Part 24 (1/2)
”Get what you wanted, Rue?”
”Yes, thank you.”
”Been waiting long?”
”I--don't think so.”
”All right,” he said cheerily, climbing in beside her. ”I'm sorry I kept you waiting. Had a business matter to settle. Hungry?”
Rue, very still and colourless, said no, with a mechanical smile. The chauffeur climbed to the rumble.
”I'll jam her through,” nodded Brandes as the car moved swiftly westward. ”We'll lunch in Albany on time.”
Half a mile, and they pa.s.sed Neeland's Mills, where old d.i.c.k Neeland stood in his boat out on the pond and cast a glittering lure for pickerel.
She caught a glimpse of him--his st.u.r.dy frame, white hair, and ruddy visage--and a swift, almost wistful memory of young Jim Neeland pa.s.sed through her mind.
But it was a very confused mind--only the bewildered mind of a very young girl--and the memory of the boy flashed into its confusion and out again as rapidly as the landscape sped away behind the flying car.
Dully she was aware that she was leaving familiar and beloved things, but could not seem to realise it--childhood, girlhood, father and mother, Brookhollow, the mill, Gayfield, her friends, all were vanis.h.i.+ng in the flying dust behind her, dwindling, dissolving into an infinitely growing distance.
They took the gradual slope of a mile-long hill as swallows take the air; houses, barns, woods, orchards, grain fields, flew by on either side; other cars approaching pa.s.sed them like cannon b.a.l.l.s; the sunlit, undulating world flowed glittering away behind; only the stainless blue ahead confronted them immovably--a vast, magnificent goal, vague with the mystery of promise.
”On this trip,” said Brandes, ”we may only have time to see the Loove and the palaces and all like that. Next year we'll fix it so we can stay in Paris and you can study art.”
Ruhannah's lips formed the words, ”Thank you.”
”Can't you learn to call me Eddie?” he urged.
The girl was silent.
”You're everything in the world to me, Rue.”
The same little mechanical smile fixed itself on her lips, and she looked straight ahead of her.
”Haven't you begun to love me just a little bit, Rue?”
”I like you. You are very kind to us.”
”Don't your affection seem to grow a little stronger now?” he urged.
”You are so kind to us,” she repeated gratefully; ”I like you for it.”
The utterly unawakened youth of her had always alternately fascinated and troubled him. Gambler that he was, he had once understood that patience is a gambler's only stock in trade. But now for the first time in his career he found himself without it.
”You said,” he insisted, ”that you'd love me when we were married.”
She turned her child's eyes on him in faint surprise: