Two weeks later the news of the Breckenridge divorce burst like a bomb
in the social sky. Immediately pictures of the lovely wife, of
Clarence, of the town house and the country house began to flood the
evening papers, and even the morning journals found room for a column
or two of the affair on inside pages. Clarence was tracked to his
mountain retreat, and as much as possible was made of his refusal to be
interviewed. Mrs. Breckenridge was nowhere to be found.
The cold wind of publicity could not indeed reach her in the quiet
lanes and along the sandy shore of Quaker Bridge. Rachael, known to
everyone but her kind old landlady as "Mrs. Prescott," could even
glance interestedly at the papers now and then. Her identity, in three
long and peaceful months, was not even so much as suspected. She did
not mind the plain country table, the inconvenient old farmhouse; she
loved her new solitude. Unquestioned, she dreamed through the idle
days, reading, thinking, sleeping like a child. She spent long hours on
the seashore watching the lazy, punctual flow and tumble of the waves
that were never hurried, never delayed; her eyes followed the flashing
wings of the gulls, the even, steady upward beat of strong pinions, the
downward drifting through blue air that was of all motion the most
perfect.
And sometimes in those hours it seemed to Rachael that she was no more
in the great scheme of things than one of these myriad gulls, than one
of the grains of sand through which she ran her white, unringed
fingers. Clarence was a dream, Belvedere Bay was a dream; it was all a
hazy, dim memory now: the cards and the cocktails, the dancing and
tennis, the powder and lip-red in hot rooms and about glittering dinner
tables. What a hurry and bustle and rush it all was--for nothing. The
only actualities were the white sand and the cool green water, and the
summer sun beating down warmly upon her bare head.
She awakened every morning in a large, bright, bare room whose three
big windows looked into rustling maple boughs. The steady rushing of
surf could be heard just beyond the maples. Sometimes a soft fog
wrapped the trees and the lawn in its pale folds, and the bell down at
the lighthouse ding-donged through the whole warm, silent morning, but
more often there was sunshine, and Rachael took her book to the beach,
got into her stiff, dry bathing suit, in a small, hot bathhouse
furnished only by a plank bench and a few rusty nails, and plunged into
the delicious breakers she loved so well. Busy babies, digging on the
beach, befriended her, and she grew to love their sudden tears and more
sudden laughter, their stammered confidences, and the touch of their
warm, sandy little hands. She became an adept at pinning up their tiny
bagging undergarments, and at disentangling hat elastics from the soft
hair at the back of moist little necks. If a mother occasionally showed
signs of friendliness, Rachael accepted the overture pleasantly, but
managed to wander next day to some other part of the beach, and so
evade the definite beginning of a friendship.
The warm sunshine, flavored by the salty sea, soaked into her very
bones. Everything about Quaker Bridge was bare, and worn, and clean;
nothing was crowded, or hurried, or false. Barren dunes, and white,
bleaching sand, colorless little houses facing the elm-lined main
street, colorless planks outlining the road to the water; the
monotonous austerity, the pure severity of the little ocean village was
full of satisfying charm for her. If she climbed a sandy rise beyond
Mrs. Dimmick's cottage, and faced the north, she could see the white
roadway, winding down to Clark's Bar, where the ocean fretted year
after year to free the waters of the bay only twelve feet away. Beyond
on the slope, was the village known as Clark's Hills, a smother of
great trees with a weather-whipped spire and an occasional bit of roof
or fence in evidence, to show the habitation of man.
In other directions, facing east or west or south, there was nothing
but the sand, and the coarse straggling bushes that rooted in the sand,
and the clear blue dome of the sky. Rachael, whose life had been too
crowded, gloried in the honey-scented emptiness of the sand hills, the
measureless, heaving surface of the ocean, the dizzying breadth and
space in which, an infinitesimal speck, she moved.
She had sensibly taken her landlady, old Mrs. Dimmick, into her
confidence, and pleased to be part of the little intrigue, and perhaps
pleased as well to rent her two best rooms to this charming stranger,
the old lady protected the secret gallantly. It was all much more
simple than Rachael had feared it would be. Nobody questioned her,
nobody indeed paid attention to her; she wandered about in a blissful
isolation as good for her tired soul as was the primitive life she led
for her tired body.
Yet every one of the idle days left its mark upon her spirit; gradually
a great many things that had seemed worth while in the old life showed
their true and petty and sordid natures now; gradually the purifying
waters of solitude washed her soul clean. She began to plan for the
future--a future so different from the crowded and hurried past!
Warren Gregory's letters came regularly, postmarked London, Paris,
Rome. They were utterly and wholly satisfying to Rachael, and they went
far to make these days the happiest in her life. Her heart would throb
like a girl's when she saw, on the little drop-leaf table in the
hallway, the big square envelope addressed in the doctor's fine hand;
sometimes--again like a girl--she carried it down to the beach before
breaking the seal, thrilled with a thousand hopes, unready to put them
to the test. Yesterday's letter had said: "My dearest,"--had said: "Do
you realize that I will see you in five weeks?" Could to-day's be half
as sweet?
She was never disappointed. The strong tide of his devotion for her
rose steadily through letter after letter; in August the glowing
letters of July seemed cold by contrast, in September every envelope
brought her a flaming brand to add to the fires that were beginning to
blaze within her. In late September there was an interval; and Rachael
told herself that now he was on the ocean--now he was on the ocean--
By this time the digging babies were gone, the beach was almost
deserted. Little office clerks, men and women, coming down for the two
weeks of rest that break the fifty of work, still arrived on the late
train Saturday, and went away on the last train two weeks from the
following Sunday, but there were no more dances at the one big hotel,
and some of the smaller hotels were closed. The tall, plain, attractive
woman--with the three children and the baby, who drove over from
Clark's Hills every day, and, who, for all her graying hair and
sun-bleached linens, seemed to be of Rachael's own world--still brought
her shrieking and splashing trio to the beach, but she had confided to
Mrs. Dimmick, who had known her for many summers, that even her long
holiday was drawing to a close. Mrs. Dimmick brought extra blankets
down from the attic, and began to talk of seeing her daughter in
California. Rachael, drinking in the glory of the dying summer, found
each day more exquisite than the last, and gratified her old hostess by
expressing her desire to spend all the rest of her life in Quaker
Bridge.
She had, indeed, come to like the villagers thoroughly; not the summer
population, for the guests at all summer hotels are alike
uninteresting, but for the quiet life that went on year in and year out
in the little side streets: the women who washed clothes and swept
porches, who gardened with tow-headed babies tumbling around them, who
went on Sundays to the little bald-faced church at ten o'clock. Rachael
got into talk with them, trying to realize what it must be to walk a
hot mile for the small transaction of selling a dozen eggs for thirty
cents, to spend a long morning carefully darning an old, clean
Nottingham lace curtain that could be replaced for three dollars. She
read their lives as if they had been an absorbing book laid open for
her eyes. The coming of the Holladay baby, the decline and death of old
Mrs. Bird, the narrow escape of Sammy Tew from drowning, and the
thorough old-fashioned thrashing that Mary Trimble gave her oldest son
for taking a little boy like Sammy out beyond the "heads,"--all these
things sank deep into the consciousness of the new Rachael. She liked
the whitewashed cottages with their blazing geraniums and climbing
honeysuckle, and the back-door yards, with chickens fluffing in the
dust, and old men, seated on upturned old boats, smoking and whittling
as they watched the babies "while Lou gets her work caught up".
October came in on a storm, the most terrifying storm Rachael had ever
seen. Late in the afternoon of September's last golden day a wind began
to rise among the dunes, and Rachael, who, wrapped in a white wooly
coat and deep in a book, had been lying for an hour or two on the
beach, was suddenly roused by a shower of sand, and sat up to look at
the sky. Clouds, low and gray, were moving rapidly overhead, and
although the tide was only making, and high water would not be due for
another hour, the waves, emerald green, swift, and capped with white,
were already touching the landmost water-mark.
Quickly getting to her feet, she started briskly for home, following
the broken line of kelp and weeds, grasses, driftwood, and cocoanut
shells that fringed the tide-mark, and rather fascinated by the sudden
ominous change in sea and sky. In the little village there was great
clapping of shutters and straining of clotheslines, distracted,
bareheaded women ran about their dooryards, doors banged, everywhere
was rush and flutter.
"D'clare if don't think th' folks at Clark's Hills going to be shut of
completely," said Mrs. Dimmick, bustling about with housewifely
activity, and evidently, like all the village and like Rachael herself,
a little exhilarated by the oncoming siege.
"What will they do?" Rachael demanded, unhooking a writhing hammock
from the porch as the old woman briskly dragged the big cane rockers
indoors.
"Oh, ther' wunt no hurt come t'um," Mrs. Dimmick said. "But--come an
awful mean tide, Clark's Bar is under water. They'll jest have to wait
until she goes down, that's all."
"Shell I bring up some candles from suller; we ain't got much
karosene!" Florrie, the one maid, demanded excitedly. Chess, the hired
man, who was Florrie's "steady," began to bring wood in by the armful,
and fling it down by the airtight stove that had been set up only a few
days before.
The wind began to howl about the roof; trees in the dooryard rocked and
arched. Darkness fell at four o'clock, and the deafening roar of the
ocean seemed an actual menace as the night came down. Chess and
Florrie, after supper, frankly joined the family group in the
sitting-room, a group composed only of Rachael and Mrs. Dimmick and two
rather terrified young stenographers from the city.
These two did not go to bed, but Rachael went upstairs as usual at ten
o'clock, and drifted to sleep in a world of creaking, banging, and
roaring. A confusion and excited voices below stairs brought her down
again rather pale, in her long wrapper, at three. The Barwicks, mother,
father, and three babies, had left their beach cottage in the night and
the storm to seek safer shelter and the welcome sound of other voices
than their own.
After that there was little sleep for anyone. Still in the roaring
darkness the clocks presently announced morning, and a neighbor's boy,
breathless, dripping in tarpaulins, was blown against the door, and
burst in to say with youthful relish that the porches of the Holcomb
house were under water, and the boardwalk washed away, and folks said
that the road was all gone betwixt here and the lighthouse. Rain was
still falling in sheets, and the wind was still high. Rachael braved
it, late in the afternoon, to go out and see with her own eyes that the
surf was foaming and frothing over the deserted bandstand at the end of
the main street, and got back to the shelter of the house wet and
gasping, and with the first little twist of personal fear at her heart.
Suppose that limitless raging green wall down there rose another
ten--another twenty--feet, swept deep and roaring and resistless over
little Quaker Bridge, plunged them all for a few struggling, hopeless
moments into its emerald depths, and then washed the little loosely
drifting bodies that had been men and women far out to sea again?
What could one do? No trains came into Quaker Bridge to-day; it was
understood that there were washouts all along the line. Rachael sat in
the dark, stuffy little sitting-room with the placid Barwick baby
drowsing in her lap, and at last her face reflected the nervous
uneasiness of the other women. Every time an especially heavy rush of
rain or wind struck the unsubstantial little house, Mrs. Barwick said,
"Oh, my!" in patient, hopeless terror, and the two young women looked
at each other with a quick hissing breath of fear.
The night was long with horror. There were other refugees in Mrs.
Dimmick's house now; there were in all fifteen people sitting around
her little stove listening to the wind and the ocean. The old lady
herself was the most cheerful of the group, although Rachael and one or
two of the others managed an appearance at least of calm.
"Declare," said the hostess, more than once, "dunt see what we's all
thinkin' of not to git over to Clark's Hills 'fore the bar was under
water! They've got sixty-foot elevation there!"
"I'd just as soon try to get there now," said Miss Stokes of New York
eagerly.
"There's waves eight feet high washin' over that bar," Ernest Barwick
said, and something in the simple words made little Miss Stokes look
sick for a moment.
