The Pyjama Man (Ainslee's, 1913)/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
Throughout the days that followed, Meg still hated. She told herself so repeatedly. The only problem remaining was to decide whom she loathed the most.
At times it was the pyjama man, who had invaded her small world, turned it topsy-turvy, and was now preparing to leave it as jauntily as he had come. For it was all settled. He and the actress had been almost constantly together, and in a few days were sailing on the Orontes for London.
At others it was Miss Holmes, with her laughing eyes and refined egoism, for with all her greatness she was still an actress. Then there was Frank Walker, the very thought of whom made her shudder. For some reason, complete as it was obscure, she saw him now in an entirely new light. Hitherto she had looked upon him as a sort of genial genius from whom anything might be expected, from chocolates and gold bangles to a miraculous termination of her father's woes, all simply dependent on her promise to become his wife. He had told her so in his own quaint way, and it had looked so delightfully convenient. Why, indeed, should she have any more objection to sitting at the head of his table than in his big red touring car? Meg was not vain, but she remembered how he had laughed and patted her hand, when, in all seriousness, she had suggested that the bargain was one-sided, he giving too much and she too little. But now a mist seemed to have lifted before her mental vision, and she saw him as he was—herself his wife—and shuddered.
Even Robert had come under the ban. One day he had scrambled through the hedge, as he often did, and found her pretending to read in the garden. He had thrust his cold, moist nose into her hand as it hung from the hammock, and she had rapped it smartly with her knuckles, to gather him in her arms the next instant and bury her face in his silky ears.
It was this incident, small in itself, hat had first clearly brought home to Meg her state of mental chaos; it left ashamed and thoroughly annoyed with herself. “Don't hate,” he had said; “it's hardly ever worth while.” It was not! And from that hour she had striven—how hard she alone knew—to prove the truth of the assertion by throwing herself into her work with an energy that demoralized the household. Never had the white house on the cliff's summit undergone such a rigorous upheaval. Mr. Bettington wandered from room to room, peevishly demanding the whereabouts of his slippers, his tobacco pouch, or some other triviality without which his world would cease to revolve on its axis, to come at last upon his overzealous daughter, enveloped in an apron and a cloud of dust.
“They are the weirdest people,” Miss Holmes had confided to Sprague shortly after the inception of this crusade against disorder. “They give one olives and game for two pounds a week, and spring-clean in midsummer. Thank Heaven, my workshop is detached!”
But the star boarder's “workshop,” a comfortable, weather-boarded room separated from the side of the house by a stretch of rank greensward, and used in a more affluent past as servants' quarters, was not immune.
Here, on a cushion-strewn divan, Miss Holmes whiled away many pleasant hours with novel and play, attended to her correspondence, posed before a cheval glass, or subjected herself to the prescribed course of physical culture that had made her figure what it was—and Meg found dust everywhere.
It was while she was vigorously polishing the windowpanes and humming an entirely new tune of her own that her glance fell on “the work.” It lay on the table in two untidy piles, one face downward, the other topped by a neatly typewritten page disfigured with copious corrections in ink.
The humming ceased abruptly, and for several seconds Meg leaned over it, deep in thought. Then she gave a queer little laugh, dusted carefully round it, and passed outside.
Despite all her efforts, the solution had forced itself upon her, and she knew that it was “the work”—nothing but “the work”—that she hated; hated as if it were a living thing.
In the evening she went down to the cove. Of late she had chosen this hour for her bath, for then, veiled in soft semidarkness, or shimmering under a gentle moon, the sea she loved held a mystery undreamed of in the glare of day.
One by one a crescent of tiny lights leaped into being round the distant curve of Manly beach, and the faint intermittently over the water, borne on a fitful breeze.
Meg sat motionless, her knees drawn to her chin, her gaze fastened unseeingly on the stretch of shining sand just bared by the receding tide.
“This must be Tuesday,” she murmured to the darkness; “Wednesday—Thursday—Friday”
“That's just what I've been thinking,” said Sprague, and flung himself on the sand at her side.
If Meg started, the movement was well hidden.
“Just what?” she queried.
“Wednesday — Thursday — Friday,” mimicked Sprague. “We sail on Friday.”
Meg laughed—a hard, taunting little laugh.
“Good gracious, you didn't suppose I was thinking of that?"
“I'm afraid I did.”
“Then it may do you good to hear that I was totting up when the washing will come back; we haven't a clean tablecloth in the house.”
