Part 23

"When I married you--across the river from Battle Field," she said, "I committed a crime against my father and mother. This is--my punishment--the beginning of it. And now--there'll be the--the--baby--" A pause, then: "I must bear the consequences--if I can. But I shall not be your wife--never--never again. If you wish me to stay on that condition, I'll try. If not--"

"You MUST stay, Pauline," he interrupted. "I don't care what terms you make, you must stay. It's no use for me to try to defend myself when you're in this mood. You wouldn't listen. But you're right about not going. If you did, it'd break your father's and mother's hearts. I admit I did drink too much last night, and made a fool of myself. But if you were more experienced, you'd--"

He thought he had worked his courage up to the point where he could meet her eyes. He tried it. Her look froze his flow of words. "I KNOW that you were false from the beginning," she said.

"The man I thought you were never existed--and I know it. We won't speak of this--ever--after now. Surely you can't wish me to stay?" And into her voice surged all her longing to go, all her hope that he would reject the only terms on which self-respect would let her stay.

"Wish you to stay?" he repeated. And he faced her, looking at her, his chest heaving under the tempest of hate and passion that was raging in him--hate because she was defying and dictating to him, passion because she was so beautiful as she stood there, like a delicate, fine hot-house rose poised on a long, graceful stem. "No wonder I LOVE you!" he exclaimed between his clenched teeth.

A bright spot burned in each of her cheeks and her look made him redden and lower his eyes.

"Now that I understand these last five months," she said, "that from you is an insult."

His veins and muscles swelled with the fury he dared not show; for he saw and felt how dangerous her mood was.

"I'll agree to whatever you like, Pauline," he said humbly. "Only, we mustn't have a flare-up and a scandal. I'll never speak to you again about--about anything you don't want to hear."

She went into her bedroom. When, after half an hour, she reappeared, she was ready to go down to lunch. In the elevator he stole a glance at her--there was no color in her face, not even in her lips. His rage had subsided; he was ashamed of himself--before her. But he felt triumphant too.

"I thought she'd go, sure, in spite of her fear of hurting her father and mother," he said to himself. "A mighty close squeak. I was stepping round in a powder magazine, with every word a lit match."

In January she sank into a profound lassitude. Nothing interested her, everything wearied her. As the time drew near, her mother came to stay with her; and day after day the two women sat silent, Mrs. Gardiner knitting, Pauline motionless, hands idle in her lap, mind vacant. If she had any emotion, it was a hope that she would die and take her child with her.

"That would settle everything, settle it right," she reflected, with youth's morbid fondness for finalities.

When it was all over and she came out from under the opiate, she lay for a while, open-eyed but unseeing, too inert to grope for the lost thread of memory. She felt a stirring in the bed beside her, the movement of some living thing. She looked and there, squeezed into the edge of the pillow was a miniature head of a little old man--wrinkled, copperish. Yet the face was fat--ludicrously fat. A painfully homely face with tears running from the closed eyes, with an open mouth that driveled and drooled.

"What is it?" she thought, looking with faint curiosity. "And why is it here?"

Two small fists now rose aimlessly in the air above the face and flapped about; and a very tempest of noise issued from the sagging mouth.

"A baby," she reflected. Then memory came--"MY baby!"

She put her finger in the way of the wandering fists. First one of them, then the other, awkwardly unclosed and as awkwardly closed upon it. She smiled. The grip tightened and tightened and tightened until she wondered how hands so small and new could cling so close and hard. Then that electric clasp suddenly tightened about her heart. She burst into tears and drew the child against her breast. The pulse of its current of life was beating against her own--and she felt it. She sobbed, laughed softly, sobbed again.

Her mother was bending anxiously over her.

"What's the matter, dearest?" she asked. "What do you wish?"

"Nothing!" Pauline was smiling through her tears. "Oh, mother, I am SO happy!" she murmured.

And her happiness lasted with not a break, with hardly a pause, all that spring and all that summer--or, so long as her baby's helplessness absorbed the whole of her time and thought.

XI.

YOUNG AMERICA.

When Pierson, laggard as usual, returned to Battle Field a week after the end of the long vacation, he found Scarborough just establishing himself. He had taken two small and severely plain rooms in a quaint old frame cottage, one story high, but perched importantly upon a bank at the intersection of two much-traveled streets.

"What luck?" asked Pierson, lounging in on him.

"A hundred days' campaign; a thousand dollars net," replied the book agent. "And I'm hard as oak from tramping those roads, and I've learned--you ought to have been along, Pierson. I know people as I never could have come to know them by any other means--what they think, what they want, how they can be reached."

There was still much of the boy in Pierson's face. But Scarborough looked the man, developed, ready.