"What's our elevation?" Rachael asked.
"'Bout--" Mr. Barwick paused. "But you can't tell nothing by that," he
contented himself with remarking after a moment's thought.
"But I never heard--I never HEARD of the sea coming right over a whole
village!" Rachael hated herself for the fear that dragged the words
out, and the white lips that spoke them.
"Neither did I!" said half a dozen voices. There was silence while the
old clock on the mantel wheezed out a lugubrious eight strokes. "LORD,
how it rains!" muttered Emily Barwick.
Nine o'clock--ten o'clock. The young women, the old woman, the maid and
man who would be married some day if they lived, the husband and wife
who had been lovers like them only a few years ago, and who now had
these three little lives to guard, all sat wrapped in their own
thoughts. Rachael sat staring at the stove's red eye, thinking,
thinking, thinking. She thought of Warren Gregory; his steamer must be
in now, he must be with his mother in the old house, and planning to
see her any day. To-morrow--if there was a to-morrow--might bring his
telegram. What would his life be if he might never see her again? She
could not even leave him a note, or a word; on this eve of their
meeting, were they to be parted forever? Should she never tell him how
dearly--how dearly--she loved him? Tears came to her eyes, her heart
was wrung with exquisite sorrow.
She thought of Billy--poor little Billy--who had never had a mother,
who needed a mother so sadly, and of her own mother, dead now, and of
the old blue coat of thirteen years ago, and the rough blue hat. She
thought of her great-grandmother in the little whitewashed California
cottage under the shadow of the blue mountains, with the lilacs and
marigolds in the yard. And colored by her new great love, and by the
solemn fears of this endless night, Rachael found a tenderness in her
heart for all those shadowy figures that had played a part in her life.
At midnight there came a thundering crash on the ocean side of the
house.
"Oh, God, IT'S THE SEA!" screamed Emily Barwick. They all rushed to the
door and flung it open, and in a second were out in the wild blackness
of the night. Still the roaring and howling and shrieking of the
elements, still the infuriated booming of the surf, but--thank God--no
new sound. There was no break in the flying darkness above them; the
street was a running sheet of water in the dark.
Yet strangely they all went back into the house vaguely quieted.
Rachael presently said that no matter what was going to happen, she was
too cold and tired to stay up any longer, and went upstairs to bed.
Miss Stokes and Miss McKim settled themselves in their chairs; Emily
Barwick went to sleep with her head against her husband's thin young
shoulder. Somebody suggested coffee, and there was a general move
toward the kitchen.
Rachael, a little bewildered, woke in heavenly sunlight in exactly the
position she had taken when she crept into bed the night before. For a
few minutes she lay staring at the bright old homely room, and at the
clock ticking briskly toward nine.
"Dear Lord, what a thing sunshine is?" she said then slowly. No need to
ask of the storm with this celestial reassurance flooding the room. But
after a few moments she got up and went to the window. The trees,
battered and torn, were ruffling such leaves as were left them
gallantly in the wind, the paths still ran yellow water, the roadway
was a muddy waste, eaves were still gurgling, and everywhere was the
drip and splash of water. But the sky was clear and blue, and the air
as soft as milk.
As eager as a child Rachael dressed and ran downstairs, and was out in
the new world. The fresh wind whipped a glorious color into her face;
the whole of sea and sky and earth seemed to be singing.
Trees were down, fences were down, autumn gardens were all a wreck; and
the ocean, when she came to the shore, was still rolling wild and high.
But it was blue now, and the pure sky above it was blue, and there was
utter protection and peace in the sunny air. Landmarks all along the
shore were washed away, and beyond the first line of dunes were pools
left by the great tide, scummy and sinking fast into the sand, to leave
only a fringe of bubbles behind. Minor wreckages of all sorts lay
scattered all along the beach: poles and ropes, boxes and barrels.
Rachael walked on and on, breathing deep, swept out of herself by the
fresh glory of the singing morning. Presently she would go back, and
there would be Warren's letter, or his telegram, or perhaps himself,
and then their golden days would begin--their happy time! But even
Warren to-day could not intrude upon her mood of utter gratitude and
joy in just living--just being young and alive in a world that could
hold such a sea and such a sky.
