Part 18 (1/2)
”Don't use that term!” she cried. ”There is no word so hateful to me as 'failure'--I suppose, because father has never failed in anything. Let us say that your success has been delayed.”
”Very well. That suits me better, also, but you see I've forgotten how to choose nice words.”
They were seated in the library, where for two hours they had remained undisturbed, Emerson talking rapidly, almost incoherently, as if this were a sort of confessional, the girl hanging eagerly upon his every word, following his narrative with breathless interest. The story had been substantially the same as that which, once before, he had related to Cherry Malotte; but now the facts were deeply, intimately colored with all the young man's natural enthusiasm and inmost personal feeling. To his listener it was like some wonderful, far-off romance, having to do with strange people whose motives she could scarcely grasp and pitched amid wild scenes that she could not fully picture.
”And you did all that for me,” she mused, after a time.
”It was the only way.”
”I wonder if any other man I know would take those risks just for--me.”
”Of course. Why, the risk, I mean the physical peril and hards.h.i.+p and discomfort, don't amount to--that.” He snapped his fingers. ”It was only the unending desolation that hurt; it was the separation from you that punished me--the thought that some luckier fellow might--”
”Nonsense!” Mildred was really indignant. ”I told you to fix your own time and I promised to wait. Even if I had not--cared for you, I would have kept my word. That is a Wayland principle. As it is, it was--comparatively easy.”
”Then you do love me, my Lady?” He leaned eagerly toward her.
”Do you need to ask?” she whispered from the shelter of his arms. ”It is the same old fascination of our girl and boy days. Do you remember how completely I lost my head about you?” She laughed softly. ”I used to think you wore a football suit better than anybody in the world! Sometimes I suspect that it is merely that same girlish hero-wors.h.i.+p and can't last.
But it _has_ lasted--so far. Three years is a long time for a girl like me to wait, isn't it?”
”I know! I know!” he returned, jealously. ”But I have lived that time with nothing but a memory, while you have had other things to occupy you. You are flattered and courted by men, scores of men--”
”Oh!”
”Legions of men! Oh, I know. Haven't I devoured society columns by the yard? The papers were six months old, to be sure, when I got them, but every mention of you was like a knife stab to me. Jealousy drove me to memorize the name of every man with whom you were seen in public, and I called down all sorts of curses upon their heads. I used to torture my lonely soul with hideous pictures of you--”
”Hideous pictures of me?” The girl perked her head to one side and glanced at him bewitchingly, ”You're very flattering!”
”Yes, pictures of you with a caravan of suitors at your heels.”
”You foolish boy! Suitors don't come in caravans they come in cabs.”
”Well, my simile isn't far wrong in other respects,” he replied, with a flash of her spirit. ”But anyhow I pictured you surrounded by all the beautiful things of your life here, forever in the scent of flowers, in the lights of drawing-rooms, in the soft music of hidden instruments. G.o.d!
how I tortured myself! You were never out of mind for an hour. My days were given to you, and I used to pray that my dreams might hold nothing but you. You have been my fetish from the first day I met you, and my wors.h.i.+p has grown blinder every hour, Mildred. You were always out of my reach, but I have kept my eyes raised toward you just the same, and I have never looked aside, never faltered.” He paused to feast his eyes upon her, and then in a half-whisper finished, ”Oh, my Lady, how beautiful you are!”
And indeed she was; for her face, ordinarily so imperious, was now softly alight; her eyes, which other men found cold, were kindled with a rare warmth of understanding; her smile was almost wistfully sweet. To her lover she seemed to bend beneath the burden of her brown hair, yet her slim figure had the strength and poise which come of fine physical inheritance and high spirit. Every gesture, every unstudied att.i.tude, revealed the grace of the well born woman.
It was this ”air” of hers, in fact, which had originally attracted him. He recalled how excited he had been in that far-away time when he had first learned her ident.i.ty--for the name of Wayland was spoken soundingly in the middle West. In the early stages of their acquaintance he had looked upon her aloofness as an affectation, but a close intimacy had compelled a recognition of it as something wholly natural; he found her as truly a patrician as Wayne Wayland, her father, could wish. The old man's domain was greater than that of many princes, and his power more absolute. His only daughter he spoiled as thoroughly as he ruled his part of the financial world, and wilful Mildred, once she had taken an interest in the young college man so evidently ready to be numbered among her lovers, did not pause half way, but made her preference patent to all, and opened to him a realm of dazzling possibilities. He well remembered the perplexities of those first delirious days when her regard was beginning to make itself apparent. She was so different, so wonderfully far removed from all he knew, that he doubted his own senses.
His friends, indeed, lost no opportunity of informing him that he was a tremendously favored young man, but this phase of the affair had caused him little thought, simply because the girl herself had come so swiftly to overshadow, in his regard, every other consideration--even her own wealth and position. At the same time he could not but be aware that his standing in his little world was subtly altered as soon as he became known as the favored suitor of Wayne Wayland's daughter. He began to receive favors from comparative strangers; unexpected social privileges were granted him; his way was made easier in a hundred particulars. From every quarter delicately gratifying distinctions came to him. Without his volition he found that he had risen to an entirely different position from that which he had formerly occupied; the mere coupling of his name with Mildred Wayland's had lifted him into a calcium glare. It affected him not at all, he only knew that he was truly enslaved to the girl, that he idolized her, that he regarded her as something priceless, sacred. She, in turn, frankly capitulated to him, in proud disregard of what her world might say, as complete in her surrender to this new lover as she had been inaccessible in her reserve toward all the rest.
And when he had graduated, how proud of her he had been! How little he had realized the gulf that separated them, and how quick had been his awakening!
It was Wayne Wayland who had shown him his folly. He had talked to the young engineer kindly, if firmly, being too shrewd an old diplomat to fan the flame of a headstrong love with vigorous opposition.
”Mildred is a rich girl,” the old financier had told Boyd, ”a very rich girl; one of the richest girls in this part of the world; while you, my boy--what have you to offer?”
”Nothing! But you were not always what you are now,” Emerson had replied.
”Every man has to make a start. When you married, you were as poor as I am.”