“Washing! And on such a night!”
Sprague rolled over on the sand, the better to see her face.
“Where on earth have you been?” he demanded. “For the past week I've sampled the cove at every hour between five in the morning and six at night without running you to earth. This time inspiration prompted me—I stayed down here all day.”
“With nothing to eat?”
“I brought sandwiches and a billy.”
“And nothing to do?”
“There was the sea, and Robert, and a book. I wanted to see you,” he ended abruptly.
“Why didn't you come to the house?”
Sprague tossed a pebble down the stretch of wet sand.
“I'm not sure that I know,” he said deliberately, “unless it is that to me the white house is yours, the Haven mine, but the cove ours. Down here you can be you, and I can be I. I wanted us to be like that when we said good-by—that's all.”
Meg's laugh jarred on her own ears.
“What a queer man you are!” she observed. “No wonder you can write stories and plays and things.”
Sprague frowned into the darkness.
“Yes, it's your turn to laugh.” He turned and faced her squarely. “Do you know,” he said, with the air of one divulging a guilty secret, “that in spite of the stories and plays—and things—sometimes I don't want to go back there at all.”
He nodded out to sea.
“Can you see what that means to me?” he went on. “It means that I have found something better than home, and nowhere should be like that. Everybody and everything that I ought to care about is back there, and yet I want to give it all the slip—it worries me a little.”
“Don't let it,” said Meg easily. “You're not going to give it all the slip, so why worry? Besides, you'll fall into place with a click, just like a dislocated arm, exactly two days after you land.”
The fitful strains of the band had ceased, and the silence was unbroken save for the gentle hiss of water-washed sand.
Sprague changed the position of his legs, and drew a deep breath of warm night air.
“I suppose I shall,” he sighed. “It's rather wonderful, isn't it? I was expecting all the ordinary reverses and a few new ones thrown in—flat refusals, polite refusals, delay, delay, delay and here's the thing accomplished inside of a week. Miss Holmes is opening with it at the Olympic—do you mind digging something into my leg?”
Meg gingerly obeyed.
“Of course it's wonderful,” she said. “It's fate—there!”
“Thanks.” Sprague lapsed into silence.
“Is that all you waited down here all day to tell me?” said Meg presently. “Because, if so, I'm tremendously disappointed. I knew it already.”
“No,” said Sprague, “that's not all. I wanted to know if you'd accept Robert.”
Meg turned at that. She knew what the offer must cost him.
“Do you mean it?” she demanded gravely.
“Of course I mean it.”
“Then I'm not sure that I like you any more; I thought you were fond of Rags.”
A second after the words were uttered she regretted them. Sprague sat quite still, looking out to sea.
“I'm so fond of him,” he said slowly, for once omitting to correct the old-time error, “that I don't want to see him suffer. Robert is a child of the open air and freedom; in London he would pine away. I shall be frightfully busy; besides, he would have to go through three months' quarantine at Southampton. I've heard something about that quarantine, and—I want you to have him; will you?”
“Yes,” said Meg, “I'll have him.”
“Thanks.”
There followed a long silence, during which Sprague felt a sudden and wild desire to snatch this chilly little mortal into his arms and kiss her into warmth. It was a novel sensation, experienced once—and only once—in his life before—at the age of seventeen. At that moment even “the work” faded into insignificance, a specter, grim and unalluring. He moved nearer to her in the sand, drawn by an irresistible impulse, and saw that she trembled.
“Are you cold?” he queried huskily.
“No,” she answered.
“Then why are you trembling?”
She turned to him, and their eyes met. He had his answer. The miracle stole over him like an opiate, seducing every sense. She leaned toward him, and for a breathless instant her lips brushed his—lightly as the wings of a moth; the next a dog's bark rang sharply on the silence, the spell was broken, and the world surged back on Sprague in a swift and overwhelming torrent of remorse.
He rose to his feet, and stood awkwardly in the sand.
“Good-by,” he said.
She looked up at him with a little white smile.
“Good-by.”
“And don't see us off,” he said, with an absurd snigger.
“If you'd rather not.”
“I would. I hate it—grinning inanely at one another from a crowd across three feet of greasy water for perhaps an hour—please don't!”
“I promise.”
“You'll write?”
“Perhaps.”
For a moment he stood looking down on her. Something in her voice awed him; then he turned abruptly and strode up the beach toward the cliff path.