Held to Answer/Chapter 17
It was three o'clock on Thursday afternoon, and John was sitting happily in the Mitchell living-room in Los Angeles, waiting for Bessie to come from school. Mrs. Mitchell stood on the threshold, dressed for the street save for her gloves, at one of which she was tugging.
"I have always felt, Mr. Hampstead, that you were a very good influence for Bessie," she was saying guilefully, "and I do wish you would talk her out of that university idea. She graduates from High in June, you know; and she talks nothing, thinks nothing, dreams nothing but university, university, uni-v-e-r-s-i-t-y!" Mrs. Mitchell's elocutionary climax was calculated to convey a very fine impression of utter weariness with the word and with the idea; but John, who had flushed with gratification at the crafty compliment, would not be swerved by either guile or scorn from an instinctive loyalty to Bessie and her ideals.
"I'm afraid I couldn't do that," he said soberly. "My heart wouldn't be in it. Bessie has a wonderful mind. You should give her every advantage."
"Well, talk her out of Stanford, then," compromised Mrs. Mitchell, as if in her mind she had already surrendered, as she knew she must. "She's determined to go there. Stanford is a kind of man's school, from what I hear. Lots of the Phrosos are going to U. C."
"But if I rather favor Stanford myself?" suggested Hampstead, feeling his way carefully.
The front door opened and closed, and John's heart leaped at the sound of a light footstep in the hall. As if hearing voices, the owner of the footsteps turned them towards the living room.
Book strap in hand, wearing a white shirt waist and skirt of blue, with the brown crinkly hair breaking out from under a small straw hat worn jauntily askew, Bessie paused upon the threshold, her eyes a-sparkle with expectancy.
"John!" she exclaimed, with a little shriek of joy. "You—you old dear!" and she came literally bounding across the room to greet him as he rose and advanced eagerly.
Hampstead thought he had never seen such a glowing picture of animal health and exuberance of life.
"Well!" exclaimed Mrs. Mitchell, addressing her daughter with chiding in her tones. "Why don't you throw your arms around him and be done with it?"
Bessie blushed, but John covered her confusion by exclaiming:
"I almost did that myself, Mrs. Mitchell, I was so glad to see her!" Whereupon he laughed hilariously, it was such a good joke; and Bessie laughed, turning her face well away from her mother, while Mrs. Mitchell laughed most heartily of all at the thought of John Hampstead putting his arms around any woman, except, of course, as he might have done in the practice of his late profession.
"And now," declared Mrs. Mitchell, as she managed the last button of her glove, "I must abandon you to yourselves; but don't sit here paying compliments. Get out into the air somewhere."
"Oh, let's," assented Bessie, with animation. "Only wait till I change my hat!"
"Don't," pleaded John. "I like that one."
"But I have another you'll like better," called Bessie over her shoulder, for already she was racing out of the room past her mother.
"Good-by. Have a good time!" Mrs. Mitchell lifted her voice toward her daughter racing up the stairs, and then turning, waved her ridiculous folding sunshade at John as she adjured: "Give her your very best advice!"
"Never doubt it," echoed John, with the sudden feeling of a man who is left alone in a house to guard great riches.
"How do you like it?"
Bessie had taken a whole half-hour to change her hat, but her dress had been changed as well, to something white and filmy that reached below the shoe-tops and by those few inches of extra length added a surprising look of maturity to the pliant youthfulness of her figure. This was heightened by a surplice effect in the bodice forming a V, which accentuated the rounded fullness of the bosom and gave a hint of the charm and power of a most bewitching woman, ripening swiftly underneath the artless beauty of the girl.
"Wonderful!" John exclaimed rapturously, rising as she entered.
Bessie's mood was lightly happy. His was deeply reverent, and there was a world of devotion and tenderness in the look he gave her, which thrilled through the girl like an ecstasy.
All the past was coming up to John's mind, all the long past of their friendship with its gradual ripening into normal, all-comprehending love, but still he was searching her uplifted face as if for a final confirmation of the oneness of the vision of his love with this materialization of youth and woman mingling; for he must make no mistake this time.
Yes, the confirmation was complete. It was the true face of his dream. In it was everything which he had hoped to find there. Marien Dounay had made woman mean more to him than woman had ever meant before. But here in the upturned, trusting face of Bessie, with its sparkle in the eyes and its sunny witchery in the dimples, there was something infinitely richer and more satisfying than experience or imagination had been able to suggest.