A full mile from the village, along the ocean shore, a stream came down
from under a cliff, a stream, as Rachael and investigating children had
often proved to their own satisfaction, that rose in a small but
eminently satisfactory cave. The storm had washed several great smooth
logs of driftwood into the cave, and beyond them to-day there was such
a gurgling and churning going on that Rachael, eager not to miss any
effect of the storm, stepped cautiously inside.
The augmented little river was three times its usual size, and was
further made unmanageable by the impeding logs swept in by the high
tide. Straw and weeds and rubbish of every description choked its
course, and little foaming currents and backwaters almost filled the
cave with their bubbling and swirling.
Rachael, with a few casual pushes of a sturdy little shoe, accomplished
such surprising results in freeing and directing the stream that she
fell upon it in sudden serious earnest, grasping a long pole the better
to push obstructing matters aside, and growing rosy and breathless over
her self-imposed and senseless undertaking.
She had just loosened a whole tangle of wreckage, and had straightened
herself up with a long, triumphant "Ah-h!" of relief, as the current
rushed it away, when a shadow fell over the mouth of the cave. Looking
about in quick, instinctive fear, she saw Warren Gregory smiling at her.
For only one second she hesitated, all girlhood's radiant shyness in
her face. Then she was in his arms, and clinging to him, and for a few
minutes they did not speak, eyes and lips together in the wild rapture
of meeting.
"Oh, Greg--Greg--Greg!" Rachael laughed and cried and sang the words
together. "When did you come, and how did you get here? Tell me--tell
me all about it!" But before he could begin to answer her their eager
joy carried them both far away from all the conversational landmarks,
and again they had breath only for monosyllables, instinct only to
cling to each other.
"My girl, my own girl!" Warren Gregory said. "Oh, how I've missed
you--and you're more beautiful than ever--did you know it? More
beautiful even than I remembered you to be, and that was beautiful
enough!"
"Oh, hush!" she said, laughing, her fingers over the mouth that praised
her, his arm still holding her tight.
"I'll never hush again, my darling! Never, never in all the years we
spend together! I am going to tell you a hundred times a day that you
are the most beautiful, and the dearest--Oh, Rachael, Rachael, shall I
tell you something? It's October! Do you know what that means?"
"Yes, I suppose I do!" She laughed, and colored exquisitely, drawing
herself back the length of their linked arms.
"Do you know what you're going to BE in about thirty-six hours?"
"Now--you embarrass me! Was--was anything settled?"
"Shall you like being Mrs. Gregory?"
"Greg--" Tears came to her eyes. "You don't know how much!" she said in
a whisper.
They sat down on a great log, washed silver white with long years of
riding unguided through the seas, and all the wonderful world of blue
sky and white sand might have been made for them. Rachael's hand lay in
her lover's, her glorious eyes rarely left his face. Browned by his
summer of travel, she found him better than ever to look upon; hungry
after these waiting months, every tone of his voice held for her a
separate delight.
"Did you ever dream of happiness like this, Rachael?"
"Never--never in my wildest flights. Not even in the past few months!"
"What--didn't trust me?"
"No, not that. But I've been rebuilding, body and soul. I didn't think
of the future or the past. It was all present."
"With me," he said, "it was all future. I've been counting the days.
I've not done that since I was at school! Rachael, do you remember our
talk the night after the Berry Stokes' dinner?"
"Do I remember it?"
"Ah, my dear, if anyone had said that night that in six months we would
be sitting here, and that you would have promised yourself to me! You
don't know what my wife is going to mean to me, my dearest. I can't
believe it yet!"
"It is going to mean everything in life to me," she said seriously. "I
mean to be the best wife a man ever had. If loving counts--"
"Do you mean that?" he said eagerly. "Say it--do you mean that you love
me?"
"Love you?" She stood up, pressing both hands over her heart as if
there were real pain there. For a few paces she walked away from him,
and, as he followed her, she turned upon him the extraordinary beauty
of her face transfigured with strong emotion.
"Greg," she said quietly, "I didn't know there was such love! I've
heard it called fire and pain and restlessness, but this thing is ME!
It is burning in me like flame, it is consuming me. To be with
you"--she caught his wrist with one hand, and with her free hand
pointed out across the smiling ocean--"to be with you and KNOW you were
mine, I could walk straight out into that water, and end it all, and be
glad--glad--glad of the chance! I loved you yesterday, but what is this
to-day, when you have kissed me, and held me in your arms!" Her voice
broke on something like a sob, but her eyes were smiling. "All my life
I've been asleep," said Rachael. "I'm awake now--I'm awake now! I begin
to realize how helpless one is--to realize what I should have done if
you hadn't come--"
"My darling," Gregory said, his arms about her "what else--feeling as
we feel--could I have done?"
Held in his embrace, she rested her hands upon his shoulders, and
looked wistfully into his eyes.
"It is as WE feel, isn't it?" she said. "I mean, it isn't only me?
You--you love me?"
Looking down at her dropped, velvety lashes, feeling the warm strong
beat of her heart against his, holding close as he did all her glowing
and fragrant beauty, Warren Gregory felt it the most exquisite moment
of his life. Her youth, her history, her wonderful poise and sureness
so intoxicatingly linked with all a girl's unexpected shyness and
adorable uncertainties, all these combined to enthrall the man who had
admired her for many years and loved her for more than one.
"Love you?" he asked, claiming again the lips she yielded with such a
delicious widening of her eyes and quickening of breath.
"You see, Warren," she said presently, "I'm not a girl. I give myself
to you with a knowledge and a joy no girl could possibly have. I don't
want to coquette and delay. I want to be your wife, and to learn your
faults, and have you learn mine, and settle down into harness--one
year, five years--ten years married! Oh, you don't know how I LONG to
be ten years married. I shan't mind a bit being nearly forty.
Forty--doesn't it sound SETTLED, and sedate--and that's what I want.
I--I shall love getting gray, and feeling that you and I don't care so
much about going places, don't you know? We'll like better just being
home together, won't we? We're older than most people now, aren't we?"
He laughed aloud at the bright face so enchantingly young in its
restored beauty. He had expected to find her charming, but in this new
phase of girlishness, of happiness, she was a thousand times more
charming than he had dreamed. It was hard to believe that this eager
girl in a striped blue and yellow and purple skirt, and rough white
crash hat, was the bored, the remote, the much-feared Mrs. Clarence
Breckenridge. Something free and sweet and virginal had come back to
her, or been born in her. She was like no phase of the many phases in
which he had known her; she was a Rachael who had never known the
sordid, the disillusioning side of life. Even her seriousness had the
confident, eager quality of youth, and her gayety was as pure as a
child's. She had cast off the old sophistication, the old recklessness
of speech; she was not even interested in the old associates. The world
for her was all in him and their love for each other, and she walked
back to Quaker Bridge, at his side, too wholly swept away from all
self-consciousness to know or to care that they were at once the target
for all eyes.
A wonderful day followed, many wonderful days. Doctor Gregory's great
touring car and his livened man were at Mrs. Dimmick's door when they
got back, an incongruous note in little Quaker Bridge, still gasping
from the great storm.
"Your car?" Rachael said. "You drove down?"
"Yesterday. I put up at Valentine's--George Valentine's, you know, at
Clark's Hills."
"Oh, that's my nice lady--gray haired, and with three children?"
Rachael said eagerly. "Do you know her?"
"Know her? Valentine is my closest associate. They meet us in town
to-morrow: he's to be best man. You'll have to have them to dinner once
a month for the rest of your life!"
The picture brought her happy color, the shy look he loved.
"I'm glad, Greg. I like her immensely!"
They were at the car; she must flush again at the chauffeur's greeting,
finding a certain grave significance, a certain acceptance, in his
manner.
"Wife and baby well, Martin?"
"Very well, thank you, Mrs. Breckenridge."
"Still in Belvedere Hills?"
"Well, just at present, yes, Madam."
"You see, I am looking for suitable quarters for all hands," Doctor
Gregory said, his laugh drowning hers, his eyes feasting on her
delicious confusion. She was aware that feminine eyes from the house
were watching her. Presently she had kissed Mrs. Dimmick good-bye.
Warren had put his man in the tonneau; he would take the wheel himself
for the three hours' run into town.
"Good-bye, my dear!" said the old lady, adding with an innocent vacuity
of manner quite characteristic of Quaker Bridge. "Let me know when the
weddin's goin' to be!"
"I'll let you know right now," said Doctor Gregory, who, gloved and
coated, was bustling about the car, deep in the mysterious rites
incidental to starting. "It's going to be to-morrow!"
"Good grief!" exclaimed Mrs. Dimmick delightedly. "Well," she added,
"folks down here think you've got an awfully pretty bride!"
"I'm glad she's up to the standard down here," Warren Gregory observed.
"Nobody seems to think much of her looks up in the city!"
Rachael laughed and leaned from her place beside the driver to kiss the
old lady again and to wave a general good-bye to Florrie and Chess and
the group on the porch. As smoothly as if she were launched in air the
great car sprang into motion; the storm-blown cottages, the battered
dooryards, the great shabby trees over the little post office all swept
by. They passed the turning that led to Clark's Bar, and a weather-worn
sign-post that read "Quaker Bridge, 1 mile." It was not a dream, it was
all wonderfully true: this was Greg beside her, and they were going to
be married!
Rachael settled back against the deep, soft cushions in utter content.
To be flying through the soft Indian summer sunshine, alone with Greg,
to actually touch his big shoulder with her own, to command his
interest, his laughter, his tenderness, at will--after these lonely
months it was a memorable and an enchanting experience. Their talk
drifted about uncontrolled, as talk after long silence must: now it was
a waiter on the ocean liner of whom Gregory spoke, or perhaps the story
of a small child's rescue from the waves, from Rachael. They spoke of
the roads, splendidly hard and clean after the rain, and of the
villages through which they rushed.
But over their late luncheon, in a roadside inn, the talk fell into
deeper grooves, their letters, their loneliness, and their new plans,
and when the car at last reached the traffic of the big bridge, and
Rachael caught her first glimpse of the city under its thousand smoking
chimneys, there had entered into their relationship a new sacred
element, something infinitely tender and almost sad, a dependence upon
each other, a oneness in which Rachael could get a foretaste of the
exquisite communion so soon to be.
They were spinning up the avenue, through a city humming with the first
reviving breath of winter. They were at the great hotel, and Rachael
was laughing in Elinor Vanderwall's embrace. The linen shop, the
milliner, a dinner absurdly happy, and one of the new plays--a sunshiny
morning when she and Elinor breakfasted in their rooms, and opened box
after box of gowns and hats--the hours fled by like a dream.
"Nervous, Rachael?" asked Miss Vanderwall of the vision that looked out
from Rachael's mirror.
"Not a bit!" the wife-to-be answered, feeling as she said it that her
hands, busy with long gloves, were shaking, and her knees almost
unready to support her.
"It must be wonderful to marry a man like Greg," said the bridesmaid
thoughtfully. "He simply IS everything and HAS everything--"
"Ah, Elinor, it's wonderful to marry the man you love!" Rachael turned
from the mirror, her blue eyes misted with tears under the brim of her
wedding hat.
"YOU!" Elinor smiled. "That I should live to see it! You--in love!"
"And unashamed, and proud of it!" Rachael said with a tremulous laugh.
"Are you all ready? Shall we go down?" She turned at the door and put
one arm about her friend. "Kiss me, Elinor, and wish me joy," said she.
"I don't have to!" asserted Miss Vanderwall, with a hearty kiss
nevertheless, "for it will be your own fault entirely if there's ever
the littlest, teeniest cloud in the sky!"