Part 114

But Margaret did not think so. She was so very calm. She was so calm that sometimes it was alarming.

“He gave her a ring, and the other day I found it, tossed into a drawer full of odds and ends. I haven't seen it lately; she may have sent it back.”

Elizabeth came home shortly before Christmas, undeniably glad to be back and very gentle with them all. She set to work almost immediately on the gifts, wrapping them and tying them with methodical exactness, sticking a tiny sprig of holly through the ribbon bow, and writing cards with neatness and care. She hung up wreaths and decorated the house, and when she was through with her work she went to her room and sat with her hands folded, not thinking. She did not think any more.

Wallie had sent her a flexible diamond bracelet as a Christmas gift and it lay on her table in its box. She was very grateful, but she had not put it on.

On the morning before Christmas Nina came in, her arms full of packages, and her eyes shining and a little frightened. She had some news for them. She hadn't been so keen about it, at first, but Leslie was like a madman. He was so pleased that he was ordering her that sable cape she had wanted so. He was like a different man. And it would be July.

Elizabeth kissed her. It seemed very unreal, like everything else. She wondered why Leslie should be so excited, or her mother crying. She wondered if there was something strange about her, that it should seem so small and unimportant. But then, what was important? That one got up in the morning, and ate at intervals, and went to bed at night? That children came, and had to be fed and washed and tended, and cried a great deal, and were sick now and then?

She wished she could feel something, could think it vital whether Nina should choose pink or blue for her layette, and how far she should walk each day, and if the chauffeur drove the car carefully enough. She wished she cared whether it was going to rain to-morrow or not, or whether some one was coming, or not coming. And she wished terribly that she could care for Wallie, or get over the feeling that she had saved her pride at a cost to him she would not contemplate.

After a time she went upstairs and put on the bracelet. And late in the afternoon she went out and bought some wool, to make an afghan. It eased her conscience toward Nina. She commenced it that evening while she waited for Wallie, and she wondered if some time she would be making an afghan for a coming child of her own. Hers and Wallace Sayre's.

Suddenly she knew she would never marry him. She faced the future, with all that it implied, and she knew she could not do it. It was horrible that she had even contemplated it. It would be terrible to tell Wallie, but not as terrible as the other thing. She saw herself then with the same clearness with which she had judged Dick. She too, leaving her havoc of wrecked lives behind her; she too going along her headstrong way, raising hopes not to be fulfilled, and passing on. She too.

That evening, Christmas eve, she told Wallie she would not marry him. Told him very gently, and just after an attempt of his to embrace her. She would not let him do it.

“I don't know what's come over you,” he said morosely. “But I'll let you alone, if that's the way you feel.”

“I'm sorry, Wallie. It--it makes me shiver.”

In a way he was prepared for it but nevertheless he begged for time, for a less unequivocal rejection. But he found her, for the first time, impatient with his pleadings.

“I don't want to go over and over it, Wallie. I'll take the blame. I should have done it long ago.”

She was gentle, almost tender with him, but when he said she had spoiled his life for him she smiled faintly.

“You think that now. And don't believe I'm not sorry. I am. I hate not playing the game, as you say. But I don't think for a moment that you'll go on caring when you know I don't. That doesn't happen. That's all.”

“Do you know what I think?” he burst out. “I think you're still mad about Livingstone. I think you are so mad about him that you don't know it yourself.”

But she only smiled her cool smile and went on with her knitting. After that he got himself in hand, and--perhaps he still had some hope. It was certain that she had not flinched at Dick's name--told her very earnestly that he only wanted her happiness. He didn't want her unless she wanted him. He would always love her.

“Not always,” she said, with tragically cold certainty. “Men are not like women; they forget.”

She wondered, after he had gone, what had made her say that.

She did not tell the family that night. They were full of their own concerns, Nina's coming maternity, the wrapping of packages behind closed doors, the final trimming of the tree in the library. Leslie had started the phonograph, and it was playing “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.”

Still night, holy night, and only in her was there a stillness that was not holy.

They hung up their stockings valiantly as usual, making a little ceremony of it, and being careful not to think about Jim's missing one. Indeed, they made rather a function of it, and Leslie demanded one of Nina's baby socks and pinned it up.

“I'm starting a bank account for the little beggar,” he said, and dropped a gold piece into the toe. “Next year, old girl.”

He put his arm around Nina. It seemed to him that life was doing considerably better than he deserved by him, and he felt very humble and contrite. He felt in his pocket for the square jeweler's box that lay there.

After that they left Walter Wheeler there, to play his usual part at such times, and went upstairs. He filled the stockings bravely, an orange in each toe, a box of candy, a toy for old time's sake, and then the little knickknacks he had been gathering for days and hiding in his desk. After all, there were no fewer stockings this year than last. Instead of Jim's there was the tiny one for Nina's baby. That was the way things went. He took away, but also He gave.

He sat back in his deep chair, and looked up at the stockings, ludicrously bulging. After all, if he believed that He gave and took away, then he must believe that Jim was where he had tried to think him, filling a joyous, active place in some boyish heaven.

After a while he got up and went to his desk, and getting pen and paper wrote carefully.