Here, he told himself reverently, was every blessing that God had compounded for the happiness of man. And it was his,—modestly, trustfully his. Every detail of her expression and her beauty, every subtly playing current of her personality, made him know it. He had but to declare himself and reach out and take her like a lover.
But, strangely, he could do neither. An awe was on him. He felt like falling down upon his knees and thanking God, but not like taking her; not like touching her even, though he could not resist that when Bessie extended frankly both her hands, quite in the old manner of cordial, happy comradeship. John took them in his, and as she returned his touch with the warm frank clasp that was characteristic of her hearty nature, he got anew the sense of the woman in her. It swept over him like an intoxication that was rare and wonderful, like no rapture he had ever known before—half-spiritual but half wholly human—therefore with something in it that frightened him.
"Bessie," he asked, abruptly, "could we get away from here quickly—in a very few minutes—away from men and houses and things?"
Bessie looked surprised. "Of course; we're going out, aren't we?"
"But quickly," urged John, "just a mad impulse, just a romantic impulse; the feeling that I want to get you out of doors. You are like a flower to me, just bursting into beautiful bloom. Better still, a wonderful fruit, which in some sheltered spot has grown unplucked to a rich tinted ripeness. You are so much a part of nature, so utterly unartificial, that it seems I must see you and enjoy you first in a setting of nature's own."
This was the frankest acknowledgment of her beauty and its appeal to him that John had ever made. It seemed to Bessie that he made it now rather unconsciously; but she saw that he felt it and was moved by it. To see this gave her another delicious thrill of happiness. Indeed her girlish breast was all a-tremble with joys, with curiosities, with expectancies. She, too, felt something wonderful and intoxicating in this slight physical contact of her lover's fingers. She felt herself upon the verge of new and mysterious discoveries and recognized the naturalness of the instinct to meet them under the vaulted blue with the warm sun shining and the tonic breezes blowing past.
"Your impulse is right, John," Bessie answered, with quick assent and an energetic double shake of the hands that held her own, and they went out into the sunny street.
Not far from the Mitchell residence, on the western hills of Los Angeles, is a little, painted park, with a maple-leaf sheet of water embanked by closely shaved terraces of green, and once or twice a clump of shrubbery crouching so close over graveled walks as to suggest the thrill of something wild. From one of these man-made thickets a toy promontory juts into the lake. Upon this point, as if it were a lighthouse, is a rustic house, octagonal in shape, with benches upon its inner circumference. Embowered at the back, screened half way on the sides, and with the open lake before, this snug structure affords a delicious sense of privacy and elfin-like seclusion, provided there be no oarsmen pulling lazily or tiny sailboat loafing across the watery foreground.
This day there was none. The stretch of lake in front stared vacantly. The birds twittered in the boughs behind, unguardedly. The perfume of jasmine or orange blossoms or honeysuckle or of love was wafted through the rustic lattices; and here John and Bessie, seated side by side, were able to feel themselves alone in the universe.
But it was so delightful just to have each other thus alone and know that at any moment the great words so long preparing might be spoken, that instinctively they postponed the blissful moment of avowal, with vagrant talk on widely scattered subjects. Indeed, it seemed to each that any word the other spoke was music, and anything was blissful that engaged their minds in mutual contemplation. But nearer and nearer to themselves the subjects of conversation drew until they talked of their careers.
John, they agreed, was going to be something big,—very, very big; though he still did not know what, and in the meantime he was going to make money, yet not for money's sake.
As for Bessie, she, too, had developed an ambition and surprised John into delightful little raptures with her statement of it.
"This country has been keeping bachelor's hall long enough," she dogmatized, placing one slim finger affirmatively in the center of one white palm. "Women are going to have more to do with government. Here in California we'll be voting in a few years. When it comes, John, I'm going to be ready for it."
The idea seemed so strange at first,—this dimpled creature voting,—that John could not repress a smile. But Bessie, her blue eyes round and sober, was too earnest to protest the smile.
"Father's going up the line; you know that, of course," she affirmed. "He'll be a big man and rich almost before we know it; but they're not going to make any social buzz-buzz out of little Bessie. That's why I'm aiming at Stanford. I'm going in for political economy. When woman's opportunity comes, there are lots of women that will be ready for it. I'm going to be one of them."
