, and there were long, slender earrings dripping down from her little ears that twinkled as she stirred.

For a moment, she stood poised at the upper end of the long room, letting him get the full effect of her entrance, fairly taking his breath away with her loveliness, appraising him with a delighted glance. Then, with all the gush of the Alice of old, only with perhaps a new touch of artificiality, she cried out joyfully, “Oh, you
dolling
! Aren’t you perfectly
stunning
!”

Then she rushed forward, and before he had any idea what was coming, she had seized his face in both her slim smooth hands and kissed him smartly on his mouth.

He started back from her. There was something in that contact he did not like or was not prepared for. It was too soon, he told himself. She seemed a stranger. He had just been looking at her as if she were some supernatural being, and now to have her rush upon him this way somehow cheapened her. Made her seem just a common stranger. He stiffened and met her onslaught almost stolidly.

“Dolling!”
she reproached tenderly, holding him off and looking at him fondly. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”

In his wilderness home, he had accustomed himself to meet all sorts of emergencies. He had trained his face to express no emotion before the unexpected, be it friend or foe or only a trespassing creature. And he had ever been a lad of few words.

So, now, as he would have done in front of his shack in the wilderness had some strange wild creatures approached him and begun to be familiar, he stood warily regarding her. He did not let her see his shrinking nor guess how he disliked this sort of thing. He just stood and took it solemnly, as if he had withdrawn within himself. And strange to say, this attitude on his part was merely more intriguing to her. She flung the sweetness of her personality against his indifference, determined to strike a spark of interest from those deep gray eyes whose lights she used to know so well, whose interest she had caught on the first glimpse, but whose light seemed suddenly to be no more lit just for her benefit.