Bessie nodded her head so emphatically that some crinkly brown locks fell roguishly about her ears, and John was obliged to smile again; but for all that the big man was very proud of the purpose so seriously announced. Besides, with Bessie's manner more than her words there went an impression of the growing depth and dignity of her character that was to John as delightful as some other things his eyes were boldly busy in observing. But presently these busy observations and reflections kindled in him again an overwhelming sense of the wealth of woman in this aspiring, dimpled girl. With this went an exciting vision of the bliss which life holds in store for any mutually adapted man and woman where each is consumed with desire for the other.
"Bessie!" he broke out impulsively, arising quickly and looking down into her upturned, intent face. "Doesn't everything we've just been talking about seem unimportant?"
Bessie's features expressed wonder and delightful anticipation.
"Beside ourselves, I mean," John went on, and then added impetuously: "To me, this afternoon, there is just one fact in the universe, Bessie, and that fact is You!"
The light of a shining happiness kindled like a flash on the girl's face, and she threw out her hands to him in the old impulsive way.
"Just one thing I feel," John rushed along, seizing the outstretched hands and playfully but tenderly lifting her until she stood before him, "just one thing that I want to do in the world above everything else, and that is to love you, Bessie, to love you!"
The words as he breathed them seemed to come up out of the deeps of a nature rich in knowledge of what such love could mean.
Bessie, her face enraptured, did not speak, but her dimples behaved skittishly, and there was a sharp little catch of her breath.
"Just one ambition stands out above every other," continued the man with a noble earnestness—"the ambition to make you happy—to protect you, to worship you, and to help you do the things you want to do in the world. For marriage isn't a selfish thing! It doesn't mean the extinction of a woman's career in order that a man may have his. It is the surrender of each to the other for the greater happiness and the higher power of both."
Suddenly a choke came in the big man's voice.
"That's what I feel, my dear girl," he concluded abruptly, with an excess of reverence in his tones, "and that's what I want to do!"
As he spoke, John had lifted her hands higher and higher till one rested on each of his shoulders. Man and woman, they looked straight into each other's eyes, as they had that day upon the cliff, but this time it was his lip that quivered and his eyes that misted over.
Bessie, sobered for a moment almost to a sense of unworthiness, as she felt all at once what it meant for a great-hearted man to so declare himself to a woman, saw something in that growing mist which impelled her to immediately reward the tenderness of such devotion with a frank confession of her own.
"Well," she breathed naïvely, "you have my permission to do all those things. I'm sure, John, the biggest fact, the biggest love, the biggest career in the world for me is just you!"
Bessie accompanied the words with an ecstatic little shrug of the shoulders and a self-abandoning toss of the head.
Reverently John pressed his lips upon hers and held her close for a very, very long time; while a thrill of indescribable bliss surged over and engulfed him. His embrace was gentle, even reverent; but it seemed he could not let her out of his arms. Here at last was one treasure he could never surrender; one renunciation he could never make.
"And to think," sighed Bessie, after a long and blissful silence, finding such rapture in nestling in those strong arms that she was still unwilling to lift her head from where she could feel the beating of his happy heart, "to think how long we have loved each other without expressing it; how loyal we have been to each other's love even before we had grown to recognize it for what it truly was."
Bessie looked up suddenly. It seemed to her that John's heart had done a funny thing; that it staggered and missed a beat.
But John ignored her look. His face was set and stubborn. He changed his position slightly and gathered her yet more determinedly in his arms, so that Bessie felt again how strong he was, and how much it means to woman's life to add a strength like that.
"Do you know, John," she prattled presently, out of the deepening bliss which this enormous sense of security inspired, "do you know that I used to fear for you? For me rather! To fear," she exclaimed with a happily apologetic little laugh, "that you might fall in love with Marien Dounay!"
But the laugh ended in a choke of surprise, when Bessie felt the body of the big man shiver like a tree in a blast.
"Why? Why? What is the matter, John?" she asked in helpless bewilderment, for the odd face with a profile like a mountain had taken on a look of pain, and while she questioned him, he put her from him and with a low groan sank down upon the bench.
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The little summer house was still undisturbed by the rude, annoying outer world; but its atmosphere had subtly changed. A chill wind blew through the shrubbery and the fragrance of bush and flower was gone. Even the sun, as if he could not bear to look, had dropped behind the hill; for something had edged between the lovers.
Bessie's artless words made John remember as very, very near, what, during this delicious hour in her presence, had seemed to be worlds and worlds behind him, in fact made him feel his shame and guilt so deeply that he could no longer hold her in his arms. Then the story of his infatuation for Marien Dounay came out, as he had always felt it must, sometime, for the purging of his own soul, even if it were she who would suffer most,—the old, old law of vicarious suffering again!
Bessie listened with white, set face, while John resolutely spared himself nothing in the telling, but when the look of hurt and pain took up its abode permanently in those mild blue eyes, a feeling of yet more terrible misgiving overtook him and he would have checked the story if he could. But once started, his natural shrinking from hypocrisy compelled him to tell the truth.
"You can never know how I have reproached myself for it," he concluded. "I have suffered agonies of remorse. Wild with love of you, and the impulse to declare that love, I have stayed away six months. It seemed to me at first that I could hardly get my own consent to come at all from her to you; that I must doom myself to perpetual loneliness to expiate my sin. And yet, Bessie," John made the mistake of trying to extenuate, "it was probably not altogether unnatural, knowing man as I begin to know him."
To the young girl, facing the first bitter disillusionment of love, it came like a flash of intuition that this last was true; that men were like that—all men! They were mere brutes! This intuition maddened the girl, and her disturbed emotions expressed themselves in a burst of flaming anger.
"You may go back to Marien Dounay," she exclaimed hotly. "I do not want her left-overs."
"But," protested John, with something of that sense of injury which a man is apt to feel if forgiveness does not follow soon upon confession, "you do not understand!"
"I understand," retorted Bessie with blazing sarcasm, "that you fell hopelessly in love with this woman; that you embraced her, kissed her, worshipped the ground she trod on; that you proposed to marry her almost upon the spot; that she refused you and drove you from her; that for a month you wrote me letters of hypocritical pretense; that when she finally not only repulsed you but revealed herself to you as a woman without character, you considerately revived your affections for me."
John felt that in this storm of words some injustice was being done him; yet he could not deny that such an outburst of wrath upon Bessie's part was natural, and he humbled himself before the blast.
In the vehemence of her demonstration, Bessie had arisen, and after the final word stood with her back to her lover, looking out upon the little lake which suddenly seemed a frozen sheet of ice.
"Bessie!" John murmured huskily, after an interval.
"Don't speak to me, don't!" she commanded hoarsely, without turning her head.
John obeyed her so humbly and so completely that she began to wonder if he were still there, or if he had sunk through the ground in the shame and mortification which she knew well enough possessed him.
When she had wondered long enough, she turned and found him not only there but in a pose so abject and utterly remorseful that her heart softened until she felt the need of self-justification.
"You were my god," she urged. "You inspired me! I worshipped you! I thought you were as fine a man as my own father—and finer because you had a finer ambition. I thought you were grand, noble, strong!" Bessie stopped with her emphasis heavy upon the final word.
"Is not the strong man the one who has found in what his weakness lies?" John pleaded humbly.
But as before, his attempt at palliation seemed to anger her unaccountably, and she turned away again with feelings too intense for utterance—with, in fact, a dismal sense of the futility of utterance. She wanted to get away from John. She wished he would not stand there barring the door. She wished he would go while her back was turned. A sense of humiliation greater than had possessed him, she was sure, had come over her. If the lake in front had been sixty feet deep instead of six inches, she might have flung herself into it.
"But you love me!" pleaded John from behind her, his voice coming up out of depths.
"Do you think I would care how many actresses you lost your dizzy head over if I didn't?" retorted Bessie petulantly, and instantly would have given several worlds to recall the speech.
"No! No!" she continued, stamping her foot
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angrily, "I don't love you, I love the man I thought you were."
"All the same, I love you," groaned John, rising up to proclaim his passion hoarsely and then flinging himself again upon the bench, where with head hanging despondently, he continued: "I love you, and I don't blame you for hating me, and you can punish me as long as you want and in any way you want. You can even try to fall in love with some one else if you like. Marry him if you want to. I love you, and I'll keep on loving you. No punishment is too great for the thing I've done."
The effect of this speech on the outraged Bessie was rather alarming to that indignant young lady. When John began to heap the reproaches higher upon himself, she felt a return to sympathetic consideration for him that was so great she dared not trust herself to hear more of them.
"Take me home!" she commanded hurriedly, walking swiftly by him, but with scrupulous care that the swish of her white skirts should not touch the bowed head as she passed, and no more trusting herself to a second glance at that dejected tawny mop of hair than to hear more of his self-indictment.